Surprise! What To Expect When You Are Not Expecting: A First Foster Placement

I wrote this post right in the midst of having our first long term foster placement. I didn't publish then because it all felt so new and I wasn't sure if I was qualified to talk about it. Several years later, I am happy I found it so I can publish it now.

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Just when we thought it wouldn't happen, when we were debating whether it should or not, when we were really super comfortable with life... It Happened.
A foster placement.
A baby.
A really little one.
Surprise!
I have been practicing the transition to three children on and off for a while with respite care, so that's not so bad. There have been good surprises like a newfound maturity in my youngest daughter as she takes up the mantle of Big Sister. There have been bad surprises like when the bathroom sink started leaking, the girls were fighting, and I was trying to change a diaper with a social worker at the door all at the same time. Keepin' it real.
But mostly the surprises have been kind of superficial. I'm not ready to be deep yet. I have a baby. My brain is fried. I thought that because I wouldn't be recovering postpartum things would be easier. I won't kid you: It's easier, just not in the areas and levels I expected.

Expectation: I'll have more energy.
Reality: For a few nights I was so sore I couldn't sleep from doing all of the squats and arm curls a baby brings! And anyway, not breastfeeding means you actually have to get up and wake up at night. On the other hand, not having all those crazy hormones and having had a big human pushed out of me means my husband is still attractive to me, so... yay!

Expectation: I'll take it slow once the baby is born.
Reality: My house has never been this clean on the regular since ever. Having social workers over constantly really puts the fire under me. Plus no one comes to help you recover or bring meals. And instead of getting a pass from doing things, there's a whole round of extra appointments for the baby: I reference the above statement about the frequent visits of social workers. Still, I didn't push a human being out, so I'm in a better position to handle it.

Expectation: Some people like bottle feeding better. Maybe it'll grow on me!
Reality: Nope. Still nope. You know how they always say to drink a glass of water when you sit down to breastfeed? I was good about that with the girls, but bottle feeding takes me two hands, and I am incredibly dehydrated. I think that's what has shocked me the most. I thought I would be better at self care. So that's a goal.
P.S. In retrospect I also missed the quiet gentle bonding of breastfeeding, and overall I think the baby missed it too. This is not to say that bottle feeding is bad, or that you can't bond, but that I did notice a difference having done it both ways several times over.

Expectation: I didn't really know what to anticipate with my children's reactions.
Reality: There is a degree to which it is stressful for them to share mommy with another person, and we didn't really prepare them for that the way we would have if I had been pregnant. There was nothing obvious that signaled that change was coming! For the most part they have been really happy and really helpful with the baby. At the same time, their fuses are quite short. Tears are coming easily, and misunderstandings abound. I may have been accused of evil step-motherhood a time or two. It's been important to celebrate their new roles, reinforce what routines we can salvage, and acknowledge the changes that are hard. I am praying that a few weeks will find us with a new, less tearful normal.

Expectation: Dance will need to go on hold for a while.
Reality: Yep. Night time feedings are kicking my butt, but I have plane tickets to dancy things, so miraculously a-dancing I will go, at least once this month. Once a month is probably doable right? [Side note: I must say doable often, because the girls sort all undertakings into the categories "Doable" and "Not-Doable."]
P.S. I ended up dancing at least twice a month throughout babyhood. Toddlerhood is kicking my butt though!

Six Things I Learned From Fostering

A few years ago I wrote about why I feel fostering is important here. I stand by every word.

We did respite care for a while, and then were placed with a baby boy whom we have since adopted. Our home is now closed to fostering as we focus fully on the children we have. I feel like this process has taken all of my personhood for a while. It's probably a good sign that I feel like I can talk about it now.

So in retrospect here are a few important things that I wasn't expecting about the foster journey.

Redemption is hard. I knew that beforehand in the way that I knew my bedroom might smell like a man when I got married and shared my room with a man. It seemed like “maybe” it would smell which through mental gymnastics really means “maybe not!” or that it might be romantic and musky, or that the pungent masculine aroma might have to do with sheets not being changed often enough. But no. It’s not a housekeeping issue, and it’s not romantic, and it is a certain part of living with a dude. 

Redemption is hard, and I don’t mean maybe. Redemption in this case is about choosing to take the consequences for possibly generations of bad circumstances and bad choices off of a child and taking it on yourself. Competence won’t hurt, but it doesn’t get you off scot-free. Like the terrain of a Bear Hunt, you can’t go over or under or around it. You have to go through it, and it’s messy. There's no "maybe not." It isn't romantic. No one is filming you stroking a cherub's hair in the sunset. It's just hard. To the degree it is hard it is also deeply good and right and necessary. It is enlightening, and I feel like I better understand the redemption that comes through Christ as a result of slogging through our own little mini story. 

Doing the “right thing” doesn’t always feel like the right thing. When our son first came to us he seemed pretty well cared for, and people who knew his mother had some positive things to say about her. As much as she had made some choices I questioned, she had also made some I could really get behind. I was filled with horror. What if I was playing for the wrong team, depriving a mother and child of one another? What if the grand act of selflessness people were lauding me for, to my confusion, was actually destructive? I finally concluded that I hadn’t been the one to make any of the decisions involved except to open my arms, and my job was to love this child as hard as I could while the decision makers weighed his next move. That wasn’t the end of feeling wrong though. Each time I had to weigh my bio children’s needs against that of a newcomer's, each time I had to evaluate how to interact with a birth mother, each time I was asked to take another child and had to say yes or no, there was no angels-trumpeting-Mayor-presents-you-with-the-key-to-the-city-parade-worthy kind of “Yes! This is right!” feeling for any of the choices. We have just had to use our heads, use our training, and try to give every person involved neither more nor less than what they truly need. 

People are much more supportive about fostering than about adoption, and the key is finality. People think that fostering is harder than adoption. The number one thing I hear is “I couldn’t open my heart to a child and have them taken away.” The uncertainty is what really tugs the heart strings. So many horror stories circulate about relatives coming to claim a beloved foster child at the 11th hour before adoption. Signing up for that sounds crazy to many people, like volunteering to get your heart broken. In contrast, the narrative with adoption is revealed by the phrase people use, “Forever Family.” It sounds just like hot chocolate and Christmas carols. People think when an adoption is- listen for that language -Finalized, it’s over and everyone is safe and everyone is happy, and we celebrate by going to Disney for a week, roll credits on the family photo of us in front of Cinderella’s castle. 

In reality the adoption journey is no more completed in a courtroom than a marriage is complete at the altar. 

At the end of the day, in the situation of a foster child being placed outside your home you can say after much struggle “I did my best and I hope they are okay, but it is out of my hands.” There is a lot of grief to that.

There is another kind of grief that people don’t rally around as enthusiastically when you realize that you must continue to do your best every single day into the future and redemption is hard and you don’t know where the energy will come from. You signed up for it. Suck it up! It sounds like whining to say “This is hard, this is harder than fostering” but for us at least it has been.  

There is always grief: My theory is that post part depression is about hormones but also about grief. I got PPD symptoms with foster children too. Grief when new children come and your schedule and family dynamics change. Grief about sharing stuff, grief in saying goodbye to free time. Grief when children leave. Grief over the too-quiet. Grief wondering where they are, and calculating how old they are this year. Grief is a part of life. Grief means you have loved. It makes the shadows no lighter to know this. 

There is joy. I wish you the mega-watt joy of introducing a foster child to something they have never experienced before, like a real theater movie, or putting together a Lego, or cooking as a family. Many foster children have never been sung to. They want to hold your hand crossing the street and read a million stories just to sit in your lap. Some will accept literally any affection and positive interaction they can get. Especially as a respite provider you can basically be a fairy godmother of positivity. There is no one else knocking down doors to spoil these children and it means a lot. 

The joy of social workers and judges really took me by surprise. They see the worst humanity has to offer every day. They see addiction and mental illness and blood curdling abuse, they deal with mystery fluids in their cars, and acting out in public. They are trying the nearly impossible task of finding adoptive families for teens with juvie records, and that’s all just part of the job! Then while they are trying to do their jobs racist people berate them for working with families of another color, and people wonder aloud why they do what they do, or whether they could make it in a “real job.” But seriously. The family court judges preside over the official affairs of generations of a family so they have been watching the equivalent of a ten car pileup of life choices for years. Everyone has tears of joy when something goes right for a little one. It is the most beautiful thing.   

Christmas in August

The time to knit stockings is not during the holiday season when you want to be making gifts, so I curl up in the air conditioning to hide from the heat and knit. We are officially legally adding to our family very soon via adoption from foster care! The inspiration for our son's stocking pattern comes from kente cloth to acknowledge and embrace his biological ancestry. In joy our family wishes you joy as well... in August, even though it is traditional to wish such a thing in December. Big gifts can come in any month! 

How To: Make Alternative Montessori Style Sandpaper Letters

 
Have you noticed a strong inverse relationship between how much prep time you spend on a teaching related project and how interested your kids are? Not so with this project in our family. Using hot glue to make flash cards worked! It doesn't look fancy, but if it does the job, who cares? These are a great teaching tool for Montessori style learning and D'Nealian cursive, as well as general writing skills. I can see this technique being successful for children with sensory processing issues who don't like rough things as well.

For the most part I really adore Montessori materials and concepts. One material my children rejected outright is the sensory sandpaper letters and numbers to trace with your finger as preparation for writing. The materials I got from Adena Montessori are great quality, but the girls abhor the feeling of sandpaper and took their strokes willy-nilly out of order regardless of instruction, so I let it go until their numbers were reversed and I was in an all-out war over cursive.
#teacheroftheyear right?
The beauty of the hot glue cards is that the glue guides their fingers into the strokes in the right order! Before I took the plunge I started with numbers 0-9 with gold stickers, and with success ventured into lower case and finally upper case cursive letter cards.

  Note: In a world where people write by hand infrequently cursive seems like an indulgence that is "way too hard" according to my kids, except for one thing– You remember things better when you write notes by hand, and one of the best ways to write fast enough to take thorough notes is cursive. I credit a lot of my good grades to cursive. Plus if you have nice handwriting its an easy ego boost because people always notice.

My children vehemently disagree with my premise, preferring to print in all caps, hence the cursive battle!

Montessori Hot Glue Letter Cards 

Supplies:
27 cardboard sheets sized 5.5" x 8.5" (mine are 8.5" x 11" cardboard sheets cut in half),
ruler,
pencil,
eraser,
marker,
a popsicle stick (optional),
red or pink glitter glue,
6 blue metallic dot or star stickers for vowels, (mine is leftover table confetti)
21 red metallic dot or star stickers for consonants,
hot glue gun, and
10 sticks of hot glue

1. On 19 cards draw solid marker lines 1.5" from the top and bottom, and a broken line 4.5" from the top, centered between the solid lines. My broken line is 1/2" on, 1/2" off. These cards are for the letters that sit on the line. 

2. In marker on the lower righthand corner print these cards with the letters a, b, c, d, e, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, r, s, t, u, v, w, and x. 

3. On the remaining 8 cards, draw a light pencil line 1.5" from the bottom, a solid marker line 3" up from that, and a broken line another 3" up from your solid line. These cards are for letters with tails that drop below the line.

4. In marker on the lower righthand corner print these cards with the letters f, g, j, p, q, y, y, and z. Yes, 2 y's, as one will serve as a consonant and the other as a vowel.  

5. Apply a line of pink or red glitter glue to the bottom-most solid marker line on each card. In D'Nealian handwriting curricula the line the letters rest on is often red/pink. Highlighting it helps the child to hold the card right side up, line the cards up by matching the red line, the glitter is a rough counterpoint to the smooth glue, and shiny is always better. 

6. In pencil, lightly rough out each letter referencing D'Nealian resources, Learning Curve Pro font for cursive, School House A font for print. For the letters with tails, use the pencil line toward the bottom of the card to show how far the tail should drop. Use the popsicle stick as a point of reference for the width of the strokes, and to round off the ends. Draw your final lines in marker and erase all visible pencil marks.

7. Apply blue stickers or confetti to the leading stroke of each vowel: a, e, i, o, u, and y. Why use stickers? To show where to start. Why metallic? Because, I am told by my product testers, that is one of the things that make these cards great. Why blue? Because in the Montessori method vowels are always shown in blue.

8. Apply red stickers to the leading stroke of each consonant, b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, and z. Why red? Because in the Montessori method consonants are always shown in red. 

9. With a steady hand, squeeze an even amount of glue along the outline of each letter starting at the first upward stroke. You can see on the letter "h" here that if a stroke crosses itself priority is given to the first pass, in this case the stroke from bottom to top, and the later stroke is partial for the sake of simplicity. 

10. Spend the rest of your children's school ages trying to get the little glue strings off. Good luck!    

Now, does anyone want to buy my barely used sandpaper letters? 

Three Year Old Tantrums– Making Peace

Three year old tantrums are like tsunamis. You don’t know how big the cataclysm will be until it’s on top of you, and you can’t stop it once it has started. You just have to be prepared beforehand and get to higher ground. 

As my daughters have moved from the developmental stage identifying themselves with me to seeking individuality and choices, the transition has been rocky and full of temper tantrums. As much as I would like to point fingers and blame their tender youth, I myself am not always the example of maturity I wish to be. I try to let myself off the hook because I am not a yeller, but I’ll say it before someone else rats me out: Bull-headedness and snarling are patterns God convicts me about regularly. Oh God, you multi-tasker, you! Using me disciplining my kids to discipline me! 

So here we are with long, massive meltdowns in very public places, but that doesn’t even matter because I happen to know you can still hear that little voice shrieking inside the house from down the block. Thank God we don’t live in an apartment at this point!

As I said, there’s no stopping it: The element of surprise is impotent. Punitive action and reasoning are equally fruitless. It takes a good 20-30 min. before distraction is an option. Mostly tantrums just have to be forestalled before they start. 

Sure, I know that means eating real meals at regular intervals. Of course it means getting regular sleep. Gee, thanks, parenting sites. I'd never have thought of that on my own!

The key for me was realizing what my daughter was trying to accomplish with her tantrums. On the surface they seem whimsical –in a bad way– but for her it is all about feeling like her rights were trampled on and having no recourse. Her solution might not be the same as your child's solution because her reasons may be different than your kid's. But if you think it may help, read on! 

What has really helped is having a family peacemaking strategy. The work of making peace is not best done by the clear-headed outside observer. It has to start in the heart of the person who is angry and sees the wrong. We have found my daughter's temper escalates when she sees no recourse for due process and justice.

My idea and my children’s ideas of justice don’t often coincide at first, but having a calm, consistent road to travel together makes a difference.

Here are the tools I want to give them: A desire for justice, capacity for mercy, a chance to cool down, a template for respectful discourse, empathy, and experience with un-begrudging compromise. The terrible thing is that this list doesn’t describe my heart of hearts! My own desire and practice are far from perfect, so this is for me too. 

My efforts at cool down time and respectful discourse had so far been blown away in the blast of living fury that is my second-born, so I needed a new strategy. We tried a Peace Table ala Montessori, and it is working surprisingly well! The idea is to have a neutral place for conflict resolution and the promotion of peace. The genius of it is that it gives my kids an avenue for positive action, not just violent protest. 

Supplies: On the table we have a rose in a shallow bowl- not a long stemmed flower in a vase, because vases are easier to knock over, and long flowers can be turned into cart whips by furious children– and a battery operated candle. 

Step 1: If someone in the home is feeling upset or experiencing conflict they can present the involved person with the rose, and it is part of the social contract that they go to the table together to resolve their difficulty. 

Step 2: Whomever is holding the rose has the right to speak, and anyone else has the privilege of listening. 

Step 3: The rose is passed between them until they resolve the matter. 

Having physical tools to hold as protocol for the intellectual/emotional process of conflict resolution is grounding and reassuring for them. It keeps them on track. There is a Montessori book to introduce this activity, but role playing was enough, and in fact, quite revelatory for us!

The purpose of the battery candle is that it is an extra task and treat for the angry child to turn on, allowing for a few more split seconds of cool off/distracted time. Every instant counts! Also they are mesmerizing and cheap at the dollar store! Another advantage to having a dedicated space for this is that it is proactive. Choosing from a small selection of activities from the table is a self-directed action. I see cool down time-outs as preventing anyone or anything getting hurt, but the angry child sees it as punishment or banishment, which compounds the drama. I want them to grow up knowing that they don’t get positive or negative consequences for how they feel, but for what they do with the feelings they have. Mature people find activities that de-escalate themselves when they are angry, but sometimes we stop kids from de-escalating by mandating things that make them angry. Once again, anger is fine, being destructive and rude is not. They have to be dealt with separately. 

When I said that role playing was revelatory, what I mean is that I discovered a reason my explosive child has a short fuse: Her fuse is not that short, it’s just that her sister is a pyro. As I found myself trying to negotiate a pretend argument for the rights to a toy I don’t even care about, I discovered that my oldest drives a really hard bargain, and she denies others acknowledgement that they have a real case. While she looks level headed and peaceable to authority figures, she looks like a tyrant when you are standing eye to eye. It raises the point that making peace is everyone’s job. No one is exempt. The burden of it can’t only fall on the people who burn for justice. Acknowledgement and sensitivity are really important. Without empathy the person who is wronged just comes off as a complaining troublemaker, and that is unjust too! As a mother it is tempting to focus my efforts on the child who is most publicly embarrassing, and who inconveniences me most, but my job is to help both the explosive child, AND the kid who casually plays with emotional matches. One is no less important than the other. 

 The spiritual component is something we are working on as well, but not in the tsunami moments. Jesus said that when you try to feed pearls to swine, they turn around and eat you. Raise your hand if that’s happened to you when your kids are angry! I find my relationship with God, my prayer life, and the help of Scripture invaluable, like pearls, but when my kids have a hunger for justice they don’t appreciate moralizing.   

Becoming peacemakers is a life-long, not week-long evolving process. Additionally, peacemaking is not just about resolving conflict, but about developing an eternal perspective, deepening one’s walk with God, developing love, practicing patience, and self-control. As my children master the peacemaking skills we started with, I expect to swap in other activities at the peace table. 

Here are my ideas: 

• Calm-down glitter jar,
• Music player with Scripture songs,
• Books about peacemaking... any suggestions? 
• Stones with applicable Bible verses on them,
• Tactile celtic knot tracing activity to introduce labyrinth prayer aides,
• Recorder for work on taking deep breaths, and 
• Puzzles for taking time to cool down.

The end of this story hasn't happened yet, but we have gone from 2 huge tantrums a day to 1 or 2 short ones a week. My daughter has been swallowing back the fearful rage and seeking healthy things like cuddling and talking about it since we have a plan. The rose is something she can present to parents too, and be certain her appeal is heard. The table also gives us a benchmark for the minimum of what is required to work something out. Often I would see my older daughter sulking about something her sister did. She always claimed to have tried to work it out, but I wasn't sure. Now I can tell them "If you haven't invited your sister to the peace table, you haven't tried to work it out. If you aren't willing to do that, you can sulk in your room, but not in our space." Very effective! 

Little Big Challenges

I'm typing one handed with a baby on my lap amongst other hinderances, knowing what I want to write, and also knowing I don't have the time to write to my quality satisfaction.
This is life.

It's easy to show my process when life looks pretty and put together, and harder when I have more time to think than act. This is a really crucial point in my work, I think. I've never felt more assured about direction, more certain of my mind, more confident in my work, or more supported by the people who count in my life. If only I could get into the studio!
In my twenties I was really honing my technique, I just didn't know what to do with it. Now I'm motivated, but the same little people who are arranging transformative life experience are also the main reason I can't get a move on. Here's to taking the scenic route!

 

Artist? Craftsman? Designer?

By now I have read enough blogs, listened to enough podcasts, and watched Lost in Living so I know I am not the only one asking “Am I an artist?” and “Am I still an artist when I am not making?” For me there is another foundational question I have to ask before that: Am I an artist, designer, or  craftsman? It's a loaded question because these are different paths. By far the option with that takes the most courage to look in the eye is artist. Growing up I was “the creative one,” shirking my responsibilities to draw and manning many a craft booth to make cash. I won a few little prizes, but nothing exceptional. My parents paid for years of watercolor lessons and I am still a terrible painter. Since my mom spins yarn and sells it, that was the family business, and definitely a craft. 

My real talent and passion after the baby-seal-drawing phase was in clothing, so I had the gaul to apply to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. I didn’t know how bad the odds were, I just knew that I had read every book on costume and fashion in my small town library, and they were written by FIT professors and/or referenced the FIT costume library, so I scraped together money I didn’t have to apply to a school in a scary city I had never visited. I got in. I thrived. I worked myself into the ground. I still don’t think I was exceptional, I just had a good sense for design honed by years of reading and making, and I worked exceptionally hard. There was a lot of talent that burned brighter than mine, but I struck a decent balance and I won bigger awards, had bigger opportunities and teachers who believed in me.  

Then I got married and moved to Texas. I was completely lost. I Drowned in a sea of the infinite possibility of time and absolute impossibility of place, being remote from all things creative. Remote, really, from all things. 

I am grateful for the time of experimentation I had in that painful solitude. I am thankful for the forge of motherhood and just generally growing up. I began to find my voice. But then there is motherhood and stuff. I haven’t put in the hours I need to. 

My studio is calling me now. I am serious enough about creating that the first room you see in my house is the one dedicated to making. Making a mess, mostly. Should I seek my voice again? Is that even right or responsible? How serious am I? Where is my place? I have asked the questions thousands of times for more than half of my life. Sometimes in my head I say I am an artist because what I have to say is not just practical, not just a thing, but a living idea. Sometimes I call myself a craftsman out loud because I am not making real art. But the-buck-stops-here reason I am not making real art is that I am afraid. I am a decent and dedicated craftsman but a designer with no market and no heart for mass production, and a poor artist. A dabbler, really. 

Being the worst at something scares me more than anything else and I have no credentials. 

In fact, I have trained and refined taste, so I know exactly how bad I am. I don’t even know if I have a dream. But there are things I must do. Things I must make. Things I must say. Things that have nothing to do with alphabets. Can I be an artist if what I am doing is knitting and sewing? I don’t know. I tried self-identifying as an artist at a party the other night and I wanted the heat in my cheeks to sublimate my whole self and all claims on artistry into the heavy air. I didn’t, not because it is impossible, but because I caught my breath and the crush of imagining denying this part of me held me in place and time. 

That is why I am still here to ask the question. 

Getting Unstuck

This popular meme summed up the creative process in 6 steps:

1. This is awesome.
2. This is tricky.
3. This is crap.
4. I am crap.
5. This might be okay.
6. This is awesome. 

You know it's true. In the past 2 weeks I find myself hanging out in the vicinity of steps 3 & 4 wondering if all the collagesI have made  –which are so many more than these–  were all flukes!

That's just how projects go sometimes, and the best thing to do is go for a walk, soak in the tub, have a dog pile/tickle/cuddle extravaganza with my kids, sing Shake It Off karaoke style (go big or go home), and tell ridiculous jokes.

Here is the one I cooked up:
Q: Why did Cinderella's soccer coach bench her?
A: Because she is always late to the ball, and half the time she loses a shoe!

Here is one my daughter shared in the style of a knock-knock joke:

Her: Salmon!
Me in a stage whisper: What do you want me to say?
Her: Whoa!
Me: Whoa!
Her: Wait. I'm a salmon, not a horse!

So there you have it.
Now time to get back to work, because the main thing is just to keep showing up!


 

Little Cooks in the Kitchen

This week is all about the kitchen. On the creative side, I have been wood burning kitchen wares like crazy. Some of it is special order, and some is on my newly revived Etsy site.

 
    If you see anything you like that's not on my site, you can shoot me an Etsy message to inquire about special orders. (I love special orders!) What is really keeping us in the kitchen is that the girls just discovered that cookbooks can fill their weekly library requirement of non-fiction books.
We have done a lot of eating from this Disney cookbook. I was fully prepared for it to be horrid as so many cookbooks are, especially licensed ones, but it is actually fairly healthy and delicious because you can't mess up Creole cooking and soul food that much!

    The cookbook pictured below is Fairy Tale Breakfasts, from the Fairy Tale Cookbook series by Jane Yolen. The stories are great, because it's Jane Yolen, and it inspired the girls to try their hands at cooking "Eggs in the cradle" by themselves. I just turn on the stove for them.

    This, in turn, sparked a conversation in our church community group. Do you let your kids cook? At what age? My mother and grandmother had me sitting on the counter from the time I was tiny, measuring and stirring. I didn't think twice about having the girls help as soon as they could hold things. They have never cut or burned themselves, they have always been careful. I can fully see why some kids are safest outside the kitchen, but for us it's a precious daily ritual. I let them start cutting soft things like mushrooms when they were younger, in addition to stirring and licking. They have graduated to pancake flipping, measuring, and spreading peanut butter and butter– a surprisingly tricky business.
    They never stir things like soup that have hot steam, and they stay away from the oven. Knives are with supervision only.

    What are your kitchen rules? Do you handle kids in the kitchen the same way you grew up, or have you tweaked things?

 

Felted Kitty Hats

It's not as if they needed more hats, hats are just the perfect transformative accessory and I just can't resist making them.
At all.
   So I saw this kitty bowler hat from Marks and Spencer on Pinterest and I just had to try it. My favorite yarn store, i.e. my mom, ordered the yarn from Brown Sheep and knit up the initial hats from this Fiber Trends pattern leaving the finishing to me.

 If I were doing it again I would make them 1 1/2"- 2" shorter before felting, because I think they turned out long. The ears are double knitted: They look 20 stitches wide, but they are really 40. With two double pointed needles you slip every other stitch on each row so you end up with 2 knit stitch faces to your work. Every third row I slipped with the yarn forward instead of behind.

Once the ears were sewn on and all ends hidden I threw the hats into the wash for some quick shrinkage, but I had to finish up by hand. By that time I was at my in-laws for Thanksgiving, and I found the perfect hat block: A medicine ball! It was all knobby and just the right size as I reshaped and finnessed the hats into shape.

All that was left to be done was embroidering the faces on with a chain stitch.

 

How To: Sew a Child's Cape

 We will try anything that makes these long days indoors fun, but we never need an excuse for more costumes! Any occasion will do. Capes make you jump higher, run faster, and spin more beautifully according to our in-house research.

I love seeing the girls zooming around in their capes because one of them is made with a play silk I was fond of as a kid. The stories we pretended with it beggar imagination, so it's great to know that its best years are ahead of it!

 
This cape project is super easy and fast, (20-30 minutes) and it's a good excuse to work on fine hemming tricky fabrics like I showed you in the last tutorial!

Supplies: 
fancy floating, silky, sparkly, or otherwise fun fabric 28.5"x 22.5" Poly organza is pictured here.
40" of 1" ribbon
safety pin
matching thread

Note: If these measurements seem random, it's because I was making do with what I had, but the measurements turned out to be a nice size for both my 2 and almost 4 year old. Feel free to improvise.

Directions:

1. Hem all 4 sides of the cape at 1/4".
2. Make a casing for the ribbon by folding one of the short sides down 1 1/2" and stitching.
3. Attach the end of the ribbon on the safety pin, and use the pin to push the ribbon through the casing. 
4. Even up the center of the cape to the center of the ribbon. Pin in the middle. 
5. Scrunch up the cape on the ribbon to 7 1/2" to each side of center, while the ribbon stays flat. 
6. Distribute the gathers approximately evenly and stitch down.  

Button, Button, I've Got the Buttons

For as long as I can remember I have been sorting buttons or watching my mother sort buttons. I have fond memories of individual buttons with personalities. The yellow and white striped block that reminds me of cheese is a favorite, and I remember the stories of buttons as I see them: The brown engraved quadrilateral  from my mother's old coat, the red dinosaurs from when cutesy animal shaped buttons were a thing.
When I was very young my mother had her deeply personal stash of buttons in a brown Currier and Ives tin with a sleighing scene on it. When we needed one we would shake out all the buttons and find something suitable. Then the buttons my great grandmothers and great-greats had saved through the Great Depression and earlier found their way south in glass jelly jars, strung on safety pins, and looped onto snarls of cotton from before the advent of polyester filament sewing threads. They were like proud but shabby refugees and political asylum seekers narrowly escaping estate sales and dumpsters.

Every button from every shirt had been saved alongside upholstery buttons popped off of sofas, wooden toggles from wool coats, heavy powdery handfuls of mother of pearl, and the royalty: timeless Czech glass, and elderly rhinestones working free of their glued settings.

The late 80s and early 90s not being a time to slum it in vintage, my mother also purchased bagged lots of bright plastic buttons and bells she crocheted onto the edges of crew socks she sold for extra cash.

We sorted and sorted.
We sorted those buttons by material: Wood, leather, horn, shell, and plastic.
We sorted them by color.
We sorted them by the number of their holes.
We sorted them into Ziplock bags.

In my tweens my family moved to a house with a laundry room full of drawers and cabinets. With joy we sorted the bags into drawers. Over time getting a button became a kind of smash and grab affair. The plastic bags, which had grown dusty and semi opaque, were no longer closed properly and the contents of the drawers started to mingle.

I moved away for college and started my own personal stash of buttons neatly threaded on tough nylon thread and kept in cotton wool lined vintage jewelry boxes and tins. Then one day it was time for my parents to turn over a new leaf and move. Did I want the buttons? Of course.

They came to me in their plastic bags stuffed into a box and liberally besprinkled with paillettes and seed beads. While I was pregnant with Thacia it seemed like a good idea to sort them so that I wouldn't have to do it later with an infant about. Ah, the naiveté of first time motherhood! I did get a great many of them sorted, but I swear the buttons multiply in the dark. Every time I think I have finally sorted the white buttons I find another huge bag to compare with the drawers of buttons already strung, and the happy congregation of singletons.

Since October I have been setting up my new studio space very slowly. I had a spot carved out in the basement and it was just too dark for me, so we played musical chairs with the house, combining the living room and dining room together to make a creative space in the former dining room. It is awesome, but that is a side note. As we brought another load of stuff out of the basement space this weekend I looked at the ranks of drawer sets and tackle boxes that hold my legacy of buttons in some semblance of order. I wonder if this is the year they will be conquered, and the last of the plastic bags emptied? As Daniel points out, I've never been closer!

I'm a little more organized in some respects than my mother, so my children probably won't spend as much time up to their elbows in buttons.
Will they have relationships with these buttons like I have, or will the buttons just be a utility for them? What new stories will we make together as we add my great grandmothers' buttons to our new creations?      

Flash Card Collage

The girls are in a Super WHY obsessed alphabet loving phase as my almost-four year old is on the cusp of reading. In full recognition that flash cards don't fit every kid's learning style, the girls love them and they have the uppercase letters down pat. This brings me to a burning question I have been having: Why in the bewildering world do we have uppercase, lowercase, and cursive alphabets? Okay, okay, but why do they have to look so different?

 
Now we need lowercase flash cards and I got bitten by the "I can do a better job than that!" bug so we are making them a little at a time. One day I did the lettering, and we have been collaging corresponding pictures in batches. Thacia is helping me to look through glossy mags to find pictures. It reenforces the letter sounds as we page through asking "What starts with R? Hey! Ribbon! That's an R word."

 
It's not all fun and games though, as I deal with my own Tiny Art Director. The standards for what a king should look like were as rigorous as they were incommunicable. Don't even get me started on princess tiaras!

Wouldn't it be fun to do this with superhero/ comic book stuff? Really any interest you could get visuals on would look cool and could be catered to the little person using them. When they are done I will get them laminated.

Snow Day

Everyone loves a good snow day, except for me yesterday. What a cold front, huh? I was grumpy about lots of things yesterday, including, but by no means limited to: Finding hats, snow pants, mittens, tights, sweatshirts, and fuzzy socks. Sometimes you've just got to send everybody out to play while you take a hot bath.

Today I was ready to earn my Fun Momma badge back and we went out to play– but this time I knew where everything was!

We whipped up some snow cream, which my mom used to do when I was a kid.

Here's my recipe:

• 8 cups fresh, clean snow
• 1/2 cup cream
• 1/2 cup milk
• 3/4 cup powdered sugar
• 1 tsp. vanilla

Stir vigorously.
Serves 6

This isn't the first snow of the year for us, but my family used to celebrate first snow with a day off,  a pot of hot soup, board games and a jigsaw puzzle. There was a family in our church who threw a big pot luck party the night of the first snow where all the food was white. Just thinking about it makes my mouth water for Chile Blanco!
How about you? Do you have any beloved snow traditions?

Value Quilt

The  Value Quilt is finished!
Thanksgiving Day is a great time to do hand work if you don't have to be in the kitchen– which, thanks to my super family, I didn't this year. The food sure tasted better because I didn't have to cook it!

The night I put the new quilt on my daughter's bed my youngest was keenly jealous. She wanted a quilt too. I tucked her very happily into the crib quilt she usually ignores. I have to admit I was feeling gratified by all the appreciation for my work.

Then of course big sister decided she didn't actually want to sleep with her new quilt on her bed. She wads it up and throws it to the floor in the night.
These pictures are a grand fiction.

Little sister followed suit, of course, when I tried to tuck her in the next night. How could I even think of tucking her in with a quilt? Silly me.
I am hoping they like things I make for them by the time they are 40. That seems doable.

When did you start appreciating handmade things? I remember staring by the hours at the patterns in afghans and quilts made for me by the time I was 5 or so. I hope this will be a comfort and fascination to my daughter like those blankets were for me as a kid. Maybe next year, right?  

How To Make a No Sew First Aid Kit

Well this is exciting! An easy no-sew project is kind of rare around here, and this is straight up crafty. That's right. I whipped out the hot glue gun.
Our first aid supplies are usually just jumbled into the medicine cabinet, but it really is a good idea to have kits for the car and the house in case you are on the go or it's the baby sitter trying to fix up boo boos instead of you.
At the same time, this is a generic covered box, and you could make boxes for all sorts of things: A treasure chest for kids, a place to corral little baby things like binkies and booties, a spot to keep keys and wallets, a Brio train box... you get it.

Supplies:

• Empty baby wipe box,
• Hot glue gun and hot glue sticks,
• Tape measure, 
• Felt to cover the box. As a ballpark figure I needed 24 1/2"x 6" and 6 3/4"x 9 1/2", but your measurements might be different.
• A scrap of accent fabric bigger than the lid of your box, 
• A scrap of leather, Ultrasuede, felt, or anything that doesn't unravel,
• Scissors,
• Pins– optional, 
• Steam iron– optional.

Directions:

1. Remove the stickers on the outside of the box. I mildly regret forgetting to do this the second time around. 

2. Plug in your hot glue gun. While you are waiting for it to heat, measure the box and cut your fabric:

• Measure the circumference + 1/2" is the width of your fabric, and the measurement from the lip of the box to a little past the halfway point is the length. Cut from felt. My measurement was 24 1/2"x 6".
• Measure the length and width of the lid, disregarding the curved corners. Cut from felt. My measurement was 6 3/4"x 9 1/2"
• Add an inch on each side to the measurement above. Cut from accent fabric. My measurement was 7 3/4"x 10 1/2"
• Cut 2 pieces of leather 1 1/4" x 4 1/2" for cross. 

3. Squirt glue all over one side of the wipe box, and press your felt into it butting the long edge of the felt against the lip of the box. Repeat for each side, neatly overlapping whatever is left at the end. 

4. The bottom of the box is wrapped like a package. Turn the box over and cover the bottom with glue. Smooth the short sides in flat first, followed by the lapped side, finishing up with the last side. Glue down any spots that got missed.

5. Squirt glue over the face of the lid. Don't worry about the edges yet. Smooth the felt into the glue. Now glue and press down the edges leaving the corners for last. Glue the corners and press in whatever excess if left. Trim all the edges up with scissors to smooth them out.

6. Smooth your accent fabric over the top of the lid leaving excess on each side. Pin it to the felt in a few places to hold it steady. With the underside showing as in the photo above, give each edge a few blasts of steam with your steam iron to crease the fabric and show where you will be folding under.

7. Fold back half of the accent fabric, squirt glue over the felt staying away from the edges, and press the accent fabric down into the glue.

8. Next fold the edges on the creases and glue them down, followed by the corners. You may need to trim some of the excess off the corners and/or use something sharp to push the corners under before gluing.

9. Glue down the small strips into a cross shape on the center of the cover.

Done! Easy peasy. Making this box is much simpler than figuring out how to take an attractively styled picture of it. As it turns out, first aid is only glamourous on television!

Stock Up:
Pick out some items you find practical for your kit. Here are some ideas scoured from the internet. 

General

• Adhesive cloth tape
• Antibiotic ointment
• Antiseptic solution or towelettes
• Ace wrap
• Band-Aids in various sizes
• Breathing barrier
• Cotton balls and cotton swabs
• Disposable non-latex gloves, at least 2 pair
• Duct tape– You can stick it on the inside of your box and peel it off later as you need it.
• Gauze pads and roller gauze in various sizes
• First aid manual
• Instant cold compresses
• Petroleum jelly or other lubricant
• Plastic bags for the disposal of contaminated materials
• Safety pins in assorted sizes
• Scissors and tweezers
• Soap or hand sanitizer
• Sterile eye wash, such as a saline solution
• Thermometer
• Toilet paper or wipes
• Triangular bandage
• Suction bulb for flushing out wounds

Medications

• Activated charcoal (use only if instructed by your poison control center)
• Aloe vera gel 
• Anti-diarrhea medication 
• Antihistamine
• Aspirin and non-aspirin pain relievers
• Calamine lotion
• Hydrocortisone cream
• Personal medications that don't need refrigeration
• Syringe, medicine cup, or spoon

Emergency Items

• Candles and matches
• Emergency phone numbers: Family doctor, pediatrician, local emergency services, emergency roadside service providers, and the regional poison control center. 
• Medical consent forms for each family member
• Medical history forms for each family member
• Sunscreen
• Waterproof flashlight and extra batteries
• Emergency space blanket