Our Newest Reader

The reader and her family are all very, very proud.

Tutorial: White Chocolate Fondue Sculptures

The big kid's been having an amazing time being interested in cooking lately. I showed her how to Google for recipes and how to bookmark them, and then how to Google for food blogs, and I'm really wishing that I had started her on all that on her own computer, because I now have a lot of recipes bookmarked!

Along with all the delicious, complicated things that we've been cooking together, I've also been making it a point to show the big kid many very, very simple things that she can cook entirely by herself: grilled cheese sandwiches, refrigerated biscuits, fried eggs, etc. The big kid has made peanut butter cookies almost all by herself from a recipe that she found online all by herself, but so far the easiest, most independent kid-friendly desserts that we've done lately have involved our fondue pot.

We have an electric fondue pot (it's possibly the wedding gift that we've gotten the most use out of!), which is why this particular recipe is so kid-friendly. I don't think that the kind that uses the candle underneath would be too far off an almost-seven-year-old's skill level, however.

To make these white chocolate fondue sculptures, first have your kiddo dump a bag of white chocolate chips into a fondue pot and, if it's an electric one, turn the heat just to warm. White chocolate is slightly finicky, in that it will seize up if you introduce any moisture into it while it's melted--we pretty much only used crackery foods with our white chocolate fondue sculptures, however, and nobody drooled into the pot, so we were all good. A more foolproof (but not as tasty, in my opinion) substitution would be candy melts. They come in a billion colors, too, so you could make your sculptures even more fun!

Stir the white chocolate chips as they're melting, because sometimes even if they're hot enough to melt, they'll retain their shape until stirred.

In my humble opinion, the tastiest thing to do with a pot of melted chocolate is to coat three-fourths of a big pretzel stick in it:

Let it sit on waxed paper until solid--

--and then you can store it in any air-tight container until it's all munched up.

What I had wanted to show the kids, however, was how to do edible sculptures with white chocolate. Using a spoon, have your kiddo drizzle melted white chocolate onto wax paper in any shape that she desires. She can stick pretzels into the white chocolate for additional sculptural bits, and sprinkle on sprinkles to color her creation:

These creations will need to be frozen to set hard enough to hold their structure, but if your sculpture base is not white chocolate, but is instead pretzel or a mini-tartlet shell, then it will hold its structure just fine without being frozen to set.

As I'd hoped, the kiddos were able to work on this particular food project completely independently--

--with me just stepping in once they'd tired of it to finish off the white chocolate (oh, white chocolate-coated pretzel sticks, I heart you!).

I think somebody else hearted her edible art:

Actually, since the entire container lasted less than 24 hours, I'd say that we all hearted it pretty well.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Just a Few More Photos of Bean Bags and My Babies

I should probably stop taking my camera outside just to play catch, but these bean bag photos are becoming a bit of an obsession. The girls discovered that if they combine their 0-9 bean bag set and their rainbow bean bag set, I'll have just that many more pop flies to toss at them before they have to gather them and toss them back:

Children exhibiting hand-eye coordination!

And yet neither of them seem to show any interest in team sports...

Our D.I.Y. Chalkboard Blocks

Syd helped me (more or less) make this set of chalkboard blocks from her gigantic building block collection, so I'm especially pleased to see how much she's enjoyed playing with them every day since.

They are, of course, incredibly simple to use.

You play with them:

You interrupt your pony ocean adventure to pose for the Momma:

And when you're done you wipe them off with a damp dish towel--

--so that they're ready for their next incarnation as pony flower garden, or pony hay maze, or pony candy land, or whatever further pony expedition you've thought up next.

My chalkboard building block tutorial is over at Crafting a Green World, and if it wasn't raining today, I'd be painting more right now! As it is, I'm seriously considering taking over the living room floor for the noble cause of multiple chalkboard building block constructions.

Masterpieces of Art in Historical Context

Or rather, color print-outs of artwork cut out, glued in the right(-ish) spot on our big basement timeline, and then painted over again with glitter Mod Podge:

After a brief foray into a library copy of the computer game Masterpiece Mansion, Willow decided that she wanted to learn more art history. All of our print-outs have so far come from The Worldwide Art Gallery, although this will also be a great subject to have in mind the next time that we attend one of those used book clearance sales that happen here pretty frequently--can't you imagine how perfect a five-cent used art history textbook would be for this project?

I still have much to do to figure out other points in an art history unit study, especially since Will has also asked to learn about Ancient Egypt, and we're still doing projects about China, dinosaurs, ballet, Independence Day, cooking, and geometry, but just from our brief study so far, Willow has already achieved the hallmark of cocktail party conversation material, in that she now has a favorite artist.

Hieronymus Bosch. Oh, dear.

Throwing the Rainbow

Oh, my goodness, bean bags have been quite the plaything around here of late. After close to an entire lifetime of being fairly uninterested in tossing and catching games, the girls are both now just about obsessed. Syd likes straight catch, but Will is in love with the "pop fly game," in which I toss a bean bag high, high, high up for her. However, she has her own particular take on the skill, preferring to crouch like an animal as I toss it, then spring up for the (hopeful) grab.

Since I like to include a couple of play shots with the still life shots in my etsy listings, I combined a game of pop flies with a photo shoot for the rainbow bean bag set now up in my pumpkinbear etsy shop. Yeah, "catching" a good shot of a good pop fly catch...

Tricky, a bit. Fortunately, I try to keep my focus at least as much on the child-centered process as I do on the child-centered product (not saying I'm perfect at that, every day, every hour, but I try), so a tricky photo shoot that involves a little girl thrilled to be leaping up to catch tossed bean bags for an hour at a time is an okay photo shoot in my book.

Here are the other photos in the rainbow bean bag listing, some more sedate, one not so much:

How lucky we are that so much of our work is just as pleasant as this.

At Least It's Clean Laundry

Near-ish enough to bedtime for little girls to start feeling sleepy, Sydney apparently came across her beloved I Spy quilt, all fresh and warm and fluffy, in the bin of clean laundry ready to be sorted:

In the effort of True Mom Confessions, I must tell you that all I did was drag the bin into her bedroom and turn out the light, and then I carried on with my evening plan of red wine, chocolate ice cream, and the final season of The Tudors on DVD.

...and Bubbles

While Willow had her wool felt bug kit, Sydney had her own kit, at which she worked diligently--

--in order to make--

--bubble wands!

 
 
 
 
Bubbles on a summer afternoon--I'm not sure what a better day would look like.

P.S. Don't forget about the Artterro craft kit giveaway that I've got going on over at Crafting a Green World. Missing out on it is NOT an option, my friends.

Bugs...

Because I can't thoughtfully review a gorgeous-looking eco-friendly children's craft kit until my children have had the chance to see if they can wreck it, throw a fit over it, or use it to shoot their eyes out, I do occasionally get sent the odd freebie, such as this Artterro wool felt bug kit that I threw at Willow to see what she'd do with it.

Here's what she did, as a matter of fact:

Played with the wool felt shapes:

Hot glued some stuff together:

 
Did a little sewing:

Admired her work:

And did a little more sewing:

And yes, her fingernails are filthy. Finally had to trim them practically down to the nail bed to get them clean:

 
Cute as a bug?

 
Definitely nothing cuter than that bug-making baby!

You must now click yourself over to Crafting a Green World and enter the Artterro craft kit giveaway that I'm hosting. You can't win if you don't play!

Rainbow W.I.P.

Bazaar Bizarre Cleveland is in less than two weeks! I need the whole family's help to get ready in time, even, apparently, the help of those who might not seem traditionally helpful:

Walking too close to the iron and ensuring that I have to inform people that my products do NOT come from a cat-free home are important jobs, too, you know.

And thus stands my stack of cut fabric, ready to sew into rainbow sets of bean bags:

Add to this the additional cat duties of knocking over my fabric stacks if I leave them out, batting bobbins underneath shelves if I accidentally drop them, and scattering the dried beans if I leave the box open and unattended. They keep me tidy, those cats.

A Girl, Her Cat, a Book, and a Suspicious Amount of Rope

Otherwise known as your average, ordinary, typical, everyday Saturday afternoon.

China Unit Study: Tangrams

Will's interest in learning how to say a few words in Mandarin Chinese (and darn it all if I know where THAT interest came from) coincided neatly with a call for participants for our local homeschool group's international fair, so in our house for the past two or so months, China has been where it's at.

Yes, we did learn a few words in Mandarin Chinese (more on that another time!), but we've also spent our morning and afternoon projects learning about silk, kites, terracotta warriors, calligraphy, dragons, Buddhism, paper, rocketry, the abacus, fireworks, how to build The Great Wall, and other wonders of China. One of our most valuable projects, however, and one of the ones that I'll think we'll keep in heavy rotation even now that the International Fair's finished, was the tangrams.

Invented in China thousands of years ago, tangrams are a simple seven-piece picture puzzle, whose infinite combinations and tricky patterns have kept the girls (and me!) occupied for hours this summer. It's a sneaky little math manipulative, especially for Willow, who has gotten into the habit of exclaiming that she "hates" math, which isn't at all true, of course, for she adores all math activities when she doesn't know that they're math, such as the tangrams!

Using a PBS teacher handout on tangrams, I was able to make tangrams from scrapbook paper, at just about any size that I wanted. I also printed extra pages of the tangrams for the girls to color and cut out, and another copy of the tangrams page on an overhead transparency sheet:

The girls LOVE our overhead projector, so that was a hit, as always:

 Although my favorite part is the shadow theater that it inevitably produces:

I know a good deal when I see one, and I am ALWAYS on the hunt for homeschool supplies, so I'm not ashamed to tell you that it was years ago that I bought a complete and unused tangram-a-day calendar from Goodwill. The pages are unbound, the tangrams are magnetic, and it comes with a metal sheet that you put about five pages back from the page that you're working on, so that you can stand the calendar up and work on a vertical surface.

Of course, the tabletop also works well:

Although the girls had loads of fun making up their own tangram pictures--

--this calendar has a full year's worth of daily puzzles to complete. The next day's page has the solution to the previous page's puzzle, set up as the same picture in miniature, but with lines to show where each piece goes. That way, if you get a little stuck--

--you have some help!

Figuring out the puzzle is good for your brain, and pretty emotionally satisfying, too:

Making the tangrams and solving the tangram puzzles both nurture valuable math skills, so I personally suggest purchasing a tangram+puzzles set that has silhouettes on which you can place the tangrams (makes solving the puzzle more doable for a little), and also making your own tangram sets from a variety of materials.

Geometry in action! And the kid says that she doesn't like math...

Other tangram resources that we tried and loved:

• tangram games from the Sagwa the Chinese Cat PBS Kids site
• Ordinary Life Magic's shrink plastic tangrams

Hoping to Find Lauren Spierer

Normally, I just can't tell you enough about Bloomington.

I can tell you what it's like to cycle through the setting of Breaking Away. I can show you the house that they used in that film--it's a few blocks from my house, on the way to the library.

I can tell you how I used to lie on my stomach on the living room floor and watch the video of John Cougar Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane":

The Tasty Freeze? It's actually called The Chocolate Moose--we also walk there pretty much every week for a moose horn and a couple of blizzards.

I can tell you how it felt to be in a crowd of people standing in a club here, standing right in front of the stage, in fact, singing along to the Old 97s' "Bloomington" just as loudly as they, themselves, were singing it.

I can tell you how it feels to go anywhere, anywhere at all in Bloomington and always, always know somebody there. And even if I don't know somebody personally, I know somebody that they know, and therefore I know all their business anyway.

Unfortunately, I also can tell you what it's like when a professor is murdered one Christmas, and what it's like to have my husband part of the jury that tried his murderer. Bloomington's a small town, you know? Professor Belton lived a block from my old house, in my old neighborhood. He entered the English department as I was leaving it, and many of my grad school friends were his friends. One of my mom friends knew him in a different context--he chatted with her and held her baby in his arms two nights before he was murdered. One of the other people invited to the party the night before his death, this party that was gone over and over and over again during the trial, is the owner of a downtown cafe, who walked in same fashion show that Syd was in.

See? Small town.

Stuff like that messes you up. You want to know that your town is safe, and not that a murderer walked right past the house that you once lived in with your baby daughter. You want to know that the friendly dude selling you organic salad greens at the farmer's market is not going to kill a friend of a friend. You want to know that your husband isn't going to have to be in the jury for a murder trial, and you don't know if he'll come home tonight because he can't leave until a verdict has been reached. Selfish little wants, I know, but you know that you want them, too.

I thought that I would have plenty of years to recover from that scary business, but now I can tell you more. I can tell you what it feels like to know that a pretty, petite, little college student disappeared off the street as she was walking home early one morning, just downtown. I can tell you what it feels like to see the posters all over town begging for information on her disappearance, to try to find a babysitter so that I can volunteer in the search party, to scan ditches and bushes and doorways for anything suspicious as I run my errands. I can tell you how Sydney's day camp is just across the street from Lauren Spierer's downtown apartment, and how navigating all those satellite trucks and police cars and reporters on camera just makes me so sad. I can tell you that I've already had the conversation with Willow, many times these past two weeks, about exactly what she will do to keep herself safe in college. I can even tell you, because this is Bloomington, after all, and I know everybody, that I know one of the "persons of interest" in Lauren Spierer's disappearance. These kids are all IU students--somebody had to teach them freshman comp, you know?

I want to tell you that this isn't my town that this happens in, not Bloomington, but of course that isn't true. Instead, I'll simply tell you this:

This is Lauren Spierer:

This is the link to download Lauren Spierer's flyer, so that you can display and pass it on.

This is a white truck that was seen circling the block near where she may have been at the time of her disappearance:

This is the number you can phone to give any information that you may have, completely anonymously:
1-800-THE-LOST.

This is something terrible that has happened in my town. If you can help us, please do.