thanksgiving

on thanksgiving we drove to my aunt and uncle's house on lake michigan.  while the turkey was cooking, sho and i snuck down to the beach for a few moments, to play in the whipping cold wind and bright sun.  sorry for the eighteen million photos, but man: winter beach shots.  they're the best.  south haven is lovely in the summer, but my favorite time of year to go is in deep howling winter to watch the ice floes bump into each other in the frozen surf by the pier.  it feels like another planet: one of the thousand reasons, big and small, that i love michigan.  my family living here is another reason, and david's family too (who are somehow still my family even without him).  i'm thankful to have spent this thanksgiving with both sides of sho's family, and even more thankful to be a part of them both myself.

but more than anything else in the world, i am so grateful to have this little buddy named shoshanna by my side.  she's my dearest little dumpling, the bravest, coolest, smartest, sweetest girl i know.  i'm so thankful that i get to be her mama.

matching nightgowns: oh yeah i went there

 
my first foray into the giant stack of flannel i bought recently was to make a big comfy nightgown for shoshi, complete with a pocket and tiny rounded pink buttons from my grandma's coffee can button stash, and of course: double-fold bias tape!  lord i love that stuff.  i'm kind of proud of this one because i invented the pattern myself.  (although let's face it, i find real patterns way too intimidating so pretty much everything i make is from some jacked-up pattern drawn by me on a cut-up brown paper bag).  i finished it over the weekend when shoshi was still pretty sick, and it was the coziest, warmest garment i could dream up to put her in.  while i was at it, i hopped on the dork train and whipped up a matching nightgown for her baby doll, complete with tiny matching headband.  i'm now about halfway through the epic pile o' flannel (the rest of the jammies will probably be christmas presents for shoshi), and am totally making a matching doll pair out of each kind of fabric.  i seriously cannot resist that tiny stitching and slightly creepy feeling of making clothing for a doll, evidently.  anyway, i snapped a few photos before i headed off to work this morning of my little mama and her baby.

i have been sewing so much for shoshi's christmas in particular lately.  after working so hard all summer to sew for strangers, it is pure joy to stay up late and make things just for my girl, with all the extra odds and ends i know she in particular will appreciate.  i'm planning on posting some pictures of what i've been working on this weekend, with links to all the good ideas i've been inspired by.  stay tuned, friends!  and have a great thanksgiving, if i don't see you before then.  xoxo

 

sick days

ach, i was doing so well with posting there for awhile!  but it's been sick times around here since last thursday, when i had a headache so bad i actually stayed home from work.  a day with my girl + horrendous migraine > work though.  then the next day, sho had a fever that by the middle of the night was so high that she was deliriously sobbing about being covered in chocolate.  "too chocowey mama, too chocowey!"  man, so cute and so so scary all at once.  fevers scare the pants off me.  sometimes literally!  and why are middle-of-the-night fevers about 200% scarier than daytime fevers?  pretty much everyone in the house was sick all weekend.  still, sick household + weekend > work.  are you sensing a theme?  i'm so grateful that there's a four-day weekend coming up, my shoshi-lovin heart really needs it right now.  anyway, i have many UNSPEAKABLY AWESOME posts coming up, but for now just wanted to check in and say hello, i'm here.  back soon.  xo  

holiday crafts you can do with kids, part 2

this is another one i sorta made up as i went along: a papier mache snowman!  and bonus, this one isn't so christmas-oriented.  i was very aware during the parade we were in last weekend how excluded people of different faiths must have felt.  santa hats for everyone!  except, you know, a lot of people.  most of the crafts i'll be posting here are non-denominational, 'cause that's mostly how we heathens roll.  (although i totally realize that a snowman is excluding any australian readers, who are just entering summer now...oh lord, you just can't win.)

this craft took place over the course of three different "pwoject" sessions, each one a good small length of time for a little one's attention span.  (i find that some of the more elaborate projects we embark upon sometimes end in me getting frustrated with sho and finishing it myself, which is basically the opposite of the point of making art with your kids.)  it started when shosh was running around like a bored madwoman one night and i said, "sho, i'm about to introduce you to a glorious thing called papier mache.  it is super messy."  actually, this entire (kind of ugly but rather dear) decorative craft involves a lot of messy, beloved-by-kids steps, in three easily do-able steps.

1.  blow up some balloons in small-medium-large sizes (we originally did three, but the smallest one was mysteriously lost along the way).  shred up a bunch of thin strips of newspaper.  mix together flour and water until it becomes a gloppy paste.  set the balloons in small bowls or cups for stability, then dip the newspaper strips in the flour/water mixture and place all around the balloon, until it's entirely covered in newspaper.  then, set it aside for a few days.  lose the head somewhere.  once it's totally dry, pop the balloons and pull them out, leaving only the papier mache shell.

2.  rummage around to find some sort of base to anchor the snowman to - i used a leftover slate tile from my parents' bathroom, but a flat scrap of wood would work fine too or really anything sturdy and flat.  get out the hot glue gun (woohoo!), and glue the biggest sphere to your anchoring device, with the hole from the balloon facing down.  continue in this fashion until everything is glued together.  then dig around in your basement until you find a bucket of old white house paint.  chip away at said rusted bucket until it finally pops open, revealing rock-solid paint from the clinton administration.  go back into your basement to find another slightly less-old bucket of white paint.  repeat, this time with better results.  (note: you could also just use ordinary white paint, if you are not a hillbilly.)  give your kid a paintbrush and let them go to town!  the fact that they are using super-permanent house paint will give this phase of the project a thrilling sense of imminent danger.


3.  let the paint dry for a couple days, then collect some odds and ends from around the house and yard to decorate the snowman with: a scrap of fabric for the scarf, some black felt for the hat, branches for the arms, ribbon, yarn, buttons and stones.  shoshi had a lot of fun picking these out, and i let her choose whatever she wanted.  sometimes it's hard not to get all control-freaky about projects like this, because you are (probably) much more capable of making an extraordinarily artistic papier mache snowman than your toddler, but try to reign it in and embrace the sweet ugliness of what they create!  it's much better for everyone this way.  get out the hot glue gun, and glue the buttons and eyes and such wherever your kiddo wants you to.  i made a top hat by cutting out a large felt circle, gluing a rectangle of felt in a circle inside it, and placing a smaller circle on top of that.  the whole time we were doing this, we used the spanish words for the parts of the body we were adding to the snowman.  educational!

so you know, the end result is probably not going to make it into martha stewart living, but holy heck did sho have fun making it, every step of the way.  and she was so proud of the finished product.  total cost: nada.  

i was such a "project" kid myself; my mom still teases me about it.  that has kind of given way to sewing and occasional design-type stuff, like cards and tags...in other words, the two art forms that i'm the best at.  it feels good to revisit the days of just making things for the basic fun of making a big mess, and turning a pile of scraps into something you made - perfectly beautiful or not.

holiday crafts you can do with kids, part 1

do you see what i did there, with those dorked-out, pinterest-worthy vintage christmas lights in the background?  (god, i don't know how some bloggers do it.  i felt like such a huge dork setting up those lights.) but pretttty festive, no?

anyway, this year is fun times because shoshi is old enough to start making her own christmas gifts to give people.  since before she was born, i've always made most of the presents i give, out of financial necessity and also because i wish everyone did that.  "be the change you want to see in the world," etc.  (i'm pretty sure gandhi was talking about xmas there, wasn't he?) shosh has always scored a major haul of gifts from adoring grandparents, family and friends, and i feel like two years old is not too young to learn that gift-giving goes both ways; that it can often be just as fun (if not more so) to give as it is to receive.  to me, this is a really important lesson to teach her.

so i'd love to share some of the projects that we've been doing lately, because they've been so much fun and i think those of you with kiddos would like them too.  but i don't want to spoil the surprise for friends and family who are reading!  it's a total dilemma, y'all.  i guess i'll start with a teensy craft we did a couple weekends ago and share other small projects as we go, while keeping the main ones under wraps for now.

this is one i invented myself!  i wanted to make some salt-dough ornaments to decorate wrapped presents with.  i was thinking of doing the ol' handprint in dough christmas ornament, but it turned out totally wack.  so, with the dough hardening by the moment and my toddler's attention waning, i bundled her up and we went outside looking for little twigs.  i raced downstairs and dug around in my glitter/crafty stash that david's grandma (an art teacher) gave me shortly before she died, and bam!  we were in business.  these ended up looking very earthy and natural, with the texture of the twigs and sprinkles of cinnamon and a dash of gold shiny things for good measure.

RECIPE  (adapted from here)

4 cups flour
1 cup salt
1.5 cups warm water
half cup or so of cinnamon
wee little twigs
little gold (or silver or whatev) shiny plastic circles - what are these called?  kind of like glitter, craft supplies. agh!  i'm a terrible diy blogger, evidently.  they're pictured below.

combine the water and salt, then add flour.  knead by hand (sho and i love this part).  add cinnamon - as much as you like.  i liked the more earthy look this gave the ornaments, plus they smell great.  our ornaments have faded a lot since they've dried though, so make the dough darker than you'd like it to end up.  then we rolled the dough into balls and squished them flat, about 1cm thick.  (you could also use the rim of a cup to make a circle after rolling out the dough.)  then take the small twigs you've collected, and help your little one cut or break them so there are a bunch of approximately three different sizes - longer ones for the sides of the tree, shorter ones for the bottom, and even smaller ones for the trunk of the tree.  press them into the dough circles in a tree formation.  then take the shiny gold crafty circles and press them into the dough as if 'decorating' the twig tree.  then, if you like, use a little toothpick to draw your child's name/year into the ornament, and poke a hole through the top.  later you'll string some twine through that hole to create a legit christmas ornament!  my mom got in on the crafty action (even though projects notoriously stress her OUT) and pressed some teensy evergreen branches (like super-tiny) into little dough circles, and those turned out quite rad.  those would be good for younger babes with limited fine motor skills to do.  officially you're supposed to bake this dough, but due to the plastic and wood involved, i opted to just leave ours out - two weeks later, they've almost totally hardened and are pretty sturdy little guys.  i would recommend checking in after a few days to re-poke the holes at the top, since ours closed up a bit.  as sho would say: "voila!  ooh la la!"

to be honest, this craft was mostly done by me, with sho dicking around in the dough and generally wreaking havoc.  (who dumps all of the shiny gold circle things into the dough at once and then presses them in even further?  who DOES that?  oh yeah, a two year old.  also, what the hell are those crafty circles called, anyway?)  still though, she had fun messing around with the dough, and i had fun reliving my toddler days.  the important thing is that she will remember making these ornaments (or more accurately, sabotaging my every effort to make these ornaments) when packages are opened, and feel some sense of ownership and pride in the giving of them.  that's what it's all about, right?

 

makin' jammies

my brother and me in our jammies, 1991

my grandma engels was a superstar sewer and pink-lover extraordinaire.  she never really officially learned how to sew, just kind of taught herself by taking apart clothing to see how it worked and sewing it back up again.  this is exactly my style of sewing too, and i am honored to sew on the very same forty-year old viking that she used for all those years.  i also inherited her thread collection, and the notions and odds and ends of a lifetime of sewing, including a delicious stash of metal vintage zippers and three coffee cans filled to the brim with buttons (some of them from her own grandmother's collection).  in all the years that i've been sewing since she died, i've gone through many of these materials, but she had so much pink thread in particular that i'm still using it.  i always think of her when i do.    

she was awesomely talented at sewing doll clothes - the bag of them i found recently seriously took my breath away.  unfortunately, the poor woman had three sons and when a girl (my mom) was finally born, she turned out to be a tomboy.  then she had six grandsons, and wouldn't you know it - when the one and only granddaughter came along (that would be me), she too turned out to be yet another pink-hating tomboy.  i wish she could've met shoshanna - finally a girly heir to inherit all those teensy barbie clothes!

every winter, she sewed a new pair of flannel pajamas for my brother and me (and i think all the other grandkids, too - only now can i appreciate what a labor of love that must have been!).  she was always really cool about not trying to make me into a girly girl, though it must've been tough for her to sew yet another pair of rocketship/cowboy/soccer pajamas year after year.  those jammies were the jam!  super soft, always with plenty of pockets, and made from fabric representing whatever we were most interested in at the time.  (pictured above: my brother and me in 1991, rockin' our jams.  shoshi is matty's age in this picture and sure does look a lot like him, i think.)

i'm trying to have all my christmas presents done by december 1 this year, which is no joke when you make the bulk of your gifts.  so i'm knee-deep in a ton of projects right now, many of them with shoshi, working on art projects together that she can give people "all by myself."  (post about this to come.)  so i've been quite busy (in a nice way), which is why i have no idea why the flannel section beckoned me so strongly when i stopped by the fabric store yesterday.  "all flannel $2.99/yard!" the signs proclaimed.  oh, dear me.  visions of my grandma's jammies danced in my head, and before i knew it i'd bought five different flannels, lord help me.  i spent my sho-free afternoon (gamma leslie takes her every sunday) blissfully creating my own flannel pajama and nightgown patterns out of the various pajamas that sho wears now, which is exactly what my grandma used to do.  i'm itching to sit down at my machine tonight.  there is something quite beautiful to me about using the very pink thread that my grandma used all those years ago, to finally make that pair of long-awaited girly pink pajamas for the great-granddaughter who she never met, but would have adored.

a parade for shoshi

on friday shoshi's grandma leslie texted me, "do you guys want to be in the parade with me tomorrow?"  um, let's see: riding the holly jolly trolley and having thousands of people wave at you while dressed like an elf?  i was such a shy kid that i probably would've had nightmares about this scenario, but for sho it was basically heaven on earth.  throw in her cousin (second cousin?  cousin once removed?) taylor, who is sho's hero, and the deal was sealed.

we were at the very end of the parade, right after santa and mrs claus. (quite thrilling for sho, i think. i've totally begun the SANTA indoctrination already.  it's just such a fun concept...a fat man in a fur-lined red suit sliding down your chimney to pull a reverse b&e?  count me in!)  it was a beautiful day and we got to watch the marching band (each member wearing a santa hat) practice in the huge parking lot staging ground beforehand, along with hordes of interesting people and dogs and costumes everywhere you looked.  there were giant polar bears (who gave sho a hug), an entire crew of gingerbread men, cinderella and tinkerbell (who gave sho a ring, which she breathlessly proclaimed "my beau-ful tweasure!").  also: grandma, dressed as an elf.  "elf gwamma!" sho kept calling out.  man, the concept of elves is almost as good as the whole santa thing.  having read the polar express my entire childhood, i'll always envision the north pole as it is in that book, midnight snow falling silently in the great square as thousands of elves gather in droves to send santa off on his epic journey.

in spite of all the shenanigans, sho was strangely tired and grew more so during the long wait for us to join the parade.  she cuddled up on my lap and rested, which does not happen every day.  she rallied for a lollipop though, and waved enthusiastically at all the people lining the streets when we finally set off.  unfortunately, the fire engine and police car that signified the end of the parade were right behind the ol' holly jolly trolley, and the marching band's enthusiastic rendition of "jingle bells" was frequently punctuated by the horrible, super-loud honking of the fire engine.  shosh held strong at first, but after the fifth honk or so, she was done.  she sat in my lap and sobbed loudly in the direction of the cheering crowds, before finally passing out, lollipop still clutched in her hand.  she slept through me carrying her several blocks to the car, putting her in her car seat, the entire ride home, taking her out of her car seat, and putting her to bed.  (this never happens.)  that little dude was tuckered OUT!  

it all made sense later that night, when she threw up all over the two of us.  my poor little elf! that was her first experience throwing up, and directly afterward she asked confusedly, "what happen?  what is that?  what happen, mama?"  i was thankful for approximately the eighteen thousandth time to live with my parents right now, because it really helps to have another adult around during any sickness involving bodily functions. (she is doing great today, and is spending the afternoon with elf gwamma herself.)

still, though.  the parade was great fun, and i'm glad leslie asked us along.  even though david aren't together, i will always be so thankful that i got his mom and step-dad out of the deal. sho's beloved gamma and kappa are a great part of my life too, for many many reasons, including (but not limited to) all-access holiday parade waving-elf opportunities.