Pinterest

In my mind, my house looks just like my Pinterest Board. BoardS, actually, as I have one for each room in my house. In reality, though, only one of my bookshelves is organized by color and the print-at-home pantry labels are as yet unprinted.

But I have two little kids and while my dreams of a wrapping paper station are still just that, I do need some systems around the house. Preferably ones that require few materials, time, or money.

When I discovered that up-cycled wipe containers make great storage, I talked the art cabinet. With the help of my label maker, I came up with this:

Notice the gray tub on the bottom shelf. That is to catch all the stuff that either doesn't fit in the wipe containers, or that doesn't have a container yet. I firmly believe in several of these tubs around your house. Clutter stays of the shelves and you can analyze what has gathered there and what might need a space of its own.

I'll get back to you when I color code them.

Peg Princesses

Recently, I made a set of peg princesses for a friend. I used female doll pegs from the craft store and acrylic paint. I’d like to make more of these, but here are a few notes:

- Yellow was the only color I had trouble with coverage so, for example, with Rapunzel’s hair, I painted it white first.

- I like gloss acrylic spray for finishing as opposed to matte. It seems to keep the paint from chipping better.

- Hair is hard but acrylic paint is cheap and easy to cover up!

Adventures in Sewing

Generally when I want to make something, I go to Etsy first. There are plenty of talented people out there who have taken the time to make all sorts of beautiful PDF patterns that I can just download and use. But when Little Bear started collecting all sorts of small animals and people, the site was uncharacteristically unhelpful. Some of my crafty friends have made little crayon and car rolls lately so I turned to pictures of those to try and brainstorm an idea of my own.

Of course, it’s worth mentioning that I got this idea at 8pm and didn’t make it to my local fabric store until 8:30, so my fabric selection was a bit hurried. Also, I then stayed up until 3:45 in the morning working on this. And that is important because visualizing how I was going to piece this together was probably much hampered by my lack of sleep. However, it would have been more hampered by two awake children so I did what I could.

Originally the pockets were going to be much more elaborate and actually look like little dresses. Well, first of all, that was going to be too hard. And second, I wanted this to be of use beyond her (hopefully short-lived) interest in Disney Princesses. The fabric does sort of coordinate with their dresses, though, which makes me unreasonably happy!

So, I didn’t make a fancy PDF pattern, but for those of you who are interested, here’s what I did.

After figuring out how big I wanted my pockets (this was sort of trial and error), I pieced them together like quilt squares. I then sewed some coordinating fabric on the back.

Then I figured how long I wanted the entire roll to be, did some fancy math, and decided how much each pocket would have to be gathered at the bottom to fit. This also involved a lot of pinning, seeing if a princess would fit, and adjusting. I used a disappearing ink pen (so cool!) to mark where each pocket should end. Plus I left about 2 inches of blue on each side.

I then pinned the pockets, hand gathered them and ironed the gathers in place. I did pin them at first but I got lazy.

You can see how much longer the pockets started out than when they were finished.

I sewed the gathers, then put iron on fleece backing on the purple (outside) fabric to give it a little bit of weight.

After that (I’m making this sound much easier than it was), I set the top and bottom pieces together and rolled it up to see where to sew tabs and Velcro. A lot of the rolls on Etsy have ribbon tying them up but I was hoping Little Bear would be able to do this without much assistance! (More disappearing ink in the picture below).

I added some ribbons and embroidery to the purple piece for embellishment. The words didn’t turn out as bold as I wanted but whatever.

This was all rolling/unrolling, trial and error. Finally, I sewed the purple to the blue and it was done! I can’t wait to show it to her!

(A final note, for those of you with sharp eyes… We do have two Aurora’s. One has the soft dress and one has the MagiClip dress. I imagine if she keeps liking them we’ll transition fully to MagiClip so I made the pockets big enough to compensate. Also, we don’t have Mulan or Jasmine, hence the light pink and teal pockets. And finally, yes, Rapunzel’s hair is too long and the wrong color to be in her wedding dress. Talk to Disney about it.)

Being a dad to a girl

...or at least being a dad to THIS girl means that you get to play make-believe. You make-believe you are cooking; that you're having an adventure in the jungle; that mama and papa's bed is a boat and you are surrounded by sharks; that every bath time is a pool party; that you are pretend-driving to IKEA; that your hooded towel makes you a dinosaur: that whatever outfit you happen to have on, plus a few well-placed accessories, makes you a princess; and on and on and on.

And this papa, the one at our house, works very hard during the day to keep bad guys off the streets. And then he comes home at night and spends several hours with Little Bear playing make-believe. He's tired and honestly would probably rather the bath just be a bath for once, but instead of saying any of that, jumps into her pretend world every. single. time.

Even if it means his picture goes on Facebook.

I didn't know when I married him that he would do these things. That this tall guy who played drums, and owned guns, and spent his life working with cops and criminals would happily twirl around the living room for yet another ball. But I love it and I want to make sure all the dads out there know the Rapunzel hair makes him even more of a man to me. And to a little blonde haired girl, whether she's a princess or a dinosaur.

So drinky!

Lately Little Bear has been making up words. Mostly conjugating verbs incorrectly or creating adjectives from nouns. For example, walking/dancing with a wand is "wandering," her smoothies tasted so "purpely" and tonight, her Pho was "so hot and drinky!"

Happy Michaelmas!

In an effort to be both more cultured and more creative, I decided that this year, we were going to celebrate Michaelmas. Of course, I decided this on September 28th and Little Bear was at her Grammy and Boppa’s until the afternoon of the 29th so that clearly wasn’t going to happen. So today, one day late, we had our first Michaelmas celebration! I got the idea from a good friend, who will hopefully post about her celebration over on Rustic Remnants.

First, a little background: Michaelmas (pronounced Mick-ell mahs) is a celebration of the feast of St. Michael the Archangel. There is a lot of history associated with Michaelmas that you can read more about on Wikipedia, but suffice it to say here that it has been around since Medieval times and often is associated with the beginning of autumn. According to Christian tradition, St. Michael did great battle with a dragon in Heaven and, having defeated the dragon, banished him forever. Therefore, on Michaelmas, one celebrates bravery, a spirit of adventure, and the courage that will get you through the long, dark winter.

Around the world, celebrations include kite flying, cooking, fighting dragons, horse racing, picking blackberries, and enjoying the last days of warmth. With no horses (or blackberries) available, we focused on some of the other traditions for this, our first, Michaelmas celebration.

First, we made a dragon out of a paper-towel roll, some wooden beads, paint, fuzzy pom-poms, and crepe paper. Little Bear did most of the work herself and was very careful to both paint the dragon, and make sure to get paint in all the cups of the tray.

The original plan was to make a crown out of fall leaves and a felt strip. However, Little Bear is two which means there’s no guarantee she’s going to want to go along with an activity, no matter how fun it is. So I bought pretend fall leaves from the craft store and we glued them on together. By that I mean that she played with her princess dolls and handed me one leaf while I did the rest of the work. It turned out wonderfully, though, and she loved wearing it. She did not love brushing her hair to go to the park, but I think the wild look added to the charm of the crown.

We packed everyone up and headed to the park. We live in a part of the country where there aren’t a ton of deciduous trees and the unseasonably warm weather didn’t help things. We found a few trees, though, and some yellow grass which is kind of the same color…

Once we got to the park it was time to make a sword out of two sticks,

and start to chase the dragon!

Little Bear’s general m.o. when it comes to scary things is to run up and hug them when she’s done pretending to be scared. In this case, that included actually taking his nose from him and (when mama begged) trying it on for size.

But, while dragons live forever, Little Bear’s attention span doesn’t and she quickly decided she’d rather poke the water with her sword,

and run around looking for rocks.

Bug-bug, of course, slept through this whole thing and only woke when we were all marching back to the car, dragon head in hand.

 

The next part of our celebration was to make dragon bread. I have never actually made bread before so it was really unclear whether this was going to be a Pinterest fail. Of course, I built it up so much that if things didn’t go well, I was doomed, which is a great recipe for success in my experience. The cool thing about making this bread is that it involves telling a story that I got from Cypress’ blog post which you can read here.

Despite her general distaste for getting her hands dirty, Little Bear enjoyed the project and even did some kneading of her own!

While my sculpting abilities leave something to be desired, the bread actually looked ok (though slightly more like an alligator than a dragon) going into the oven and even better coming out. We let it cool and…

…chopped off it’s head and ate it right up! So now, despite the fact that it’s still 80 degrees outside, we’ve searched our souls, found our inner avengers, and have prepared ourselves for fall. I’m not usually a big seasonal decorator but Michaelmas put me in the mood so we’ll see what happens in the next few weeks.

Now bring on the winter!

Welcome, Bug Bug!

 

At 10:21 today, our little family got a little bigger when Bug Bug joined this world. He was 9lbs 12oz and 20.5 inches long and is settling in quite nicely. Welcome, baby!

Interrogation

I'm not really sure how anyone has an actual conversation with a two-year-old. I mean, one where you are trying to get information out of them. If you had been driving home with us this afternoon, you would have heard the following...

*Tooth clacking noises from the back seat*

Mama: Are you eating something?

Little Bear: Yes.

M: What are you eating?
LB: Nothing.

M: What is that noise, then?
LB: Do you hear something?
M: Yes, are you making noise with your teeth?
LB: Yes. 

M: Is something in your mouth?
LB: Is something in your mouth?

M: What is in your mouth?

LB: There's something in my teeth.

M: Ok, when we get home, I'll get it out for you.

LB: NO! They are my special teeth.
M: But you said something was in them.
LB: I'm just pretending.
M: Pretending what?
LB: Just pretending, don't worry.

*noises continue*
M: Are you pretending to eat something?
LB: Yes.
M: What?
LB: I want to find my telescope and then go into the quiet forest to find Isa the Iguana.

(When we got home, it turned out that she was putting the harness adjustment strap from her car seat into her mouth and then pulling it out, causing her teeth to make that horrible noise!)

Family photos

Got these in just as our family is about to get bigger... Sarah did a great job and we are so thankful!

Check out the preview!

Phone blogging?

Wondering if this even works...

Little Reader

“We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”

One of Little Bear’s favorite books, for years now, has been the Michael Rosen and Helen Oxbury version of “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.” We apparently read it to her a lot because this is what I heard in the car the other day…

Loving these summer weekends!

This weekend brought another parade and a trip to the milk carton boat races. Weather on Saturday (as per usual) was touch-and-go at first but there was no rain and a great time was had by all. Little Bear’s best friends joined us and we managed to keep track of all three girls among the thousands of people, bands, horses, and floats. Everyone got a bit tired and cranky by the end so we packed up before the bagpipes went by (much to Papa’s dismay) but we avoided any total meltdowns. Little Bear’s favorite this year was the marching bands. Papa is convinced she’ll play drums when she’s older!

Urban sprawl

Lately, well, for the past year and a half, Little Bear has been really into playing with little people and animals. I have it on good authority that I was very similar at this age so maybe that’s why I find her play now to be so cute. Because of this, she has collected herself quite an array of doll and animal houses. Mine from when I was little, a Calico Critters manor, a cardboard beach house… the list goes on. In preparing for our summer downsizing, we’ve been trying to figure out how we can get this neighborhood down to just a few living spaces. What does she like about each house? How does she play with each of them? What aspects do we, as parents, like? And of course, the very important question: How does the size of each house fit with the scale of all of the little animals and people that we have amassed?

While at Learning Palace the other day (a dangerous place to take your two year old and, as it turns out, your husband) we saw a really cool Melissa and Doug castle. It came in a “Princess” option and a “Medieval” option. Papa and Little Bear both liked the former but I get more votes than they do, so the Medieval castle it was.

And holy cow, did we pick right. I am the first to admit when we buy a toy that flops (Stride-To-Ride Dino, anyone?) but this has been a total hit. Not only did it stop the tears at Grandma and Grandpa’s this afternoon, but she bypassed Papa to play with it once she got home. And papa has pretty much been at the top of her list lately. Anyway, true to form, the castle was shared by many friends: My Little Pony, Tangled dolls, Calico Critters, Playmobil princesses, a large stuffed dog, a plastic bear, and what I’m pretty sure is a Little People air traffic controller (though you could convince me otherwise). The bear attacked the princess (who was in the bathtub), the elephant mama carried the mouse baby up and down the stairs several times, Flynn Rider spent his time falling into the dungeon, and there was constant inter-species bedsharing.

 

So what is to become of the rest of the dwellings? I think we might put the Calico Critter house on the market. It’s spacious and the correct scale, but it doesn’t have a trapdoor. And everyone knows you need a trapdoor.