Spooky Window Treatments

How fun is this?

We were at home yesterday. An in-service day...following a day off for Yom Kippur = desperate for things to do!

Even though it is not yet October, we decided that it would be a good idea to get started on Halloween decorations.

Yet again we started with an idea from Family Fun Magazine. They suggest doing this with cardboard. I thought poster board would be infinitely easier.

We carefully measured our upstairs windows. This is unlike me. I usually eyeball it and wing it. And then regret it and rig it. This time I was smart and patient and measured. And promptly left the paper with the measurements at home. Oops.

Luckily my intermittent dyslexia (which kicks in when I am attempting to tell someone my phone number and I blank...) didn't strike and I was able to remember that the windows were each 33" X 64".

We went to Target and found black poster board for $0.69 per sheet (which rang up as only $0.57 each...ka-ching!) Each sheet was 28" x 22" so I figured we could stack 3 together with a slight overlap and end up in the 28" X 64" range.

Aren't you glad I am sharing the specific numbers since your windows will totally be a completely different size? I just want to show off how good I am at math. Impressed?

We laid the sheets out and taped them together with packing tape. Then the kids each drew Jack-o-Lantern-ish faces on the boards. Sprouts window has a seam down the middle, so she did it as one big face. Tater was doing two separate windows.

Then we (I) cut out the holes. I did offer to let them cut. They didn't want to. Really.

Is it some measure of progress on the Zen-Mommy front that I didn't yell at Sprout about sitting on the table until after I took her picture?

After we (I) cut out the faces, the kids took white tissue paper and taped it over the holes. They each did a "Dracula" face and used red tissue on the "blood".

Tater felt the need to use the longest pieces of tape he could possible tear off.

I wasn't all that zen about that.


After all of the holes were covered with paper, the faces were ready to hang up.

How happy is this kid?

We used masking tape to stick the finished faces into the windows. Of course, since I didn't actually measure the sheets as we taped them together, the first three were a few inches too long. But we rigged it to fit. Improvisation is our friend.

Sprout's window. Now her room is like a cave. No light is getting in there. She can peek out through the eye holes if she wants a glimpse of the outside world.

Tater decorated our guest room (his room is in the back). He is sad that he can't look at the faces all the time.

I suggested he could sleep in the guest room, but he was freaked out by the double bed. And the fact that we call the room "Grandma's Room". Like she might sneak in at any moment. Scaaaaarrrryyyyy!!

Now we are all set for Halloween. Although I think that the kids are on a roll now and will want to keep going. Tater had some interesting ideas last year. I wonder what he'll come up with as the month rolls along.

This was a fun, easy project that took up a decent chunk of time. And the final results are, I think, "spooktacular"!

Fine Art

How do you like this fabulous piece of art? It was painted especially for us by a young (very young) artist.

You know her as Sprout.

She did this one when she was about 4. I liked the abstractness of it and thought it looked like many of the random artworks that you could buy to fill your walls. So I got this nice frame and hung it on my wall.

This one is a Tater original.

I believe that the lines were made by driving a toy truck through paint. Very emotive, I think.

Then we have this example of a multi-media composition, I think this was a Sprout, but I can't be sure. Colored tissue paper. The rainbow-ness of it is moving in the direction of clearly pre-school art. But I love it nonetheless.

And finally, a Pollack-like splattery thing. I think this is a Tater. I should have labeled them so that my poor, weak brain cells wouldn't have to search for the answer.

I have these hanging in my "formal" living room and dining room. I think the abstractness of them is key to it not looking like my kids' artwork is hanging all over the place. But maybe it just looks like my kids' artwork is hanging all over the place and no one has called me on it.

Either way, this could be a good idea for what to do with some of the huge piles of artwork your kids bring home from school at the end of the year. It makes them feel like "real" artists to see their work hanging in real frames on the real walls.

And I love that the art on our walls means something to us.

And, yes, I know you can see my reflection taking the picture in almost every shot.
I meant to do that.

Hippity Hoppity

So, I typed "Easter Bunny" into Google, to see if I could find a picture to put in this post. And this guy came up.

I think if I showed this to Tater, he would no longer be interested in the Easter Bunny coming to our house. I think he's already on the fence about it. But since there is candy, he is willing to overlook the scariness. But this would certainly shift the balance.

This morning, as we were driving to school, Tater asked me if we have any Easter decorations. I mulled it over for a moment, and said that we did not. But did he think we needed some?

He thought we did. So I asked what sort of decorations he had in mind - assuming we were talking about a basket of colored eggs, or some bunny stickers in the window.

He said, "A big blow-up bunny with an egg for the yard".

Like the one we had just driven past on a neighbors lawn...about 5 feet tall...

Um...no.

Me: I don't like those blow-up creatures.

T: But you have a blow-up bed. (Actually, an Aero-bed for guests.)

M: Not in the yard.

T: No.

M: Should we put it in the yard to decorate for Easter?

T: Yes, with eggs on top. (giggling)

Sprout: (Who has been oblivious) - What did he say?

M: Do you think we should put the Aero-bed on the yard with eggs on it for Easter?

S: Why would we???

I think I might need to make a run to the store for legitimate decorations before Tater turns us into a tourist attraction.

Gotta Know When to Fold 'em

Just for the record, I am not a huge fan of origami. Or, to be more accurate, I am not generally any good at doing origami. And I am not a huge fan of being bad at things.

Something about the precision and the patience required makes it a not-great fit for me.

My mother-in-law is an origami master. She made me a beautiful box that I still can't believe didn't come from a fancy store somewhere. And she has frequently given us books of origami paper and the instructions to make animals and bugs and things. And after yet another confidence-draining session attempting to make elephants and crickets, I generally give up.

But today, faced with a long afternoon with Zach and Cody or getting ourselves together to do some sort of activity, I found this super easy idea that results in a origami "frisbee".

We gathered up all of the pretty papers we had given up on and made these. I made one myself to confirm that it was, in fact, as simple as it appeared. And then each of the kids made their own, with very little intervention. Sprout's is pictured at the top, Tater's at the bottom. Quite fab, I think!

To make your own, get 8 square pieces of paper. I think these are 5 x 5 or 6 x 6. The pretty ones make it more fun, but anything would work.

Put a piece of paper on the table and fold it in half to make a rectangle shape. Put the folded edge at the top. Take the left top corner and fold it down diagonally so that the edges are lined up. Then fold the right bottom corner up the same way. This will result in a parallelogram shape.
If you look, the right side will have a little "pocket" where the corner was folded up, while the left side will have an open-edge.

See the little pocket there? The other side isn't hooked together...

Do exactly the same folds with the other pieces of paper. So you have 8 little parallelograms.

Take one of the folded papers, folded side in the back and the "pocket" side facing to the right. Take the "un-pocket" side of a second piece and tuck it into the "pocket" of the first - they should fit right together.

Then take the next piece and tuck it in...go in a clockwise direction - pocket to un-pocket until the 8th one hooks the whole thing together. You can put a little glue to hold each piece together if you are actually going to try to throw it like a frisbee. They would also be pretty mounted on another piece of paper as a piece of artwork.

These would even fit my "kids art as real art" decorating theme. I like to take the more abstract pieces of kids art and frame them for my house.

They are not particularly aerodynamic. But they are pretty! Give it a try!

Light it Up

No, that's not my house. But if my kids had a vote, ours would look very much like that.

I just came across a picture from our first Christmas in this house. There are about 3 tastefully arranged strings of white lights. That's it.

Four years later - we have multi-colored lights on a tree, multi-colored lights going up the pillars in the entry, the hook from our windchimes is wrapped with red and white lights to look like a big candy cane, there are some additional white lights in between, and then there is the new (somewhat dangerous) lighted reindeer.

Most years - putting the lights up has been a one-hour ordeal. I use the little 3M sticky hooks and my fingers go numb trying to peel the itty bitty papers off of them (impossible to do with gloves). But that is about as much trauma as there has been.

This time it has taken me a full week to get them all up and functioning.

The first round of lights on the tree and the bushes went reasonably OK. Then I got the candy cane lights all wrapped up and plugged them in to find that none of the reds were lighting.

So back to the store for more reds. Unwrap, rewrap.

Back to the store for the lights for the pillars (the old (white) ones half-died). Got them all hooked up and turned on. Then about an hour later - half of the lights outside were out. One of the strings of lights from the new set had died.

Back to the store - new set. Take down, put up, plug in. Pretty.

Then an hour later - half the lights outside were out. The replacement string had died.

I finally put it all together and figured out that I had too many things all plugged in to one extension cord. Oops.

That whole thing about only plug 4 strings together...they meant that?

Rejig the cords...replace the blown string... Whew. And everything stayed lit. Score!

Then I saw the deer at the store. A cheap-ish deer allowing me to satisfy the pleas from the kids for some novelty item without a) breaking the bank and b) ending up with an enormous inflatable thing in my yard.

Brought the deer home...set him up...nearly killed myself while attempting to stake him into the ground (forgot about the sharp sharp antlers). And then only half of him lit up.

At this point two things kept running through my mind - the line in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" where he says "There's a light on this tree that won't light on one side." and the version of the 12 Days of Christmas where the guy keeps whining about putting up the !@#$%^&* Lights.

So the deer goes back in the box. And a new one comes home. And he is set up and staked in and lit up. And I am officially done.

I know - I am tired just writing it and I am sure you are all "Enough already!" reading it!

One of my favorite Christmas season pastimes is driving around on the way home at the end of the day and taking detours to see all of the Christmas lights. There is a shopping area/park with a ton of white twinkle-light covered trees and the kids beg to go past the "Sparkly Trees". There is a neighborhood next to ours with enormous mansions with very pretty Christmas displays.

But a couple of years ago, we happened to turn down this out of the way road. And the houses are neat little duplex-types. And we come around the corner and see - WOW - the house in the picture up above there. My camera-phone picture doesn't begin to capture the amount of STUFF these people have in their yard. It is utterly AMAZING.

And today when we drove by, both kids said - "We should do our house like THAT!"

I don't think we should. I am not strong enough for that...I think we have maxed out my capacity to rig up outdoor Christmas lights (although I have barely started on the back!)

But I am so glad someone out there does!

Boo!

The Halloween decorations are coming out.

My neighbor (Hi, Deb!) put up a bunch of ghost-y things today. Soon there will be Halloween lights up, skeletons sticking out of the gardens, and pumpkins on every doorstep. Other people do the full sheafs (sheaves?) of wheat, scarecrows, witches crashing into trees thing. One neighbor does a full-on haunted house in his garage. We haven't been brave enough to go in (there is smoke coming off of his lawn on Halloween and my kids refuse to even walk directly past the house, much less enter the attraction).

Here is my question. When did this all start?

When did Halloween become a decorating holiday to rival Christmas? When I was a kid (back in the day...) we carved pumpkins and called it a day. I don't even know that there were other options available. Perhaps that spider-web stuff that you can stretch across the bushes...but that was it.

About 8 years ago, I put pumpkin lights up around my front door and I felt like quite the overachiever. Now I am completely dusted...often forgetting to even carve the pumpkins (I don't like to do it too soon since they get all mushy and gross, and then I forget completely).

I am torn between my competitive side, my "good-excuse-to-put-cute-stuff-up" side, and my "but-it's-only-Halloween" side...triangulated...in a holding pattern...paralyzed...

I am guessing the decorating urge will win out, especially once the kids realize we are under-adorned. I give it a week.