group photo

What is it about kids and cameras?

When they are all by themselves…they take great {albeit serious} photos.

But if you try to get a bunch of them all in the same shot, it just…

…never…

…works…

out.

treat

We still haven’t carved a pumpkin, but we did get around to creating a haunted mansion.  Bob Vila’s website has some fun templates.  I have never had any desire to construct a gingerbread house.  It just seems wrong to spend so much time baking when the end product is practically inedible.  {Which is why our house sits on a lawn of yellow cake, frosting and green coconut.}  One of my son’s favorite books is Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett. Whenever we get to the page where the gingerbread baby goes into the gingerbread house, he always asks me if he can make one. So we did.  Halloween style.  Because I just don’t know that I will have it in me when December creeps up on us.

Hope everyone has a fantastic and fun halloween!  We will be out and about with Thomas the Tank Engine and a cute little monkey doing our best to collect gobs of candy and spook the neighbors.

pink and green

Little girls need little bits of pink and green, don’t you think?  This is a scalloped garland I made for a friend who is expecting in February.  I could make different versions of these all day long.  The tutorial is here, though I took shortcuts.  {I pinked, rather than turned under, the edges.}  I think that some of these fabrics will eventually make their way into a twin sized quilt for my baby girl.  They are in rehearsal here and I think they are ready for the big show.

keeping track

I started a journal recently.* The impetus was to keep track of some of the funny things that pour out of the mouth of my almost three year old.

Exhibit A:

Me: “Fireman Frank. Do you have that fire under control?”

Him (in his ‘Big Man’ voice): “Yes, Mom. I have a remote control.”**

I used to keep handwritten journals when I traveled a lot, but have really gotten out of the habit. With work and the kids, life is pretty hectic right now, so the idea of adding one.more.thing to the mix seemed daunting. I knew that if I was going to start to record little snippets of our life, I needed to choose a format that was doable. Enter the 5 Year Diary.***

Each page represents one day across five years, so once you have used the journal for one full year, you will be able to read what you did that same day the previous year as you write your new entry. That alone will motivate me to keep up with my little journaling project. Also, each entry only leaves space for six lines of text. It takes me a minute to figure out which occurrences are worthy of documentation, but the actual writing is accomplished in less than five minutes. The fact that you are forced to distill information is great. Only the most important bits make it in there. One very pleasant surprise has been that my writing has not been exclusively focused on the kids. Some entries record things about my husband, our friends, and random little ideas that I would like to have filed away. I think it is going to provide a great little snapshot of our lives at this particular point in time.

I feel compelled to mention that while I don’t typically like posting on topics that make people feel wanty to buy things, I really do like this journal. If you like the concept but don’t want to purchase it, you could always use a blank notebook and emulate the format.

*Yes, I am fully aware that I maintain a blog. And that a blog, technically, is a journal of sorts. But if I started to post things like– “He cut down all of the dead trees on our property. So happy!” — things may start to get kind of dull around here.

**Um. Watch TV much?

***This blog post has some nice photos of the inside of The 5 Year Journal. As a bonus, its author does some very cool embroidery.