sweet thing(s)

inspiring teens

two Toronto teens sent the first Lego man to space

here is a little interview with them about their acheivement:

{this moment}

inspired by Soulemama's 'blog-along' Friday ritual:

from Soulemama:  {this moment} - A Friday weekly! ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savour and remember

 

monkey boy!! (or "some stuff i made part 2"- or "from the holidays part 3")

you might remember this monster suit from a few years ago?  (he looks so little!!) well, it's finally too small.

so I thought monkey boy needed a new under-the-radar costume (i.e. he can wear it to school without being "IN A COSTUME")  It even has a snap-on detachable tail!

(photo shoot at the St. Lawrence Market!) 

and I have to share this video- a perfect job for grown-up Asa!!!

it is really funny- it has one swear (the B word) in it but otherwise child friendly (well, if you don't mind hot half-naked men- but in a good way)  and the kids LOVE IT!!

the Island: community pebble mosaic project

the image in my new banner (look up!) is of houses and bikes and bike carts from our Island- showcased in an amazing pebble mosaic newly installed in front of our community clubhouse.  

the mosaic project was spearheaded by my neighbour, artist Kathleen Doody, who drew in lots of other community members for the creation and installation of this gorgeous work.  (the project and how-to's are documented here)  (kathleen instructed me in this method for our garden stones we made last year)

east view:

west view:

some stuff i made (Part 2: from the holidays)

we were feeding a neighbour's cats over the holidays- I had the brilliant idea (pat pat) to set up all my sewing stuff over there so I could work on my Christmas sewing.  It was so great!  I didn't have to worry about curious children or leaving a mess out- just work and then walk away leaving it all set up.  must be what it's like to have a spacious studio...

aside from the Christmas jammies and bathrobe, 

i made:

a dog coat for my mom's dog (Butterick 4885)

i learned that dogs are even harder to photograph than children

 

i also sewed matching dresses for Maxine and her new dolly

this (sort of dark) picture is the only one I have as Maxine tried it on only the once: unfortunately as a pattern for Maxine's dress I used one of her dresses that is basically too small and I hadn't realized it.  so that is a shame unless I can get some more fabric.  it was from Joann's and it's this super cute owl print corduroy:

:: hint hint to Auntie Mar who was going to look for some in Seattle for me! :)

Maxine's new dolly is a Canadian girl (well, they're actually Maplea Girls but the are the equivalent of the you know-who-dolls in the USA).  

she LOVES HER!!!!!  

her name is Saila and she is from Nunavit. (The girls are all from different provinces)  Max also got a bunch of clothes for 'her girl' (she calls her 'my girl'!) and spends hours daily dressing and undressing her, and making up stories about her.  I enjoy brushing her hair.  (someone else in the family also enjoys braiding her hair but he won't let me say who.)  and i have to say I'm looking forward to making more clothes.

someone asked me, under his breath, 'live vicariously much?' and this may be completely true, but who cares?

{this moment}

inspired by Soulemama's 'blog-along' Friday ritual:

from Soulemama:  {this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savour and remember

 

the Island: winter beach days

{this moment}

inspired by Soulemama's 'blog-along' Friday ritual:

from Soulemama:  {this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savour and remember

 

Happy New Year!

my lovely sister-in-law and new brother-in-law got married on New Year's Eve in a magical small ceremony at a wonderful downtown restaurant.  

best new year's ever!!

Part 1: from the holidays

we had our 3rd annual cookie exchange party-  6 friends each brought 5 dozen extra holiday cookies ready to share.  (so you end up bringing home 5 dozen different cookies than what you made)  

I brought sugar cookies with lots of icing and sprinkles for kids to decorate.  really fun! (and delicious)

merry christmas!

we had a fantastic day and hope you did too!

(the kids are wearing their Christmas jammies- Lee is such a big boy this year he got a bathrobe!)

xmas crafts will be posted soon....

sand candles

Lee is representing this year at the Island Christmas Boutique.  he made some "Ward's Island Beach Candles."  

Our neighbour gave us a bag of old half-used candles and we melted them down, added some crayons for colour, and poured them into our sand and rock molds.  (the wax has to be hotter than usual to stick to the sand a bit- this is not a bad tutorial)

When I was a kid (Lee's age actually) I went through a phase of being obsessed with candlemaking.  I remember making sand candles, ice cube candles (also fun!), using crayons to colour them, and setting a pan of wax on fire.  whoops!

These candles were a lot of fun-  I'd like to try to make some with beeswax.  

the season has begun

i love Christmas, but i love it to start about a week before the actual big day- no sooner.  

my one exception is advent calendars.  i find it helps kids who are WAITING so patiently for Christmas when they have a little tiny thing to open every day.  in the past we have always gotten the Playmobil or Lego ones.  This year we got Asa the  Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar - i couldn't resist.  He is such a fan.  I didn't see anything especially nice for Maxine, so Lee and I had fun wrapping a bunch of little prezzies and hanging them on ribbons.

the cat likes them too.

As Lee and I were working, he said, "Mama- I bet you have an advent calendar for me too.  You just want to surprise me!"  Ugg.  No I didn't!  At 10, he's at that in between age- too old for most toy presents, but young enough to care if he's not getting them.  A promise of a movie date with me or his dad before xmas solved the problem...

The Boy in the Moon

i'm reading this book (The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son) and it's so wonderful.  I know you Americans don't hear much about Canadian books so I thought I'd pass it along.  while it is so heartwrenching at points, it is so beautifully written.  I think we can all recognize ourselves and our struggles as parents (even of 'normal' children) in it.

SO!  my sister wrote to me and said "Occupy your blog!!"  (but she just wants to see the nephews and niece...)

I have been busy as I am sure you all are too.  We went to Vermont for American Thanksgiving last week (Happy Thanksgiving!!) and I am as always in the whirlwind of family obligations and homeschool etc.  And I'm trying to get ahead of my Xmas sewing so I don't have a stressful week lead up.

I taught a needlefelting workshop tonight and it was really fun.  I'll put up some pictures soon of the needlefelted figures I've been making.

I'm going to go back to reading my book on the couch now...

Occupy Wall Street

My man and I went on our first solo trip since before Lee was born (11 years!!!) to New York City for the weekend.  (It was a wonderful and much-needed get away!)  While we were there we checked out Occupy Wall Street.  On the way home I read this article in Vanity Fair.  It was about the bankruptcy of local governments but the last section seemed so pertinent to the issues that the Occupy protesters are trying to address.  

from Vanity Fair "California and Bust" by Michael Lewis 

...The richest society the world has ever seen has grown rich by devising better and better ways to give people what they want. The effect on the brain of lots of instant gratification is something like the effect on the right hand of cutting off the left: the more the lizard core is used the more dominant it becomes. “What we’re doing is minimizing the use of the part of the brain that lizards don’t have,” says Whybrow. “We’ve created physiological dysfunction. We have lost the ability to self-regulate, at all levels of the society. The $5 million you get paid at Goldman Sachs if you do whatever they ask you to do—that is the chocolate cake upgraded.”

Food for thought.

I've included the rest of the section after the break if you want to check it out.

recycled gift wrap idea

old calendars + tissue paper + dialogue bubble= quick and charming gift wrap

if you don't save your old calendars, you could use pictures cut out of magazines, etc.  

super cute and easy!

The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair

I love this annual event!  

I've written about it here so many times, and it's really not very different from year-to-year, that i almost didn't write about it again.  BUT someone got a new iPod Touch (not me- Asa!  Can you believe?  my 7 y-o has fancier gadgets than his parents...) and I finally got to try Hipstamatic (i know- so 2009) so suddenly the Royal Winter Fair photos seemed different from the last 4 years of posts.  

(I love how the Hipstamatic app makes everything look so soft and painterly!)  

(Also, I had to laugh when i re-read one of the posts above that said we had cereal and fried eggs for dinner- guess what we had tonight?)

just a little bit more about Halloween

our Island community had a pumpkin carving party on Saturday

Lee and Asa made Jack-O-Lanterns 100% by themselves and I helped Maxine (she drew the design, I carved)

What was interesting to me was how completely each pumpkin said something about each child's personality:

Maxine's (far left) is all about the eyeballs.  People with defined eyeballs are what she loves to draw lately.  Plus her pumpkin is just really cute.

Lee's pumpkin (middle) is quirky just like him.

Asa's abstract Jack-O-Lantern (far right) is slightly perverse and different from everyone else's (notice the knife stuck in the side)

I don't want to put the children into little boxes by analyzing them this way-  I just love how each child shines through in his/her creative expression!

Happy Halloween!!

to you from my Steampunk Bandit, Zombie Princess (such an improvement on the typical 4 y.o. girl princess theme obsession, don't you think?) and Griffin (mythical half-lion and half-eagle).  as usual, ridiculous amounts of time were spent by both parents on costume making but, also as usual, it was worth it for the kids!  (i am especially pleased with the griffin mask fashioned out of plaster cast material and wire- you can click on the photo to see it bigger!) 

the Island: Toronto Island Tree Tour

if you live in Toronto or are visiting, this is an interesting, fun, and different way to get to know the Island.  Our wonderful Toronto Island Park supervisor organized a map showing the what and where of 57 different tree varieties on the Island.  Each tree is labelled with its common and Latin name, family and origin. 

Asa under a  European ash Fraxinus excelsior

Lee looking at a Big-leaf linden Tilia platyphyllos

you can download this map here

happy tree walking!

half-marathon!

here i am

happily running to the finish line of my second half-marathon on Sunday (my first was a year ago)

i hope to be back blogging soon...

hero

if you can take 5 minutes to watch this video i think you'll be glad you did.  

today is the national Terry Fox Run day.  This weekend on the Island we had a Terry Fox run and also a swim, a soccer game and a baseball game.  Terry Fox is a Canadian icon and hero- for those of you who don't know who he was, here's an introduction from the Terry Fox website:

Terry Fox was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and raised in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, a community near Vancouver on Canada's west coast. An active teenager involved in many sports, Terry was only 18 years old when he was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma (bone cancer) and forced to have his right leg amputated 15 centimetres (six inches) above the knee in 1977.

While in hospital, Terry was so overcome by the suffering of other cancer patients, many of them young children, that he decided to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research.

He would call his journey the Marathon of Hope.

It was a journey that Canadians never forgot.

After 18 months and running over 5,000 kilometres (3,107 miles) to prepare, Terry started his run in St. John’s, Newfoundland on April 12, 1980 with little fanfare. Although it was difficult to garner attention in the beginning, enthusiasm soon grew, and the money collected along his route began to mount. He ran 42 kilometres (26 miles) a day through Canada's Atlantic provinces, Quebec and Ontario. However, on September 1st, after 143 days and 5,373 kilometres (3,339 miles), Terry was forced to stop running outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario because cancer had appeared in his lungs. An entire nation was stunned and saddened. Terry passed away on June 28, 1981 at the age 22.

The heroic Canadian was gone, but his legacy was just beginning.

To date, more than $400 million has been raised worldwide for cancer research in Terry's name through the annual Terry Fox Run, held across Canada and around the world.

I started running for real 2 years ago for the Terry Fox run.  A friend had died from cancer a week before and i wanted to do something hard- so I ran the 10K- twice as far as I had ever run previously.  I got hooked on running and now i am training for my second half-marathon.  I am still pretty slow, and I find running hard, but every time i think it's hard i think of Terry Fox running a marathon a day on one leg and I keep going.  

Tonight as everyone else was palying krokonole i read this book by Douglas Coupland Terry: Terry Fox and His Marathon of Hope and tried not to cry too loudly. Not because i was necessarily sad about Terry or anyone else who has died of cancer, but because i was so moved by the monumentality and selflessness of his Marathon of Hope.

Terry Fox is a real hero.

{this moment}

inspired by Soulemama's 'blog-along' Friday ritual:

from Soulemama:  {this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savour and remember

 

first day(s) of school

Tuesday, last week:  Asa about to head off for his first day of Grade 2 and Lee staying home for his first day of Grade 5.  yes, we are homeschooling again!  (just Lee)  Maxine is still in her jammies because her first day of kindergarten !! was later in the week due to a staggered entry.

Thursday, last week:  Maxine's first day of junior kindergarten!!!  Don't let her serious expression fool you.  This kid was EXCITED for school to start!!  

(i got to go with her on the first day- so much fun!!  is this not the classic kindergarten shot?)

she loves it- and I'm not surprised as she is an insanely social creature.   every day she wakes up asking "Is it school today Mama?"  (she goes 2.5 days a week so unfortunately she is disappointed more often than not...)

big kids and big changes.

love and garlic

let's pretend i posted this in mid- August, okay?  that's what i meant to do...

the love part: my man and I met 20 years ago this summer at the Bread and Puppet Theatre festival.   (we've been together half our lives!)  

(image via Bread and Puppet website)

 

(crappy image via me 20 years ago!!  the rest are various photos i found elsewhere- all kosher i believe!)

Bread and Puppet are a theatre group/community in Vermont known for their giant puppets and their political message.

(image via this blog- a nice post describing what shows are like now)

I grew up going to Bread and Puppet every summer of the 1970s and 80s with my family.  New York transplants from way back,  Peter and Elke Schumann and their family have a year round farm/art/theatre community and museum in the very rural Northeast Kingdom in Vermont.  

you may have seen their puppets at marches, or recognize their influence in the work of JulieTaymor- a B&P protege. 

one of their philosophies is Cheap Art:

 

here's some nice cheap art. 

image via  More on the art here 

for many years on one weekend in August, the Schumanns, their people, and the town of Glover, VT would host a free 2 day festival.  (in 1998 they stopped the weekend event- it had gotten too large and unruly)  The day started with the Domestic Resurrection Circus.  

image via Bread and Puppet website

The audience sits around on the grass in a natural amphitheatre, and the B&P bus pulls in with most of the company sitting on top- dressed in white, waving large flags with prints of every day objects and and words underneath- "Brother Frying Pan," "Sister Toothbrush."  A band accompanied the performers- and always Uncle Sam on sky high stilts and silly 'animal' (people in animal costumes) routines.  (here's a good video of a recent Circus performance)  

image via flickr

At dusk, there was the Pageant.  Silent and serious- the audience would wait as performers would appear from over the hills with bird puppets.  The theme was always serious and something always got burned at the end.  (our Island Fire Parade organizers are Bread and Puppet alums- small world!- and we always burn something at the end of the Fire Parade.)

 

image via Bread and Puppet website

image via Chazz

i haven't gone back since they stopped doing the weekend festival- but i think we must next year.

and the garlic? it's puppets- and BREAD.  a delicious part of the  Bread and Puppet experience is the FREE hearty fresh baked bread with a raw garlic spread.   my man and i met in the queue for bread-- love and bliss ever since!! :)

i've been growing garlic in my little garden.  

i love to eat it spread on bread with oil, salt and pepper.   I don't know what exactly they put in it at Bread and Puppet, but i find that my version reminds me of those days.  

so- Love and Garlic- two of the best things I have going for me.  i raise my garlic bread to you my man.