Marian's Dino Book and Lunch at School!

Marian made a dinosaur book for her best friend, who loved Dinosaurs. She checked out a book on dinos from the library and used it to model her book. It was so cute. And I am getting better at reading her phonetic spelling. Here is her book, with translation provided.

Dino Book

A Triceratops' horn are his weapon. His beak is for chewing leaves.

(Check out the nifty bone insert drawn at the top left corner!) A Hypacrosaurus bone looks like this. Hypacrosaurus can grow up to 30 feet long.

A Argentosaurus is one of the biggest dinosaurs. It eats leaves in high up places.

A Tyranosaurus Rex is a meat eater. It isn't as big as a long neck dinosaur. It guards his eggs and eats meat while he's waiting. Some dinosaurs lay their eggs and leave because they could squish their babies.

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Yesterday the school held their annual Veteran's Day lunch. Its their Thanksgiving lunch, but they have it on Veteran's Day I think because so many dads are off work that day. Maybe not, but it works out well anyway. Marian said she wanted Daddy to have lunch with her, so Dan went and enjoyed cafeteria fare first. I met him at the tail end of their lunch and handed off Rylee. Dan and Rylee went home and I waited 15 minutes for Callie's class to come to lunch. It was fun to sit with her at a table with a bunch of giggly, adorable kindergartners! Joshua's class came in just before Callie's finished, and he came to join us, and I hung out with him till his lunch was done. Th kids really enjoyed having us come. Callie was so excited all week for it, so it was nice to feel like we were special!

Dan and Marian. And Marian's friend who really wanted to be in the picture too!

Me and Callie. I don't know why my teeth look funky.

And here is Joshua enjoying some tasty turkey.

Museum of American History

Today Dan didn't have to work. We decided to go to the Smithsonian! We tossed Delaney in the stroller, and Rylee in the backpack and off we went.

The day was gorgeous, and Rylee was content to hang out. She liked being up high where she could see everything.

There was lots of neat stuff to see. We especially enjoyed the section on War. It was really interesting. Delaney enjoyed posing for pictures.

She was cute here. She was concerned as to why the man had bandages on his head.

I wondered how George Washington might have felt about a shirtless statue of himself here.

Delaney liked riding the Metro, but she thought that was all we were going to do. She was less impressed with the Smithsonian!

Rylee conked out and slept for about an hour in the carrier. It certainly made the Metro ride easier!

Delaney wanted lots of pictures of herself on the Metro. The funny thing is, she wanted me to take her picture as she looked out the window. I wasn't going to take pictures of the back of her head though.

Girls are the BEST!

I have the funnest girls. They make me laugh every day. Recently, Marian has been making "books" and it is a lot fun to see. She is so creative and comes up with the most interesting things. I am almost sad that she is giving all her books away to her friends. Here is her Thanksgiving book. Be warned, she is still a very phonetic speller!

5 little turkeys, trying not to be eaten.

1 got eaten while they were playing.

Another was eaten while they were trying to help.

Then Callie took a turkey.

Then she took another turkey to eat.

The little turkey was all alone then. He thought, "if I don't have friends, I'm going to be eaten."

And he did.

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Delaney got a haircut on Sunday. She actually asked for it and I was thrilled to oblige. She twists her hair around her finger as she sucks her thumb and it has been known to cause knots and tangles, and she has gotten her finger stuck in her hair. So I had been thinking for a while now that she needed a trim. Since she wanted "Short hair", I did cut it a little shorter than I would have otherwise.

Before

After

I couldn't get a good shot of it, but she really looks cute with the shorter hair. She definitely looks older.

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And Rylee, ahhhh, Rylee...... She is something else!
She was laying on the floor with a pencil, trying to write on the magazine. It is the toy edition, so the kids have all been going through it, circling their wish lists.

Rylee was so cute on Sunday in her lovely dress. I sat her on the stair and she thought that was the best thing ever! A little seat, just for her! She was thrilled to discover this.

Such a funny girl!

And, last, is this shot. Rylee thought she was a big girl. She grabbed the bike helmet and tried to put it on. Then she tried to climb in the tricycle. I was laughing so hard! She really thinks she is a big kid!

Quiet Book #1

Okay, the kids are in bed, Rylee is making a mess with popcorn in the living room and I have a few minutes to myself. So, I will share with you what goes on behind some of the madness that is my compulsion to make quiet books! I have a couple books. Thank you to Ebay and Amazon, I now have 5 of them. I just got one in the mail today, so I can't tell you how helpful it will be. I got most of the patterns from these books though, and from the wealth of blogs out there on the internet. Here are the most fun books I have used:

The Kite and Nose are from this one. And the Christmas Tree. I like a lot of the ideas, and they do a good job explaining how to make the pages. A good book.

This is the book with all the ideas for the quiet book I grew up with. Most of the old school ideas are in here. I like it, but it isn't always clear on HOW you do some of the things. I, of course, am not very crafty, nor am I good at sewing, so they probably assume you know that stuff and I don't. Nice long sentence there! Still, some great ideas, and a lot of them! Plus, I like that it has different activities and you can choose. For example, you have 3 different pages to choose from that involve buttons. That makes it easier to tailor it to your ability and your child's interest.

This one has some fun ideas. The cowboy, Noah's ark, the egg, the traffic pattern.... those are from here. I like the designs, but one or 2 of the pages had me scratching my head. Again, I think they expect you to be smarter than I am to know how to work some of the pages. You can still wing it, or skip it, and it has some really great ideas in it. I recommend all 3 of these if like me, you aren't confident or imaginative.

The next question is, how do I put it together. If you look online, you can find lots of different ways. I like to go with what I know and I grew up with a book made of muslin, and sewn together. I do like the idea of making them to fit into a binder so you can add pages or remove them, but that's more work than I am prepared to do right now. I like muslin because it is inexpensive and I love, love, love that it is sheer enough to trace through. The downside is that it is fragile. I like to use pellon under the places where I'm sewing something to it. So if I am sewing buttons on, I iron a piece of pellon under it to give it more support so the kids don't just rip the button off when they pull. I'm also starting to iron pellon onto the cover and back pages for more support, but the book works fine either way.

I eyeball it and cut 4 (equal sized) long pieces of muslin and fold them into quarters to make 4 pages in a row, like this. When I am done with the 4 pages on each long fabric piece, I fold it in half and sew them together. I end up with 4 pages of 4, with a total of 16 activities.

Now I have 2 pages on front and 2 on the back. (The nose is one of my favorite pages! The nose is made of chain and can be posed. So fun for the kids!)

You can see here that the pages were not cut very straight. As I said, I don't like to measure, and fortunately, this is a very forgiving medium! So if my pages are glaringly not straight, its not a big deal.

And this bottom one is the front and back covers. I get all the pages together, and I stack them in the order I most like and sew a line down the center between the 2 pages to make the book. This does mean that the only pages I coordinate to be together is the center one. I do not plan ahead for particular pages to face each other, although most people seem to.

I have gotten smarter and now I wait till I've sewed it together before using the fabric paint. The paint doesn't iron well, so it gets tricky when putting things together if I have already used it.

When do I have time? Well, I don't. Fortunately, Dan has let me take over a corner of the living room and the ironing board, sewing machine and card table are now semi-permanent fixtures. Whenever I have 10 minutes, I can sit down and work on something, since all of my supplies are strewn all over the table and ironing board. I work on them when Rylee is napping or after bedtime, or whenever I can! Plus, I do very little planning or measuring, so I just dive right into work.

I love it because I can see progress and feel like I have accomplished something. Its not like being the mom, where it is always a work on progress. I can see the end and finish something! Dishes, laundry, dinner- all these thing have to be done over and over again. But this, this quiet book making, I can do it, and I can finish it and I can feel like I have completed something that I won't have to do again tomorrow.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

And stay tuned, because I'll be posting the books that Marian has made soon.

Quiet Book #2

Yeah, yeah, I know I haven't done Quiet Book #1 yet. I didn't download those pictures yet. But I did get this one done. I made this one for my Friend's daughter who is turning one. I wanted a special present, and my friend is the most fabulous person and she's always, always there to watch the kids when I need her. Plus she is the nicest person ever. So, I wanted to do something special for her daughter. That, and I love making Quiet Books!

Front cover. I really like the sparkly paint! Oh, to make them, I know there are 100 different ways to do it and 100 different fabrics to use. I refuse to measure. Too much work. I buy a yard or 2 of muslin and eyeball it. I cut it to be about the size I want. I'll show you more when (er, if!) I get Quiet Book #1 posted.

The nesting hen and the apple tree. The apple tree is tradition now and must be included!

I did velcro since I detest sewing snaps. And I do like the lift flap on the barn. I just glued the dog inside the barn door.

I decided I love the lift flaps on the houses. I put pictures of her family on the house. I like the roof flap a lot, that's her dog in there! And the girl has yarn hair to braid or whatever. I wish had made it longer. Still, it was easier than I thought it would be and I think it came out cute.

The chick in the egg and the Jack-o-Lantern.

The kids had a great time helping me t cut out eyes and mouths and noses for this pumpkin. The pumpkin and the face parts are felt, so they stick to each other. I like that! And the spare parts fit inside.

This mailbox was so cute. It was easy to do too. Well, once I got the pattern printed, it was easy. I couldn't eyeball this one at all!

An envelope will fit inside the mailbox, so you can write letters and mail them off. hee hee hee.

I thought these hula girls were so doggone cute! I traced them in a coloring book. That's why I love the muslin! I found this adorable ribbon and used it for skirts. My biggest trouble was the fact that in the coloring book, the girls had dressed on, so I had to wing it on the legs and I didn't do such a great job. But the skirts are adorable, so who cares! The vase I like because the flowers come out to play with. I did make it a bit too big though.

The princess was also from a coloring book. And the jewels are the first time I used adhesive backed velcro. It worked quite well! I also have gained a testimony of heat-bond and used that on the velcro to stick the jewels to. The pieces were so small, I wasn't sure there'd be enough to stitch on. That may not have made sense. All you need to know is, it was simple and fun! And it is cute.

See, cute! And the stop light is a fun one I like a lot.

This is the first time I tried the garden. I saw it on a blog online and loved it. I had some trouble figuring out what kinds of veggies grow underground. I do know that potatoes do not have green stems like carrots but that's what I had!

I like the Kangaroo and the baby joey that comes out of her pocket. I wish I had a pattern for a full joey, not just his head, but I'm not good enough to try to freehand that!

And the back came out super-cute! I tried this purse for the first time and it looks good. Even more fun is that you can put fun things in it. Open the button closure and see what's inside!

There is a hair clip, a bead bracelet I made and I made a lipstick out of felt. It came out better than I expected. I also made some felt money which was really cute.

So that's what I have done for my friend's daughter. I love it and may have to make another one!! If you want to know how I did anything specific, ask me and I'll let you know!