Halloween Costumes: Zombie

Day 28/31:

This costume takes about 10 minutes and about $2.50. I went to the thrift store and bought a pair of jeans that were large enough to fit over another pair of pants and I bought a army-ish jacket. They each cost me $1.25. The condition of the clothes as far as tears really doesn't matter when you buy them, and being a little worn out is actually good. I used a pair of scissors to liberally shred the clothes, enough so there were lots of holes but not enough it would fall off as the kids ran around playing.



Then I rubbed black and brown crayons all over the shirt and pants to give them a dirty look. We added a little blood with Halloween makeup to the front but that part is really optional. For his hair I filled it with hairspray and ratted it up a bunch. His eyes have just a little black Halloween makeup crayon and that's it. And in 10 minutes and for next to no money it's now a child's zombie costume.



This was the picture the kids took right as they were headed off to school. A zombie, a kitty, and a viking .

The Importance of Art for Kids

I cannot express enough how important I think art is to children. Even the littlest of projects may stay in a child's mind forever and help shape the person that they will become. My grandmother was a very artistic and creative woman and started in early teaching us kids to love it too. She enrolled me in my first sewing class, helped us make enamels, taught me how to twist wire for jewelry and make coils (like this) and was always such an inspiration. Her home was very colorful and expressive and filled with interesting things for the kids and adults to find fascination in. She also gave me my first copy of Anne of Green Gables and helped cement my love of reading. I can only hope to instill in my children all of the gifts that she gave to me.

Below are a couple of the projects she helped me with. They created memories that I will never forget and, while they just seemed like fun at the time, it started a love of art that I'll always have.

Age 11: (I wasn't really this talented at enamels. My grandmother helped me quite a bit to recreate a drawing that Little-Little and I had made for her.)


Age 10: (My older sister used to draw this all the time and I wanted to recreate it as an enamel. Like the 80's ponytail?)


Age 7: (This was an exercise in perspective. I made this picture with the assumption that I was laying on the ground with the flower in front of my face and the houses off in the distance. My older sister made endless fun of me for thinking that flowers could be bigger than houses...)


After the kids went to bed last night I grabbed a level and a hammer started changing the art wall around to include my childhood enamels.



I added the canvases the kids made with punches this spring and the enamels I made when I was small (before we found out that the enamel powder had lead in it and they stopped letting me use it. boo). It also brings more blue to the top of the wall and it seems to make the chairs match everything better.



What kind of projects do you do with your kids/grandkids/nephews/nieces?

4th

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend!



We spent the weekend working on backyard projects (hopefully to share really soon) and at the annual neighborhood BBQ for the 4th. Did you do something special this weekend? Did you go somewhere or stay close to home?

Once upon a house...

Once upon a time, a daddy built his girls a dollhouse. It was a very nice dollhouse, solidly built, with 8 rooms and a staircase. It had a front door and a garage door and a nice little patio. The house was lovingly painted in bright colors left over from building the real house.

The dollhouse was played with often and was very happy.



Years went by as the 3 girls grew. 2 more girls were added and all 5 of them had played with this house. The girls painted the house new colors. Some of the floors started to give way but were temporarily replaced with cardboard. They painted it again. And again. The garage door became stuck with layers of paint. The front door was lost and a replacement was stapled in place. Part of the roof came off, and only a hinge was left to remember where it had once been. It was painted again.



More years went by and all of the girls were grown and gone. The house was moved to a storage area and forgotten. For several years the rains came and often soaked things not well protected in storage and the wood of the house swelled with water. It remained there for some time, lonely and forgotten.

Then one day the daddy was cleaning some things from storage and recalled that there was this house on the back porch. He offered it to one of his girls, who snatched it right up.



She took the dollhouse home with fond memories of playtimes past. The poor waterlogged thing was in a very sorry state indeed. Not really knowing how to work with wood or do many things handy she asked the hardware store and they sold her some paint stripper and a scraper. The paint stripper was poured on and she got to work taking away the gum it made but the poor little house wasn't looking much better. All of the water had done a lot of damage and she felt overwhelmed trying to fix it.

So the poor little house went back into the garage and there it stayed again. For 13 years the girl took the house with her everytime she moved. And every time, the house was stuck in some corner of a garage and forgotten again.



The girls had girls of their own but instead of the old fixer upper their dolls recieved move-in ready houses. The dollhouse was again forgotten and sad.



And then, one day, after those 13 long years since someone tried to last fix the house, the girl realized that she now knew a little about how to work with wood and tools. She now had some knowledge of paint. And she pulled the poor little dollhouse out and gave it another go.

Today we began sanding and I think maybe she can be saved. A little sandpaper, a little wood filler and a lot of elbow grease will be needed. But I think we can do it.



Erin said she likes the paint job after the sanding and would like to keep it that way. I think we need to paint it again but that blue if kinda pretty...

Thor

Back in 1998 I was walking around the Saturday Market and there on the grass was a couple of hippies with a box of puppies. They were all crawling over the top of each other and stepping on heads and tails. And in the middle was a beautiful golden puppy who didn't really look like his half pit-bull litter-mates (we never did know what the other half was). I was instantly in love and, though I had no plans for a dog, he came home with us.

We brought him home and we had trouble picking out a name. He was a very lazy puppy but he was half pit-bull so we knew he might not always be so lazy. We needed a name that would suit him either way. A friend jokingly suggested that if he was so lazy he should be named Thorazine and I said that Thor could work if he grew out of the lazy (he didn't) and he was so named.

When he was a few months old he accidentally knocked my small niece down and got a scolding and ever since that day he scaled his playing to the human's size. He would be tough on an adult but he was incredibly gentle with children. They would pull on his ears and try to sit on his back and he would just look at us with eyes pleading for it to stop but he never nipped. Not once. If the kids jumped on the trampoline he was right there with them, hopping along and loving it.

If you left your drink (especially a beer) anywhere he was, it was guaranteed to be knocked over and drank. Food on the floor was his domain but off of a table he just didn't touch it.

When I brought my son home from the hospital Thor spent the entire night trying to investigate this new and strange noise. He almost tipped him from the crib a few times, tried to cuddle him anytime he was down low and cried when you locked him from the room. Thor and Joe grew up together and that dog was loved.

Never was there a more faithful companion. He was a dear friend of many years. And yesterday we lost him to those years. Thor had a good 13 years and I am thankful for the friend we had for so long.

Thor 1998-2011

10-10-10 = 42 and Happily Ever After

This Sunday, I was a 10-10-10 bride. A little over a year ago we were deciding on dates when hubby, being a computer geek, noticed that the date was all 1s and 0s and could be a binary number. Since he was sitting at the computer anyway he converted it to decimal and behold, it was 42, the answer to life, the universe and everything At least, it is according to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but maybe there is something to it because it sure felt like a great day to me.



Our ceremony was in a casino since I do live in Reno after all. And I must say if you are getting married in Reno, the Atlantis really was beautiful. We looked at several of the chapels here and considered the possibility of an outdoor wedding. Unfortunately, the weather in mid October is a little too unpredictable to guarantee good outdoor weather (though it did turn out to be a beautiful day) and all of the chapels we saw looked like they might have been decorated in the 80's and then forgotten. I wanted something a little prettier and the Atlantis certainly delivered. They partition off ballrooms and bring in an arch just for the weddings and it's quite pretty.

I didn't want to spend thousands of dollars on a wedding since, as lovely as it was, it's only one day and we have the rest of our lives to be married. Luckily my family and friends are fantastic and honestly, I don't know how anyone pulls off a wedding without the help of friends and family.

All of my photos were taken by family members and friends. Luckily, someone got a nice shot of the Atlantis for me.



Selena made my cake and cupcakes and did a beautiful job. I feel that I am seriously indebted to her for this. The cake stand (cupcake tower) I made with what lumber I already had in the garage and I think it turned out pretty. My nieces Brianna and Julia helped make and place little 42s on every cupcake, too.





Since this wasn't my first wedding and we both came in to this marriage with children we decided that the kids would be our bridesmaids and groomsmen. My children walked me in and gave me away.



Technically Keith was a groomsman but he was 100% sure that he was our miniature Master of Ceremonies.



Family vows were also added to include the children as they are a very necessary component of this life and relationship.





Groomsmen


Bridesmaids


Our first family photo. I told Eric that we should come up with more reasons for him to wear a tux because he looks fantastic in one.



We actually managed to get all 11 grandkids in one place at the same time.



Though very soon we will need a new picture so we can have all 12... These are my sisters, without whom (along with Selena and Mom) I would have never pulled off a wedding so well.



Not at all hard to tell what the kids are thinking about.




Erin was glad to finally get her hands on some chocolate. Yum!



It was impossible to catch all of the family in any one shot so we took lots. The man on the left of the second shot is Eric's best friend and also our Pianist. I owe so many thanks to him as well.




All of the children had fun blowing bubbles everywhere. So did many of the adults.



All in all, quite a lovely day.

Og The Little Frog

I found an album of love letters to my grandmother from her husband. 20 years of love letters just sitting among the photo albums in their cardboard boxes (treasure troves, I tell ya). They're in a yellowing album that smells like old books (Which, by the way, is such a fantastic smell and until the Kindle can include that I can't imagine why I'd ever buy one. Psh!). Anyway, I can't believe that nobody jumped to claim the albums and I'm so glad that I did. Since there is a LOT of family history to catalogue and share (and hopefully my family will contribute more) I have started a seperate blog for all the loveliness. Come take a peek if you like over at Og The Little Frog.

Grandfathers

I've been looking back through childhood pictures and came across these two next to one another. They are my grandfathers and I think the two very different pictures say something about just how different the two sides of my family are.



Louie Glenn, my mother's father, was a farmer (I've written about him before). He almost always wore blue and white striped "farmer" overalls and smelled like a combination of vegetables, fertilizer, and tractor oil. He played a lot of games with us children, he usually had pink snowballs in the bread box, and the candy he gave us most often was the neapolitans (I still love those!). After he passed away I inherited some of his furniture. I was in middle school and I put his banquet cabinet (from the dining room) in my room and didn't keep a thing in there. When I missed him I would crawl inside and shut the doors and breathe in the smell of vegetables, fertilizer and tractor oil. Every now and then I pass an aging gentleman with that smell and I instantly like him, even though we've never met.



Erskine B. was my father's father. He usually had on a suit when I saw him which is not very surprising since he used to be a lawyer. He had bowls in several places in his house filled up with not often used coins, like silver dollars and half dollars, and I used to spend hours with those bowls. He loved to duck hunt and I even remember waking up while spending Christmas there to find out that he had left at 4 that morning to go hunting but he said to tell us "Merry Christmas". Another Christmas I remember him catering dinner which I thought very funny because there were only 12 of us. Have you ever seen the movie Must Love Dogs? Her dad reminds me so much of my grandfather, right down to the poetry recitations.

Anyway, I'm not sure that I have a point exactly, but it just made me laugh to look at these pictures together. So very different and yet somehow they both had kids with close enough interests to meet while racing cars... Strange.

7 years old

7 years ago there was a baby



Who got annoyed with picture taking for a while



Until he realized there were worse ways to get attention



My small but mighty little man



With all the youthful spirit a mother could ask for



And last Thursday (the 10th) my beautiful boy turned 7. And on Saturday in the midst of this:



There was a party for the little artist.



And the presents were opened



And wishes were made



And a good time was had by all. (Though daddy needs to practice his party face)



Happy Birthday, Glenn!