free spirit

Yesterday we went to a craft class at the local Michael's. They have these demonstrations on how to do certain things and I decided to take The Girl to see them do painted glass ornaments. They did then allow the five little girls to paint an ornament to take home. My Girl did hers slightly differently. Shocking, I know. The rest of the little girls followed the exact directions to make a sweet little Christmas ornament. They decoupaged on sweet little snowflakes and glitter and such. My girl? Well, she decided that she wanted to make an Autumn ornament. So, she painted it red and she then painted green leaves on the ornament. The green leaves happen to also look like chicken feet, but she was quite happy with her creation. Though, I will admit that the other little girl's ornaments looked quite a bit more polished and "finished," I will also admit that My Girl's ornament was all HER.

She is a free spirit. She doesn't typically care if you are not supposed to read books on the bench during soccer. She reads them cause she wants to.




She creates games that get little girls running and all using their imaginations. During her brother's soccer games she would rally the troops and lead treasure hunts using maps drawn on her little sparkly purple etch a sketch. Then all the little girls were asking their moms for etch a sketches for Christmas.

She is often in another world. Sparkling and dancing and moving and doing her own thing.

Her own world is different. The only problem is when it collides with someone else's world. Or someone else's desire to actually play baseball and get people out... rather then pick clover.

Free spirits may not actually make good second base players. Frankly free spirits don't bother much with baseball. Free spirits enjoy other pursuits like finding those sneaky little fairies that hide in the clover.

I hope she does not lose her free spirit. Ever.

things that make me pause and take note

I have honestly been coming up at a loss for what to put on this blog. Sad. The problem is that my life is wrapped up in my kids really and I won't post pictures of them online. So many of the time I just start writing a post and it ends up getting too long and then I don't have time to finish it and when I go back to read it and write more I have lost the main thought and I don't finish it.

This post will be fairly short.

I hope.

I read online probably too much, but I read and I can't help myself. I used to get my news fix in magazines and the TV but most of my news fix now comes from online sources. One of my favorite online sources is NPR. I used to listen to NPR all the time and I loved the mix that the NPR channel in Springfield MO gave me. They would have the classical music on interspersed with the awesome news shows and jazz piano and Car Talk and Prairie Home Companion... etc. Unfortunately here where we are now (sorry about my annoying vagueness) closer to a larger city we have multiple "NPR" stations but they are all specific. One is only talk, all news, all talk type stuff. Another is all classical music, but it has ads? And this station is still on the NPR website, but never advertises itself as NPR. Weird. Another station is all Jazz. I miss my all in one station. SO... I mainly just listen to the classical station because much of the news found, well... anywhere isn't appropriate for children to hear and the local news personalities annoyed me.

So, as I continue on writing my, ahem... short post... what I was trying to say in the above paragraph is that I no longer listen to NPR for news, I read it online at their site. Sometimes I also listen to it online it just depends on the story and what is going on in my world. Tonight what caught my attention was a story on pinhole cameras.

I vaguely remember studying the overall concept of pinhole cameras in school, but I don't think we actually made one. I am really interested in making one of these in the future with my kids.

The image has such a great look to it and honestly the picture is much better to my poor eyeballs then the cheap type kid safe digital cameras that they make. Those pictures make my eyes want to bleed. The fuzziness... the painfulness the annoyingness. I lose patience for those cameras very fast.

Perhaps we will try this during the summer months here. I have a feeling that we need some nice crisp light to get this to work well and summer sounds like the best time for us to experiment and play with light.

moving and grooving and reflecting

Today I went on a total cleaning spree and moved furniture and vacuumed like my life depended on it. I have a love relationship with my vacuum cleaner so he and I hung out all day. We did the walls, the floors and touched up the drapes!

Then I folded all the laundry and washed all the bedding in the house.

I have still resisted the urge to take down the Christmas decorations but it is hard for me this year.

It took me a long time to get into the Christmas spirit thing and now I want all the decor gone so that it will be easier to clean and organize again.

I am resisting as long as I can for the kids. They love the Christmas stuff and I want them to enjoy it.

Oh, I had a question about my Jesse tree. One of my amazing readers had never heard of such a thing, so I will tell you a little bit about ours.

Last year I found this book at the church book store. It had directions for making a banner and then making felt and embroidered ornaments to hang on it. The idea is that you do a Bible reading for each day tracing the story of Christ through the entire Bible and you hang an ornament that helps to symbolize that story each day.

Well, not to disapoint you all, but I don't think I could embroider all of those ornaments in a year's time. That just isn't a skill I have learned yet. So, I pulled out something that I did know how to do and that is clay. I made all the ornaments, with my kids, out of polymer clay. We baked them in the oven and we started doing our readings.

Last year when I started this my kids were young. They were 4 and 6 and well, they couldn't sit through all the scripture readings that they had laid out for us in this book, so I would use the stories from the Children's Bibles that we have around and sometimes I would read portions of the actual Bible story and sometimes I would read portions and paraphrase it all so the kids would get it better. It worked out great!


These are a few pictures of our ornaments on our Jesse Tree. You can spot a burning coal in tongs as in Isaiah, a scroll as in the scroll of Caesar calling for the census, the fish as in Jonah and the Great Fish, the ram from Abraham and Issac, the Rainbow from Noah's ark, the tree in The Garden.

You may spot others as you look at the pictures. The entire collage can be clicked on to enlarge it.

This has been a wonderful way for us to reflect daily on the wonder of the season. It has made our Christmas season much more meaningful.

I have more to post concerning Christmas but that will be saved for another post.

one sunday in november

One Sunday in November I took a day's worth of pictures. I didn't plan anything special this day, it just sorta happened. It was a busy day looking back on it, but I have a feeling that everyday would seem busy if I actually took pictures and documented everything we do. I didn't start taking pictures until mid-morning, so I will describe that morning until that point.

I awoke to The Girl playing multiple instruments on my bedroom floor. We are talking drums and tambourines and singing... it was great. Really. We did breakfast, which I think was pancakes and then we settled in to cleaning up the house and living the standard Sunday morning. We attend church on Saturday night so we do not have the typical Sunday morning church routine.

As I was cleaning the kitchen, the kids started pulling out projects and things to do.

The Boy pulled out a kit to make window clings and decided on a turtle. First he needed to outline it all in black and wait a few hours and then color it all in.



On the other end of the table, The Girl started this project. These little guys are like packing peanuts and are actually just like the biodegradable ones that some companies use. They sell these at expensive kid stores for crafts. I got mine for free from someone who was getting rid of their stash. You simply wet them slightly and they stick together. She was making a wall here.



This is the caterpillar that The Boy made.



After a bit the Aquadoodle was pulled out. I love this thing! Art with painless water filled markers! Who ever thought this up deserves a gold medal. We practice spelling words on this too, but that is another post.


Back to the kitchen and a bit later, this is the outline done on the turtle. It is now drying.


In the meantime, I am checking out this magazine. Look at those cookies! Yum! I love the detail of that one with the snowman and the boy and I actually got on ebay and checked out the molds that are used to make cookies like that. I was just so impressed with the look of it.



Yet another item was pulled out of the laundry room. This is another favorite. I found this toy at a yard sale on base at our last station. It is from Germany and that becomes obvious as you look at what this toy does. You get to use a little hammer and real tacks. You see in Germany they can sell fun toys like these because people are not as sue happy there. They know that if a kid swallows a tack that they as a parent are to fault, not the company for making a toy. My kids love this and I think I paid a dollar for it. Great fun!!!



This is the overall look of the table as all of this was going on at virtually the same time. My table nearly always looks like this though.

I tell people we just have the privilege of eating in a classroom.


The finished hammering project. Nice standard little picture there... now we can all collectively sigh at the happy little domestic scene.


Time for music!!! Singing and making up songs about virtually nothing! Can it get any better?


The instruments were put away and they collaborated forces to build a fort to fight the bad Tigers. No kidding.


The cushions are off my sofa again.



They made arrows and spears out of K'nex. They had to fight off the bad guys from their fort. Guess who had the privilege of playing the bad tiger? Yup... that would be me! See what getting half your college education in Drama gets you?!


After some grand battles we stopped for lunch. That consisted of amazing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Yum. We had a few other things with that but I can't really remember what right now. Probably some clementine oranges. We love those guys!


After lunch the turtle was finished and it currently resides on the window of The Boy's bedroom.
The colored portions become more clear as they dry and look like a sun catcher type thing. It will stick right on the glass until the sun will slowly over the time of about a year disintegrate the material and you get to scrape it off the glass with a razor.


I checked on the bedrooms and what was going on up there. It looks like the dollhouse people are having a picnic. Notice the composed dad and the family dog. Now, look at the mom's wild and disheveled hair. Should I be fixing my hair more often?! What is she trying to tell me?!

The kids are playing here having great fun in the tree house and enjoying the picnic.


Ah, now next door in The Boy's room we have the K'nex mess. This mess shows up way too often around here. He loves these things though. They can be so many different things and he does use them to build things with the kit instructions but he also builds tons of different things. Like arrows. Spears. Guns. Such things that are so worthy of a little boy's time.


It was right about then that we went outside and The Boys started doing this.


The girls started doing this. It was time for the garden to get winterized. Mushy pumpkins were getting buried so they could make yummy dirt to plant things in when spring hits us.


The boys continued doing a bit of this...


The girls did a bit of this...


Then it was time to get ready for kid's choir practice. I washed up the kids and got them into appropriate clothing and ran to the commissary because I forgot that it was The Girl's turn to bring in snacks for her class. We picked up some of these guys for the kids. They are safe. No milk, no peanuts, just issues for those with wheat allergies and she has none of that going on in her class. She has developed a dairy allergy, but that is a whole 'nother post. I have found it is just easier to bring in snacks for her myself more often then not. If I don't bring snacks then they end up trying to serve them goldfish, or ritz crackers and she can't have either of those things so then I have to run next door to the store and grab her a different snack.


I stayed to help out some in her class cause there are tons of kids and we got all the juice boxes ready. I pulled up the "wings" so that the kids could grab those and not grab the box and squirt juice everywhere. They still did squirt some juice around. God bless janitors everywhere. They need it.


I took a fuzzy picture of her class on purpose. I do not post pictures of kids on my public blog at all, but I wanted you to get the overall impression of her class. Lots of kids, lots of fun. She is the one in the red dress on the right side of the picture.

The Boy's class was practicing for the musical they did for Christmas. Another fuzzy picture for you to enjoy. He was up there on the left side somewhere. I made this one too fuzzy for me to even tell where he was exactly.

For dinner we had tortilla soup. I made up those little yummy tortilla strips in the skillet too. Yum. I did take a picture of the soup, but the lighting was not working for me, so I will subject you to my fuzzy kid pictures but not to bad lighting pictures. I have my standards.


Yummy ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery. It is a tradition. We do not always go out for ice cream, more often then not we have sorbet here at home, but we always do Sundaes on Sundays. It is something that we picked up on from some of my dearest friends at our last duty station.

The Boy broke the norm and had mint ice cream. He ALWAYS has sorbet so this was something new for him. He ate half of it then he dumped out the ice cream and ate the cone. He just isn't an ice cream lover.

That was our day. I am sure that somethings were left out, like how I fell over once the kids were in bed, but you get the gist of it. I will have to do this again sometime in the future as well. It was fun to see our day from later looking back. It made me realize how much we actually do in a given day and most of our time was spent at home just messing around.

I hope you have an amazing weekend and time with your family as we prepare to celebrate this amazing season!

until they found a little house covered in candy...

There is nothing like Neccos for the roofing of gingerbread houses. I wonder if even the witch in Hansel and Gretel used Necco wafers?

The Boy made this little wreath for the back of the house. I thought it turned out quite well done.

I don't know that I would have been able to resist the sight of the sun shining through gumdrops either. The witch would have had me too!

The Boy working fervently on gluing on as much candy as possible. Can there ever be enough glued on?

Somehow I doubt the witches table was as messy as mine, but she was getting ready to eat kids, not letting kids consume copious amounts of sugar.

The Girl's finished house.

The Boy's finished house.

We did use a basic Wilton house kit. I don't really like to admit that, it is sorta like using a mix to make cookies. The deal is, I have decided that I will use the box because then I will have time to get it done. If I had to make the dough and bake it and cut it just right I am not sure we would have made the houses at all and I am so glad that we did make the houses. I will also add that I knew that Wilton put a pathetic amount of candy in the box and I bought plenty of my own to finish them off. The box didn't contain Neccos for example and I was set on having Neccos.

I did help with the roofs but they did them... and I did give suggestions on a few things, but they created. I did teach them how to make the icicles hang on the side of the roof, but those weren't really all that exciting for the kids to make. That took too much patience for them.

Maybe someday I will take the time to make my very own gingerbread house and will make it beautiful and exactly how I want it. Sometimes it is hard for me to not say a word as they make their own house the way they want their own house to be. Sometimes it is hard, but I am always so grateful when I keep my mouth shut. They come up with amazing things on their own that way. For example, I love the way The Girl put the little candy balls all over the roof. She loved playing with them and dropping them all over the floor and I loved the way they ended up looking.

The Boy created that sweet wreath and lined the edges of his area with those gum drops and I love the way that turned out.

The Girl said that so far this was her favorite part of the Christmas Season. That made it worth my keeping my mouth shut and made it worth the huge mess that was my kitchen and made it worth the tons of sugar I let them inhale.

raku

Last month we attended a Japanese Festival and among many wondrous things that we were able to see and partake in this is but one of them. We were able to watch a potter fire some Raku pottery. Raku started in Japan and is a method of firing pottery. It produces a great finish to a piece, and usually one that is poisonous with lead. Do not use your raku pottery to eat from please!

I have heard quite a bit about Raku, but I have never seen it done before and I was quite interested in watching this. The kids also loved seeing this take place. They have watched their daddy fire pottery at VBS/marketplace and so they knew the process, and they have had it described as I have shown them and talked about the pottery that I have done. But this was unlike anything they had watched before.

This is a picture right after he took the kiln off the pots. They are orange hot still and just a few seconds after this shot was taken they went ahead and picked these up with long tongs. It was incredible.

Here he is with the long tongs putting the pot into a small garbage can filled with straw on the ground.

You can see the fire start in the straw because of the extreme heat in this picture.

While the pot was in the metal bin, he talked to us a little bit, but not more then about five minutes. He then pulled the pot out and put it into water. I got wide eyed cause well, when I have put really hot things into really cool things, they have really broken, but this guy knew what he was doing.

They passed the pieces around afterwards so we could all see them. The interesting thing was that I could touch them. Weird to me, considering how long we usually wait for a kiln to cool before you could touch your pots. They were beautiful and the other interesting thing is that they smell like smoke!




I really followed only the one pot with these pictures, but if you look at the first picture you will also see this pot below and this is it finished. They both turned out so well. Very interesting process. The kids loved it!

Sculpture and Art

We were discussing ways in which we humans were made in the image of God once in our Bible Study group. I noted that we love to create. Now, obviously we do not create in quite the same way God has, but we do create in our own way. I love doing pictures of God's creation. These are some of those.

First we have here a naughty little grasshopper sitting on a little grape tomato on my vines. Yes, the tomato and the hopper are really that small. He is just the neatest little thing, never mind that awesome tomato that will ripen soon and tomatoes really have to be one of the yummiest things that God created. Of course in a perfect world there would be only garden grown tomatoes because the ones bought in the store are really pathetic, but for months of the year I deal with those pathetic tomatoes, then in summer I rejoice mightily as I eat mine from the garden! Yes, I am passionate about home grown tomatoes... amazing things they are (that last part was obviously said by Yoda, not me, I would never write that way).



Sunflowers
You know that sunflower decor was all the rage, oh, back in the early 90s and that was all fine and flowery but the fact is that these are some of the coolest flowers ever. Look at how scuptural they are! The rows of seeds... the way the flower will slowly open and ripen into this beauty to behold. The way the huge head on this flower tracks the sun and turns as it follows the heat and light across the sky, everyday. The way the birds will actually perch on the head of the flower and eat the seeds out of it. Bright color, sculptural design, food of the birds, who could ask for anything more.

I love taking time to look, really look at things around me. Probably cause I am a bit lazy and dreamy and I get distracted easier then a june bug in June, but take a look... take a walk... relax and dream and look at the awesome creation. It really does calm my spirit. If you are stressed go de-stress and dream. If you have a little one teach them how to do this as well, it will save you from many therapy bills.

There. I did my nature sermon for the day. Dismissed.