Marilyn Nelson

 Last night I went to a reading being given by Marilyn Nelson, a well-known poet who has published numerous volumes of poetry and who, from 2001-2006, was poet laureate of Connecticut.

In short, the reading was amazing. I left the reading really inspired and excited about the poetry she'd read. One poem she read is still unpublished, about two women, Millie and Christine, who were conjoined twins born in 1851-- she said she found this story while digging through the National Archives. I'm looking forward to seeing it in print and experiencing it again.

My favorite set of poems that she read came from her book Fortune's Bones. Essentially, they tell the story of a skeleton that, up until the 1970s, hung in the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT. In the 1990s the museum commissioned a forensic team to research the history of this skeleton and its provenance. What they found was that the bones were from a slave who lived around 1745 and who worked for a doctor who worked as a bonesetter. When the slave died, the doctor dissected him and prepared the bones for display in his house for educational purposes. The series of poems in the book tell this story from a range of perspectives, and they are really astonishing. I would highly recommend this book--check it out from your library or purchase it.

The final set of poems she read came from a book called Sweethearts of Rhythm (which was illustrated by Jerry Pinckney, who won a Caldecott Medal for The Lion and the Mouse). Anyway, this set of poems draws inspiration from a multiracial all-female touring band during the 1930s and 40s and the poems are all written from the instruments' perspectives.

Yeah, We "Decorated" for Halloween Already . . .

The other day I told J to go ahead and mow down some of our pachysandra because there was a lot of tall grass growing among it and it just looked really, really, really bad. Well, I think there were also a lot of spiders living in that grass. Just CHECK OUT our azalea bushes the next day!!!!!!

Leaf Crafts

Fall is starting to really kick in around here. Lots of leaves falling, lots of trees really changing color. We checked out Lois Ehlert's awesome book, Leaf Man, from the library and decided to make our own leaf people. To do this, we went on a long walk around our neighborhood, collecting all different kinds and shapes of leaves, looking for interesting colors and styles. The kids had a blast doing this, although I got very tired pulling them both in the wagon around our (very hilly) neighborhood. It's harder than you might think to pull 65 lbs of children up a hill in a wagon while trying to stop and pick up interesting leaves all along the way. Anyway, here's a photo of some of our leaf bounty!

It was also harder than I expected to attach the leaves to the paper. When leaves dry, they start to curl up, so you don't want them too dried out. But if they're wet, they also don't stick well either. (Ehlert talks about this problem at the very end of her book, when she talks about creating the artwork. Her solution was to find leaves and make color photocopies of them while they were still fresh and flat. Great solution but not so convenient or economical for us, as color copies are something like $1 per page! But an idea for a future activity perhaps, or for someone who owns their own color copier or scanner).

So, we started off with Elmer's glue and then I put wax paper over the leaf people and stuck a book on top so they would dry flat. R made the lady with a yellow leaf skirt. I made the little man, and then there's a baby (on the red paper) that R made. Note, if you can, that the princess is holding a flower (a really pretty-shaped leaf we found) and that the baby has red hair on top of his head.

In addition to making leaf people, we did leaf rubbings which was super fun, I really got into this. I just think they are SO pretty. R arranged them just so on the window for me and I had to talk her into letting some of the leaves hang upside down. In the picture below, you can also see a princess that R colored in next to the leaf queen--this is so that we have a whole family up there. After putting her up, R declared that the baby was a boy. So you can just guess who lines up with who on there!

As we move into October, we'll start adding more Halloween-y things to our window. We got that started with a foam sticker craft the kids did on Friday when we had their friends over for dinner and playing. You can see RUS's foam spider with stickers while R decorated a cat that isn't in the picture--it's on the right side of our window.

Grammie and Grampie also gave the kids some Halloween window clings so those are adorning the other set of kitchen windows, the kids had a lot of fun putting those up last night.

101

J pointed out to me that today RUS is 101 weeks old.

Yet Another Backdated Post

This one goes all the way back to those long-promised first beach visit pictures. I've had this post in the queue for months now, but it took me forever to get the pictures off of Grammie's camera, and then to upload the pictures to the post, and THEN to remember to add text to the post. It really was quite a lovely afternoon and it turned out to be the only Delaware beach trip we made this summer-- we went to the beach in San Diego and in Maryland, but not again in Delaware. Anyway, here you go: Our first beach trip this summer!

And, believe it or not, I still have more backdated posts to put up. One is about R's other big birthday gift, from Grammie and Grampie--I have a LOT to say about this and quite a few pictures that aren't on this particular computer.

And, this one is really embarrassing. You all know how we went to Japan last year? Well, I still haven't fully blogged about my brother's wedding! There are way more Japan pictures to put up. At this rate, it's going to be a "Happy first anniversary Local Hero and Local Heroine!" blog post.

Community Day 2011

Our city has an annual "Community Day" festival in mid-September and it is, hands-down, my favorite local event. We got there really early--it started at 11 and we were there by 9:30--so we let the kids run around on campus for a bit first. That was actually really, really fun. The kids had a blast at the fountain and then climbing on various walls and elements in front of campus buildings.

Then we headed over to the festival itself, which is chock-full of booths advertising events, local businesses, independent sellers, schools, child care facilities, everything. At three separate booths we got free books for the kids! Wahoo!

One of our favorite booths was the one for our local state park, which had a "mystery touch and feel" box where you stuck your hand in and tried to guess what it was. One of them made me scream and it ended up just being fuzzy grass. One was a snakeskin that J tried to get me to feel and actually figure out what it was, but I am so easily skeeved out that I couldn't bring myself to really go at it. The kids LOVED it though! R got to use stamps to decorate a forest scene with all kinds of animal stamps and tracks.

At our local library's booth, we got tickets for a free gift from the library (yippee!), picked up two free books (Magic Treehouse for R and Mem Fox for RUS-- I absolutely love her books) and the kids had a great time decorating these hats. RUS especially really enjoyed sticking the stickers on. I think we are going to implement some more sticker crafts for him very soon :) R got her hat fitted so that it stayed on a little bit better, and you can see that in the bottom picture.

We hadn't intended on buying lunch but it came to be noon and we weren't ready to leave yet, so we went ahead and bought falafel sandwiches from one of the booths, and here's R posing with the Egyptian Princess.

After eating, we walked around to a few more booths. R and I got Raspberry Cheesecake ice cream cones from our local dairy--SO AWESOME, I am not even kidding you. If any of you visit we will buy a pint of this stuff to share with you all. And R really wanted to try a few more "spinning wheels" which was good because she finally won the highlight of her day--a tiny little highlighter from the university radio station.

She brought the highlighter to school today and proudly shared it with her teacher and another friend as they colored before school started.

Lego Adventures

Our local Lego store turned 1 year old recently and as part of their birthday celebration hosted a Building Event at the mall. J and I took the kids. Basically, you could build anything you wanted out of three different shapes of red bricks. There was quite the crowd participating.

 R had a blast putting together a castle that ultimately became a throne with J, while RUS and I pushed the stroller around and tried to avoid running into people

 Here's R's finished product--the construction right in the center of the picture.

And here she is displaying her "Certificate of Achievement"!

Look what RUS can do!!!!!

At Great Grammy and Aunt L's!

And here's my last, belated, post about our trip to CT from last month. I've already covered everything right up until we stopped over at Great-Grammy and Great-Aunt L's house for a delicious lunch and family gathering before heading on our way back down south.

It was great to catch up with family members we don't get to see often. Both J and I commented afterwards that we'd had a really really great visit.

R enjoyed hanging out with her second cousin K, who is just stunning.

And before we left, we made sure to get some R snuggles with Great-Grammy and Great-Aunt L! RUS was already asleep and in the car, otherwise he would have joined them, I'm sure.

What We Did This Weekend

We made chalk tracings of ourselves, of course. 

J:

(I did the tracing. R colored in his shirt and shorts, drew his shoes, added a hat and eyes and his mouth.)

R:

 (I traced R and drew her shirt, skirt, and her right bracelet. R drew her hair, face, necklace, her left bracelet, and her shoes. And then I decorated her shoes with little tiny babies.)

S:

 (R traced my body and drew my fingers. I drew my own face and made a rainbow sleeve and a polka dot sleeve, per R's instructions.)

RUS:

(J did the tracing and I did all the coloring).

We Couldn't Resist . . . Back to the Orchard this Weekend

One of our goals this fall is to come up with activities that don't involve spending money every time we leave the house. Our local orchard is one of the most awesome places to go because there are tons of things to climb and play on, and there are animals, and there is just a lot of hands-on activity. Until their weekend "Fall Festivals" start, there's no admission! It's all completely free. (Once the Fall Festival kicks in, though, there's an admission fee and there are a lot more activities.)

Anyway, here are my photos from this afternoon's jaunt. R as always loves to get her picture taken in the cutouts. She really loved climbing on all the vehicles and having RUS and J and I "ride" while she drove.   RUS, on the other hand, would pose for about 5 seconds and then run away, making it hard for me to actually snap pictures since I usually had to log in to my phone before taking a shot. He also got very upset when we dragged him out of the sandbox so I couldn't get him to pose against the height chart. Oh well!

I really wanted to get RUS behind this apple--this was one of the photo ops I missed!

But I did manage to get Farmer RUS, and I especially LOVE this picture because the way he is angled it really looks as if that is his body.

You can't tell, but R is flying a plane.

And now she's driving the school bus!

And crawling through the train!

R made J and I stand against this too. No surprises there-- I am "almost 5 and 1/2", aka 5'5" and J is "almost 6", aka 5'10". Here it looks as if R is about 40 inches, or "3 and 1/3."

Apple Crafts!

Yes, it's that time of year again. Apple craft time! I saw this apple print idea in a magazine (see picture below) and thought I'd give it a shot with the kids, so one morning we whipped out the paint, cut up two apples (one lengthwise, for that classic apple shape, and one horizontally, to get the star-print where the seeds are) and got everything all set up on our porch.

R picked out the paint colors: red, pink, purple, and blue. I made her take off her fancy dress--all that fabric was sure to get dipped into the paint at some point and I didn't want to deal with the mess it would make.

RUS got in on the action too, of course, although I failed to get pictures of him doing it. The difficulty is that when you try to get a picture of him, it means you're not at that same moment making sure he doesn't do something else you don't want him to do--like eat paint or start painting the walls of the porch. This green sheet is RUS's creation. R made quite a few prints. The one below is my favorite--she loved being able to fold the paper in half and see the mirror image appear on the other side.

And she was pleased as punch to pose afterwards with the apples!

To commemorate our first visit to the orchard, we did two apple crafts. The first was to make an apple tree and cut out some apples from red, yellow, and green construction paper. RUS helped us crumple up tissue paper and decorate the apples, but R and I did most of the work. R cut out almost all the yellow apples and I think I did the green ones. J decorated a few, too. Then R and I colored on a tree that I cut out of brown construction paper--we tried to give the bark a somewhat realistic tone!

Then R dictated the placement of the apples on the tree, as well as the placement of the tree on the window. As the season progresses, we'll add more things--like pumpkins, maybe even bats and a full moon, and of course, turkeys!

In addition to our tissue and construction paper apples, R and I made some "a is for apple" apples. We cut out letter "a"s, dug seeds out of a few of our orchard-fresh apples, cut out construction paper stems and leaves, and glued them all on. R even took one in to her pre-Kindergarten class, which is about to start a unit focusing on individual letters so her teacher was VERY interested in this particular craft. We haven't stuck these apples up on our tree yet but they'll be appearing there very soon.

I will say, in doing all these crafts lately, I've realized that RUS is not all that interested in doing crafts. It was easier working with 2-year-old R on crafty stuff because we only had her to work with. But with both of them it is really hard to monitor and help R while trying to wrangle RUS at the same time. I've been trying to come up with some crafts that he can do more easily. Like stick stickers on stuff. He loves that! And he's been having fun with crayons lately so those masterpieces may be appearing in select mailboxes before too long.

I think the other thing too is that I forget that R was a lot like this too-- you had to focus on crafts with a short attention span. She's been so interested in crafty stuff for so long that I've forgotten it ever used to be hard to get her to do them. I would plan out cards for the cousins, for example, and it'd take a week to get them done because she'd only be willing to do one card at a time! Or just one step at a time!

Ok, I finally blogged about R's birthday party

Here's the link: R's 4th Birthday Party

Apples, Apples, Apples!

You GUYS. I am SO EXCITED that it is fall. I cannot even tell you. I absolutely adore the transition from summer to fall and we were so excited to celebrate the first weekend of apple picking at our local orchard by picking some fresh Gala apples--I know we'll make it back out there at least one more time before Halloween to get more apples. Maybe with Grammie and Grampie in tow next time.

And of course one of the kids' favorite things to do is get photo ops with the scarecrow and the picture cut-outs.

Here's RUS with the scarecrow . . .

and then here's R with brown pigtails . . .
and now blonde pigtails!

R's Fall Activity

Last year R did dance class all year long. After dance ended, she didn't seem to miss it at all, and when we asked her if she wanted to do it again she was really indifferent and in fact acted mostly like she hadn't even heard the question. But a friend of hers had a birthday party at a local gymnastics place and ever since then, all we heard about was how much she wanted to do "gin-nastics" so we took the plunge and signed her up with one of her preschool classmates.

Saturday was the first class.

SHE LOVED IT. I'm so happy because it is just really refreshing for her to get really fired up about the class as opposed to being "ok, I have dance class." I mean she didn't hate dance, she just wasn't excited about it.

Here they are warming up. R and her friend are the two at the right facing one another. R is wearing pink, her friend is in red.

Doing a mini-obstacle course, which included hanging from the rings, walking across the parallel bars on hands and feet, and swinging from the single bar and then playing hopscotch.

On this one they had to jump from fish to fish, crawl through the tunnel, jump in and out of the ball pit, do a handstand for 10 seconds, and then climb the rock wall and slide down.
Afterwards I asked her what her favorite part was and she said, "doing the handstands!"