Choose Your Day

Freshly baked pumpkin chocolate chip muffins and steaming coffee, sweetened with a smidge too much sugar, on the table.

All before 7:00 a.m.

You're looking at either a terrible morning or a beautiful one.

Can changing your perspective change the outcome of your day?

 

Improvise, Improvise As Fast As You Can

Grandma. A trove of kisses and hugs and endless patience.

Grandma. A cornucopia of surprises and treats and toys and little gifts.

Grandma. Purchaser of a gingerbread men kit, sent home with Abbey and Dylan after their night with Grandma and Grandpa.

Grandma. Ignorer of directions.

run, run, run as fast as you can

you can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man

poor Gingerbread Man

Because while rolling hunks of fondant to a specified thickness and delicately cutting icing into darling clothing items for gingerbread boys and girls may work for some craftier moms, the idea of it sent me running for the kitchen and my filled-with-chemicals food coloring.

I push the fold-out flyer of directions, thick with restrictions, to the corner of the counter with the rest of the junk mail and other recycling.

I may not be a whiz with pastry knives, but I can whip up a batch of buttercream icing and a plan B while singing the Gingerbread Man song and tossing packets of fondant into the recesses of my baking cupboard.

Fondant is a foreign word to Abbey, but she knows the sweetness of frosting, dipping a finger into the stainless steel bowl before I have the chance to divide and color the creamy, sugary peaks into festive colors.

Dylan knows he wants his chair in the kitchen with his sister and me, fascinated by the tiny candy balls that tinkle into ramekins, chasing them across the floor when they tumble from his grasp.

Without the burden of cutting out dresses and itty bitty scarves, we giggle while digging Abbey’s tea party knives out of her toy kitchen goodies, though Dylan prefers working with his own utensils.

Without the danger of pastry knives or kitchen shears, they spread icing with plastic knives, without my assistance or my nervous hovering.

Small hands frost and taste test and decorate with whimsy, choosing colors and licking fingers and imagining their creations rival those on the box.

Which they do, of course, when seen through a mother’s love-tinted lens.

We may have ended up with this:

instead of this:

But we had this:

and this:

An afternoon craft without tears or impatient tantrums or gritted teeth.

Proving that sometimes the best directions are the ones you don’t follow.

(Please don’t tell my kids that!)

Laundry During NaNoWriMo

One more week of my National Novel Writing Month experiement, and my characters have overtaken my brain.  They're misbehaving and blowing raspberries at my carefully planned tone and structure, and I'm torn between Type A chagrin and absolute delight.

It's possible that I have been so wrapped up in Greta's shenanigans that I have put the laundry into the machine in the evening and forgotten to switch it to the dryer, which is both embarrassing and annoying, since it means I have to re-wash a load of clothes.

Thankfully, at the beginning of the month, I stuck the awesome Bounce Dryer Bar (Outdoor Fresh scent) onto the side of my dryer.  At least I know I can't forget my dryer sheets while I'm trying to figure out what sort of relationship Greta might be looking for at this point in her life.

If you haven't tried the dryer bar yet, it's a bar of fabric softener that you leave in your dryer.  It says it needs to be replaced approximately every three months, and there's an indicator strip.  I haven't gotten that far, yet, so I can't say for sure.

I can tell you the smell is pleasant, which I like, and I love the convenience of not thinking about throwing in the dryer sheet.  I used Bounce sheets before trying the bar, and I haven't noticed any difference in the feel of my clothes.

Also, if you dry certain loads without fabric softener, the dryer bar is easy to clip in and out.  Dylan's diapers appreciate that, because fabric softeners aren't so great for diaper absorbancy.

One more week of NaNoWriMo, but then I'll be editing.  I wish the Bounce Dryer Bar could be trained to fold the clothes before I took them out of the dryer, but I will take any convenience I can get, and it definitely took a step out of the laundry process.

BlogHer provided me with a Bounce Dryer Bar to try, without any requirements to post about it.  I wrote about it because it is helpful and smells good.

Bringing the Fun Inside

Autumn in Michigan is means colorful trees, red barns at cider mills, warm colors tinged with sunshine.

Taking advantage of sun soaked mornings, we dawdle on our way to the garage, turning the few feet into a roundabout journey through the yard, pointing to old birds' nests peeking through thinning leaves.

Autumn in Michigan is gray skies, wind stripping branches of their colorful accessories, rain-soaked leaves trodden into brown pulp on the sidewalks.

Errands and playdates beckon, but some days the rain is chilly enough to bring the fun inside instead.

Both kids love washing dishes, brushing their teeth, washing their hands and all other activities that involve running water. 

In an effort to practice a little conservation, and give them a way to play together without elbowing for position, the water table came inside, along with some bath toys.  Later, a couple squirts of floor cleaner and a mop recycled some of that water into an afternoon cleaning session.

This week, we washed and hollowed our mini pumpkins.  Perfect (temporary) homes for my little Cinderella's favorite friends.

How are you spending your rainy days this fall?

A Gourd Disco Party

she takes her crafting seriously

"Let's make a craft," Abbey suggests, at least once a week. 

The one necessary requirement for a craft, in Abbey's expert opinion, is glue.  We can glue sequins or small, puffy balls, or pictures cut from magazine, but we must glue.  Anything else is "just coloring" or "just painting" or "just play doh."

When my friend Nichole posted about a three-step craft involving glue, glitter, and little gourds, I knew we would be making the trek to Michael's to supplement our craft supplies and make a mess of the dining room yet again.

We covered part of the dining room table in a plastic table cloth, covered little pumpkins and squash with copious amounts of glue, and shook glitter until the colors ran out (little packets!) and then moved onto the back-up glitter.

Originally, I had planned to do an orange or two, a gold, and maybe a pale green.  A little glitter goes a long way, you know.

a gourd disco party wasn't in my plans

Abbey thought otherwise.  She carefully painted, holding them up for my approval, and shook glitter until I told her it was gone, helping me scoop it between bent sheets of paper that made it a little easier for her little hands to control.

We ended up with eleven sparkling gourds, and she insisted that all of them, "are good to put out, Mommy."

this isn't exactly how it looked in my head

but who can argue with all of her hard work?

We purchased:

two bags of plastic gourds (I wasn't sure if I wanted to do small or mini)

glue for glitter crafts

giant container of gold glitter (not the fine type, this was back-up glitter)

candy corn

We had at home:

paintbrushes

multi-colored packets of fine glitter

cake stand

taper candles

vase