Chess.

It's a contact sport in our house.

Conversations.

Hannah and I were fixing her hair when she looked at me in the mirror and said "Are we drawings? On a tv show?"

You mean like a cartoon? I asked her.

"Yeah."

So is everything we're saying to each other right now part of the cartoon?

Big eyes. "Yeah, I guess so."

So can we say what we want to or only what is written down? Can we decide what we want to do or is it all part of a cartoon?

"I don't know... .... I'll have to think about this." Big pause. "Do you think Homer and Marge know that they're just cartoons?"

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We were sitting down for lunch with soup and sandwiches when Ainsley decided to proclaim our family a super-hero team.

Pointing around the table, she said "Gay and Daddy and you and that girl" (pointing to Hannah) "are a Us Team."

Me: "What's the Us Team?"

A: "Supah-hewoes."

Me: "Really? What is your power?" Blank look. "You need a super skill if you're going to be a super hero. What are you going to do? Fly? Walk through walls? Leap buildings in a single bound?"

Ains: "I paint buildings in one bound. With my tummy."

Matt: "You can be the Belly Blaster. What's Gray? The Super Pooper?"

Hannah: "No, that's you Daddy."

Matt: "Then what are you?"

Hannah: "I don't know. What am I good at?"

Matt: "Your super power can be charm. We'll call you Charm Alarm."

Hannah: "What's charm?"

Ains: "I BEWWY BASTTER!" Aims with her tummy.

Hannah: "Dad, you can be Super Worker because you're good at working. And Mother, you can be Super Lover. You're good at loving us."

Me, looking at Matt: "Is that my power? Super Lover?"

Matt: "Yes. But a super-hero costume wouldn't hurt."

Yesterday we took a Snow Day.

It was necessary.

It isn't the snow. The snow is fun.

It's the 50 mph wind that comes along with the snow. You have to dress up really warm, run outside, play for maybe two minutes tops, get the obligatory first bite of snow ...

and then run back inside.

We looked for activities to keep us busy inside. Hannah wanted to do her sewing.

I did some of my own.

Gray played with his cars (natch) while Ains played her Little Mermaid game on the computer.

Gray went down for his nap and we got out the finger paints. When I was putting the plastic on the table, Hannah asked if they could paint on the floor instead. With Gray not around, we went for it.

It took a turn I didn't expect - but should have.

How did I not expect that?


Or this?
All those colors together make brown. I expected *that*. Hannah wanted to add more colors and see if that changed the brown. It was an Experiment.

A Hands-On Experiment.

Or a 'Body-On' experiment.

It's hard to carry a five year old under her arms up to the bathtub without her getting any paint on the walls. But I'm sure you expected that.

Clean-up was amazingly easy. Shower off.

After Gray woke up, and we'd fed our calves, we turned to games. Magical Creatures. In which the genie rode in a tractor. He'd kicked the satyr out.

Bambino Dino.

Old Spider and the Fly.

Which led to singing about a certain Old Woman with a very bad diet.

Then Connect Four and rediscovering Chess.

We made it through the Snow Day.

When your husband finds a frog at work ...

They loved it, of course, and Hannah took getting him to a safe place to live for the winter very seriously.

It reminded me of the last time (two years ago) that Matt found a frog and brought it in to show the girls. Problem was, the kids and I (I was pregnant with Gray at the time) were taking a bath right then. One of my husband's wonderful(?) qualities is that he sees problems as opportunities, hence the following post I posted on a small forum at the time....

"When your husband thinks he's funny, you could just end up with a frog in your bathtub, a hysterically giggling 10 month old trying to catch it, and a 3 yr old who's yelling that she wants to hold it, so "catch it, Mommy, catch it!". And the frog just might end up grabbing ahold of your nipple as the only port in a storm. Which might make your three year old giggle for the next two days about the frog nursing.

I'm just saying. That MIGHT happen."

The punchline of that story is that the next day, my little Hannah (3 years old at the time) told the lady at the post office that "My mother nurses frogs."

You can't explain that. You just can't.

Let them eat cake.

Hannah (the Queen) and Ainsley (the Princess) decided to host a tea party for the cats and dogs.

That didn't work out as well as they'd planned, so they settled for the next best thing - a brother. Who is Not A Prince, by the way.

They talked him into joining them by offering him a drink of tea (water) sweetened with sugar (chocolate chips). He fell for it.

Then they got distracted talking about Many Important Things.

Gray tried to understand, but he was getting bored, so he started looking for a way out.

The Queen noticed this and fed him a tea cake (graham cracker). He bit. (Heh.)

And then the talk got boring again. Look at the poor kid trying to keep his eyes open.

There they go ... drooping ...

He just wants a way out. "Maybe if I roll off the chair and onto the porch and keep rolling, they'll laugh so hard they won't offer me anything else and I can get away."

Which is what he did. Rolled all the way over to me and we got the well house swept out and ready for winter - can't have the well pipes freezing and breaking. That is what we commoners do while the royalty eats cake.

This one's for Grayson.

Kind of. It started out that way.

Gray's a tactile kid - much more so than either of my girls - so I decided to put together one of those rice/bean buckets for him.

Hannah and I poured some rice, barley, lima, and pinto beans into an old ice cream bucket and mixed it all up.

Then we went through our 'Creation Station' box (where anything still mildly useful for creative purposes goes to find a second life) and found little things to put in the bucket for him to dig out.

We arranged the items in groups by color, took pictures of them, printed the pictures out on cardstock, and stuck them with the bucket.

Obviously, Gray doesn't care too much about finding the objects on the cards (rice and beans are too much fun to dig in and, ahem, throw), so when he find objects, looks at them in a bemused fashion ("What is *that* doing in my bucket of rice and beans?") and hands them to his sisters, they squeal over which card they've finished.

It started out for him, but it's been fun for all of them.

Today was ...

Play dough.

(2 cup each flour and water, 1 cup salt, 2 tablespoons oil, 3 tsp cream of tartar. Cook over low heat until it forms a ball. Knead food coloring in.)

Big hit with the 'everything must be tested for ability to be airborne' set.

And with the bigger kids, too, who had it be everything from snakes to cake to lollipops.

Then movies in a tent.


Collages. I use suitcases from the thrift stores to help in organizing my craft room.

One of these two suitcases holds old magazines - some given to me by my sister, some saved by me for years - and the other holds miscellaneous print materials. Old coloring books, books from thrift stores/library sales with gorgeous pictures but not so good story lines, old, fun playing cards, book slip covers (I don't keep slip covers on any kids books), calenders ... anything with interesting pictures but of no other use goes in there.



I tried to explain the finished product and then told them to cut out pictures that made them happy. Next time we do this, we'll use another theme - animals, colors, jobs, moods - so many possibilities, but for their first time doing this project, I wanted a no-pressure approach.

Hannah got right to work, even coloring some pictures from coloring books to include.

Ainsley had me read most of the books in the suitcase to her before she'd pick any pictures out.

Grayson played beside us.

When the girls had the pictures they wanted, we went upstairs to paste them on. Hannah learned how to plan a collage while Ains tried to eat paste. I told her that she shouldn't eat paste, even if it was homemade. We had had this discussion with the play dough too.

Then the girls worked at pasting their pictures on.

Today we tried out a homemade paste and it was perfect for a project like this. Equal amounts flour and water. A few teaspoons of alum for every 1/2 cup of flour that you use. Add a bit more flour if you need it stiffer, a bit more water if you need it runnier. We applied it with a paintbrush - my hands-on girls loved that.

Gray played beside us.

The finished artwork on our art clips in the dining room.

Then yoga.

Dinner.

Diego Jungle Rescue on the computer.

Hello Kitty on the tv.

And bed.

Well, this isn't working.

Health issues equal blogging issues. Instead of being excited to post every day, I can go days before I realize that I haven't even *thought* of posting.

So many pictures, waiting to be posted. Most of them never will be - catch-up isn't really my style.

I will leave you with these pictures of Halloween - pictures snapped quickly of our little fairies (and a ghost cousin) and a little Peter Pan. Wish I had better pictures of the costumes, but my camera appears to be off-kilter and most pictures come out fuzzy, so we take what we can get.



And these pictures of our favorite Halloween crafts.

Stiff Fabric Ghosts

Crow puppets.

And this - the most important thing. Do you remember my sister? She used to look like this.

Now she looks like this.

And there was much rejoicing. (And no small amount of baby lust.)

In progress.

Three Halloween costumes.

Two straight days of sewing. Two costumes are almost done, one is being cut out.

The girls have been playing their own games around me - and with me when I take much-needed breaks. I went tearing up the stairs yesterday when I heard Ains yelling 'MOTHER!!!' and was told that she was just yelling for her bunny's mother and "You go work on my dress". Nice.

Gray's not at the independent play age, so he's with me.


Yeah, he's right here with me.

Seven hours to go ...