Five pictures from the first day of school.

So school started yesterday, as it did in many places. This year was a special year for us though, as Lauren started Kindergarten. She's not *quite* five- her birthday is still a week away- but she's clearly ready and meets the cutoff. Mike and I are shocked at how fast that five years went!

First, your traditional first day of school photo with all the kids. 5th grade, 2nd grade, Kindergarten.

Then the excited girl herself.

Happily, Noah is in the same class as his BFF again this year.  Since it's a brand new school, it was pretty important that he have something to ground him a bit. Noah struggles to contain himself, and if he didn't know anyone it would be a disaster.

Tristan's BFF is there too, but is in 4th grade, so they have to content themselves to recess and playground time.

Mrs. Harford has been teaching Kindergarten for 29 years. How many first day pictures do you think she's taken?

This morning also went smoothly, but Lauren was a little  nervous out on the playground waiting for the bell. I hung around until most of the kids were there, but she was uncharacteristically shy and unwilling to reach out. (This is normally the child that marches up and introduces herself to any other kid in the playground/park/restaurant/etc.)  I gave her a big reassuring hug, and I bet she does just fine.

Happy Holidays from my house to yours!

The Christmas holiday begin in earnest for us today. The Pirate is out of school early and we are zooming off to start a whirlwind tour of people. We'll be home again on Monday to celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in quiet with just the five of us, which is how I like it. I'll be offline until then, but will be back in force the week after Christmas with some book reviews, some present reveals (finally!), and some really exciting news. I hope you all have a terrific holiday.

Halloween 2012

Batgirl is confused by her cape.

• Look at this cool library in an abandoned Walmart. I'd love to hang out there.
• Don't forget to join in on our new Where in the World are you Reading? meme (#wwread)
• We had new neighbors move in yesterday. We haven't met them yet but they have a little girl around 5 or 6.
• I made another eReader case this week bringing my total to three.
• I was reading that planks are the new crunches, so have been doing planks twice a day. I am almost embarrassed to realize how challenging they are for me. Much quicker than crunches though.
• Mike and I are contemplating similar but not exactly the same anchor tattoos like this or this or maybe this.  His fake heart attack seems to have made us fall back in love again- not that we were OUT of love, mind you. Just it made us remember we're more than just parents. Highly recommended.

What I Read This Week (And other Bookish Notes):

• I revisted NetGalley. I'd signed up before but the format did not work on my iPhone. Now that I have the Nook I went back and downloaded At Last by Jill Shalvis. This was my first book by Shalvis and I really enjoyed it. I'll post a brief review of it next week.
• I worked on The Stand a bit more. I'm SO far behind. I'm tempted to buy the ebook since it's so dang unportable.
• I have roughly 30 library books staring me in the face, not to mention the ones on my Nook. I started The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E Smith, but the writing style is awkward to me. I'd like to finish it because I like the premise, but with so many others waiting I'm just not sure. Someone advise me.

Picturing Pierre, SD: Camping at Farm Island Recreation Center

This weekend we chose to go camping with the kids at Farm Island Recreation Area (a SD State Park). Farm Island is just outside Pierre, about a ten minute drive from our house.  There is a fairly large campground at Farm Island and our site was near the entrance end of the main campground. We were just across the road from the swim beach, which stretches the length of the entire campground (if you were on the other side of the loop you'd have to circle around some trees to see the water, it could be a hike with little kids.)  The beach is fairly shallow and very easy for little kids to enjoy, even ones that aren't terrific swimmers. They can play quite a bit without accidently getting in deep and even the Princess could be trusted at the water's edge without my having to be right with her. As you can see in the picture with the Princess, the water flows to the right, which pushes them into the end of a little cove, not out to open water. I was able to sit on the beach and just let them play. It's not super sandy once you get in the water, but it's not overly rocky either. There is a good bit of squishy mud in the water, but the kids don't seem to mind. Farm Island has full comfort stations with showers and electricity, as well as scattered vault toliets (nice clean ones, with motion sensative lights). All sites have electricity hookups, picnic tables, and fire pits.  You can rent bikes, paddleboat, and fishing poles. Last year during the flood the campground was completely under about 3 feet of water, so we were worried if there would be a beach or any grass, but I am happy to report that it seems completely recovered.

I ended up taking the kids up around one, before Mike got off work, which meant I had to park the camper all by myself. Granted, we only have a small popup, but I've never backed it up by myself. I've taken it alone to pull through camp sites, but the ones at Farm Island are not pull through slots. Amazingly, I was able to back it in myself, and promptly took pictures and texted them to half the people on my phone. It was nice and straight and everything!   By the time Mike got off at 5 and stopped by the house for hamburgers, I had the camper set up and ready to go.  Our particular site didn't have a lot of shade, just one tree near the road, but we set everything up and it turned out fine.

We planned it at the last minute and I didn't take time to really think about packing, I just threw everything in a bag and ran out the door. We keep a few things in the camper anyway- the bedding, bug spray, paper plates, some toys- so it was just a matter of food, clothes and swim gear. Plus we were ten minutes from home if we needed to fun back.  Mike stopped at the house and got the dog and some burgers and chips and met us out there. We made dinner and swam a bit, then had a campfire (OMG BOYS AND FIRE! So cliche, so true.) and then tried to get everyone settled around 10.  (By the way, the next picture was taken around 9:30 pm. It's not dark at ALL.) Mike and I were exhausted and the Pirate was willing to sleep, but the other two were just insane. We finally gave up around 10:45 and came home to sleep in our own beds.

The next morning we went out to break the camper down and took turns letting the kids swim while the other parent took it down. I am incredibly proud of myself for being able to do it all start to finish now. If I were completely INSANE I could go camping without another adult.

One last cool thing, when we were swimming at dusk we happened to notice turtles sunning themselves a short way down the beach. We tried to sneak up on them, but of course turtles aren't stupid, and they swam away before we got a good look. We both noticed that they weren't the more common hardshell turtles, and after googling have decided that they were Spiny Softshell turtles as seen at that link.

How to make a cheap Lego table

The boys are crazy about Lego. I am also crazy about Lego, but not quite in the same way. I am, like every other parent, sick of picking them up, of moving them off the table, of stepping on them! I have been coveting all the fancy Lego tables I see on Pinterest and Amazon, but it's just not in our budget these days. (Plus, they're all so small!) I've been dreaming up all kinds of solutions, none of which work. I bought a washing machine pan recently, but the boys didn't like the height of the lip and it was too awkward for them to move on their own (you can see the corner of it under the table. It's about 30x30). I've been obsessively checking the local Facebook yard sale group and the thrift store for a cheap table and today we finally scored this beauty:



Ok, so it wasn't a lot to look at, but it's big (31x40) and it was only $.50. That's half a dollar. We stopped by our favorite hardware store and picked up some trim pieces and a can of blue spray paint. (I might add, we get a terrific discount at the hardware store, so this was also very cheap.) This is what the trim looks like. Mike tells me this is called "cove" and is used for inside corners and along the ceiling.



I used a hacksaw to cut it to size. It could be done much better with some kind of electric saw, but I was in a hurry. If you cared, you could make pretty mitered corners. I didn't care. Then the Pirate and I nailed it down on all four sides to make a lip to help contain the Lego.



Next we spray painted it a bright blue color. Ideally, we'd put two coats on, but it was very windy and we used the entire can on our first coat. I decided I didn't really care, since it'll be covered in Lego anyway.



Finally, we ended up with a table that looks like this. The washing machine pan slides neatly underneath. We have two of the big base plates, but the table has room for 9 of them, so I'll be watching for a good deal on Ebay. I won't attach the ones we have until I can do all 9. I don't expect that this will actually completely contain the Lego, but I have hopes that it will at least help.



Our total cost? About $9 and we have most of a box of nails left over. Without the nails, about $5. Your cost would be slightly more, without the crazy hardware store discount, but still way less expensive than a real Lego table.

Sandra Boynton's dinosaurs broke my daughter's heart (Video!)

The Princess recently found a copy of Sandra Boynton's Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaurs! in the bookshelves.   The boys were never really impressed with this one (though they we both huge fans of Doggies, so much so that we are on our third copy) so I don't think we'd ever read it to the Princess.  We sat down to read and she forced me to read it about eight times before she got fixated on page two. Dinosaurs starts with "Dinosaurs HAPPY (with a picture of a dinosaur birthday party) and dinosaurs SAD (with a picture of two sad dinosaurs and their popped balloon.)  The Princess was VERY upset about that balloon. She was so sad for the dinosaurs. Her little face just collapsed and she was nearly in tears. (And they say toddlers aren't capable of empathy.) After a good ten minutes of this, I finally turned a light on and tried to catch it on video. It's a little backwards, she's talking about the picture first, and then I tried to get her to say it again and she wouldn't, but I think you get the idea. At this point she'd calmed down a good bit and was no longer quite so emotional about the situation.



I also couldn't get her to repeat the word "dinosaur" for the video, but she was pointing at every page and saying "Dinosaur, dinosaur!" A 20 month old saying dinosaur is about the cutest thing ever, I'm sorry you have to miss it.

If you have toddlers and you don't have any Boynton, I highly recommend that you fix the situation immediately. We also really enjoyed Moo Baa La La La ("three singing pigs say La-La-La") and Blue Hat, Green Hat ("oops"). You can get a pretty good feel for Boynton on her website (the splash page alone made me laugh, but you should really poke around at the rest) and on Twitter.

This is why I didn't blog today.

1. I took my children to the park this morning, because I could always blog during naptime. (We met my new friend there. The Bug terrorized a group of kids from a daycare while the Princess stood at the top of the slide and didn't go down. It was fun for everyone.)
2. While at the park I had the thought that if my house only stayed clean ALL THE TIME, we could go to the park guilt free every day. (Well, every day that I could stand it.) (Did I mention we went to the park yesterday too?)
3. So when we got home I flew around and swapped laundry and did the dishes and fed the kids and took out the garbage and then when the Princess went down for her nap I collapsed at the laptop from all that exertion.
4. Which is when the Bug insisted that I "play" Risk with him. (He makes up his own rules.)(I was only allowed to be the "girl colors". I chose yellow.)
5. Ok, so then I was gonna blog. I was. But first I followed this link to a great post on organization. 
6. That led me to renew my dedication to tracking my blogging on Google Calendars, so I made a new calendar. (It's called "Blogging" cause I'm creative like that.)(I made it pink.)
7. I "played" another 30 seconds of Risk with the Bug.
8. Then I discovered (again) that your (my) (an) iPhone doesn't default to showing more than one Google Calendar.
9. Much googling led me to these instructions for syncing all your Google Calendars to iCal, so I did that, and WAHOO! they all showed up. Eventually.
10. While I was waiting, I played another few minutes of Risk. ("Played")
11. But the colors didn't match, so I had to fix that before I could blog. (Blogging is orange now.)
12. And then it was time to wake up the Princess to go get the Pirate from school, so you get this picture instead.

Doesn't it make you want to be on a boat? (That's the Missouri River on the other side of that big tree.)

I made a castle out of a card table.

And apparently I'm never going to take better pictures, so you get these.

A month or two before Christmas I saw this play castle on Etsy. The kids are (were) forever asking me to make a tent out of ours by throwing a blanket over it, so I just knew they would love it. I had SO much fun making this. It really started an addiction to making things with felt.

I started with the door side, since it seems obvious that they will need a door.



The purple bit to the left is a little mailbox, complete with a flap so you can actually put mail in it. I didn't know who would be King or Queen at any given time, so it has a crown on it for identification. The door has velcro to hold it closed. And the porch light, of course.



This side is the castle proper. I left the canvas behind the felt window to give it a bit of body. It's very sturdy, but the canvas is unraveling a bit. Might do that differently were I to make another.
 The orange things inside are from the Nerf guns. The castle makes a good target.


This side has a tower (obv) that makes me think of Repunzel. The flowers and leaves are only stitched on through the middles, so the petals are 3D.



The last side was really challenging for me. The inspiration castle had a dragon and a knight on it, but I knew I wasn't up to making a dragon and since I wanted the girls to enjoy it as well I didn't want to do a knight. I ended up with this Sword in the Stone, and the knight's abandoned helm. You can actually see through the helm (please ignore the fact that you'd have to lie on the floor to do so) and I sewed a little pocket in front of the felt sword so that they could slide a toy sword inside and pull it out trimuphantly.

I had a few issues with it fitting properly, that would have been easily corrected if I'd been able to set it up during the making process. While I was able to make all four panels right in front of my kids ("Mom, why are you making so many flowers?"), I didn't want to set the entire shebang up while they were watching. And since I worked every single night until midnight, I wasn't about to do it at 1 am! So there are a few baggy spots. I was unable to take it in more without getting into the designs.

Do they love it? Sadly, no. They barely even noticed it. Regardless, it was a lot of fun to make and I think once the Princess is better at interactive play it might get more use.

Scenes from work at home Monday

Halloween Owl Change Purses in progress

The boys playing on the rocks, just before the bleeding head wound.

The Princess and Bo Peep on the porch

Laundry on one end, sewing on the other.

PS. Did you remember to enter the giveaway for your own owl pouch? You'll be able to choose a Halloween one if the others don't strike your fancy.