Whizzing along from September to October

We've acclimated to the school year routine.  We're weathering the cooler temperatures.  The nights are getting dark earlier.  All signs that winter (my least favorite season) is on it's way.  

I appreciated this reminder not to let the turkeys get me down.  

Terrible dark pictures of Katie roller skating at a birthday party.  

I'm thrilled she's so capable.  I don't roller skate, so it's awe inspiring to me.  

I'm reading my 5th/6th graders The Horse and His Boy this year.  (We did Magician's Nephew last year.)  I decided to get the Narnia map I'd grown up with, but I was disappointed in the quality of this version.  It's not a printed paper poster like the one I had as a kid.  It's photo paper, and not great print quality.  It feels like someone took a cell phone photo of the real map and printed that.  

Katie's flag football season is drawing to a close.  They won one game this year.  

Took the cats in for their shots.  It's nobody's favorite.  I ended up bleeding and Grumman and Fiona gave me the side eye for the rest of the day.  

I stopped at a local Little Free Library to swap some books, and it was full of baby frogs!

It's been a while since I've been up close & personal with amphibians.  

We read a book about the changing season and watercolored autumn leaves on diffusing paper.  

I like that I could use different leaf shapes for different classes, so I could see at a glance which dry leaves belonged in which stack.  The following week, we mounted the leaves on construction paper and wrote Give Thanks in paint marker for a fall decoration.  I didn't get any pictures of the finished projects, though.  

I'm pretty sure there's a picture of Annaliese very similar to this somewhere.  Just purple softball uniforms instead of blue flag football ones.  Katie is #2.  

Speaking of Katie, she had a birthday!

My baby is 13.

At the pumpkin patch for evening church one night.  

This story isn't finished yet.  I introduced my 2nd graders to Kandinsky, and we're working on a Kandinsky inspired project.  

Here's the example I made them.  Fingers crossed they can create something similar.  

My eclipse supplies.  I sat outside on the porch swing for the whole thing.  The kids popped in and out of the house.  

We were in the 80% band of the map.  We did have some clouds, but they were moving quickly, so we got some good views.  

No, Grumman did not look at the sun.  

Is it me, or does the eclipse look like the French hood Anne Boleyn wore?  Not that I'm Tudor obsessed or anything.

Fiona IS autumn decor.  

She's also a fairly good seat warmer.  

Jack's boss needed an aerial shot of his business for the county.  So Jack and I flew the drone one morning.  (Okay, Jack flew the drone while I hovered nearby telling him not to crash, not to go over the road, not to go too high, and other "helpful" things.)  

Tell me you've been flying a drone without telling me you've been flying a drone.  I'm just glad he had access to the roof it came down on.  

Still weird.  

Grumman pulls random things out of the clean laundry and drags them upstairs to me.  He was really enjoying this pair of boxers.  

Fiona would much rather hold down my latest projects in the sewing room.  

Speaking of projects, this was a fun one.  Our city was holding a drive through donation event for the food bank.  Instead of going through the pantry and pulling out random garbanzo beans and such, we made birthday cake kits.  A couple 4 packs of disposable covered casserole pans, cake mix, frosting, candles, extra packs of unopened napkins from birthdays gone by.  I printed coloring pages, and we put a colored page in the bottom of each one, hoping to brighten the recipients' day.  

My step mom sent us an advent calendar.  I put it away so I wouldn't peek at it.  Now to remember 1) to pull it out on the right day, and 2) where "away" is when the time comes.

The school choir performed in church.  I was impressed.  The accompanist lost her guitar strap in the middle of the song, and the kids kept right on singing while she seated herself and began playing again.  

I've found some odd things in the washer over the years.  But this was my first pair of scissors.  Instead of, "WHO PUT SCISSORS IN THE LAUNDRY?!?!" which would have elicited panic and lies, I left a note on the white board, and the guilty party laughed and indicated they'd seen it.  

This year's school pictures, brought to you by the color orange.  Not sure why they're using the Trump filter on everybody, but several of the moms were like, "This barely looks like my kid.  They're supposed to be blonde, not redheaded."  

Unlike the cake kits, this was an idea that was better in my head.  I had no idea how long caramel takes to melt, and by the time it finally did, the kids had lost interest and wandered off.  The results weren't really worth the trouble, so we won't be doing this one again.  

Stay tuned for visits from the adult kids.  Maybe if I get really inspired I'll even go back and share the highlights of the rest of our road trip.  It really was quite the adventure.  

Our Spring Break Week

I've been sewing!  I went to a quilt show with a friend, and came home with some new fabric, which inspired me.  

Here are the fabrics I picked up.  The center is a charm pack that coordinates with the two prints on the left.  

I decided these needed to be a bag.  These are the (sideways) front and back of the bag.  

I had the yellow piping in my bias tape bin.  The white is the lining of the external pocket.  

I picked up some foam interfacing at JoAnn's.  This is the "trying to figure out how to sew the guts and have everything right side out at the end" part.  

Seriously, Fiona?  Usually Grumman is the one messing with my sewing stuff.  

He must be a bad influence.  

The finished bag, side one.  Straps are made from navy, extra wide, double fold bias tape with a stripe of lime twill tape.  

And side two.  The inner lining is the bottom navy print.  I bought a Bagnet that's the baby green of the lower right charm square.  

Katie had a biome diorama project for school.  This is the "working on it the night before it's due, in pajamas with bath hair" picture.  

This is the, "Hey, Hannah, take a picture of your sister's finished project for me" on the way to school shot.  

Ah, now this is what usually happens.  While I was puttering in the sewing room, I found a UFO and decided to finish it.  So when I picked up the foam interfacing for the bag, I also got a yard of minkee to back the little blanket I was working on.  I got to the point where I was ready to put them together, so I spread the minkee out on the floor, and Grumman lost his mind.  He ran over, slid onto it like a baseball player, grabbed it, bit it, bunny kicked it...  little psycho.  

Eventually, I shoed the Grum away and serged the top to the minkee.  Then it was time to bind the edges.  My basket of bias tape yielded almost enough bias tape.  :sigh:  

The finally finished product.  (This UFO was started during the mask sewing part of the pandemic, 3 years ago.)  It's a small blankie, a good car seat size, so I'm sending it off to Texas for the grandbabies.  

I spy Fiona in the window.  

JoAnn's is dangerous for me.  Even though I went with a list of like 5 items I needed, I ended up with a few extras.  Such as this Starry Night inspired print that became napkins backed in navy flannel.  

And there's my Grum-lin (Grumman the gremlin) who immediately came over to "model" with them as soon as I tried to take a picture.  

Proof of life that Jack still exists.  He had something on his elbow that he couldn't see, so I was going to take a picture of it so he could look at his elbow.  He recently had a birthday and got new sheets as one of his gifts.  Because when you're an adult, presents can be practical.  

Katie brought home her mountain biome in one piece, so I took a better picture of it.  

While we were on Spring Break, Katie got the opportunity to participate in a medical study at Shriners.  

They took some measurements, we answered some surveys, and they had her do some step ups to get her heart rate up.  Then we went to the lab for a little finger stick blood test, and then a couple more measurements and we were done.  It was an easy way for us to give back in a small way for all the care we have received there.  

Dropping Jack off at work, we often see bunnies in the mornings, but this was the closest one we've seen.  I'm always afraid of hitting them as I roll through the teardrop shaped loop where I let him out, so I go really slowly.  

Having a week off has been a nice rest.  We've had one "thing" each day, but not been so booked up that it's been stressful.  Hopefully we'll go back refreshed and ready to hit the massive twirly slide that is the chaos time between Spring Break and the end of the school year.