Pretty In Pink

Again I blame the hot weather for this mess. We were actually supposed to leave the house for a change on Tuesday. But in the process of getting lunch packed up and dealing with a few phone calls, the kids made their own fun. I decided it wasn't worth the effort of getting them cleaned up only to put them into the car to go to the park. We just ended up hanging out the whole day again and had some good ole back to basics fun. We like to think of it as the 'spa'.

Not the first time this has happened

It's been in the nineties this week so, yeah, I've just been letting Sabine go around naked. Half the time because it's so hot I just don't care, the other half because it's so hot I don't have the energy to chase after and put clothes on her. Well she pooped on the floor today. I walked into the dining room and there she was - I don't know what she was trying to do, pick it up - with her hands covered in poop.

I scooped her up and with my arms fully extended, carried her to the bathroom, washed her hands three times, cleaned up her toosh and then handed her off to Zach. I went back to the dining room to clean up the mess and it was gone. In it's place were the dogs, looking very excited about the treat they'd just received.

The End (of the corn)

The End is the title of last night's episode of LOST. The Last Episode Ever. But I'm far too numb in that regard to ruminate on it here. I just needed to get that out of my system; this post is really about the corn.

Over a year ago we attended a birthday party for one of our little friends. We got to leave with a 50 lb. 'goody bag' of dried corn. Since then I'd kept it on the deck and used it as a texture bin for Sabine.










I left the bin on the deck for the winter, underneath something else protective, but at some point during the frigid winter the box cracked and water leaked in. I didn't know this until we went to use the corn for some project earlier this spring and saw that the bin was half full of water. I tried to salvage some of it but quickly realized most of the corn was green.

I've been doing my fair share of the yard work this year but the 50 lbs + whatever the water weighed was too much for me. Zach told me to leave the dirty job to him. He kept telling me he was going to do it, but then would forget. A couple months went by and we had a couple very hot streaks. Can you imagine what that crap would look like trapped inside a plastic bin in the hot, hot sun for weeks on end? Well, lucky for you I took a picture, so you don't have to imagine it.

Normally in a case like this I would have just kept on leaving it, but this past weekend I hosted the spring party for my moms' group. We had 14 families coming over, some of whom had never been here before. I couldn't go and let this be their first impression of my home. I would have called it my Third Annual Husband Experiment in any other circumstance, and I'm sort of sad that I didn't get to see where this would go, but at least that stank is out of my yard! Seriously, the smell was getting really bad. I couldn't open a couple windows on the back side of the house because when the wind blew the smell came right in. When I took the top off to take these photos I had to hold my breath, it was that bad. I thought it might be crawling with maggots and half expected it to take form and swallow me whole.

So Zach did fulfill his long-ago promise and he dumped it in the woods behind our neighbor's house where we always take our clean fill, though there's nothing clean about this fill. Anyway, I had had plans for that bin that it was in, but in the end there is only so much to the claim Plastic makes it possible. There was no saving that thing. After the garbage gets collected in a couple days I'm just going to toss it right in there - to hell with recycling. I don't want to be the cause of one of those recycling people to be rushed to the hospital.

Cheek to cheek

My children have never gone to sleep easily. Sabine is a quirky little thing and always finds quirky new ways of demanding to be put to sleep. With Zach, Sabine sort of has a routine and that is all good and well, but if he's not around then I have to do it. And there is not much that I hate more than putting my kids to sleep. After all, I'm the one they got the sleepless gene from, so it's sort of useless for me to try to induce sleep. I get in there and my non-stop energy shakes everything up.

Anyway, here's the method she chose yesterday:

She asked to have Baby Honey in the carrier and then stood around swaying with her (which happens to be my default method of getting her to sleep) going "Bye Baby" - which is how Sabine sings Rock-a-bye baby. I think she was feeling the futility of the whole effort and chose to highlight the fact by making fun of my meager attempt.

Sabine would not take that thing off and the one time that I tried to by unclipping one of the latches, she had a Royal Fit that continued for five minutes after I'd put it back the way it had been. So to make a long story short, she eventually fell asleep like this. And even though Baby Honey is still awake in the photo, she looks very happy, doesn't she?

Homemade Play-Doh

We made homemade play-doh the other day. It was a lot of fun for the kids to help make, and then to play with. And it was really easy too. We did 4 different colors, aren't they pretty?

Every activity we do lately seems to hold Jacob and Sabine's interest equally. Even though they're almost 5 years apart, their interests are remarkably similar.

Here's the recipe we used:
In one bowl mix:
1 1/2 cups flour
3/4 cup salt
1 T. cream of tartar

In second bowl mix:
1 1/2 cups water
3 T. vegetable oil
food coloring

Combine both mixtures and heat on stove (low heat) until it reaches the consistency of thickened mashed potatoes.

I don't usually keep white flour in the house, and something told me my wheat flour just wouldn't make the right consistency so I bought a package of white flour, and I'd also recommend getting some kind of cheap oil. I forgot to do this and it was painful to watch my organic canola oil go into batch after batch (because we repeated the activity in Playschool the next day) of play-doh.

It actually only took a few minutes to cook the doh, and I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to tell when it was done, but that wasn't a problem, it started to look like store-bought and I knew that was it. I used a double-boiler to heat the mixture just to be on the safe side because I tend to burn things.

Our 'Special' Child

I posted this picture a couple weeks ago and since then Sabine has been really into that helmet. As you can see from the picture below, Jacob was responsible for Sabine ending up in the crock pot box - zooming around the house at top speeds (hence the need for the helmet) - which anyone could have guessed. What I think they were trying to do was invent a new Olympic sport, one they could enter as a brother-sister team. Good luck with that endeavor, I say, as long as they don't use any of my good boxes ;-)

When I was showing pictures one day, someone remarked that Sabine looks like a 'special' child in that helmet. Indeed she does.
Here she is after putting on her own jammies. Poor thing couldn't figure out why she wasn't walking right, but Heaven help the person who might try to fix her right leg into the proper place. The one butt cheek look was kind of darling though so I would have hated to see it be corrected anyway.


But when you consider the man that half my children's genetic material came from....is it any wonder? Neither of them really had a chance for normalcy.
What a special girl she is....

Hot Commodity

I've been trying to get back into regular posting here, and I didn't want to start with something so mundane, but baby steps, right? So here's my tip for the day.

When you empty the lint trap in the dryer, instead of trashing the dryer lint, stuff an empty toilet paper roll with it. You can then use these for fire starters. Viola! And there's also a bunch of other crafty things you can do with dryer lint.

Who would have ever thought that dryer lint would take on the status of hot commodity in my house?

For My Mom On Mothers' Day

More pictures and story to come later...

There's a very good explanation for this...

I'm just not sure what it is.

For G'Ma Chris

Zach spent the weekend at his dad and Chris's house re-doing their barn roof. As he was wrapping things up late Sunday afternoon, I brought the kids down for a visit. Sabine was still in her party skirt from that morning when we attended a baby shower. Chris just went nuts over the skirt and couldn't get over how cute Sabine was in it. She said, "I can't wait to show all my friends a picture of my hippie chick grand-daughter in that skirt!" Or something to that effect, but the point is that she said Grand Daughter. That's a big step for someone who doesn't have any of her own children and swore she'd never be referred to as a grandmother.

Jacob must have sensed a shift because the next day when we were back down there picking up Zach's truck, Jacob walked over to Chris to ask her to open the horse stall. He started, "Grandma Chris, can you..." and she didn't even flinch. Zach and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows as if to say, did you just hear what I heard?