Happy Halloween Boo!

J made this picture in his spare time. I liked all the detail..bony skeletons, witches, bats, roof shingles, etc. I told him if he colored it I'd put it on my blog. So here it is!

AJ made this fun little picture at school which I enjoyed too. Especially since the skeleton has a very detailed Ahsoka Tano belt, that made me laugh.

Making an Ahsoka Costume

Anakin Skywalker's spunky Padawan, the orange girl...



Getting an idea on how to make headtails. It looked like a jester cap, so we looked up a free three tailed jester hat pattern online.

Tracing the shape on tissue paper

The front of side tails: Ahsoka's side headtails curve, the back one is straight, bigger, and longer, I cut 2 of these

back of side tails, cut 2
back tail, one piece


designing the stripes and pinning it all together.


I traced the pattern again so I could cut up for stripe patterns. It looked something like this. This part takes a lot of time, but it looked so cool, we thought it was worth it.

crushed panne fabric with indigo stripes hot glued on (note, sewing machine didn't sew through glue very well, imagine that! I should have avoided putting glue close to the edges where I was gonna sew and then just touched up later.)
we stuffed it with polyfill from JoAnn's and hot glued a ski cap inside to finish it off.

We were almost done here, I'll get the finished product later. She wore it comfortably all day at school and it stayed on even during a cartwheel!

Next a cute orange and maroon t-shirt dress to finish it off. See the finished costume!


one more photo...

Recent Pictures

Imagine there are pictures.

What we've been up to lately
I don't really know how to make a blog post without a picture, but here goes. We got a new computer. Hooray! I don't know how to use it yet though, so although my pictures are on there somewhere, I don't know how to get to them yet. If I had them, I'd show you some birthday party pictures for AJ's eighth birthday, the picture I snapped of the 20 minutes AP wore shorts instead of a dress one day, pictures of a messy preschool activity, lots of kid crafts and creations, baby D sneaking into my canning peaches (the very first time a kid sneaks is cute and entertaining and this was one of the first), baby D learning how to walk with a hot pink baby stroller, and the kids with their second cousins at Thanksgiving point having a great time.

Traffic on this blog
I realized last time I was blogging that blogger has a stats page for who visits your blog. I looked at it and after the Lego Art blog post which was publicized by some really big blogs, the most visited post was the one about AJ's halloween costume last year. Apparently there are lots of other people out there looking for ideas on how to make a "Crysta from Fern Gully" costume. How random. I would have never guessed.

I finished!

Have you ever taken on a major challenge such as remodeling an old house or running a marathon? Doesn't it feel incredible when the rooms are all done or you cross the finish line? Okay, I'd feel horrible at the end of a marathon, but the sense of satisfaction would be amazing. I remember when I decided to earn my BSA "mile swim" award in a freezing cold lake. I worked up to it over the summer. When I finally finished that swim, my body was so numb I don't know how I was still swimming, but I was absolutely ecstatic about finishing. When I finally got feeling back enough to walk, I was walking on air.

Well, I'm pretty excited today because I finished my year on the "12 steps to whole foods" nutrition program. Last year my GreenSmoothieGirl nutrition ranking on a scale of 1-100 was 23. I was eating no fruits or *vegetables unless you count spaghetti sauce and I ate half a box of granola bars a day. This year I'm at 76 and I feel much better.

*Let me amend that statement. We ate a TON of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and zuchinni from the garden last August. I'm referring to all the other months of the year where all we had were a few spoonfuls of frozen veggies for dinner once a week.

Strabismus

D's glasses are to treat strabismus its not a strong prescription, but the theory is that his eyes have been over-focusing. Sometimes his left eye is turned inward and sometimes his right is turned inward like in the pictures below. Strabismus can be treated surgically, or with eye patches as well. There is no real proof about what works, its usually a lifetime thing that you keep working at. Our neighbor across the street has strabismus and has been helpful to talk to. We'll try glasses for a few months and if there isn't any improvement, the next option is usually surgery.

They determine the prescription for babies with a little machine that looks in the eye and uses light and shadows and geometry. Pretty amazing.

Baby Glasses

I was prepared for a major battle to get D to wear these, he went ballistic when we tried on glasses at the doctor or baby sunglasses frames, but these glasses are especially for babies and don't have any metal parts. He seems to really like them. When we first put them on he was all smiles and giggles. He has put them through a few crashes so far and they are super gentle and don't hurt his face at all, I'm very impressed. He knows he isn't supposed to take the glasses off, so sometimes he giggles and does it just to tease me.