Christmas 2017: A Shark and Two Mermaids (But No Pony)

Christmas at home.

I never wanted to give up spending Christmas with my Pappa--one thing about being raised by your grandparents is that for as long as you can remember, you've always known that we creatures are frail and mortal--but I've known for years that after he passed, I would dearly love to spend Christmas at home.

Last year, my first Christmas after he (and then Mac--god, what an awful year that was) had died, was me mostly getting through the holidays intact, which I did. Mostly. This year, however, I was able to find the sweet as well as the bitter, and as I thought I would, I dearly loved spending Christmas at home.

Thirteen, as well, is being kinder to my Will than eleven and twelve were, but frankly, being more comfortable in her skin has made her into even more of a terror, although in a different way. She consented to visit Santa this year, for the first time since she was ten, so that I could have my Christmas picture, but she came away from that meeting telling everyone she met that Santa was going to bring her a pony.

"Uh, no he isn't," Syd would try to correct. "He said he couldn't fit a pony cage on his sleigh."

"Huh-uh!" Will would insist, smugly, daring her father and I to so much as try to talk sense into her, "Santa SAID he'd bring me a pony!"

Strangers would ask her what she wanted for Christmas. "I'm getting a pony!" she'd announce, and just smile brattily at us when we tried to react to the excited squeals of everyone listening.

That kid. I swear.

Thankfully, Santa DOES have the sense that his mother gave him, because this is what Will found on her stocking on Christmas morning:

Her father and I have told her ever since we moved into this house that we would be happy to buy her a horse, but she'd need to do all the research and legwork to figure out exactly what infrastructure we needed and how to install it first, and figure all of the expenses so that we could work it into our budget. Thank goodness that Santa is on the same page!

Fortunately, Santa's replacement surprises seem to have hit the mark:

That's Choc-ola, a local chocolate soda that's actually not full of crap, so yay!

This  little one also had plenty of surprises:

She was just as excited to receive HER favorite dream food, gummies--and lots of them! 

My little crafter also made everyone else's gifts, too. She made Will a beautiful black lab out of Sculpey:

You can't tell as well from this angle, but she made me my favorite My Little Pony character, DJ Pon-3:

And she wrote a book for Matt, in a book that she actually bound herself:

That kid, I swear. 

We tried to make her gifts special, too:

Fat unicorns are kind of an inside joke in our family, so this is a fat reindeer.

Over the course of The Nutcracker run, I convinced all of the Mother Ginger Boys that they were in fact Mother Ginger's deadly assassins, and then I had to deal with them karate chopping and high kicking backstage when I was supposed to be keeping them quiet. Oops!

 

The kids thought that the present that they picked out for Matt was the funniest thing on the planet:

It's a potholder that says "Pizza's here!" on it, and has a picture of a family eating pizza around the dinner table.

Get it? We don't cook and instead order a lot of pizza!

Good times.

I had meant to make most of my family's gifts, but wow, why didn't y'all tell me that handmade gifts take a billion years to make! It was INSANE! In the end, I managed to make one small and one big gift for each kid, and the stuff that I had intended to make for Matt he's just going to have to get on our anniversary, because man, that did NOT happen. I had to send Matt and both kids out on a bunch of fake errands all day on Saturday just so I could finish panic-sewing Will's big gift.

 But yes, it was crazy, but it was so worth it. We now have a small mermaid--

--and... 

...a girl-sized mermaid!

We also have...

...a girl-sized shark!

It's not a pony, but I do think that she managed to like it, nonetheless:

I love the fact that Christmas is at the beginning of the break, because now we can just enjoy each other, put together puzzles and do crafts and read together, and I don't have to panic-sew a single thing.

How to Make a Fuzzy Ball Christmas Ornament

The kids and I made the cutest Christmas ornaments ever quite by accident:

I was attempting to make a wool dryer ball (which I did, and I'll show you how another time!). I didn't want to use wool roving, so I was instead using wool yarn. I made a giant pompom out of the yarn, and was about to stuff it into some old tights, tie it off, and toss it into the wash, but Syd got to it first and started playing with it.

I let her play while I worked on another, and she played with the wool yarn pompom so much that she unraveled all of the yarn strands and turned the pompom into a adorable, soft, fuzzywuzzy fuzz ball. We have a couple of these now sitting on random tables as fidgets, but the cutest couple I strung up on the tree as ornaments, and we adore them.

And here's how we made them!

You'll need some chunky yarn, 100% wool. Something like this wool yarn would work, although ours is this wool from We are Knitters.  

Make a giant pompom around your hand by holding the end of the chunky wool yarn between two of your fingers--

--then wrap the yarn loosely around your hand approximately 50 times:

Slip it off of your hand and use another piece of yarn to tie it off tightly in the middle:

Cut through the loops and you'll have yourself a giant wool yarn pompom!

The pompom would be super cute as a gift topper, but if you play with it a while, fidgeting it around in your hands (which won't be hard, as it feels super soft and awesome!), the yarn strands in your pompom will unravel, and now it will look like this:

Ugh, I love it so much!

To make your wool fuzzy ball into an ornament, thread a nice color of embroidery floss through that tie in the center--

--and tie it into a loop.

It's so pretty!!!

We're not really ornament buyers, and so although we've got a few store-bought ornaments on our tree, I do love that the vast majority of our ornaments are vintage ones from Mammaw and Pappaw's Christmas tree when I was a kid, and homemade ones from our years celebrating Christmas together as a family.

I'm really crushing my goal this year to have an ornament for every single branch of our Christmas tree!!!

Mommy and Me Book Review: Disney Princess Felt

Syd is my right-hand girl when it comes to craft book reviews, because she's as likely as I am to spend the day in a pile of craft supplies, making all the stuff. Yesterday, for instance, she completed most of her schoolwork (she's a sneaky-sneak who avoids her French homework whenever possible), and spent some time lounging over the floor heating vent with a book and a blanket, but she spent most of the day drawing comics on the computer and baking and decorating a Grinch-themed cake.

I meant to throw her outside for an hour, but it was rainy and gross and I forgot. Guess we'll try for that Vitamin D today...

To aid in the crafting, this month I actually have our big table in the playroom set up with all kinds of supplies to make ornaments. I've got rocks and paint pens, ribbon and hot glue, scrapbook paper and kite paper, glue sticks, dried leaves--all the most important ornament-making supplies.

Will has been a paper chain making machine, I've done some mini window stars, and Syd and I have painted a few rocks (because who doesn't want rocks hanging from their Christmas tree?), but the hit of the table happened when I received this Disney Princess Felt kit free from a publicist for review and surprised the kids with it.

We've done several projects from the Star Wars Felt kit over the past year (I'm actually mid-Boba Fett right now...), so both kids were able to jump right into this one with little instruction from me. They already knew how to find the labeled templates for the character they wanted to make, and how to pop them out of the cardboard (pro tip: put the templates for each character into a little plastic baggie with that character's name on it, and keep the cardboard shell that you popped the templates out of, so you'll have a way to remake them when you lose them). They already knew to fetch the chalk and scissors, and basically got themselves right to work while I sat and dawdled over which princess I wanted to make.

Syd, of course, chose Ariel:

Excuse the chaos, and the inferior lighting that these short days necessitate. Solstice is coming soon!

 I was interested to see that with her expert knowledge after having made Star Wars felt critters, she chose to simplify the project for herself by not backing and stuffing her Ariel. After all, piecing the pretty front and putting in all the details are the fun parts!

I bet that if you wanted to make the project even easier, you could glue the pieces together rather than sew them, but you'd have to be very careful about where you put the glue, as you couldn't then embroider details through it.

Here's my Belle, with all her pieces together but not yet sewn, except for the jewel in the neckline of her dress:

You piece her together with a stab stitch--

--and then the fun part is embroidering on all the details!

Later on this day, as I was stuffing my Belle and Will was sitting across from me making yet another paper chain (our tree is bounteous with them this year!), we were discussing Belle, and whether or not she had Stockholm Syndrome, and if abduction was a legitimate method of finding a life partner. I told Will that if I were Belle, I'd have been sold on that first tour--the Beast would show me his library and I'd have said, "Yep, Buddy. I'll totally marry you. Just let me know when the priest arrives, and also have all my meals brought to the library."

Will snorted with laughter, but did not disagree with my sentiment.

You can do all kinds of things with these little stuffies, and if you had younger kids, it would be super cute to just make the entire set for them to play with, or to make all the pieced fronts, not stuff them, and use them on a felt board or for quiet play. We have our own way of using all the stuffies that we make from these kits, however:

These Christmas ornaments could not be sweeter.

Now I'm off to go hang up Syd's Ariel!

Made-from-Scratch Gingerbread Houses: 2017 Edition

If I had to pick out a favorite holiday tradition, it would be making these gingerbread houses. It's super messy, as in I'm still scraping hardened royal icing off of the kitchen table, and it's chaotic, and there's just way too much sugar and artificial dye involved, but everyone is in the same room, everyone is happy (well, it took two tries to catch the teenager at a time when she was willing to be happy, but that's why God invented the chest freezer...), everyone is drinking eggnog and listening to Christmas music, and it's nice. It's just really nice.

We have made these DIY gingerbread houses the exact same way for the past eight years (EIGHT YEARS?!? See, this is why I blog, because my blog keeps all my memories for me!)... until this year, when the webpage holding the gingerbread recipe that I always use was unexpectedly broken. Sigh, Internet.

The good news is that the replacement gingerbread recipe that I used instead is actually way better! Yay! And I even made it with coconut oil instead of Crisco, and it turned out great!

It hardened up fast after coming out of the oven, though, so I didn't get all the pieces trimmed as well as I would have liked.

The bad news is that the gingerbread recipe was so much better that I got cocky and decided to abandon my eight-year-long usage of melted chocolate to hold together the houses and instead use royal icing like everyone else.

Massive. Made. Of. Fail.

I just don't have the patience to stand there holding house pieces together for 20 minutes while they take their time about drying, and neither did my helper, Syd. After her house fell down three times and my house fell down twice (of course, the house where I just put the walls together and then left it alone for an hour did fine...), I pulled them both apart and started all over again with an emergency bag of chocolate chips, which I then tried to melt in the microwave instead of on the stovetop because I was impatient, so they started to curdle and Syd and I just kind of muscled the chocolate onto the house edges and MADE them stick together.

Use melted chocolate to put your houses together, Friends. My even better trick is to use melted chocolate, then put the whole house outside in the freezing cold. Hardens it right up, although these days I also have to set a guard on it so that the chickens don't sneak over and eat it.

But after you've broken a sweat, sworn several times, BUT your houses look more or less stable, you can haul out all the candy, pour rum into two eggnogs, and let the fun begin!

Ugh, this is so gross that I can't even look at it. It's Syd, drinking eggnog through a Twizzler straw. I can't even:

As always, the children's finished gingerbread houses are masterpieces of architecture and joy:

Will's house

Syd's house

the house they built to give to their grandmother

 We always decorate cookies on Christmas Eve, because SANTA, so most of the gingerbread cookies that I baked are in the freezer, but we don't eat our gingerbread houses, so we HAD to decorate at least some cookies to eat!

Christmas tree

dinosaur

I... don't know...

 

snowman

 And my own personal creation--Girl scout trefoil!!!

In case you're inspired, here are some other gingerbread-related activities and tutorials on my radar:

• gingerbread Scrabble. I really want to make this!
• gingerbread ghosts. These are technically for Halloween, but my kids would happily make these anytime.
• cardboard gingerbread houses. I think that these would be cute to make for a class or a Girl Scout troop, and then raid all of your craft supplies for the decorations.
• gingerbread boy garland. These are super cute, if you don't mind not eating your gingerbread cookies!
• Valentine's Day gingerbread house. If you don't get to gingerbread houses before Christmas, just change the color scheme to all red and white and do it for Valentine's Day!
• life-sized cardboard gingerbread house. Syd made this for her candy-themed birthday party a few years ago, for a life-sized game of Candyland. It would make such a cute indoor playhouse for a kid to decorate!
• gingerbread Stonehenge. Next year while the kids are doing their houses, I might make myself a gingerbread Stonehenge.
• gingerbread house ornament. Super elaborate, but super cute!

Today's Christmas tradition is letters to Santa, to be written and mailed--Syd is the one who reminded me of that one, and asked me to put it in the kids' schoolwork plans this week. Normally, I have the kids put the letters in the mail, then I sneak out later and retrieve them so that Matt and I can write replies. One memorable year, I didn't get out to the mailbox in time and berated myself terribly, but you know what arrived in the mail the next week, addressed to my children?

Letters from Santa! I can only imagine that our postal worker took it upon himself to write the replies and put them in our mailbox, because the kids' letters certainly didn't have return addresses, just envelopes scrawled with "SANTA CLAUS, NORTH POLE," and probably some drawings of reindeer.

This year, however, I plan to outsource the letters by mailing them to Santa Claus, Indiana, where some of Santa's elves who volunteer there will mail back replies to the children. If your kids tend to write their letters early in the month, you can also use Santa's mailing address in Anchorage.

Today is also the deadline to order something from my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop and have it shipped before New Year, so this weekend I'm going to make etsy orders and sew a ridiculous number of homemade gifts, and then next week, the kids and I are going to relax and enjoy the season.

Except for AP European History, of course. AP European History stops for nothing!

My Kid Made Soap All By Herself

I mean I was there, obviously, talking her through it, but from start to finish, my kid's hands were the only ones to touch this entire batch of cold-process soap.

Imagine. Eleven years old, and she can already make her own soap from scratch! Can you think of a more authentic homeschool credential?

To be fair, there was an actual academic reason to set the child up to make cold-process soap. Syd and I are studying the history of fashion together this year, and it's mentioned (although I'd loooove to see the primary source...) in our textbook that the Celts introduced the Romans in Britain to both soap and pants.

I'll be teaching Syd how to sew leggings after Christmas, but way back in September I taught her how to make soap. It's what a good little Celt knows how to do, you see.

We used an easy beginner's recipe, mostly coconut oil and olive oil in simple ratios, something that you'd have to work hard at to screw up.

When you're just pouring distilled water and measuring oils, you don't have to wear any protective garb:

But when you're ready to get the lye out, on go the goggles, the breathing mask,  AND the rubber gloves!

You can see that she's wearing long sleeves, as well, in this photo--

--although she's not in this one:

Her gloves went almost up to her elbows, so when she got overheated in our early-autumn kitchen and wanted to change, I let her. Probably a mistake, but she didn't receive any chemical burns, so there you go.  I wish I could find kid-sized lab coats for a reasonable price somewhere!

She stirred the lye to dissolve it into the distilled water (you always pour LYE into WATER, never water into lye!)--

--then took its temperature. It is hot, because yay for exothermic reactions!

I didn't photograph the oils for some reason, but imagine them warming on the stovetop, and Syd moving from checking the temperature of the lye water to checking the temperature of the oils, waiting for them to approximately match.

When they do, the fun begins! She poured the oil mixture into the lye water, then blended and blended and blended:

I had previously dug up some of last season's Girl Scout cookie boxes (I keep the empties as much as I can for projects, because it's important to Use Resources Wisely!), reassembled them, and taped them back up, so here Syd is pouring her soap into the Girl Scout cookie boxes,  standing up inside a larger box, to serve as her soap molds:

When the soap has cured enough that it's solid and able to be cut, Syd extracted them from their molds--

--and cut them to size!

I had a half-batch of soap to cut and trim, too:

That wavy knife makes everything cuter! The soap should cure for a few more weeks after it's cut, and even then, the longer it cures, the harder and longer-lasting it will be.

Soapmaking with children is an enrichment activity that can serve all kinds of studies. When the kids were little, they made simple glycerin soaps, and even laundry soaps, as a practical life activity, and an exercise in measurement and a practice in philanthropy:

• kid-made glycerin melt-and-pour soap
• kid-made laundry soap

That latter tute actually reminds me that we haven't made homemade laundry soap since moving into our new house! As you can tell in that post, my process was quite organized, and without that same scaffold in the new house to remind me, it just slipped my mind. 

Mental note to make time this winter break to make laundry soap!

If you're studying history, then hopefully you'll run into the Celts, because they're a fascinating people. We studied the Celts back in April of last year--most notably, by painting ourselves in wool and then having a giant battle with the Romans over the sheep that we'd been stealing--but here are a couple of other resources on my radar for studying the Celts:

• Celtic knot templates. These could be coloring pages, but you could also use them as templates for shrinky dinks or clay.
• BBC Celts. The BBC Schools website is great for any topic that affects Great Britain. They have plenty of information about the Celts, as well as several hands-on activities for enrichment.

And, of course, if you're making soap with kids, you'll surely want some more interesting soapmaking resources!

• Explode Ivory soap. This is a fun rainy day activity, and perhaps an interesting tie-in to a consumer science study.
• Felted wool soap. The kids and I have felted wool around rocks and wooden Easter eggs before, so I know that it's a great kid-friendly activity!
• Paint with bubbles. This is a way to get younger kids involved, but even my 11- and 13-year-old still love sensory activities like these.

Here are the books that Syd and I explored as part of our soapmaking study. Some are more on my level and some more on hers, and I have some bookmarked recipes still to try out in several of these!

• Homestead Blessings. This DVD is kind of amateurish and they don't use safety equipment (gasp!), but it's still helpful to see the process of soapmaking from start to finish. Just wear goggles, though.
• Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life. I like to learn more about whatever the kids are studying, so this history of our conception of "dirt" in our cultures was super interesting.
• The Natural Soap Chef. Here's one of the books that Syd looked through to find the recipe that she wanted to use. I still have a couple of recipes bookmarked in here!
• Handmade Soap Book. Here's another good one for recipes.
• You Wouldn't Want to Live Without Soap! The kids both love this series, and I'm often surprised about how frequently they have a title suited to something that we're studying.