Blog? What Blog?

Yesterday, Lil Miss turned five years old. The night before her birthday I took out her baby book, which was also my prenatal journal and read some of the entries to her. I was surprised that I took the time to write so much in the midst of very difficult circumstances, and was pleased to relive some of those very happy moments.

That said, I have noticed that I haven't taken much time to write or journal, here or elsewhere over the past many months. And it's a shame really. I've been spending my free moments sewing for my kids and myself, maintaining important friendships or taking deep breaths... it's a very busy year for us and it's only just begun. L is in preschool this year, three days a week, which she LOVES and requires about 4.5 hrs of driving a week for me (Ugh). Also this year we are in a home school co-op which is stretching all of us in good ways. I'm teaching third grade art, and the boys are getting some subjects I don't have to teach at home. The kids have all made some nice friends, but it is one more thing on the calendar each week.

So, the blogging hiatus hasn't been due to anything bad in particular. Things are going generally well for the kids and me, just a change in circumstances that require me to be "on duty" a whole lot more than before. Unfortunately, swing dancing has been placed on the back burner for the time being, but I hope to resume my efforts in swing and Lindy Hop once again.

Look what fell off the Ugly Tree!

After seeing these "Ugly Dolls" (left) in a toy catalog yesterday, my boys decided they'd like to design and make their very own ugly doll.




















D drew several designs and finally settled on a bat-like creature. I had to enlarge the drawing to make it a more workable size. Instead of making it all in fleece, D chose to use some black leather scraps for the ears and wings. In K's drawing the legs were too thin to sew so we beefed them up a bit. I did most of the assembling, but the boys did do some hand sewing on the eyes and mouths. They also stuffed them and then I sewed them closed. The only thing this cost us was time. I think they turned out quite nicely and the boys are so proud of their unique toys!

Poke-a-what?

I thought I'd finally post something! I started school with the boys two weeks ago, we are following a pretty structured schedule now and so far so good. Last week's impromptu art lesson, jumping off from something the boys were already "into," was to create their own Pokemon character in a crayon/watercolor resist. They had already been busy making (rather crudely) some of their very own Pokemon cards drawn out in colored pencil on index cards and then roughly cut to size. My idea was to make a larger painting of one of their favorites. It took very little to motivate them, in fact they were busy before I finished giving them some basic instructions. Today, after fiddling around with the scanner and changing some preexisting cards, at K's request, I thought, we should actually make their paintings into cards. This became an all day project of figuring out the software and remembering once learned, and soon forgotten, computer graphics skills I picked up in high school.

The paintings:



As you can see, K already added some of the card info to his painting.








OK, now their cards. I had to squish D's "Spiraly" to get him to fit our format, and they aren't perfect, but certainly satisfactory for a first time effort, I think.



Twice this week I received emails from different friends with a link to this ebay item. There's a very funny story that goes along with the Pokemon theme here, about shopping with lots of children, and how sometimes we buy things we never even meant to. She is a kindred "mommy blogger" check out her other funny writings here.