I Just Flew in From Florida, and Boy are My Arms (and Legs and Back) Tired!

We flew in from Florida yesterday, and arrived a little after 8:00 p.m.  Mike got the car and then picked the rest of us up, and as we drove toward home we debated...should we go straight to Borders or go home first?  We ended up driving to the bookstore first thing, and I ran inside to see if she was even still around.

Oh, by "she" I mean The Pioneer Woman.  She was in Dallas last night, signing her cookbook. 

I don't think the employees were prepared for the onslaught.  Most of them were walking around with glazed eyes, looking either perplexed or amazed. 

I found out that the line was long (hours long), and that they were going to keep the store open until everyone had had their cookbooks signed.  Whoever was crazy enough to stay until the end.  Apparently even Ree was crazy enough to stay until the end.

Michaela had gone in with me, and we walked the line just to see how long it was, and to see PW, as well.  I felt like we were playing a live version of "Where's Waldo", but with Ree.  We finally discovered her, and I snapped a quick picture; she was all smiles and seemed so friendly.

We drove home and got Christian and Eliana settled (they were already sacked out), and then I headed back to Borders with my camera and my cookbook.

Then I waited.  And I waited.  And I waited.  It would have been a lot of fun if Michaela could have stayed or to have my mom, or some friends there.  I spoke with a few people in the line around me.  And we wound our way around the entire store.  There was a section at the back of the store that was lined with chairs and small stools; it was a relief to sit down after standing for so long.  We would sit and then everyone would shift over one or two chairs every so often.  It was like a strange and slow game of musical chairs.  Without the music.   And a lot more people than chairs.

I was pretty near the end of the line; there were about fifteen people behind me.  Since there were no more people waiting after this particular group, they decided just to move the chairs along and keep on sitting in them.  There were two women right behind me, and then a couple (like a husband and wife) just behind them.  The women discovered the couple sitting in their chairs backwards. 

The ladies asked these two why they were facing the wrong way.  They looked over their shoulders and then pushed against the floor with their feet so that their chairs scooted forward.  Or backward, however you want to look at it.  Pretty funny.  Pretty much everything is funny at one in the morning, though.

I am too lazy to move chairs and scoot them along.  I just stuck with my own two feet.  And eventually they got me to where I was headed...

It was 1:02 a.m.  At this point the signing was pretty quick, but she was just as sweet as she could be.  She never stopped smiling, and we had a brief conversation.  ("Hope you get some sleep tonight!"  "I hope you do, too!")  (I didn't say it was brilliant.)  It was fun to be there with her even though it was such a short moment.  When she first began writing in my book I said,"You are such a good sport!"  She replied,"I would never leave ya'!"  And that's how she seems...like someone who will stick it out to the end, and who cares as much about the eight hundredth person in line as the first person in line. 

Now I just need to get to the store, stock up my fridge (it's pretty empty since we were gone) and git to cookin'!

When You Go to Florida Don't Forget Your Blades

You would think that on a trip to Florida we would not want to forget our shades...but it seems that a bit of winter chill has snuck into the area and we found ourselves wrestling on some ice skates (and by "we" I mean the older of Wendy's and my children) and then slipping and sliding all over some ice!

Christian began by checking out his blades; maybe he was determining how fast he could go based on how wide and how long they were, added to the temperature of the ice plus his ability to keep his balance.  He's good with math...

I took a lot of pictures of Christian because he was so dang funny to watch.  He looked like he was having a great time, and he is really very tenacious.

He would eyeball his target...

and crash into it!

Fortunately, this did not involve people most of the time.

There was a little of this...

and this...

and this...

and this...

and this...

followed by this...

and a lot of this...

Now, this might be my favorite picture from the afternoon.  Cousin N. did as well as any of them.  They haven't been on ice skates since we went to Tahoe two years ago.  But look at this...

I managed to catch him landing a double axel!

The girls offered a different kind of photo op...

They were very happy to go around and around, gaining confidence with each lap they took.

They stuck together most of the time...

and I hope they always will.  They are so sweet and love each other so much.  I truly hope that their friendship just gets better as they get older.

This is the best I could do to get a picture of all four of them...

I'm not great at capturing a non-moving target, much less four moving ones.

This was the finale with the cousins.  We had to say goodbye to them for this trip when we left the rink (actually, I drove cousin C. to her house, and Christian went in Wendy's car and I picked him up, so they had a few more minutes together), and there were hugs and tears and sweet and hard goodbyes.  I'll see Wendy tomorrow, but her kids will be in school.  Saying goodbye is always hard, but it just means that we have next time to look forward to. 

It also means that I have to pack.  Which means I have to finish the laundry.  And the night is not young. 

Neither am I, which is why there are no pictures of me on the ice!  No offense to all the lovely adults who are quite capable upon the ice.  All I mean is that it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks.  Woof!

Delusional? Of Course!

My kids have been telling me for several weeks what they want to be for our church's Fall Fun Fest.  This is an event that can either take the place of Halloween trick-or-treating, or be a candy-filled prelude to the later evening candy-gorge-fest that inevitably takes place each 31st of October.

As a little sidenote, or undernote, or whatever you may want to call it, I don't particularly like Halloween.  I don't have any very well-defined arguments or concise thoughts and intelligent answers to the question that has been posed to me before,"Why don't you like it?"  It's probably a combination of several things.   One is the large quantities of sweets doled out to all the children (which I will then invade and eat half of, thank you for that, all you so-called nice people out there...my bottom does not need your Snickers and bite-sized Hershey bars.  When you eat sixteen of them, they turn into a GIANT-sized Hershey bar which has more calories than a couple of Big Macs in the end.  And my end doesn't need all those calories, I say again.)  (I suppose I don't really have to eat half of their candy, especially all at once, but...well, I...oh, it's my fault, isn't it?  Shoot.)  Did I say this was going to be a little sidenote?  Sorry for misleading you.  I misled myself, if that helps.  I also don't care for all the spooky stuff:  the skeletons and the ghosts and the creepy goblins or zombies or whatever.  I know that it's become this funny sort of parody of scary in many ways, but I also think that it adds to that general sense of desensitization (is that even a word?  Should it be desensitizedness?) that we have in this country to things that we should be more sensitive to.  What a sentence.  Can you make sense of that?  The hardest thing for me to put into words has to do with the spiritual aspect...but, seriously, I feel like I'm going to shake to pieces if I even think about starting to talk about that.  I'm more the "I just feel that way" kind of person...so don't ask me to explain it, please.

Now after I've said all that I'll tell you that our kids went trick-or-treating last year around the neighborhood (for the first time in their lives) with a group of friends that was also at the Fall Fun Fest; I really did not feel like I could say no.  It would have been very awkward.  And, my goodness, did they have a good time with their friends.  This going out afterward has now become a tradition that has been long-anticipated by my two older children.  And they have been thinking for quite a while about what they wanted to dress up as.

Which leads me to the reason I began writing this in the first place.  They told me they wanted to be a cowgirl and a Native American.  (Not both together...Michaela wants to be a cowgirl [I'm sure you never would have figured it out that she wanted to be a cowgirl], and Christian wants to be a Native American.  Which will be so easy to pull off since he has hair the color of the sun's rays.)  I thought to myself,"I can make their costumes!"  Sure, since I sew all the time (in my head) and I have nothing else to do (except thirteen loads of laundry, and clean all twelve rooms in my house thoroughly, and actually make dinner one of these nights). 

(See title of post now.)

We went to the Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft store and I found the perfect fabric and craft supplies (imagine that!) for our venture into this great unknown.  I got out my sewing machine, and started cutting and sewing the next day, which was Thursday-two whole days before the 31st.  This is actually a major deal, since I am quite famous for waiting until later than the last minute to do anything.  Especially time-consuming things.  Things started out well, though.  The girls were home with me, and Michaela was sweet to keep Eliana occupied with The Little Einsteins.  I stitched a "fine seam"...

But if I tell the truth then I'll say the seam was really a hem and actually looked like a drunk bear had gotten a hold of my sewing.  Why a bear?  I don't know.  Why not?  It was the crookedest, wacked out hemline I've ever seen. 

Undaunted, I forged on. 

Then my sewing machine went haywire.  One of the most important parts for threading the needle was nowhere to be seen (I mean it, it's like it fell down into this slot that you are suppoed to slip your thread in and I couldn't figure out how to get it out, or if it ever was out, or if it was broken, or if I had a machine that was different than the one in the picture so no wonder I couldn't follow the directions.  I thought I was in the twilight zone when I was telling Mike my troubles and I turned around and there it was popped up out of the slot!  Talk about creepy.) and the bobbin thread managed to get wrapped around the small metal rod that the bobbin slips onto...how on earth did that happen?  It doesn't even seem possible, yet these are the kinds of things that do indeed happen to me when I attempt a project like this.  It wrapped around that metal rod about sixteen times and then also got mangled, tangled, and stuck in the space in between the bobbin cavity and where the needle goes in and out of that cavity.  It was crazy.  I thought I would cry.  I may have actually shed a tear.

I just wanted to sew a straight line. 

I decided that although theoretically a sewing machine would get the job done faster, in my reality hand-stitching would mean that this job would get done before October, 2015.  So, I set to stitching by hand. 

Talk about a straight line!  What talent (I don't have).  But at least now I was getting somewhere.

Somewhere called the Loony Bin.  But somewhere.

Michaela said to me,"Why are you stiching like that, Mommy?"  I told her it would be faster (I was just taking the needle and thread straight [sort of] across the material).  Later, I began using a backstitch, which is what the kids in Christian's class are using for their quilt squares, and she said,"Now are you going to use a real stitch?"

The first thing I worked on was a vest for Michaela...I hadn't seen any while out and about, and I think that even if I had I wouldn't have wanted to buy the plastic ones, or the ones that were fake leather and cost $30.  I didn't have a pattern, but just made it up as I went along (this might go a long way to explain my crooked sewing...).  I think it turned out all right when it was done, and she was very happy with it. 

I'm glad she is so easy to please.  I would like to do something to the shoulders, but I'm not sure what.  I'll look at it again later, since she had it on all day today.  Notice that I covered up my crazy stitching with red ribbon (which, by the way, I should let you know ribbon is very hard to put on a curve when the ribbon is straight, since the curve is, well, curved).  It's cute, and she likes it.  I also got smart and started using the Heat'N'Bond, which you iron into your hems and whatnot.  Sew much easier!  Ha, ha.  I do make myself laugh. 

Next I got to work on Christian's outfit.  I had looked up some stuff online and gotten a general idea of what I wanted to do, but then I just started messing with the fabric and laying it out to see what would happen.  I knew I wanted to double the fabric and cut out a neck hole which seemed easy enough.  I cut off one end of the large piece of fabric; I thought it would be wide enough to use as a tunic.  My plan was to cut slanted lines a little below the top, for his sleeves, and then below that stitch straight down, leaving some unstitched at the bottom.  I did all of that, and it looked pretty good; I flipped it right side out and burst out laughing. 

I wish that you could have seen it for real; it looked like a great tunic for a Native American broomstick.  And Christian is pretty skinny, but...I needed to go back to the drawing board. 

I did save that first attempt, thinking Eliana could wear it.  We convinced her to try it on (and believe me, the child is so opinionated that that was no small feat), and at first she thought it was pretty funny...

When it's just our family around, the child loves to be the center of attention...

"Me?  Why, yes...of course the world is revolving around me?!  Did you not know that?"

Then she realized that this tunic, or dress?, was starting to feel a little like a boa constrictor that had wrapped itself around her squishy little belly...

And she wondered how on earth she was going to unpeel this article of clothing from her body.

She hung out in there for a couple more minutes...

but then she was ready to get it off!  Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of that effort; it was equal parts funny and sad since she like to do things all by herself and got into a really tight spot trying to get it off of her arms.  I saved her from her misery, though.  I'm a good mom like that.

I went back to work on Christian's tunic; I cut a new piece and left more room this time.  The sleeves turned out longer, which I liked better anyway.  I stitched the sides again, and this time it looked like it would be roomy enough for the little man.

I cut the extra material off of each side and realized that there was a bonus (or extra bonus, as I always like to say!)...what was left looked just like the breeches that I had seen pictures of, which Native Americans had worn during the cold winter months.  I tried to use the iron-together hemming stuff down one side with the intention of leaving the other side open.  I ironed and ironed and nothing happened; I left it sitting for thirty seconds or more.  I flipped the iron upright and then set it back down just in case it had automatically shut off...nothing was working.  I could feel that the material was warm, but it wasn't hot.  I started to think that all the machines in the world were conspiring to make me lose my mind.  Didn't they know that it was already gone?!  I finally noticed that, no, it had not automatically shut off, but that I had actually turned it off myself.  That helped explain why it wasn't working! 

I started thinking that maybe 2015 wasn't that bad of a guess for finishing, with or without the sewing machine.

Once I had the one side ironed together on each pant leg, I cut holes all the way down the other side in order to be able to wrap the thing around Christian's leg and then use strips of (fake) leather to tie it together.  I thought it would be very cool. 

I finished the tunic and the pants by ironing on a bright strip of woven looking cloth-across the chest, and down the sides of the respective garments. 

I was very pleased with how it ended up looking, and when Christian saw it all and said,"Whoa!" with a huge grin on his face I was even happier.  There is nothing like doing something that your kids actually like.  It was a great moment.  The picture shows the stripes on the pant legs going down the front, but that's just so you could see them.  They will actually go on the outside of them.

Since I was on a roll, I decided to make moccasins.  I had looked around a little in stores, but hadn't found anything in his size.  So, I took his sneakers and covered them all up with this same fake leathery suede material...

After some folding, cutting, and the addition of leather strips, they turned out okay...

The one thing I'm going to have to figure out is how to make them not slippery...the sneaker is literally wrapped up in this fabric and he put them on and went skating through the house.  You know, I could put some of my microfiber cleaning cloths on the bottom of these things and let him go crazy dusting the floors...

I did adjust the tight tunic so that it fit Eliana in a more normal way, and I added a strip of that bright cloth to the bottom of it.  Pretty cute.  I don't know how authentic any of it is, and I don't want to offend anyone.  I tried to make the outfits so that they were more like replicas than the silly costumes you might find in some places.  I need to make the headpiece for Christian and a small quiver for some arrows, but then I'll be done.  I had a good time with this project, but the best part was hearing them say how much they liked the things that I had made.  It was totally worth the time and the needle pokes in my fingers.

And on a final note, I wanted to say that Michaela was so sweet while I was working.  She wanted to sew too, but she watched Eliana when I really needed her to.  She had ideas (I can't tell you how many times she said,"If I were you, I'd do...) and started her own little project with a scrap of the fabric.  She also made a belt for herself and was pleased beyond measure with it when she was done.  I love that girl.

Can you believe her eyes?  I know that it is a bright picture, but I just love the color of her eyes captured here.  That brightness and lovliness are reflected by her inside and out.

And now, since I reminded myself that I have a quiver to make, I am off to make a quiver!

An Afternoon With Some Animals (Other Than the Kids)

The other day a storm was threatening our fun all morning and into the early afternoon. It finally decided to show up...

It wasn't as bad as it could have been, but the rain went on and on.   We were stuck inside for several of the afternoon hours.   What usually happens here, though, is the sun bursts back through the clouds after the rain.  The sun never really came back out that day, but we did end up outside for a late afternoon that was very exciting.

First, the kids discovered a skate and a bonnethead shark down on the beach; they had died and washed ashore.  They were small, but the kids thought this was very cool.

Cousin N. will touch or pick up pretty much any animal life that he's allowed to...

Christian didn't pick it up, but he was right there. I think he was cold.

Even Aunt Wendy took a turn with the shark!

Then to add to the excitement of the evening someone spotted fins in the water.  This usually means dolphins passing by, and they seemed closer in than usual.  The conditions were such that there was a drop off just past where the waves were breaking on the beach. The kids tore off down the beach chasing the dolphins as they headed north.

I tried very hard to get some pictures of the dolphins jumping out of the water, because they were leaping and catching fish.  Here is one; I had to close in on it when editing so it's not sharp, but you can see that there is a fish in its mouth.

Then it jumped way out with another fish in its mouth!

They were so amazing to watch, sleek and beautiful.

The kids were so excited and wanted to swim with them! Especially the girls...

Wendy was trying to tell them,"There it is!" You can see how close we were to them...

I love this picture; it tells such a great story.  Cousin C. is headed out with no hesitation, and Michaela is right behind her.  Cousin N. is on his way, but not quite as quickly.  And bringing up the rear is Christian, and really he's stepping backwards.  They have such distinct personalities!

Cousin J. happily ran down the beach with everyone else, and loved watching all of the activity.

After a long chase up the beach we had to head back to get ready for dinner.  The boys discovered a crab on the beach and had to investigate the situation.

The girls just ran and ran all the way back to our condo.  Holding hands.

We eventually came to the conclusion that the lovely creatures who put on such a show for us were pilot whales.  It was such a fun experience to witness their lively pursuit of dinner (Sorry, little fish!), and their playing in the water. A final shot, because we too were in pursuit of dinner, and we headed inside right after this.

No Ranting, Lots of Railing

After running errands with me this afternoon for a hundred hours (or three) (hours not hundreds) the kids discovered the train track set in the living room.  It had been relocated after a long period of "hiding" under another table in our schoolroom/playroom.  Because of its previous lodging, it had suffered neglect for ages, abandoned for other more accessible toys, and through no fault of its own. 

But today, today the railroad tracks saw the light of day again.  Today the tracks were handled with eager hands, busy hands, constructive hands.  Today the tracks emerged from a dark place of desertion, from their disregarded state, from being ignored and overlooked, and with victory and glory and dignity once again, they were laid down.

The real beauty of this construction lies in the peaceful development of the track between the head engineers, who otherwise can be real head-butters when it comes to designing something of this magnitude (or choosing who gets what scissors, or who gets to stand on what chair in the kitchen-I don't have stools, just little chairs-or who gets out of the car first...).

They made a whole town, populated by people, animals, trees, and buildings.

They were thrilled with their handiwork, and I must say, so was I. 

An evening of such calm and creative interaction gives me such happiness that I cannot express it properly.  I cherish these moments as a mom, watching my kids getting along so sweetly, so contentedly, so cooperatively.  I hope that they will remember these happy times too, with joy, when they are older.