Long, cold, lonely winter

We had an even less tolerable winter than usual.  And both kids had a week of quarantine due to fever.  Put them together and what have you got?  Projects!  Lots of projects.  Some of them were much more worthy of mention than others, but I'll include most of them here anyway.

This first one was awarded the She Thought of It Herself Prize! by a board of impartial judges.  Frances saw me making miniature flags to decorate Chandler's first birthday cake, so she got out her supplies and started working on her own.  Plus, in the background, you can see a ceramic sculpture she painted and then coated with gold glitter.  I can't even tell you all the places that gold glitter ended up.

We made play-dough out of grape Jello.  That got the Get Us Through The Day! award.  Unloading the dishwasher is so much faster when Chandler is playing with play-dough than when she's "helping."  I know I'm supposed to embrace her contributions, but I'm too worried about her embracing knives in the dishwasher.

This got the It's a Miracle! award.  I decided to make a Pane Francese, referred to on at least one website as an "advanced" bread.  It more or less started as goo, and, through much rising and kneading, became a bread.

Frances was a big help on this one.

The finished product:

Everyone agreed the bread was good, but for that amount of work I could have made about a dozen boules.  I think I'll stick to my boules.

For Christmas, I got myself a book of crafts for kids.  Frances has really enjoyed going through the book and picking out projects.  Sometimes ol' mom hasn't gathered the supplies fast enough and she's lost interest, but this particular project only required newspaper and glue.  And then some more newspaper and glue, with some discreet patching by said mom.  We'll give this the Are We Done Yet? award.

Frances pressed on and on and on until the bowl was ready for paint.

Now we have a new bowl to hold our keys.  Very successful.

The craft book also had instructions for building your own birdhouse.  I'm not going to even pretend I was tempted but it put the idea in Frances's head.  During Frances's sickness, we spent an afternoon at Target with Frances whimpering in the shopping cart and picked up this little gem for one dollar.  All I had to do was wait for Frances to improve a bit, spread some newspaper, step back and observe.  We'll give it the Yay Target! award.

This next project definitely gets the What a Waste of Time! award.  My friend Beka was about to have her second kid.  For her first kid, she had requested handmade gifts (she's a pain like that).  So I thought for this second kid, I would use natural dyes to brighten up these onesies.

There was much salt measuring...

...and fabric preparing... 

...and carrot chopping (the carrots were supposed to be grated, but that was so tedious).

And then the onesies looked almost exactly the same.  Well, not exactly the same.  They looked like a baby had eaten carrot puree while wearing them and the stains hadn't quite come out.

Grumble.

Moving on to the What Could Go Wrong! award.  After consulting the crafts book again, Frances decided she wanted to do tie-dye.  Target failed to provide the equipment the book required, but it did provide a handy dandy tie-dye kit.  Handy dandy tie-dye kit it is!  Frances got up on the dining room table for this one, so as to avoid her little sister's assistance.

Not bad, huh?  And all the extraneous dye was cleaned up within a week or two!

This last one gets the Why? award.  Our church celebrated Purim and I volunteered to bring in hamantaschen.  How many times in her life does an Episcopalian have an excuse to make hamantaschen?  So we gave it a try.

The results were quite pretty, if I do say so myself.  They may have tasted good too, but I wouldn't know.  I gave up white flour for Lent, so I couldn't try them myself.  So many "Why?"s....

That almost gets us caught up on the home front.  I realized in putting this post together that it looks like we don't have enough to do.  Don't be fooled: so much laundry was ignored in the finishing of these projects.  So much laundry.  Luckily, I've learned that no matter how much laundry I do, there will always be more, so there's no point getting upset about a load or four here or there.