I love technology. While Hurricane Irene mostly avoided central Virginia, Sam had a few minutes of “video playdate” with her oldest friend in the Bay Area. Sam and Meri have known each other since they were 1 year old, and even though they haven’t seen each other since they were 4 (sniff!) they enjoyed playing …

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A menu (with coupons!) for one of our favorite pizza places… in the East Bay. OK, so this is slightly less useful than the ketchup packet, but the coupons don’t have expiration dates, so I’ll probably keep saving them 🙂

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This November we made a Thanksgiving tree. We started with twigs from the back yard, dirt and twine. Then we added felt and brown paper “leaves.” On the leaves we wrote things that we are thankful for. Sam is crazy about writing these days and insisted on writing her own gratitudes (with me spelling the words for her). …

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I’ve been neglecting the blog of late because I’m pouring all available nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and adverbs into the novel I’m writing for NaNoWriMo. As of today the novel is 21,666 words and I need to get to 50,000 by the end of November. These words you see here? Renegades. They’re slipping through …

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All three of us got our craft on last month. The first rainy Saturday we spent making rubber stamps for our Letterboxing obsession. AC did the actual carving. Here Sam makes us a model for the butterfly stamp she wanted: My tulle tutus for Sam’s little “magical dress-up” birthday party. Try saying “tulle tutus” twenty …

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“‘What are you doing up there, Charlotte?’ ‘Oh, making something.’ she said. ‘Making something, as usual.'” Charlotte’s Web has been running through my mind lately, not only because the audiobook is still the daily soundtrack around here, but also because I’ve been feeling a little like Charlotte recently. After Sam …

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Warning: this activity is highly contagious. It involves ink, stamps, maps, compasses, clues, and an internet connection. It will make you look at your neighborhood differently. It will make you get on your knees a lot. You will spend time hunched down poking through bushes, counting trees, peering into hollow logs, …

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Salt dough letters and shapes: They looked like cookies until Sam painted them. Egg carton spiders: We made these when we were reading Charlotte’s Web. We also use them in French class when we sing “L’araignée gypsie” (The Itsy Bitsy Spider). Using the hole punch on painted egg carton was difficult and so the second …

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Tonight when I was putting Sam to bed, she said, pulling the covers up to her chin petulantly, “I want a new Mommy. One that lets me do the things I want to do.” “OK,” I said. And I thought, for the hundredth time today, “Thank goodness AC comes home tomorrow!” AC has been in the UK for the past two weeks. I’ve missed …

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I cried this morning during read-a-loud time. It was the penultimate chapter of Charlotte’s Web. Sam handed me a tissue and said, “It’s OK, Mommy. It’s just pretend.” While I was crying and trying to read the words using the voices for each character that I had settled on (Charlotte– cultured, standard American; …

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