Just Our Style

FoldSchool: how to make usable cardboard furniture for kids.

I’m Not Just Doing This Because She Linked to Me This Morning

I was going to link to this post by Karen before I saw her next post. Her daughter’s remark (and approach to life) deserves to be shared!

Betsy, you’re a girl after my own heart.

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Lilting House Info

Here’s how to fix a broken link to a Lilting House post:

If the permalink
looks like this—

http://liltinghouse.clubmom.com/the_lilting_house/2006/10/my-rule-of-six.html

—simply replace the

liltinghouse.clubmom.com/the_lilting_house part of the URL

with

melissawiley.typepad.com/liltinghouse

so that the URL reads:

http://melissawiley.typepad.com/liltinghouse/2006/10/my-rule-of-six.html

That URL should take you to the correct post. The date and everything after the date needs to remain the same. Email me if you have trouble!

And if you missed the explanation of what happened to my Lilting House blog, here’s my farewell post:

November 16, 2007

Changes Afoot

A
couple of months ago, I realized the time had come for me to close up
shop here at ClubMom. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here, blogging
at Lilting House, and I am deeply grateful to have had this opportunity
to meet many new readers and writers, and to explore in greater depth
some of the subjects dearest to my heart.

I’m not finished with those conversations. But it’s time to move them back to my original blog, Here in the Bonny Glen.
Pretty much the only aspect of ClubMom blogging I haven’t enjoyed was
seeing certain ads pop up next to my posts. Back in early October, I
began talking to the MomBlog liason at ClubMom about retiring from
blogging here and moving the content to an archive at my other site.
There were some techie details to nail down, and the dialogue took a
while. During that time, the liason left ClubMom, so my move has been
on hold for a few weeks.

Today I learned that ClubMom is going to wrap up the entire MomBlog
program at the end of this year. The ClubMom folks have been extremely
classy in their handling of the details regarding closing the blogs, so
while it’s a move that may shock many readers, I have great respect for
the way the decision has been made.

What’s going to happen with Lilting House is this: this blog will
stay up until the end of the year. But I won’t be posting here anymore.
I have moved the entire blog, comments and all, to The Lilting House Archive.
There you will find all the posts I’ve written here, and I encourage
you to continue the discussions we have going in the comments.

All my new material will appear at Bonny Glen. This includes the
ongoing series I have been doing here—the day planner reviews, the
upcoming sewing-book reviews, posts about speech therapy and special
needs kids, reviews of Latin curricula and other fun learning
resources, and, well, everything I’ve been doing here. I’ll continue to
mine the comments of this blog for new posts at Bonny Glen.

Thank you all very, very much for helping to make the Lilting House
the delightful experience it has been for me. I love hearing from you.
I deeply appreciate the support you have given me (including that blog
award last year for Best Unschooling/Eclectic Homeschooling Blog). You
are a terrific bunch of readers, and I hope you’ll all join me over at Here in the Bonny Glen!

Happy Birthday

…to Alice the Best!

Card courtesy of Public Domain Images.

Chillin’ (Not)

Our fridge is on the fritz. At first it was just the freezer side, so yesterday, with all our frozen food rapidly thawing, I cooked all afternoon. The fridge was still working. I filled it with parmesan drumsticks, pork chops, cooked chicken breasts, tortellini salad, and a meatloaf. That’s more than I usually cook in a week. Ha! That’s more cooking than I’ve done some entire months! I felt positively Betty Crockerish.

Then I zipped off to a baby shower for two beautiful friends. Had I realized the fridge was going to go kaput as well, I would have taken all those nice meals with me. Wouldn’t that have been perfect? Some nice meals for the ladies about to give birth?

Alas, Betty Crocker’s vision did not extend past bringing the bag of defrosted strawberries to the shower to puree and serve over the scrumptious almond pound cake we were serving. (It was a Tastefully Simple catalog party as well as a double shower; that was our cover story. Yum.)

Ah well, I’d been needing to clean out the fridge anyway.

Blerg.

Unschooling Voices Is Up

The new Unschooling Voices is here. I’ve barely begun to dig into the posts…some good, meaty, inspiring stuff there. Enjoy.

I know it’s been quiet here this week. We had quite a week! Where to begin? Too much to tell. Family in town…an infected foot (shudder)…an overnight trip to L.A. to see Springsteen in concert oh my goodness so phenomenal don’t even get me started…Halloween…All Saints’ Day…did I mention we saw Springsteen in concert?

A wee bit of advice: it is unwise to dance on an infected foot. I’m just saying.

About the Wildfires

We’re fine—the fires are north and east of our area. I posted in more detail at Lilting House. Thanks for all the inquiries. You are so kind to think of us! Please keep all the evacuees and firefighters in your prayers.

Time Out from Homeschooling Talk

Just for a minute. Can we talk about sunscreen? One thing about living in San Diego—we are spending a lot more time in the sun than ever before. I’ve never been a sun worshipper. At our neighborhood pool in Virginia, I was the mom trying to squeeze myself into the bar of shade cast by the fencepost. In fact, I have friends who laughed hysterically when they heard I was moving to one of the world’s sunniest vacation spots. The climate, they feared, would be wasted on me.

What I didn’t realize about Southern California until living here was that, except for a few hard-baked weeks in the summer, sunny doesn’t necessarily mean hot. It’s balmy and breezy and just so darn pleasant. And so off we whisk to Balboa Park or Mission Trails, and the kindly sun beams down upon us.

Which means, of course, sunscreen is our new best friend. But I have to say I don’t entirely trust this friend. I once heard an oncologist say that if you use any sunscreen stronger than SPF 15, the chemicals are worse for your health than UV rays. I don’t know what kind of stats support that statement, but it’s always there in the back of my mind.

So what do you do? Chinaberry sells a "natural sunscreen" that’s supposed to be safer than most brands (it does not contain oxybenzone, whatever that is), but yeesh, the price tag! (Although when I went to get the URL just now I discovered they’re having an end-of-summer sunscreen sale, so there you go.)

In the summer the kids go through the stuff so quickly that I usually wind up opting for whatever’s on sale at Target. But ugh, that chemical smell, I can’t stand it. And what’s in that stuff? I seriously don’t trust it. For occasional use, fine, but for something they need to wear every day?

For myself, I seldom bother to do more than put an SPF 15 moisturizer on my face. I always forget about my arms…

I don’t wear makeup, but I’ve been looking at the SPF-containing mineral powders (like Bare Minerals) and wondering if they’re a better idea than the creams. But then I read that Bare Minerals contains bismuth, which sounds as sinister as oxybenzone. So I’m back to square one.

What brands do you use? For you, and for the kids? Do you use something
different for faces and bodies? Every day, or only in summer?