On Being Mischievous

It's four o'clock......

........do you know where your toddler is?

{p,h,f,r} Snow Day Edition, Take Two

{pretty}

I warned you she would probably take up most of my pretties.  Those big eyes!  Those smushy cheeks!

And what was she looking at out of that window? Why it's another snow day.  We got a warning email last night from the city telling us to prepare for power outages because of the ice.  Let's hope that's just them overreacting because we are most assuredly not equipped for power outages.  I did take the precaution of going over our coffee preparedness plan with Chris though and he assured me that in case of emergency he could heat our kettle on the grill to boil the water for the french press.  Priorities.

{happy}

This week I made the executive decision to give up on manuscript handwriting and switch David to cursive.  He just refused to form his letters correctly when printing.  Sure he would do it if I was standing over him drill sergeant style but as soon as I turned around he was back to starting at the bottom of the line or the wrong side of each letter because it seems faster to him.  I tried telling him it wasn't faster in the long run and if he wanted neat handwriting he had to practice doing it correctly but he (shockingly) was unmoved.  The thing about cursive handwriting is that it forces him to form the letters correctly.  Try starting that 't' in the wrong spot now kid!  Plus, David thinks it's more fun.  Double mom win. 

We'll see how it goes but for right now we're both happier with the new arrangement.

{funny}

I found this Junior Deluxe Edition of The Water Babies at my new favorite used furniture store and thought, even though I've never read it myself, it was surely a sign that it should be our next read aloud.  Not that I needed a reason to buy it--I can't seem to pass up these editions because they always remind me of the ones at my grandparent's house.  

Well, do you know how a child becomes a water baby?  They drown, that's how.  Luckily the boys were fairly oblivious to that fact and when little Tom jumped into the water and then 'fell asleep' they were unfazed.  Since we started, I've heard daily choruses of "I want to be a water baby mom!"  Um, let's hope not children.  

Dying children aside, it really is a wonderful story and full of great lines:

"Besides, people who make up their minds to go and see the world, as Tom did, must needs find it a weary journey.  Lucky for them if they do not lose heart and stop half-way, instead of going on bravely to the end as Tom did.  For then they will remain neither boys nor men, neither fish, flesh, nor good red-herring:  having learnt a great deal too much, and yet not enough; and sown their wild oats, without having the advantage of reaping them."

Or,

"You see, experience is of very little good unless a man, or a lobster, has wit enough to make use of it."

And then my favorite,

"Oh, how good little boys ought to be who have kind pussy mammas to cuddle them and tell them stories, and how afraid they ought to be of growing naughty, and bringing tears into their mamma's pretty eyes!"

Well, a mamma can hope anyway.  

{real}

And just to be sure you know it's not all lovely stories and beautiful handwriting around here....

I don't know what exactly happened here and the big boys have all blamed the sleeping John.  At least it wasn't an alphabetized shelf.

And, as always, click over to Like Mother, Like Daughter for more captured contentment.

On Making the Most Fantastic Curtains You Have Ever Seen

Well, okay.  They might not be the most fantastic curtains you have ever seen but they are still pretty fantastic.  

First, the back story.  After we moved in I bemoaned the fact that in a fit of senseless frugality I hadn't bought the rest of the sheets at the thrift store that matched the pillow case that was the inspiration for Margaret's quilt because they would have made great coordinating curtains.  Then one night as I was looking at vintage sheets on Etsy (which I'm sure is a totally normal thing to be doing) I found a listing for a set of queen sized sheets in the exact same pattern.  I don't know what the odds are of finding another set of these old sheets but I took it as a sign and snatched them up--ironically for about ten dollars more than it would have cost me if I had just bought them originally.

I then spent a lot of time unnecessarily trying to decide if I should make long elegant curtains or short cute curtains before I just decided to make them as long as I could given my limited amount of fabric and then hem them up if they looked bad.  The length of the flat sheet ended up being perfect, which is lucky since, you know, that's all I had.  I also lined them with the old twin size white flat sheets that I confiscated from the boys when I decided that I wasn't going to make children's beds with flat sheets on them ever again so that's how wide the curtains are.

Clearly I am a very precise and professional seamstress.

It's really hard to take pictures of curtains with light shining through the windows but I did my best.

The men folk round these parts weren't super impressed, but aren't they sweet?   The curtains that is, not the men folk.  Clearly they're a bit grumpy.

Margaret loves them of course.  If she had words or was able to do more than flail her arms and legs while lying on her back I'm sure she'd be dancing around and singing about how amazing they are.

Once I finished the panels I realized that the one thing that would make them even more spectacular was pom pom trim.  I'm pretty sure pom pom trim makes everything better.  I got this trim from the same Etsy seller I used when I made the crib skirt so it would match.

On another note, pleating tape.  Where have you been all my life?  You just sew this stuff across the top of your curtain panels, pull the strings and congratulations, you've just made pleated curtains.  So easy!

See how nicely everything goes?  Note, don't try to stand on your rocking chair to take aerial pictures  of your nursery.  Your photographs will be blurry and you will probably fall off.  Just take the extra three seconds to grab a stool from the bathroom. You're welcome.

Now, make sure to tell me what you think!  Unless you don't like them, feel free to keep that to yourself :)

Linking up with Ana since it's still February and I need more affirmations than my menfolk can provide on all things crafty :)

On Snow Days

It's a little lame to have a Saturday snow day when you know that if it was during the week your husband would have had the day off but we made the best of it.  And by "we" I mean "Chris" who was outside for four hours straight with various children coming and going.

Please note that the children are all wearing snow pants.  Interestingly February is apparently much too late to actually buy snow pants in a regular store--I tried Walmart hoping to grab some on clearance and there was nothing.  They had already turned the whole store over to Spring, including the baby section where I could have bought Margaret all the sundresses and shorts she could ever want but there was not a long sleeved onesie to be found.  So to recap, now that it's actually snowing and most definitely still winter there are no winter clothes left to purchase.  There are plenty of bathing suits though.

Chris found these (after a hot tip from a colleague) at the nearby Columbia outlet where there were still a few pieces left in the clearance section.  Catastrophe averted.

So the boys were warmer as they went sledding at pretty much the best sledding hill ever.  According to Chris when he was on the sled too they were getting air going down those bumps.  I'm just glad I wasn't there to witness all the shenanigans.

Even John had fun although, once again, he ended up napping through sledding time.

He tried really hard to get his trike going in the snow and yes, making some sort of bike port on the side of the house is one of our projects for Spring.  

 

And here are some bonus sledding videos, because I can........

 

 

Hope you all are *still* staying warm!

Lent

So the kids and I didn't actually make it to the Ash Wednesday mass this year.  I had concocted this amazing plan that involved driving the kids to the Pentagon to meet Chris for mass there, but with the snow days and government shutdown our parking pass never got processed and I was not about to trek the kids the mile long walk down to the metro in the snow to get there.  It was probably for the best since the two Ash Wednesday masses at the Pentagon were apparently standing room only which, let's face it, would have been a disaster.  

I did pull together some of our tried and true Lenten activities though and I even managed to make them pretty to boot.  

Note:  The following is mostly for my own records--when I tried to search the blog to find a picture of our Lent calender from years past to see how I made it the only one I found was from Pennsylvania--a total mom blog fail.  I'm not a super "lets do all the activities!" type of mom so pretty much everything we're doing here takes place around mealtimes when I'm most likely to not forget.  Anyway, here's what we're doing just in case you're interested.......

Sacrifice/Kindness Beans:  For every kind deed/sacrifice the kids make they put a bean in the jar and on Easter they are magically transformed into jelly beans.  This is a family favorite and the jars are always filled to the brim with jelly beans no matter how full they were the night before Easter.  David was in charge of picking out the bag of beans from the store this year because I apparently purged the old bag of black beans I've been reusing for the past four years when we moved.  He couldn't quite settle on any one type so he begged for the twelve bean soup bag.  Henry is slowly emptying the bowl of all the giant white lima beans since clearly, bigger is better.

I also printed a copy of Lent for Children:  A Thought a Day because it's simple and free.  We've been reading it after breakfast as part of our 'morning basket' time.  We also light those candles and say our prayers because I've found the best way to get children to pay attention to their prayers is fire.   We've also been attempting a family decade of the rosary right after dinner which has been going about as well as you can imagine.  I like it though since, a convert myself, I don't know all the rosary prayers by heart which is my biggest stumbling block to actually praying one.  So this particular Lenten devotional is good for me and not too much of a hardship for the kids.  Plus, the ones that stick it out nicely get to blow out the candles.  See--the magic of fire.

I also made the same countdown calender I always do from the book Guiding Your Catholic Preschooler mostly because the boys LOVE gluing down the crosses each day and as a bonus, if you don't get to be the one to glue on a cross you can put a kindness bean in the jar for your momentous personal sacrifice.  I didn't have any big sheets of paper this year but I did have the cardboard back of an empty sketchpad so that's what I used which turned out great since I can just lean it up against the wall.  In the past we've had the kids count household objects to earn pennies to give alms with as the book suggests but this year I might let them do chores to earn pennies instead, or not, we'll have to see how Lent goes.  We've also been fasting from TV and sweets which is hard but also a nice reset from the winter induced TV and candy bender we've been on.  You can click here for a much more professional version of the calender complete with printables.....or if for some reason you want my printables let me know and I can send you a ridiculously old word file :)

I love Auntie Leila's advice to just live your own Lent and bring the children along.  I've been attempting to discipline myself to get up before the kids again (which I haven't done consistently since before the big move) in order to pray/start my day in peace which I've had about a 75% success rate at so far.  If I wanted to ensure being up before my minions I'd have to wake up with Chris at 4 AM and I just don't see that happening anytime in the near future.

I would really like to take the kids to church on a Friday and go through the Stations of the Cross with them--not at 7 PM when that's actually going on and the kids would be complete disasters--maybe just during the day when the church is empty?  And I have a vague plan to print and laminate these free, Montessori style Stations of the Cross cards for the boys to work with.  I might have already hit my limit for Lenten crafting though.  We'll have to see :)

How's your Lent looking so far?