My Only Sunshine

Look what Bug did

My Bug drew this in the car on the way to dance class yesterday afternoon.  Isn't she something?

We need help

So anyone who reads this blog knows Bitty.
She's my 6 year old.  This is her on the subway last week in NYC, with Flat Stanley.

Bitty, aka Bit, or Lovie, asked me to teach her to knit recently.  What knitting Momma doesn't look forward to that moment?  What Mommy of two artistic daughters doesn't dream of all of the fabulous things her lovely daughters will make for themselves as they turn the knitting world on it's ear?  One problem, she's a lefty.

Bitty is the only left handed person in our family and we celebrate it.  She is so different from the rest of the family in so many ways (look at the curly hair) and the left handedness just seems to embody all of her singular Bit-ness.  I'm right handed though, and I knit right handed.  I'm a "thrower" rather than a "picker" and though I have attempted to teach myself other ways of knitting (I taught myself to knit via books and the internet) I just haven't found anything that works as well for me as my tried and true.

That's where you come in.  Do I have any left handed knitters reading along here?  Does anyone have any place to point me so that I might find a good way of teaching her?  I'm so excited about having a knitting kid and I don't want to mess it up.  I want to turn her into someone who loves yarn with a deep passion as I do.  Please Help!

DI've got pics

So I've mentioned before about my DI team.  In early March we had our "competition".  We weren't really compared to others due to our age group but we were still geared towards our goal as if we would be.

My team was made up of 4 second graders, 2 first graders, and 2 kindergarteners.  That's a pretty wide age range when you are anywhere from 8 and a half down to just recently turned 5.  Things were rocky but very fun during the preparation but as we got closer to the actual day I started to worry.  I just wasn't really sure we would get it all done in time and be able to pull it off.  My worries about the kids' abilities were completely unfounded, they were GREAT!  Things weren't really what we were expecting at the performance site and I did not have myself together nearly as much as I wanted to but the kids were perfect.  They performed better the day of than they ever had before and when it was over the judges asked questions that were answered better than I could have coached them.

Here they are performing.  That's one of the judges in black.  Bones, standing up, is a paleontologist.  He and his fellow scientists, Kimberley and Houston, changed history by using a spray bottle filled from the waterfall to the left in the picture to bring the three dinosaurs crawling around on the floor back to life.  The orange triceratops is my Bitty.

These are our two museum curators who narrated how our dinosaurs came back to life.  That's Bug on the right.

After doing the skit we had put together we went on to do an Instant Challenge which is the portion where the kids go into a room and are given a problem to work together on just while they are in the room.  I can't tell you about the problem we were given because it's a secret but I can tell you that we were nominated for an award for our performance in the room.  That's pretty exciting.  The funny thing is that I expected the kids to do much better on the spontaneous portion than they did because we worked so hard on it.  I'm terribly amazingly proud of the fact that they got an award for how well they worked together.  That was my main goal with these 8 kids, to teach them about DI and how to be a team.  I competed in OM when I was young and it was such a big thing in my life.  It's important to me to bring the same things to these kids and I feel like I did.  I'm proud of me too.

Here are two of my dinosaurs waiting for the awards ceremony to start.  Aren't they precious?  We all had matching t-shirts that also matched with the 4 other teams from our elementary school.  I think all the kids looked great in their tie dye and our school really stood out and made an impact.

 

Arts and Craps

We've been doing lots of Arts and Craps (another term coined by my Girlies) at my house this weekend.  We are preparing for both DI Performance and 1st Grade music program.  The most fun part of the Arts and Craps is how Buster participates.

My husband has always said he is not a crafty guy.  He hated that part of elementary school and young life and works hard to avoid it when the girls do artsy craftsy things.  When push comes to shove though, he is the world's best Arts and Craps Dad.  Here's an example.

He helped the girls and I make a geologically correct backdrop designed to look like the rocks of Utah.  It's wonderful.  Our DI presentation is about Dinosaur bones so a good rocky backdrop is a must.

Doesn't Bitty look like she is having so much fun painting the rocks?  Here's another pic, look at the lovely shape of the top of our mountains.

Have you ever tried cutting cardboard precisely?  It's HARD!  I had an inspired moment yesterday when I was trying to figure out how to cut the cardboard.  Want to see?

It's the electric knife I bought years ago to cut turkey and only used once.  It was PERFECT for cutting cardboard just exactly the way I wanted it.  Try it, you'll like it.

Want to play my Tangerine?

Bitty was encouraged to make an instrument for school.  We, the parents, were asked to let the kids do it themselves.  It seems to be becoming a bit of a problem at school with parents doing most of the work for their kids on larger projects.  I don't have that problem because my kids would never allow me to do their work for them.  They love projects too much.

This is what Bitty made...

She sewed it entirely herself and chose to fill it with M&Ms.  Smart huh?  She has an instrument and a snack at the same time.  The funny thing about this instrument isn't that it is made of paperplates or that it has candy inside.  My favorite part is its name.

Those readers of my blog who have kids will probably recognize this phenomenon.  Sometimes when children hear a new word and they don't know it, they change it to some word they already know that is close to the new word.  Bit's little paper plate shaky music maker is a "Tangerine".  When I mentioned that I thought maybe it was a tambourine she disagreed with me, she was pretty sure it was a Tangerine.

Planning to post about her tangerine made me think about all the other things my Girlies say that are special to the two of them.  Buster and I started making a list.

Lose instead of use, "I need to lose the bathroom."
The Lizard of Oz
A buffalo and is Buffaloaf

A museum would be Newseeum
Has instead of as, "This is has good has it gets."
Snow Glove

I love these things.  I hope I can remember them all and get them all written down.

On a totally unrelated note, They are making Starbucks pods for my Tassimo!!!

Another

Am I having too much fun with my doodles? Now if I could just figure out what to do with them.

It's Elemental

How many of you see the wonderful and amazing things people do with Photoshop and wish you could do it too?  Yes, right up until the point that you realize that PS costs a bajillion dollars.  Me too.  Do you have Photoshop Elements?

I have Elements and often find it lacking, but every once in a while it does the things I was wishing for.  Last week I saw this post on Craft Chi and thought I would very much like to give it a try.  This is where the complaints about the cost of buying Photoshop come into play.  Why should I have to spend hundreds of dollars in order to make some scrapbook paper or something out of my own little doodles?

It works in Elements too!  I'm very excited.  This is just a few minutes of goofing with some simple doodles I whipped up just to try out this tutorial and some cursing at my scanner but I think it is pretty fun.  You should go check out Craft Chi.  She's got a good little blog over there.

Have you ever tried to knit a sweater without shoulders?

This is Soft.  I'm not describing her, Soft is her name.  She doesn't have shoulders.  When Bit got Soft for Christmas she didn't have any clothing and Bit wasn't sure that was good because her other rabbits who sit upright all have clothes (we should have stock in Build-a-Bear).  So she got yarn out of the yarn closet and brought it to me.  "You could make Soft a sweater!"  It was really half an idea and half an order.  That's just how Bitty rolls.

I knit a lot but I don't have that much sweater practice.  I have knit myself one sweater and I have knit a couple of shrugs and things like that.  So I turned to a pattern for the sweater for Soft.  I used Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns.  I chose a raglan cardigan pattern because, as you can see by the pictures and the title of this post, Soft doesn't have shoulders.  She also has the skinniest arms EVER.

I think the sweater turned out pretty cute though, don't you?  I mean, even with shoulders on a shoulderless bunny rabbit.  The most important thing is that Bitty likes it and she thinks Soft feels much better now.  Look how cute her little rabbit tail is.

Speaking of rabbits, if you like rabbits as much as we do at our house you should go take a look at Rachael's blog.  She even has a fantastic rabbit filled etsy shop.

Doing Fine

Have you ever had one of those days where you just wanted to tell everyone what a great day you were having?  Like when you make a really great batch of cookies and just want everyone to taste them?  There is a new forum that has just started up, pretty interesting, all about those kinds of days.  It's a place to go to talk about all the good in the world.  If you'd like to take a look you can click on the Doing Fine.Org button in my right  sidebar.  It would even help me out if you clicked it, and then I'd be Doing Fine.

Sure is good COOKIE

Do you like Nestle' Tollhouse Cookies or do you prefer the fancy cookies you get at bakeries and those cookies boutiques at the mall?  Yeah, me too, I like them both.  Over the long weekend I was in the mood for chocolate chip cookies and a little baking with my Girlies.  I wasn't in the mood for thin Tollhouse style this time though, I wanted something thick and rich and gooey.  I may well have found the perfect recipe.

This recipe is from Words To Eat By and she calls them "the best homemade chocolate chip cookies in the entire world".  I'm pretty sure she's right.  She includes some tips on how to keep your cookies from spreading out flat and I used some of them but I also did a few things of my own.  I creamed cold butter with the sugar for the shortest amount of time I could to get things fully mixed but still cold.  I used a cold egg and kept things cold as I worked.  I also used Nestle' Chocolatier Bittersweet Morsels which are 62% cacao.  Yumm.  Once the dough was mixed I used an ice cream scoop to put the dough onto the cookies sheet on a silicon liner and then put it all into the fridge to chill it thoroughly.  This way when I cooked the cookies they didn't spread too fast and stayed thick ad chewy.  With the size of the cookies I made I only got about 14 out of the recipe but that was just right.  One cookie is the perfect size to go into Bitty's backpack for her school snack.  She'll probably come home with chocolate all over her.