Productivity and... Wait, It's Almost October?!?

I discovered today (quite by accident, I assure you) that tomorrow is the first day of October.  I knew it was coming, because Oz and I spent the weekend watching helplessly as our hands and feet carried us around the house and yard putting up Halloween decorations, but I somehow still expected September to last another week or three.

My mantel.  Most of it, anyway.  You can't see the black roses in this shot.

I may have a serious Dept. 56 problem. 

I didn't even notice the candle had fallen until just now.
Wow, I'm observant.

Suck it, Pinterest.  My son's closet offers
better choices than your store-bought ones any day.

Still, we got a lot done this weekend.  In addition to all my decorating, Oz changed out the rocks in our front garden.  I say 'garden' - that's not entirely an accurate description unless you consider a rock garden a garden, which I guess I don't.  This unplantable space is good only when it rains, because it floods like the Flavian Amphitheatre during sea battles, which keeps the porch from flooding, and I like that, because a waterlogged porch isn't on my list of things that make me happy.  Formerly it held a bunch of red-brown lava rock and several very large pieces of sandstone.  Both Oz and I thought those didn't match the character of the house, and I can also tell you from experience that walking on lava rocks with your bare feet is a bad, bad idea.  The new rocks are much nicer on the soles.  Lava rocks also are not a very effective barrier for plants because they're lightweight and somehow maintain a lot of space in between the stones.  I had to spray for weeds, which I hate doing, about every month or so, and even then the weeds were multiplying.  Oz put down a new double layer of landscaping fabric under the new rocks, which makes me love him even more.  We'll see how this holds up.

New rocks.  Way better. 

I also hauled myself into the kitchen and made cake doughnuts and triple-chocolate cookies.  The doughnuts were for me, more or less, and I realized how dependent I've become on my cast iron pans for frying things when I decided, for some unknown reason, not to use cast iron to fry the doughnuts and the kids came down during the middle of a very frustrating fry session and hollered, "FISH STICKS!!!!"  Suffice to say the doughnuts were getting a bit burnt.  I couldn't get the oil temperature to stabilize to save my life.  Stupid electric cooktops and non-cast-iron pans... I will say this, though.  Toss burned doughnuts in cinnamon and sugar, and all is forgiven.

Please ignore the state of my sink.
We're focusing our negative energy on the pan.

Not forgotten, though.  Stupid pan.

Mmmmm taste the char.  A food blogger I am not.

The cookies were payment to Oz for all the effort he's put in around the house lately.  He's been working overtime to keep me fat 'n' happy, and he's succeeding admirably.  He's been dying for cookies for a long while, so I finally hunted down the recipe I'd saved on Pinterest and made him a gigantic batch (seriously... the recipe made 95 cookies.  NINETY-FIVE.  That number hasn't seemed so significant to me since I was in catechism class as a 6th grader and had to learn about Luther's Ninety-Five Theses in great detail).  I prized a dozen out of his clutches and took them to a friend's house because she was driving us to dinner at a restaurant downtown where we met up with two other women and scored free lemon drops courtesy of the anonymous gentleman who left before the drinks were served so we couldn't even thank him and tell him that for some of us **hackhackMEhackhack** that was the first drink they'd ever had that was sent over and purchased by someone else.  Delicious.

Triple-chocolate cookies make the Oz Cookie Monster happy.

So, anyway, tomorrow is the first day of October.  My son will turn 11 in a week and a half.  I'm really not okay with this, but apparently it's not up to me and time will march on whether I like it or not, and if you try to tell the boy that he isn't allowed to turn 11, he will laugh at you.  Don't ask how I know.  He lost his sixth (seventh?) tooth of the year yesterday, and he's got yet another tooth that's actually being absorbed (GROSS) because there's nothing to push it out and he refuses to let me pull it even though it has no root.  Soon his mouth will be full of adult teeth and adult thoughts emerging as adult words.  With teenage attitude, of course, but the seeds are planted for eventual maturity... I hope.

I simply cannot believe how quickly this year is going by.  I really do think it's time to hibernate now.  Anyone wanna join me? 

Craftiness

I am not a crafty person.  Even when I look at most things on Pinterest, I think to myself, "But WHY would you want to do that when you can just... not?"  However, I've been in a serious funk lately (I know this because I've been buying shoes and haven't been cleaning the house.  These are not normal Sarah things.  Personality changes indicate a problem.  I know that because I watch 'Perception' on TV and it says so).  Suddenly the idea of sprucing up M2's bedroom walls became a manageable one.  I poked around on Pinterest a bit and found two ideas - making a letter chain of M2's name and making fabric-covered cork pinboards.  Feel free to click on the links and follow them through to their more thorough directions, but I'll give you a brief, simple overview of each project here.

The first project we did was the letter one.

We started with supplies, of course:  wooden letters, scrapbooking paper, ribbon, Mod Podge, a foam paintbrush, and a craft knife and self-healing cutting board (I like the 'self-healing' part.  It amuses me).  Oh, and M2 also found some cute flowers that she wanted to add to each letter.

I traced around the edge of each letter (oh, before I go any further, notice the hole in the M?  I had Oz drill a little 1/4" hole that so that I could tie the letters together with ribbon more easily.  Didn't have to do it on every letter, just the ones that didn't have good ways to tie them) and left some extra room around the edge for cutting error.  I did NOT left wiggle room the first time and, well, let's just say it was a good thing the paper was more than twice the size of the letter.

Trial and error are excellent teachers.  But I got the hang of it.  M2 hung around and directed me regarding which letter went on which paper as well as where on the paper she wanted it to go.

She also wanted to do some of the work, so I set her up with the Mod Podge.

She glued the paper onto each letter...

... and once they were dry, she gave each letter another topcoat so it would be a bit glossy.  We let them dry, glued on the flowers, and I tied them with the ribbon.

She and I both thought they came out beautifully!

Our second project was the fabric-covered pinboards.

I let her paint the hoops with tempera paint - any color she wanted.  She has one pink hoop, one lilac one, and one... well, you can see it in the middle there.  It's multi-colored and very, very M2.

Next I traced the inside of the hoops and cut out the circles with my handy-dandy craft knife.  I did the same with the cork liner I'd bought then peeled the sticky back off of the cork and stuck the two circles together.

Then I shoved it all into the hoop.  Voila!  After that it was only a matter of covering them with the fabric that M2 had selected, putting on the outer hoop, stretching the fabric, and tacking it to the back.

M2 is delighted that her walls now have more decorations on them.  We popped into Mardel this afternoon and picked up some big metallic push pins so she can already put her boards to use.  The girl is one happy little being.  Even she said so... specifically, she said, "Mom, I feel so spoiled!"

It's a good thing, because I think I hit my crafting limit for the year.

It's Amazing What Paint Can Do

M1 is at away camp this week.  I dropped him off yesterday and won't see him again till Saturday.  It is a weird feeling.  M2 has day camp this week as well.  It's five hours a day, and it's five minutes away from my house.

Hear the angels singing?  I do.

When we moved in last year, we liked the color of most of the rooms in our house.  The one room that really stuck out to me (well, other than the master suite) as needing a good paint job was the school room.  Today, I painted it.

Before

After

Before

After

One more 'after' for good measure

As Oz said this evening, "It's a much more cheerful room."  It still needs new curtains, but I'm ready to see M1's reaction... and get back in there and TEACH!

Whaddaya mean, this is ART??

Art has always been a dirty word to me. The minute taking art class was optional in school, I opted out. The extent of my ability to draw is limited to a slightly lop-sided 3D square. Vanishing point? Heard the term; have no ability to make it happen. Perspective? Psssshhht. My only perspective is being the person in the art gallery staring at the trompe l'oeil painting and wondering how on EARTH someone can use paint (or colored pencils, or crayons, or whatever) and make something look so REAL. I recently stumbled upon this cross-stitching site and about fell over backward. I'm pondering a couple of them for my recently redecorated bedroom.

However, that site also gave me a new perspective on what might be considered 'art.'

I love to cross-stitch. When the kids were infants, I cross-stitched each of them a little picture with their names and date and time of birth. They hung in the nursery over the crib of each child, and I still have the works carefully preserved in the 'forever drawer' of each kid. (Things like school awards, swimming ribbons, tiny toddler eyeglasses, baby books, and other mementos go in this drawer, and each kid sometimes likes to go through his or her drawer just to see what they've forgotten. I also have letters to the children tucked away in there.) When M1 got a bit older, I found a free dragon pattern online and designed a cross-stitch that reads, "Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup." The free dragon design went on the right side of the words, and this work still hangs over his bed, in between his mounted glow-in-the-dark dragon puzzles and his shelves of ceramic dragons (and below the dragon wallpaper border). M2 got a bit older, and I cross-stitched a cute little image of a cat and a mouse all dressed up in English finery riding in a hot-air balloon. I have a common dinner prayer stitched and hanging in my dining room.

Even with all the time and effort and love I've put into these works, I've never considered them art. They're just things I did, little tidbits to bring the hominess into my home. They're nothing spectacular.

But then again, maybe they are. Maybe art is more than I've given it credit for.

M2's bedspread had been getting pretty ragged-looking recently. It originally had bows at each corner; those had been torn off, either by cats or (usually) by the girl herself. It was originally white; my latest critical assessment labeled it 'dingy gray with splotches of I don't want to know but suspect marker.' Washing wasn't helping, and there were a few spots where the material was nearly worn through.

It was time for a new bedspread.

Oz and I poked around online to see what we could find that would fit M2's personality but still complement the colors in her room, which were painted to match this now-worn-looking bedspread. Thankfully pink and green are still an easy duo to find in girls' bedrooms. M2 picked out a cute quilt in the end. It's white again, but minus the tulle covering and thus easier to spot-treat and wash, and has little pink/red rosebuds and greenery over it.

When I was washing this bedspread and removing the old one from her room, I pointed out the cat-and-mouse cross-stitch over her chest of drawers.

"Do you think you're getting too old for that?"

She agreed.

"Would you like me to stitch something else?"

Part of me thought she'd say no. This is the girl, after all, who has a very unique taste in art and who is insistent that she learn how to use the acrylic paints that came with her Christmas art set (this will be another post, because Art-o-phobic mom + Art-o-phile daughter will probably equal Acrylic Paint Disaster). But she didn't. She wanted to know what I had in mind. I pulled out this pattern from a design book that I own, and she loved it. Wanted me to make it for her. And a little part of me swelled up with happiness. I asked M1 if he wanted to take down his dragon (and his puzzles), and he said no.

*tear*

I might just be hormonal, and I may never make anything unique or amazing, but if my children will hang my cross-stitching on their walls, then I don't care if I can't draw a circle. The art is in making my children happy, and that's all that matters.

Christmas Stories

It came to my attention tonight that I did not have a normal upbringing when it came to Christmas. A little background information is required first. Allow me to set the genealogical stage, if you will.

I am German. OK, I'm American, but if you look at my ancestry, it's about 90-95% German with a little British/Welsh thrown in for good measure. I have embraced my heritage and can speak a smattering of German, but I'm nowhere near as good as my paternal grandmother. But we're not talking about her today. Oh, no. Today we're talking about my mother's family. The family from whence my good china came and from where, also, I got the stuff I'm talking about today.

My mother's grandmother came from a well-to-do family, the kind of family for whom the Great Depression didn't mean as much as it did for farming communities. My mother's grandmother's name was Frieda. Frieda Margaretha Magdalena Baden. At least she was a Baden till she married a Hellwig, but never mind. Frieda's family spoke primarily Low German, which is closer to Dutch in origin, and apparently the stories her family learned for the holiday season are pretty close to the stories the Dutch still tell today. I know this because my friend Berber is from Holland and shared her holiday traditions with my mom's group recently, and it matched the stories my mother used to tell me.

Enough background; on to the good stuff. These are some Christmas tree ornaments that I've apparently had since I was four. The year is written on the back, along with my name, or I'd have no idea. In my world, they've just always been there.

I love the ornaments. I think they're beautiful. I love the old Victorian-looking Santas. Just gorgeous. What Christmas should be, in my mind. I thought they were older than they are; apparently they were made in 1977 or 1981, depending on the ornament, but they're still pretty.

My mother used to tell me stories about the ornaments, and about how Santa (Sinterklaas, she always called him when she talked about these stories) would come and visit the children and leave presents down the chimney. But only if you were good!

If you weren't good... well, then, THIS would happen:

... and Sinterklaas would whisk you away to his workshop, and you'd become one of his Black Pete's.

Forget coal and sticks. This was the stuff true Christmas nightmares were made of.

Sweet dreams, everyone!

My To-Do List

Things I need to do, in no particular order and on no particular day, just stuff that needs doing soon-ish:

1. Get Oz to dump the entire contents of the attic into my house (well, except for the Halloween stuff) to the point that my living room looks like the North Pole threw up. The dining room won't be far behind. And then the cats and children will dismantle it all.

2. Ponder seating in the living room and debate the merits of having two single chairs versus a loveseat, especially when a bookshelf is factored in. A reading nook sounds uber-cozy. Unfortunately, they don't make living-room-safe fire pits.

3. Buy unscented bath soap for the children. I don't know how it works, but M1 and M2 can both go take a bath or shower, and yet M1 will come out hardly smelling of anything and M2 will come out smelling so strong that it actually gives me a migraine. I suspect the boy may not be using soap, and I suspect the girl may be OD-ing a bit. Happy medium, there is not.

4. Ask myself whether it's worth the money and effort to try to find a Christmas dress for the girl who will only wear it once. Right now I'm leaning toward no. In fact, if I leaned just the tiniest oonch more, I'm pretty sure I'd fall off the fence. I just have to procrastinate enough that OOPSY, we're out of time. Crimes of omission are the best.

5. Buy tickets to go see a local children's ballet performance of the Nutcracker. We have a couple of friends who are performing.

6. Pray that if it does snow next week that it'll snow enough to cancel school. There's nothing good about snow AND school at the same time. It's just an awful combo, and I'm not even talking about the roads.

7. Try to find side-dish recipes that I can fix for Christmas Eve lunch for my mom, sister and brother-in-law, and grandmother. And my family. No gluten, no nightshades, no bananas... and I'm not sure what else. I need to get a list.

Amazing how December gets away from me before it even starts!

If You Buy a Mom a Bed Set...

If you let a mom buy a new-to-her bed set...

... she might decide that she's really, really sick and tired of staring at green shag carpet in her bedroom.

And if she decides that she's really, really sick and tired of staring at green shag carpet in her bedroom...

... she might make you rip it out on a Friday night...

... to reveal about a ton of dust that contains god-only-knows what sort of crap from bygone eras...

... and gorgeously finished wood floors underneath.

And if she finds that there are gorgeously finished wood floors underneath the really, really ugly green shag carpet...

... she might also decide that she needs a new light/fan combo to go with the color scheme of the room that no longer includes gold...

... and she also might decide that the dark wood paneling on the walls needs to be painted.

And once she gets the new light/fan fixture that no longer includes gold...

and gets the dark paneled walls painted...

and gets new trim put around the floors to hide the ugly edges and new electrical outlets and light switch installed that actually match (instead of the outlets being chocolate brown and the light switch being black with a white faceplate)...

and gets a headpiece attached over the closet door that's been sitting in said closet for years, and gets the closet door rather attached to the floor rather than swinging freely, and gets a new rug that matches the aforementioned bed set...

... she MIGHT... just *MIGHT* be really, really happy with her "new" bedroom.


P.S. We're not done yet. We still have to contend with THIS:

but there's a new red damask wallpaper on order. It'll be in before Christmas. And hopefully there will be wall art, too.

Yummy.

Thank you, dear, for all your hard work, and thank you, too, to my children for putting up with a busy, cranky mommy! Muah to you all!

'Tis the Season

Halloween is nigh!  The skinny black cat that scales my china cabinet like it's a fabric-covered couch (which it isn't) has informed me so.

The calendar has, too, but who pays attention to the calendar?  That would remind me that there are only 78 days till Christmas, and I don't need to know that.  It just adds to the mental pile of compost that is growing in my head.  I'm just hoping someday all this poo will become useful.

What I really need to know is that there are 25 days till Halloween and three days till my son's birthday.  That's the important stuff.

I love Halloween.  I love the pagan roots, I love the idea that there is a day when spirits can connect with loved ones (a la Dia de los Muertes), I love the origins of trick-or-treating in a revelry of triumph over the Devil before All Saints' Day... the whole shebang.  The best part is that nobody trick-or-treats at my house because we live in an area sans sidewalks, so I never have to worry about missing kids, and we can all go out together as a family.

And I *REALLY* love decorating.

It's kind of an obsession with me.  I have a ton of Halloween decor, but every year I feel the need to add something new.

So a month or so ago, I went to Yankee Candle* and spent entirely too much money on things like this.  Isn't it darling??

I also picked up the 'blood'-dripping candles to go with my black leaves and light-up jack-o-lanterns and ghostie.  The ghostie is M1's favorite decoration.  He thinks it's his.  I think he's wrong.  In LOLcat speak, I have informed him that all Halloweens are belong to me.  He simply raised an eyebrow.

I also may have a thing for candles.  The candy corn is real.  Oz hates that he is not allowed to touch it until after the holiday is over.  If I let him at it, he'd have it emptied every day or two, so I just let him get extra bags of candy corn while he waits for this to become available. 

This is one of my favorite displays this year.  One of three.  Honestly, this is the best year of Halloween decorating I've ever had.  I usually hang the fake blood on the window opposite this mirror in the dining room, but it didn't seem right to me.  So I put it on the mirror this year, topped it with the leaves, and then told M1 to go rummage through my makeup and find some red lipstick.  Unfortunately I had tossed my hooker lipstick in the trash when I was purging a few months ago, but I think this sufficed.  The kids are still trying to figure out what 'REDRUM' means.  I'm not telling.  When they're old enough to read "The Shining," then they can learn.  No sense scaring the pee out of them before it's necessary.

I love my front porch display this year, too.  The pumpkin lights you see at the bottom of the stairs extend almost all the way out to the driveway.  There are spiders that light up hanging on the wall, cling ghosts on the screen door (M2's favorite part of decorating), a broom by the door with a sign above it saying, "BEWARE!" and of course the tombstone.  Mr. Pumpkin up by the glider does light up, and the ghost on the left can be turned on for sound activation, at which time he flies across the porch.  Now all I need are a few *real* spiderwebs to crop up.  It'll happen.  It always does.  We get monster spider webs around here.

Last but definitely not least are my Department 56* figurines.  I was taken with them when I visited my friend Bridgette up in Indiana a couple years ago and bought my first house.  This year Oz and my mother have given me three more between them.  I'm in decorating heaven.  I can't wait to get a few more small items to flesh out the display.  Here's a sampling of what I have:

The 'Pumpkin Lane' sign was blank originally, but it already had a name on it
when I purchased it off of eBay.  I have no problems with that because I like it!

My first/original purchase.  A flickering light inside and bats that
spin around the top add tons of personality to this haunted house.

This piece has been discontinued, yet Oz found it for me. 
The roof glows green when the lights are turned on!

I love having a school.  Love the belfrey.

Hello, freak show!  The monster there is silhouetted beautifully
when the lights are on, and the kids love staring at all the monsters.

Happy Haunting, everyone!!

*Yankee Candle and Department 56 have never heard of me.  But if they hear of me now and want to send me free stuff, I'd be okay with that.

Pysanky!

So I sat my butt down on the couch this weekend and created some pysanky. Ukranian Easter eggs. Pysanka is singular, pysanky plural. The things I learn and feel the need to share :)

Anyway... this was my first egg. Which I broke while trying to remove the wax.


So I made it again with slightly less success. One of the most interesting things about making Ukranian Easter eggs is that EVERYTHING is a symbol. Every color, every shape, everything means something. On this egg, the curls signify defense and protection, the dots can represent stars or Mary's tears at Jesus' crucifixion, and the background color of black signifies the darkest time before dawn. Neat, eh??

Now, the process of actually making pysanky is time-consuming but well worth it (even if your results are as amateurish as mine).

THIS is the setup (and I learned later that tea candles don't cut the mustard). Dyes are in the labeled containers up the top and are not edible and will stain everything, including your hands. Eggs have to be room temperature. Q-Tips are for dabbing on small bits of dye into small areas for certain colors. I'm a lefty, which is why the beeswax and candle are on the left. Good lighting is also a must.

First, you have to draw your guide lines. They (usually) get covered up with dye when you're making the egg. After you draw your guide lines, you heat up the beeswax using the candle in one of the kistky and sketch the areas you want to keep white. Then dip in the first color. Dry it off. Cover everything you want THAT color with wax and repeat the process till you're done! Sounds so simple, right? And then you melt off the wax, cover it in varnish, and empty out the internal contents.

But really... they're so pretty. And if I can ever get the hang of it, I'm going to really, really enjoy it.