The Gingerbread House

Yesterday we were in desperate need of some holiday cheer, so I took out the gingerbread house kit that I'd picked up at Target a few weeks ago. I followed all the directions on the box: kneading the icing for one minute, carefully piping the icing down the sides of the front, and holding the pieces together for the requisite period of time. Still, when it was all put together, it looked like this:

The Baby got a little over-zealous with opening up all the gingerbread pieces, which is how it cracked. It wasn't Santa and his reindeer landing on the roof.

After a few minutes, the whole thing came down like a 2-1 bungalow in the Great Lakes neighborhood. (Translation: we have lots of tear-downs and rebuilds in our area).

I found this all to be poignant and fitting because I feel a little bit like our real house is falling apart, too. After the Baby spent all last week down with the crud, the Girl caught her cold and is wracking up the secondary infections like the Duggers wrack up children. As of today, she has bronchitis, a double ear infection, and an eye infection. Our window sill/medicine cabinet looks like this:

Thank goodness the house next door is vacant, or our neighbors would think that we are cooking up meth in here. (Obviously, organic honey is a key ingredient in methamphetamine!)

Meanwhile, the Boy has been left largely unsupervised, which allowed him to charge over $150.00 on iTunes buying players on Big Win Football. Has anyone ever successfully challenged Apple about something like this? The K is planning to call and trot out his best contract law argument: the Boy is a minor and can't be bound by the terms and use agreement, but I'm not all that optimistic. I hope the Boy got some really good pretend players for all that real money.

Since the Girl is sick and less animated than usual, the Baby has seen fit to fill the void.  Yesterday, when I was driving the Baby home from school and the Girl was practically asleep in the back of the van, the Baby informed me that Audrey the Moose has a new name: Ella Cookie. This is confusing because Ella Cookie is the name of the gerbil in the Baby's classroom that we will be fostering over winter break. I tried to convince the Baby that it is best for Audrey to stay as Audrey because it would be confusing for some sort of mischief to happen and not know if it was Audrey, now known as Ella Cookie, or Ella Cookie the gerbil who caused the mischief. The Baby said that now only Abe our Elf on the Shelf causes mischief.

Then, because I've lost all sense of normal conversation topics since I've been trapped in the house for 11 days,  I told the girls about Prince and how he had the fight with the record company and changed his name to the symbol and then everyone called him “the artist formerly known as…” because no one knew what to call the symbol.

Me: So, then he made up with his record company and went back to being called Prince.

The Baby: Did he play football?

Me: No. He is really short.

The Baby: Really short?

Me: Yes, he’s about 5’3” and he likes to wear high heels because he’s so short. And purple.

The Girl: Does he have a high voice, like Justin Beiber?

Me: I guess so. Some of his famous songs are “1999” and "Purple Rain" and “Little Red Corvette.”

The Baby: Was the red purple?

Me: No. He likes purple, but the Corvette, which is a car, was red.

The Baby: Little red riding hood likes red.

Me: Yes.

The Baby: I call it a coat.

Me: You call her little Red Riding Coat?

The Baby: (yelling) No, Mommy!  It’s Little Red Riding Hood, not coat.

The Girl has got to get better so that the balance of power can be restored and the Baby will stop yelling at me about my knowledge of fairy tale characters. More importantly, the Girl has to get better because her tolerance of being home with me was even shorter than her sister's. Today, with a temperature of 101.5, she begged me to let her go back to school tomorrow so that she can learn about the partial-products algorithm from someone who doesn't have to Google it. And most importantly, she has to get better because I may literally go insane from the sound of her coughing. Are we sure that it is babies crying and not the sound of a loved one's incessant coughing that we use to torture terrorism suspects? The sound of the coughing has broken me, I promise you that.

Back to the Gingerbread House. I decided that the icing was the problem and I happened to have some old (scary old) Betty Crocker cookie decorating icing that I used to cement the house together. Voila:

As Hemingway said, "The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places." Let's hope that Ernie was right about that; for the house and for me. 

Of Magic and Mooses

The other day I noticed this all over the back of the Baby's door:

Me: [Baby], who did this?

Baby: It wasn't me. It was Audrey the Moose.

Me: [Baby], you know that you shouldn't draw on the walls or the door, right?

Baby: (whispering) Bad Audrey the Moose.

Ahhhh! I had some hope that a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser might work its magic on the moose scribble, but I didn't expect that it would be so easy:

I just dampened the Magic Eraser and rubbed off the crayon. Good as new. I have to give credit to a former teenaged babysitter who watched the Girl and the Boy before the Baby (or Audrey the Moose, coincidentally, I'm sure) existed for telling me about Magic Eraser. I guess that the sitter grew up in a home where parents imparted practical advice to children about proper cleaning techniques and how to balance a checkbook and change a tire. Growing up in my house you learned about antiquing, making gravestone rubbings, and the NATO phonetic alphabet. I had a liberal arts kind of upbringing. I'm not saying that one is better, just different.

No one was more relieved than the Baby that the Magic Eraser lived up to its name:

The day after the scribbling incident, I received this in the mail:

I love One Kings Lane and I was supa, dupa excited (as the Baby would say) about what was in the box. Here she is, everyone!

Y'all, it's Audrey the Moose! Well, technically it's a chindi wrapped moose, multi colored, but we all know who it really is. She's a little more whimsical than my usual taste, but she is so perfectly Audrey that I had to have her. She is supposedly Christmas decor, but I don't think that the chindi is really holiday or seasonally specific.

It's funny that the Baby chose a moose to be her imaginary friend/object of blame. The summer that I was pregnant with the Baby we went to Maine for a couple of weeks and I was meeting up with Sister to go for a walk. I was walking down the dirt road (the same one where I had my first driving/crashing lesson) and as I came upon a clearing I saw the ugliest horse ever. You know in Cinderella, her old horse? He looks like this?

 
That's sort of what this horse looked like, only even uglier. Then after a minute I realized that it wasn't a horse at all, it was a moose! It sized me up and kind of shrugged and ambled off through the woods from whence it came. Whenever I tell this story, I tell the Baby that she and I saw the moose, only she was in my belly. When she tells the story, it's like she was really there.

Anyhow, we're happy to have a tangible and decorative moose join the family. It was certainly easier to obtain the moose than it would have been to build on extra rooms for all of the imaginary brothers that the Boy had when he was the Baby's age. Even Abe (aka Blade, according to the Baby) got into the act:

Love it! Happy weekend!

Teacher Gift

Hey everyone! Short post today because I am ex-hausted. I'm sure you all are relieved that this won't be a post about incurable boils or water that turns to blood or some other of the Plagues that I seem to have been writing about the last few days. No, today we're going with a pencil vase that I put together as a Thanksgiving gift for the Girl's teacher. Here's a pic of the finished product so you can decide if you want to keep reading:

I keep going back to the well with this teacher gift; I think this is my third. Sometimes when I read blogs I wonder what came first, the crafty project or the blog. You know that there seem to be people who cook up craft projects just so they have something to blog about. Well, rest assured that this one pre-dates the blog by several years.

So, I think I may have a problem with the $1 area at Target. You could put a bin of empty cat food cans there and I would feel compelled to buy them. I was at Target for some other reason, but saw these packs of fall-themed pencils and bought about 8 packs (with 8 pencils per pack). Here's a picture of some of the pencils:

One has acorns, which reminds me that the Boy came home today with this major bruise-scrape thing on his side.

"How did you do that?" I asked.

"I fell."

"On what? The concrete?"

"Nah, on the acorns."  

Who knew that the squirrels were doing us a favor? Dang squirrels. Rats with better styling.

Anyway, the only other things you need for this project are a couple of rubber bands and an empty round plastic container like the ones that Crystal Light drink mix used to come in. They seem to have changed to a more oval-shaped container that I don't think would work. Our store brand of instant sugar-free lemonade still comes in the round container, so I went cheap on the drink mix and bought the Publix brand.

So, just put the rubber bands around the plastic container and use them to secure the pencils in place as you put them all around the container. See here:

I used the kind of rubber bands you would use in your hair, but you could use those "free" ones that they put around your strawberries at Whole Foods. The point is to secure them to the container without gluing the pencils so that the teacher can use the pencils in class. Here's another picture of the whole thing covered:

For some reason the pencils like being on an angle. No shame in that. Be who you are, pencils. The only other thing I did was to tape a little card on it to wish the Girl's teacher a Happy Thanksgiving. Oh, and I picked up some sunflowers at one of my umpteen visits to Publix this week and they look so happy in the vase. What's a vase without some flowers? Ta da! Finished product:

My friend, Steph mentioned that she had tried to make something similar with candy canes, to less success. I don't think you could do it the same way, because the candy canes would break unless you were really careful and I'm just not that careful. You could probably glue the candy canes, but then you couldn't eat them or turn them into peppermint dust, which this lady blogger claims has "fourteen bajillion uses." Hopefully one of the uses is the ability to fly. 

I'm going to leave you with one completely, totally unrelated picture just because it's funny:

Audrey the Moose has left the Girl a message. "I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!" That Audrey is not to be trifled with. I can only imagine what the Girl did to infuriate her so.

Hope you all have a great weekend!

We are Thankful

I decided that we needed to start a new Thanksgiving tradition this year. Our old traditions of eating too much, arguing about politics, and watching football are fine, but somehow they don't really capture the spirit of the holiday. So, I decided that we should make a wreath of thanks. I was inspired by this give thanks tree that I saw on Dixie Delights:

You make a bunch of paper leaves and you choose something that you are thankful each day, write it on the leaf, and stick it to the tree. Brilliant. But, I read the brief tutorial that Amanda gave to make the tree and she lost me at a "width" of cream felt. I started to panic because I don't know what a "width" is and I'm sure that if I pop into our local Hancock Fabrics and ask for a width of fabric, the ladies will laugh me out of the place because they will know that I have no clue what I'm doing. Also, I figured that in between Halloween, several birthdays, a school fall learning celebration for the girl that I'm working on, and the usual sports and activities, I had approximately one hour and 17 minutes to spend on the project.

I immediately thought of a wreath. Since my success with the Halloween wreath, I consider myself the wreath queen of, well, the family, anyway. The Girl might take me down someday in a "Great Santini"-type one-on-one-wreath-off battle, but until then I'll reign supreme. Getting back to the project, I went into the study/junk room/catch-all room/don't-open-the-closet-or-you'll-be-buried-by-throw-pillows room, and pulled out one of the three willow wreaths I have left from my Tarjay excursion. I'm recently obsessed with burlap and decided that the wreath had to be burlap. I mustered up my courage and went to Hancock. I tried to act all nonchalant as I walked past all the sewing-type things that I don't understand. I found the burlap without asking anyone and dragged the bolt over to the cutting table and asked for two yards. The lady asked me what I was going to use it for and I told her a wreath. She gave me a look that was skepticism combined with pity. I also picked up some pieces of brown felt, just in case.

After some trial and error, I decided that the easiest thing to do would be to cut a strip of burlap and wrap it around the wreath. Of course, because the children are always swiping my scissors, I had to go on a hunt for my fabric scissors (only called such because they're actually somewhat sharp). I didn't find my scissors, but I did find this:

How does the Baby/Audrey the Moose come up with this stuff? When I see a smushy styrofoam toy, my first thought is not, "Hmmm, let me cut this up with my leopard scissors." But, I guess I'm not a three year old with a scape moose to blame.

Also, Audrey must have been shooting craps while destroying the little fellow:

So, I cut a strip of burlap and also cut up the felt into strips, as well:

I wrapped them around the wreath, alternating the felt and the burlap so that it looked like this when I was finished:

Sorry I don't have any pictures of the actual process, I was only about 30% sure it would work and even finished, I'm still not entirely sure. I hot glued the end of the burlap to the wreath and then set out to make it look a little nicer. I tied a burlap ribbon (told y'all I was obsessed) around the top to hang it and finished off with a little bell we got when we rode the Polar Express a couple years ago:

When the Baby got home and confessed to absolutely nothing with regard to the the doll evisceration (be glad that she's on our side, folks), I put her to work on the leaf aspect of the wreath. I made a cardboard template and cut around it to make some leaves:

Then my child laborer stuck the hook part of some velcro dots on the backs of the leaves. Little fingers are so good at doing the delicate work:

Because I have a compulsive shopping problem when it comes to the $1 area of Target I had some maple leaf-shaped felt coasters (?) that we also velcro dotted. We put all the leaves in a glass vase and decorated it:

The final part of this project is a list so we can keep track of what we are thankful for each day:

So, this is how it would look with a few leaves stuck on:

I figure that on Thanksgiving, we'll go through the whole list and read everything for which we are thankful. So, for November 1st we got these responses:
The Girl - my life (awww)
The Boy - the iPad
The Baby - flowers (and scissors, apparently)
Me - that we're in a safe house with electricity
The K - our family (double awww)

My response was such because I've been reading and hearing all the coverage of just how horrible things are in New Jersey. The pictures of the devastation at the shore, Hoboken under water, gas leaks threatening to burn what is still left standing are all heartbreaking. My step-mother sent me this picture last night:

This is the house that I grew up in from age 13 until I graduated from high school. Mom sold it in 2009. My bedroom was just to the right of the porch gable. The tree crushed the front porch and tore the  gutters off the roof above the master bedroom. Thank goodness no one was hurt. I received many pictures just like these of the destruction in my little 1 square mile home town. I am so thankful that all my friends and family are safe, but cleaning up from a storm like this will take years.

I hope that this Thanksgiving we won't just say we're thankful for things, but that we will be genuinely thankful for all the lucky things in our lives. Of course, we'll still have the football and the eating too much, but I hope that the wreath will be a new tradition that everyone will enjoy. Happy Thursday, everyone.

Ghosts of Birthdays Past and Present

Happy Halloween everyone! So, for the two to three people who are reading this blog and don't personally know me, thanks, first of all, and second of all, today is also my birthday. When I was growing up I loved having my birthday on Halloween. As a kid, you're guaranteed to hang out with your friends and get a lot of candy.  What's not to like? When I was in college, there were always tons of parties and I definitely worked the birthday angle to my advantage and scored some free drinks.  Having a Halloween birthday when you're an adult with small-ish children is a totally different ball of wax.  Now I spend my birthday getting costumes together for the kids and doling out candy.

This year, Mom had sweetly offered to take me shopping, but the Baby was still nursing a cold, so I wasn't counting on that happening.  In fact, I'd say that I set my expectations pretty low this year.  When I was cleaning up from breakfast this morning, though, I had this birthday surprise:

Can you see her in there?  Someone hid our Russian nesting doll inside the pumpkin. She was peering out of the nose like she was in the gulag. Then when the Baby and I released her from her pumpkin prison she wouldn't totally close.  That's because this was inside the last doll:

We're still not sure who set up the little surprise. I suspect the Boy, but the Baby's money is on Audrey the Moose. I don't think I've mentioned Audrey before, but she is a major player in our household. Whenever some kind of mischief or mess is revealed, the Baby insists that it is Audrey. She lives in our neighbor's car and has telescoping antlers. Audrey has a way with the paintbrush that is surprising for a hoofed (hooved?) animal. Remember our fabric paint project from the other week? Well, old Audrey got into the paint a couple of days ago and made quite a mess. She also left a paint handprint that was just about the size of the Baby's hand. Hmmmm.

In any case, we chuckled about the dolls for a little bit, but then we found an even bigger surprise when we opened the front door:

My sweet friends had rigged up a ghost right outside the front door as a birthday treat. Underneath that sheet is a life-sized cardboard Batgirl. Batgirl has clearly been working out with Jackie Warner. Get a load of that v-taper:

Batgirl-ghost remains up to greet the trick-or-treaters. Her sheet keeps slipping off, which makes her fit in perfectly with our other deteriorating decorations.

The Baby's nose was running, but I thought she could make a go of it at school. I tried to talk her into it by mentioning that everyone would be wearing costumes and she totally freaked out and refused to go, so that was that and I had a companion for the day.

Around mid-day, Mom came by with this random assortment of balloons:

Yes, that's a Sesame Street balloon. I'm not sure if it might have been a political message? Mom is very obsessed with the election.  Since the Baby wasn't that sick, Mom took us to lunch at Taqueria del Sol. If you've never been to Taqueria, you totally have to go. They put something in the food that is positively addictive. We got really lucky because the K was able to join us.

Right before we left for lunch, Dad called from the hurricane zone. They still don't have power and the stores and restaurants are all still closed. The thing about Dad is that he basically subsists on cappuccino, so he's had a rough couple of days. I think that the DTs have set in. He borrowed a french press from my step-brother and his wife, but he didn't know how to use it. So he called to wish me a happy birthday and to get a french press tutorial (never mind that he actually lives next door to my step-brother and probably could have gotten directions that way). I gave him the 411 (does that exist anymore?) on the french press and let him get off the phone so he wouldn't waste his minutes.

After we got back from lunch, I opened Dad's gift (which arrived about a month ago) and, in keeping with the randomness of the day, it was, well, random. Here are some pictures:

The first picture is of a really old blanket with patriotic symbols. The second item is an Amish birth record that is entirely in German. I feel like I'm describing lots in an auction. Clearly these are about as far from a generic gift card as you can get. In my *ahem* youth, I probably would have been annoyed by this and wished for a J. Crew sweater, but I've grown to appreciate these unique gifts. I put the blanket over a chair in our study. I use the term "study" loosely because it's really a room with all the things that don't go in any of the other rooms. Y'all know what I mean? Don't pretend that you don't have a room like that in your house. We should come up with a name for that room.

So, as far as birthdays go, this birthday rated pretty high for me. I loved all the quirky little things that happened - the babushka in the pumpkin, the Batgirl ghost, the Sesame Street balloon, Dad's call about the french press, and my unique gifts. I loved my lunch and wasn't even upset to lose my day of shopping because the Baby's cold/masklophobia. It was really nice to just stay at home and do nothing. Our schedule has been so crazed, that I felt like I got a chance to breathe for just a second. Best of all, tomorrow I get to take down the Halloween decorations! Happy Halloween everyone!

P.S. I added a gadget so you can sign up to get blog posts by email. Let me know if it still doesn't work and I'll try to troubleshoot it. Seeing as my computer skills are on par with my photography, it may take a while to work out all the kinks. Thanks for your patience!