Archive for September, 2008
September 20, 2008 @ 4:04 pm | Filed under: Sewing and Handwork
Me? Not so much.
I’ve just finished making my second-ever set of curtains. I thought they’d be easier than the first set because the first ones were lined and these weren’t. And, I mean, curtains. Four straight seams. Not rocket science.
Also: the fabric I picked is checked. Checked! As in: the pattern is basically a grid of straight lines in pretty colors. Right? That’s what checks are: a grid. So for all my cutting and ironing and sewing, I had built-in straight lines to follow. Foolproof, right?
Not proof against this fool, apparently. Even Scott had to admit my level of incompetence is pretty impressive, when he saw the evidence hanging right there, unevenly, in the window. He witnessed how carefully I measured and re-measured before each cut, each round of pressing, each seam. He watched in amusement at my overzealous triple- and quadruple-checking. He saw me ever so carefully compare the finished first panel to the almost-finished second one before sewing the final seam, a bottom hem: how hard I worked to make sure they would be the same length when hung.
They aren’t. Scott actually burst out laughing when he saw the final product, because it really is comical that a reasonably intelligent person like his wife could spend two entire Saturdays on a project, applying an almost insane degree of attention to detail, and wind up with one curtain a good three-quarters of an inch shorter than the other.
Oh, and there’s a nice little splotch of blood on one of the panels, too, from where I ran a pin into my thumb. The blood got on the back side of the curtain so we figured it wouldn’t show, but it turns out that when the sun shines through, there’s a gruesome little silhouette. I should really be washing that out right now instead of writing about it.
Although, come to think of it, maybe I should stick to writing about women who can sew instead of trying to be one myself. 
September 19, 2008 @ 6:01 am | Filed under: Blogging
I’m not sure when I became a contrarian—I don’t think I started out this way, but my parents could speak to that better than I could—but I cannot deny that the pattern in my adult life has been that if I sense myself being ushered toward a box, I make a sharp left—or right, you can’t pigeonhole me that way either—and dash away from the box as fast as I can. Even if—no, especially if—I’m the one who created and announced the box.
So it shouldn’t have surprised me that the very moment I declared on Bonny Glen Up Close that my fabulous new notebooking system had rendered that poor little side-blog obsolete, I would find myself compelled to post there more than ever. Big long chatty posts such as I’ve not written there in a long time, or maybe ever. And now that I’m calling my own attention to this shift, it’s entirely possible the chattiness will dry right up. Except that now I’ve called my own attention to that possibility. So there’s no telling what will happen.
September 18, 2008 @ 7:08 am | Filed under: Links
I keep forgetting that I changed my Delicious auto link-posting to “save as draft.” The links have been piling up—whoops. Of course, they appear in my sidebar the moment I tag them, so you’ve probably seen them already. I fold them into a post for the feed-readers among you.
- Think! – Weekly challenges for kids—this is fun stuff, building boats out of foil and straws, etc. Very grateful hat tip to Theresa of Lapaz Farm.
- Bacon’s Rebellion: The Home School Revolution – A happy private-school parent gets a look at what homeschooling (a misnomer, as he points out) is really about. Great piece.
- fussypants: BPA, Dangerous Plastics, Boys Adrift, and Scarey Headlines
- Pakistan orders troops to open fire if US raids – washingtonpost.com
- Apple of His Eye: 1964 | Shorpy :: History in HD – A photo blog that archives very old photos. Some incredible history here.
- Flickr: Discussing Stump Ketzel – and the rest of us – with mystery plant and flower photos! in Ketzel Levine’s Talking Plants: An NPR Flickr Group – A site for posting pictures of plants you can’t identify. Other people will chime in with their answers. Great for those of us doing Sarah Sours’s 100 Species Challenge! HT: Monica at Small Things.
- The Minimalist – It’s Soup – Vegetables, Herbs, Water – NYTimes.com
- EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect – Use water instead of canned broth?
- Petal Pusher: Hey Slacker Nannies; The Nanny Narc is Watching You!
- Important work can be done while daydreaming – The Boston Globe – What Anne of Green Gables knew all along.
- Poetry Foundation: The online home of the Poetry Foundation – “Home Appreciation:
Homeschoolers are turning a million kids on to poetry—through fun, not homework. Here’s how you can do it too.”
September 17, 2008 @ 10:30 am | Filed under: Books
What are the Cybils, you ask?
The Children’s & Young Adult Bloggers Literary Awards!
The call for nominations for the best children’s and YA books published in 2008—nine categories of books, from easy readers to poetry to nonfiction to novels—will begin on October 1st. The tireless Cybils organizers have worked hard to assemble panels of judges for each category. Each category has a team of round I panelists—people to read all the nominated books and compile a shortlist in each category—and round II judges, who will choose the winning titles from those shortlists. For more details, and to see lists of Cybils winners from 2006 and 2007, visit the Cybils website.
I’m a Round 1 panelist for the Fiction Picture Books category this year, and I am really looking forward to reading (and sharing with my children) all the nominated books. So start thinking about what picture books bowled you over this year (published in English between January 1st and October 15th, 2008) and watch for the call for nominations at the Cybils site.
My fellow team members in the Fiction Picture books category:
Category Organizer
Pamela Coughlan, Mother Reader
Panelists (Round I):
Cheryl Rainfield, Cheryl Rainfield
Stephanie Ford, The Children’s Literature Book Club
Travis Jonker, 100 Scope Notes
Round II Judges:
Erica Perle, Pajamazon
Emily Beeson, Whimsy and Deliciously Clean Reads
Maureen Kearney, Confessions of a Bibliovore
Anne-Marie Nichols, My Readable Feast
Stefan Shepherd, Zooglobble
To see the judging teams in the other categories, visit the Cybils site.
book awards, children's books, Cybils, kidlitosphere
September 16, 2008 @ 3:03 pm | Filed under: Rilla,These People Crack Me Up
Rilla: “No! I baby!!”
Wonderboy: “No, you ’weetheart.”
Rilla: “NO I NOT! I not fweetheart! I BABY!”
(Um, Rilla honey, I hate to break it to you, but…)
September 15, 2008 @ 6:51 am | Filed under: Hearing Loss,Special Needs Children,Wonderboy
I am reposting this piece from March, 2007, now that I have finally gotten around to fixing the broken image links. When I imported it here from Lilting House, all the images fell out. Now they’re back!
Did you know that ears are one of the few body parts that never stop growing? I think noses might be the other. Besides hair and fingernails, obviously.
When you wear behind-the-ear hearing aids, the hearing aids last for years, but the ear molds—the little custom-made silicone or acrylic doohickeys that fits into your ear—need replacing every so often. As your ear grows, the ear mold ceases to fit, and first you get a feedback problem, and then eventually the mold just won’t stay in the ear at all.
So you go to the audiologist’s office, and she makes new impressions of your ears with a quick-hardening goo. You ship the impressions off to a lab, and in a couple of weeks you’ll have your brand new ear molds.
If you are three years old, you may find this process somewhat entertaining, if mildly uncomfortable. If you are six years old and the uncomfortable part is happening to your brother, not to you, you will consider it a ripping good time. Beanie pronounced it “huge fun.”
I get a large number of hits every day from hearing-aid-related searches, including variations of “toddler ear molds,” so I thought it might be helpful if I posted a walk-through of the process. Besides, pictures are always fun.
First the audiologist checks your ears, making sure there isn’t too much wax in there—that might mess up the shape of the impression. Then she carefully inserts a little foam stopper to make sure none of the impression goo goes too far up the ear canal.
Then she pops the two kinds of goo out of their little bubble wrappers, and she mixes them together into a pliable substance that can be squeezed out of a syringe but will harden within a few minutes. Beanie, supervising, thought this mixing process looked pretty nifty and is now wondering how to work “become an audiologist” into her plan to be a scuba-diver with ten children.
The audiologist scoops the goo into the syringe and carefully squeezes it into the ear, sort of like making an icing rose on a birthday cake. Now you have to sit and wait. You can’t poke at the goo, much as you might wish to. Nor can you pull on the string that is connected to the little foam stopper inside your ear canal. Patience, grasshopper.
Meanwhile, the audiologist squirts the leftover goo out of the syringe. This, I am told, is THE BEST PART.
Let’s do the other ear while we’re waiting. It’s okay to drool.
Finished! Time to pull out the impression. No need to be suspicious; it won’t bite.
The impressions go into a box and are dispatched to the Lab, that mysterious place where ear molds are born.
Now comes the fun part! (The other fun part, says Beanie.) What color ear molds do you want? The sky’s the limit. No, Bean, your brother isn’t getting the sparkles.
What color did he get? You’ll have to wait two weeks to find out.
September 14, 2008 @ 6:40 am | Filed under: Photos
I love to watch these two playing together. They are such good pals. (Most of the time.)
Yes, you heard me, young lady. You know what “most of the time” means.
By the way, did you notice Wonderboy’s shirt? ’Twas a gift from some beloved friends back in Virginia.
How perfect is that? (Thank you so much, S & C!)
September 13, 2008 @ 9:10 am | Filed under: Blogging,Family
The wise and gentle Ann of Holy Experience has a post up this morning about some blog-related questions I, too, have grappled with, am always grappling with—this summer more than ever, as I’ve wrestled with the question of how much to say about a new diagnosis my son received, one that was not exactly a surprise and yet was certainly a lot to take in, and which I very much want to write about (can’t imagine NOT writing about) for a number of reasons, but I have made myself tread slowly while I ponder the question of where the line is between frankness and invasion of privacy.
(Boy, how’s that for a run-on sentence?)
Ann explains why she shares secrets. Her reasons are very much akin to my reasons. Examining our lives helps us see them more clearly, live them more joyfully. Recording our stories is how I know I’ll remember them: the small moments that are so important because they, like the tiny pieces of a mosaic, are what come together to form the big picture of our lives.
And sharing the struggles, the successes, this is how we mothers help each other. Seeing the ways other women handle the broken tiles, the sharp corners, the dropped pieces, helps me to better discern how to sort through the jumble of tiles in my own hands and scattered at my feet.
Thanks for articulating it, Ann, and thank you for welcoming us into your kitchen, your fields, your good times and bad, so that we may be inspired by the mosaic you are piecing together with such tenderness and love.
September 13, 2008 @ 8:36 am | Filed under: Day Planners
The lucky winner of our BusyBodyBook planner giveaway is…
(Results determined by random number generator.)
Congratulations, IrishMom. Drop me a note with your address (thebonnyglen AT gmail DOT com) and I’ll pop it in the mail ASAP. Which, just so you know, probably means not until Wednesday.
Day Planners, giveaways, mom planners
September 12, 2008 @ 6:22 am | Filed under: Nature Study
I jotted down some notes at Bonny Glen Up Close the other day about the hummingbirds that are in love with our feeder. We think they are Anna’s Hummingbirds. (Someone please correct us if we’re wrong.) The one above is the male: emerald back, ruby throat. These next two photos show the female, more modestly attired in shimming green without the crimson ascot.
How we have marveled to see them perching on the feeder instead of hovering, wings aflutter! Besides their coloring, the reason we’re pretty sure they are Anna’s Hummingbirds is because they sing:
This bird is most often found singing a series of scratchy sounds, including a sharp “chee-chee-chee”, from a high perch. This is the only California hummer to sing a song. When moving between flowers they make a “chick” sound.
Our trio—we’ve counted two females and a male at once—are quite the musical bunch, chittering away all day. They seem to live in a tree right behind our backyard fence. We’ve seen them perched on a branch there (more perching!) and zooming back and forth to our feeder.
Don’t be fooled by the female’s demure attire. “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” Should a weary sparrow happen to pause on the feeder’s perch for a moment, she will fly in his face and scold him furiously.
Reminds me of someone else I know.
