Making Your Own Felt Dryer Balls: A Cautionary Tale

After taking your wool yarn and making a ball, you're supposed to put the ball into a sock and tie it off before throwing it in the wash. This is why:

Yes, those are tangled around my cloth diapers and covers, because that's the only load I ever do on hot.

Also, shut up!!!

Spot The T.A.R.D.I.S. , or, My Strength Is In Trees

I finished the abstract tree art I wanted for the playroom. In the end, I'm not happy with it. Once I started adding the circles, it went down from there.

 What saved it for me was when Connor came up, studied it thoughtfully, and announced that it needed a T.A.R.D.I.S. Of course, he was right. He pointed to a spot on the tree and Bryan added it. 

 

Now, of course, the piece is perfectly US. 

Meanwhile, I learned something about myself - I make a pretty good tree. So, I decided to make another abstract tree, this time without any flowers or leaves or mod looking circles. 

There are some odd shapes where Deirdre decided to help, but I love it. I put it on the wall in the bedroom so that it is the first thing you see when you stand in the doorway.

I've discovered that I really enjoy the tactile experience of blending pastels. It's almost as therapeutic as writing. Bryan graduates in a few weeks and then we face the unpleasantness of unemployment (believe me - we've been working on alternatives since the moment we found out none of the PhD programs will fund him). But, when we are in a position for "frivolous" expenses again, I would like to get more art paper and a wider range of paints and pastel colors and maybe do one a month, just for the hell of it. I'm no professional, but everyone needs a creative outlet, and this one fills in the gap between the music and the crocheting and the writing...a gap I didn't even know was there until I decided to risk making the tree myself and found out I love it.

Robin Eggs

We found these on top of the soil pile next to our community garden. We used a light bulb to look inside and then cracked one open to explore the tiny yolk and pretty blue shell.

My Latent Artistic Abilities

I got tired of waiting for my artist husband to do another tree for me, so I did it myself. The background I did a while ago with watered down acrylics and a wash cloth. The tree is in pastels. I like how it turned out, even though I did smudge it a little too much in some areas.

Animal Mommies For Mother's Day

I Liked Having Her In My Life

I felt inspired by a friend's blog to answer the question, what do I hope people will say about me at my funeral? I liked reading her entire post. Her answers were wonderful. When I answered the question myself, however, I found I could actually sum it up in one short sentence. I want people to be happy I was in their lives.

When I spoke at my father's funeral, I was the only one of my sisters able to do it. I said something that needed to be said because it seemed odd to me that the sister the least close to our dad was the one memorializing him in front of over a hundred funeral attendants. I said "My dad and I didn't always get along." It's true. We didn't. We loved each other - I know he loved me fiercely. But we did not get one another at all. It was hard.

I don't want my kids to say that about me. I want them to say "Mom was awesome. I liked having her as my mom."

And my husband? "I was better off with her than without her. I'm glad I chose her."

And my friends? "My life would have been a little 'less" without her."

I say this because I have people in my life (and some who aren't in it anymore) with whom a relationship was a lot of effort. I have people I care about and want to keep in my life but I really have to work at it in order to do it. We all have people like that, either because we feel devoted to family no matter how they treat us or we treat them, employers in jobs we never want to leave, friends on different paths from us but we've known them for so long we go out of our way to find common ground with them because we love them and don't want to see them go. It's not that they drain us, necessarily, but the relationship sometimes pinches a little. I know I am that person to some people. I know which friendships are effortless and which ones take a little work. Some of them are worth keeping and some aren't.

I know there will be people who, in the end, will be glad we were friends, and liked knowing me.

But there are also people in my life that were just fun and awesome the whole ride. People who are just super easy to love. I hope, at the end of my life, it turns out I was that person for some other people. I hope at least a few say, "she was just awesome my whole life."

And if there's two things I hope people say about me, the second thing should be, "she did more good than bad and thus helped bring balance to the force."

Here's some pygmy hippos for no reason.

Catching Up With Home Schooling

Now that the baby is getting older and I'm feeling fully recovered from the surgery, we are slowly getting back into the swing of things as far as home school is concerned.

This is our alphabet wall in the play room. About once a week (or every two weeks, we're not that structured yet) we introduce a new letter to the kids. Mommy draws outlines of the letters and we use different forms of art to decorate them - sometimes glitter, sometimes tissue paper, sometimes colored rice, sometimes paint.

Next, Daddy draws them a character whose name begins with our letter. Anakin Skywalker for A, Dora for D, Indiana Jones for I. We spend the next week or so pointing out that letter in books, on signs, etc.

We have a small group we get together with for spring related activities. Here we are learning wet felting to make eggs.

We also took a bird walk with our group. We have a red tail hawk's nest in the trees near our community garden.

Here we are rolling out air-dry dough to make nests. That's Megashark VS Crocosaurus playing in the background. Our "school" rocks.

We used sticks and yarn with the clay to make nests.

Dalek math! The evil Dalek peg people want to use radioactive frog counters to destroy the world, but first the need to know how many they have! We used our Base Ten math manipulatives to practice counting by tens.

Here a friend helps us with the garden. We also have indoor plants and seed starting activities.

One of our new pets, Hawthorne. We also got him a buddy we named Eugene H Krabs.

Our tiny little caterpillars. They've already changed into butterflies. I'll have to get current pics.

And, of course, the kids' favorite way to learn. Here Deirdre has looked up pictures of Dora The Explorer by spelling and typing "Dora" by herself. Connor has already memorized how to spell over ten words this way, including Batman, Hellboy, Killer Croc and Shark. We write the words down on paper for them to type in, or call the letters from across the room, and they like to look up pictures and videos. They also have favorite game websites bookmarked (yep, they bookmarked them. I didn't even know you could drag a window up top your toolbar to save it until Connor did it one day). They had their own old laptop for a while until it died. We're working on getting them another one.

Relaxed, Holistic Educational Model and Superior Test Results: Welcome to Finland

Excerpts from an article I just read and love:

"Spring may be just around the corner in this poor part of Helsinki known as the Deep East, but the ground is still mostly snow-covered and the air has a dry, cold bite. In a clearing outside the Kallahti Comprehensive School, a handful of 9-year-olds are sitting back to back, arranging sticks, pinecones, stones and berries into shapes on the frozen ground. The arrangers will then have to describe these shapes using geometric terms so the kids who can't see them can say what they are.

"It's a different way of conceptualizing math when you do it this way instead of using pen and paper, and it goes straight to the brain," says Veli-Matti Harjula, who teaches the same group of children straight through from third to sixth grade. Educators in Sweden, not Finland, came up with the concept of "outside math," but Harjula didn't have to get anybody's approval to borrow it. He can pretty much do whatever he wants, provided that his students meet the very general objectives of the core curriculum set by Finland's National Board of Education. For math, the latest national core curriculum runs just under 10 pages (up from 3½ pages for the previous core curriculum).


The Finns are as surprised as much as anyone else that they have recently emerged as the new rock stars of global education. It surprises them because they do as little measuring and testing as they can get away with. They just don't believe it does much good. They did, however, decide to participate in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And to put it in a way that would make the noncompetitive Finns cringe, they kicked major butt. The Finns have participated in the global survey four times and have usually placed among the top three finishers in reading, math and science.

In the latest PISA survey, in 2009, Finland placed second in science literacy, third in mathematics and second in reading. The U.S. came in 15th in reading, close to the OECD average, which is where most of the U.S.'s results fell"

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2062419,00.html#ixzz1LVvr3c29

After Our Nap, We Shall Reveal Ourselves To The Jedi