Food and bodies and lists and links

Well, wow. I knew I wasn't the only one who felt this way about how we eat in this crazy culture, but jeez, thanks for all the comments. You folks are awesome. A round of smoothies for you all!

"A balanced diet" is what I was always taught to aim for, but it seems that nobody knows what that means any more. My mother, who is a registered holistic nutritionist, insists on an 80/20 rule for healthy eating: if you eat well (not necessarily perfectly, but well) 80% of the time, then for the other 20% you can go a little nuts, and your body isn't going to suffer for it, because it's already nutritionally happy. Mom enjoys the odd trip to A&W as much as any of us (and perhaps a little more than some). There's also much to be said for the emotionally therapeutic effects of some foods that might not be technically "good" for you. Eating a big wodge of cheesecake while having a laugh with some dear friends is good for you, no matter what the nutritional profile of the cheesecake is. And sometimes a bowl of ice cream really does make everything better. Not a bucket of ice cream, and not ice cream to the exclusion of all other things, but a nice bowl of ice cream. And if you're going to have a bowl of ice cream, shouldn't be actual ice cream rather than some fat-free stuff that's all filler and weird chemical additives?

Can you tell I've been thinking about this since yesterday?

Since I was talking about fat-phobia and body image, I thought I'd share this little thought with you: when I'm explaining to Miss B why certain foods aren't fit for frequent consumption (fast-food offerings and what have you), I'm very careful to emphasize how those foods make you feel, rather than how eating too much of them might make you look. So, rather than saying that such and such will "make you fat," the line around here is that eating poorly makes people "floppy and ill-tempered." This is important to me, because,

• first of all, the idea that there's a clear equation between body weight or size and overall good health is constantly being disputed, and to reduce the complex issue of health to the size of one's jeans is ludicrous,
• secondly, telling kids that something will "make them fat" as a deterrent to them eating it means that you're placing a value judgement on people of larger sizes, and it could easily lead a child to the ridiculous and incorrect conclusions that a) being fat is inherently bad, and b) people who are fat are that way because they do not know about nutrition,
• thirdly, it's just not true: I know many people who eat all kinds of crappy processed food as dietary staples and are still stick-thin (although they may not be remotely healthy),
• fourthly, it places an undue emphasis on outward appearance generally,
• fifthly, a child with many years of growing ahead of her (or him) is undoubtedly going to have weight fluctuations, and I want those to be understood as normal, not as the result of some kind of "bad" behaviour, and
• sixthly (am I still talking?), the threat of becoming "floppy and ill-tempered" works for me because it reiterates that the way a person feels and the way she (or he) interacts with others is of far greater consequence than the way she (or he) looks. And it sounds kind of archaic and funny at the same time.

It is absolutely true that too much fast food makes people (okay, me) floppy (as in un-energetic, lacking oomph, wanting for get-up-and-go, unable to participate fully in life's good times), and ill-tempered (the highs, the lows, the crashes... hardly suitable for children). Size and shape have nothing to do with it.

Oh, I could ramble on. But you all know where I'm going with this, right? Arright, I'll stop.

A few people who left comments on yesterday's post also left links to articles:

• 2WeeMonsters recommended this read on what happens when people swing too far in the health-food-at-all-costs direction, which is of course the flip side of the fast-and-packaged-food effect. It's a really well-written reflection by a natural-health practitioner who once suffered from what is now being called orthorexia nervosa, and
• my old schoolmate Dara mentioned some columns she had written on children and nutrition. I haven't made my way through all of them yet, but these two recent ones both have some good advice about not stressing too much over picky eating.

Also, I wanted to link to some of my older columns at The Scope, which is celebrating its 100th issue today (yay!). If you're looking for ways to subtly and joyfully boost the nutritional value of your food, these recipes may be of some use to you. Some of them are from before we went gluten-free in the house, so they might require some fiddling if gluten is a problem for you (you can just sub in your preferred flour mix, but you know how that sometimes goes). Some of them are purely dessert-and-snack-y, but any veggies count, right?

• Gluten-free brownies (with black beans)
• Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies (with white beans and, obviously, pumpkin)
• Cornmeal berry muffins (with quinoa)
• Chili (with quinoa or brown rice, and sweet potatoes)
• Veggie burgers (with chickpeas, lentils, walnuts and veggies - I have no idea if most kids would like these, but they might)
• Chocolate beet cake (which might be my most popular recipe ever, full of beety goodness)

And finally, I wanted to link to two other blogs which have very little in common with one another, but which both get me thinking. The first is The Ethical Butcher, which documents the awesome quest of Portland-based butcher Berlin Reed to make ethically-raised meat available to the people. If you live in the Portland area you may have heard about Berlin's Bacon Gospel and heritage breed feasts, and even if you don't eat meat yourself, you have to respect his passion for real, honest, delicious food.

The second has nothing to do with cooking, crafts, home economics, or parenting small children (I do have other interests, you know), but has some extremely moving posts on body image. It's called Bloginatrix, and it's written by NYC-based burlesque performer and teacher Jezebel Express. The writing is sharp, personal, funny, occasionally angry, and always thought-provoking. Jezebel's last entry on feeling disempowered while picking up a load of make-up made me well up and sniffle, and I'm a pretty tough cookie.

Alright, off I go. We have a handyman in, putting in a range hood so our whole house can stop smelling like spaghetti every time we make it. Why is it that food smells can be so transcendent in the moment, and so utterly gross when they appear in the wrong time and place (like in my bedroom, in the middle of the night)?

Jeggings, fauxnuts, and a bad thing I did

If I were a cooler person, I would know that there is a word for hybrid jeans-leggings, and that the word is "jeggings." I'm not that cool, though, so I just thought they were skinny, skinny jeans like the people who were mean to me in junior high would have worn. Part of me rejects outright any style throwback to the 1980s, a decade of such fashion hideousness that it still gives me nightmares. The return of the Cosby sweater disturbs me in ways you can't possibly imagine.

And yet, the jeggings. They're kind of cool, and they don't bunch up when you put boots on over them. Boot-bunching makes me all panicky. So when I saw a jeans-to-jeggings post on Wardrobe Refashion I figured, hey, why not? I had these stretchy maternity jeans that had gone through several lives, passed from a friend over to me, over to another friend, and back to me again. I think they had already been worn by several pregnant ladies before making their way to the first friend, too. They're super soft, but they were definitely looking a little sloppy and stretched out after all that wear.

No before picture, sorry, but I'm sure you can picture "sloppy boot-cut jeans" without visual assistance. Now they're like this:

I just put them on inside-out, pinned where I wanted to take them in along the inseam, did a zig-zag stitch and then ran a straight stitch just inside it, and trimmed the excess. It's a relatively untidy job, but they're so comfortable I don't even care. I wore them to Hubby C's book launch on Monday with a really cute dress that is too short to wear as a dress and too flowy to wear over regular jeans. Total hit.

You need the boots to get the full impact of the legging-ness. Ah, Sorels. How iconic you are. The only thing I don't like about my new jeggings is the way they have that fake faded effect at the tops of the legs, and they're kind of weirdly fake-faded on the back, too. I think I might dye them... has anyone ever removed the colour from multi-toned jeans and then overdyed them with any success? I'm hesitant to use bleach on them, because they're already so worn it might kill them. Now that I actually like them, I want to keep them in decent shape.

***

And now, let me tell you about fauxnuts.

They're fake doughnuts, baked in one of those doughnut-shaped pans instead of dropped into seething oil. They're basically O-shaped muffins. They're full of wholesome goodness, but they look like they're full of sugary fun. They have pumpkin, carrot, parsnip, and apple purées in them, and they're made with brown rice and buckwheat flours. My kids are going mad for them.

I bought the doughnut-mold tin to add a little bit of novelty to Miss B's school lunches. But the real beneficiary has been Bear, who has decided he's never going to eat another vegetable again, but somehow appreciates the veggie-liciousness of the doughnuts. I don't like lying to him, so I keep telling him that the fauxnuts have vegetables in them, but I'm pretty sure I sound like the teacher in the Peanuts specials.

I am fundamentally opposed to lying to children - or to anyone - about what's in their food. I think it's a horrible thing to do to kids, and that it sets a dangerous precedent for the table becoming a battleground. I don't know if boys end up with the same food issues that girls so often do - if they do, nobody ever talks about it. I want my table to be a place of trust, joy, pleasure, celebration. Not to say we never fight at the table, but we keep it minimal. And I try to be perfectly clear with Miss B about what she's eating, even if it means pointing out things she doesn't like. I'd rather do that than be accused of trying to sneak something by her. It's impossible to sneak anything by that kid, anyway, so why not just be upfront about it?

I'm not losing sleep about Bear not getting tons of vegetables. He eats lots of fruit, and grainy baked goods, and he's the picture of apple-cheeked toddler health. Still, though, I would like him to develop a taste for vegetables sooner rather than later, if I can do it. But in my quest to find ways to make vegetables palatable to young Bear, I did a horrible thing. A horrible thing I swore I'd never do. I bought a copy of Deceptively Delicious. It was remaindered, mind you, and I got it at the grocery store, but I bought it nonetheless. I feel so dirty.

I loathe so much about that book. The very premise - that vegetables are something you have to trick your children into eating - offends my soul. Jessica Seinfeld's little quips about how her kids "would never eat this if they knew what was in it" make me want to hurl the book through a window. The little line drawings of the author winking and making shushy-faces make me want to get out my best black pen and give her a mustache and devil horns. Oh, how smug you are, Ms Seinfeld! Oh, how clever of you to lie to your children at every meal! What a favour you're doing them!

I have to admit, though, that the recipes aren't all bad. None of it's rocket science, and I doubt there's a mom out there who hasn't figured out a few tricks for making certain foods more appealing to her kids. Unfortunately, I have had to swap 2/3 of the ingredients in the book for real food, since Seinfeld uses fat-free everything. Once you go through and sub in oil for cooking spray, butter for margarine, whole eggs for egg whites, whole milk for skim milk, full-fat cheese and yogurt for reduced-fat cheese and yogurt, real bacon for make-believe bacon, ground beef for ground turkey (a substance so vile as to ruin everything with which it comes in contact), and make your own pancake batter instead of opening a box, it's alright.

Which brings me to another point: how dare anyone visit their own fat-phobias on their growing children? Raising children on this kind of a hyper-low-fat diet is just the height (or depth) of ignorance. If children are morbidly obese, it's not from eating full-fat Wensleydale or having real milk in their cereal. It's from being fed processed food artifact which is so far from anything you would find on a farm or in a field that the kiddos' poor little bodies don't know what to do with it, and they hang on to it for later, like a person who has their body frozen in the hope that someday they can be thawed and cured. I know you're not supposed to judge other mothers' parenting, like, ever, but I'm sorry, unless your child has some kind of illness which prevents them from metabolizing normal amounts of fat, it does more harm than good to feed them all this low-fat, fat-free foolishness. Never mind that their bodies actually need fat; their brains are practically made of the stuff. How are they supposed to learn to read when their brains are starving?

I'm not a whole-foods purist, by any means. I eat sugar, I eat chocolate, but I try to steer clear of foods with ingredients that sound like they came from a secret underground laboratory. And as for the marketing of "healthy" laboratory food, it's a scam. If the amount of fat in cheese worries you, why not just eat less cheese? The effects of the cheese-fat-removal process are going to be far worse for you than the fat in the cheese would have been.

Real food. Butter and eggs. Or avocados and walnuts and olive oil, and lots of them, if that's more your thing. And fresh air and tree climbing and cookies and telling jokes and having quiet time and not giving your children food with all the integrity sucked out of it. If you're worried about your kids' weight, go for more walks with them, play in the park, and eat more salads and more Mediterranean and Japanese food. If you do that and nothing changes, how about not freaking out about it? Maybe they're just going to grow up to be big, strong, gorgeous, sturdy adults who ought to feel as beautiful and as valued as everyone else. Develop an interest in Renaissance art. Rent some opera videos. Go see some belly-dancers. Our culture's beauty aesthetic is purely a symptom of its politics, and its politics are lame. This "plague of childhood obesity" was created by a crappy corporate agri-business system, not by people giving their children real cream on their porridge, and leaving the yolks in their eggs. Now the same corporate agri-business people are selling equally poisonous rubbish and telling people it's a "healthy choice". Same garbage, different bucket. Gah.

You always have to keep a few pounds on in case you get sick. Not that long ago, a nice, chubby, radiant child was a comfort to parents, because it was less likely that he or she would succumb to scarlet fever or cholera or whatever was going around. My dear Hubby C, who is as slender as a birch sapling despite my many attempts to fatten him up (the man considers gravy a beverage, but clearly has the metabolism of a hummingbird), was in the hospital for two weeks a couple years ago, and when he came home he was practically translucent after losing ten pounds. You never know when a bit of chub of going to come in handy.

That is all. Well, no, but I'm going to shut up now and have a cappuccino.

Bread

Everyone in blog world seems to be all over the Artisan Bread/Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day books, and I get baking lust every time I see someone else's gorgeous photo of flour-dusted bread cooling on a rack, or in thick slices slathered with butter and honey. It used to be that Hubby C was prime bread baker in the household, but when we put Miss B on a gluten-free diet, it hardly seemed fair to be baking all this lovely bread she couldn't share. She loves bread. Total carb fiend. I've tried a bunch of gluten-free bread recipes, and I got into a good rhythm for a while, but Bear kind of disrupted that. So we've been buying these outrageously expensive frozen breads and English muffins for Miss B, and she likes them fine but given our financial status I just can't justify it.

From what I can garner, the gist of the books is that you prepare a whole whack of low-maintenance (i.e. no-knead) bread dough at the beginning of the week, and then you leave the dough in the fridge and bake loaf-sized portions as you need them. Process is minimal, fresh-baked deliciousness is maximal. I think this is brilliant. I plan to get my hands on Healthy Bread in Five, because it has a whole chapter on gluten-free baking.

I found this recipe via Gluten-Free Girl, and made it last night. Turned out fantastic. I halved the recipe to make two loaves - the loaves are small, just right for one person to have toast or a couple sandwiches over two days. Easy mixing, only a few ingredients, no frustration. There are about a bazillion comments on the cookbook's site if you want to make the bread and need a little guidance, but the whole thing seemed perfectly straightforward to me.

Now let's just hope Miss B likes it.

How sweet

Well, all the hearts and pink and lovey stuff must have gotten to me. Saturday night before bed I made batter for a batch of buckwheat crepes, which I hardly ever make (despite how awesome they are, and despite the fact that I own a gorgeous cast-iron crepe pan). I used this recipe, but I ended up having to add a lot more liquid than the recipe called for, which resulted in a lot more batter, which means I now have a half dozen extra crepes in my freezer. Not complaining about that.

It being a day of ridiculous sweetness, we ate the crepes with chocolate spread and summer-picked wild raspberries, taken out of the freezer Saturday night and left to thaw with a sprinkling of sugar, so they made their own sweet-tart syrupy sauce without any cooking or stirring or anything. Hubby C went for a manly bacon-cheese-sour cream crepe filling, but Miss B and myself went for the sugar high.

Despite not really caring much about making Valentine's Day into a holiday, Hubby C and I ended up taking a rather romantic trip to the Paderno outlet in town, where they were having a sale. We had gift cards to spend, and we actually had a great time picking out some goodies that we would never normally buy for ourselves. I'll feature them in an upcoming post. For now, all I have to say is "crème brulée."

One thing we realized while out shopping for cooking gear, though, is that we really have pretty much everything we ever wanted for our kitchen. Now, our kitchen has hideous wallpaper, inadequate counter space, ugly knotty pine cabinetry (oh how I cannot wait to paint you, ugly cabinets!!), a laminate floor that shows every smudge and drip and spot and which I can't wait to some day replace, and a sink faucet that doesn't actually fit the sink, but in terms of pots, pans, and appliances, we're in great shape. I am blessed with excellent second-hand kitchen gear mojo. Flea markets, church sales, thrift stores, online classified ads: I take a glance through them, and suddenly enamel Dutch ovens and copper pots and cast iron pans and discontinued decorative cookie molds are just throwing themselves at me. I have the worst luck when it comes to thrifting clothes and shoes, but for kitchen gear, I'm tops. I must have been exceptionally kind to tinkers in a former life. Anyway, having a look at all these kitchen goodies, and realizing that we already had as good or better at home was very liberating. When you spend a lot of time on design blogs, it's easy to get swept up in kitchen envy. It's nice to know that the only thing keeping our kitchen from looking like one of those is that ours is stuck in the 1980s. Once we bust into the future (or at least the present), at least one room in my house will be very snazzy indeed.

Valentine's Day

We've never done much to celebrate Valentine's Day here. It seems like it's a pretty big deal for the rest of the bloggy world, though. Maybe it's because many of the blogs I read are from the US, and maybe that's more of a Valentiney culture, or maybe it's because many of the blogs I read are by craftsy-types, and the thematic opportunities of Valentine's Day are pretty hard to pass up. I don't know. When I was a kid we exchanged valentine cards at school, and we probably had cookies or something, but I don't remember it being much of an event.

When Miss B was in day care, I had total Valentine's Day trauma. I was picking her up, the day before Valentine's Day, when I saw that they had all made their little Valentine's mailboxes and were eagerly waiting for the time to come when they could fill them. I can only imagine that a stricken expression came over my face when I realized that my kid was expected to bring in valentine cards for her whole day care group - kids whose names I didn't know, or who were only there on Wednesday mornings and whom I had never even seen, or whatever. It was already almost supper time. I had no car, there was nowhere remotely close to my house where I could buy cards, it was the middle of winter, and I was freaking out.

Freaking. Out.

See, it had never occurred to me that three-year-olds had a clue about Valentine's Day. As far as I was concerned, Valentine's Day was a celebration of the romantic, grown-up kind of love, where the partnered people might make one another a nice dinner or go out on a relatively schmancy date, and where single people like myself would curl up on the couch with a box of chocolates and a bottle of wine and watch Say Anything, shedding a tear over the Lloyd Doblers who got away. Um, for example.

What do children know of the complex matters of the heart? I had seen the "I Love Lisa" episode of The Simpsons about 30 times, but still, that's pretend.

In the end, I had to call a friend and have her drive me and Miss B to a drug store where the commercial valentine cards included the obnoxious (Dora the Explorer) and the insulting (Bratz) and the incomprehensible (Pokemon), but nothing generic or even half sensible. After throwing myself about in a fit for a while, I bought some construction paper and kept Miss B up way after her bedtime making her write her name (or, eventually, just "B") on pink and red slips of paper onto which we had potato-stamped some hearts. What could have been a nice mother-daughter craft project turned into a bit of a sweatshop. I'm still ashamed of my behaviour. Sometimes, when you feel like the worst mom at day care, you actually turn into the worst mom at day care.

The next day, when Miss B brought home her mailbox of valentine cards, the cards were all the same ones that I had rejected at the drug store the night before. Only one other child (the child of a friend of mine, of equally anti-commercial leanings) had home-made cards. Most of the cards were signed by the parents. Lots of them had candy attached. Miss B had some chocolates and was happy as anything.

Since then, I've recovered somewhat. We've always made our Valentine's Day cards, with some variation of pink-red-white potato stampage. I had been preparing to do the same this year, until Monday, when Miss B came downstairs from her room after school and announced, "Mom, I have my valentines done."

She had made them herself. Without any suggestions, assistance, or control-freakery from me. She used paper from her paper bin in the crafts closet, did each one the same but with a different coloured pencil, and spelled everyone's name from a list she had made at school that day.

They are absolutely perfect. My kid is awesome.

For my part, I did make some little cupcakes to send in for the party - gluten-free for Miss B, but I also made them egg-free because there is one boy in the class with an egg allergy. Do you know how much a shaker of red sprinkles costs at my grocery store? $4, people. Insane. I made my own by putting some chunky turbinado sugar in a jar, adding a drop of food colouring, putting the lid on and shaking it. I challenge anyone to tell the difference!

Miss B picked out her outfit days ago. She made a necklace from construction paper at my mom's house after school yesterday, based on a picture in a magazine. She insisted on looking very, very serious while I took her photo this morning. Then off she went, with her cards, her tray of cupcakes, and a big day of highly educational valentiney festivities ahead.

Celebrate the sensitive boy

Every Monday, Miss B brings home an assortment of beginner books to read over the week. On Friday she has to bring in a "report" with the title of each book, a picture she's drawn, and an appropriately happy or unhappy face to indicate whether or not she liked the book.

Most of the time, the books are pretty awful - ugly illustrations or stock photos from the 1980s, uninspired narratives. I know, there's not a lot of nuance you can pack into a 12-page book meant to be read by a six-year-old. But still.

This week, though, she brought home a book called "Un ami" (A Friend) and it was just so sweet. I've decided to post it in its entirety, even though that's probably all kinds of copyright infringement. Somehow I don't think I'm going to get too much hassle over an educational French booklet from 1977 (but if I do, I'll take it down). I'll translate, for the sake of those of you whose grade-one French might be a little rusty.

Nicholas is coming home from school.

He is sad. He has lost his lunch box.

Nicholas goes to the park. He sits down on a bench.

He is crying. "Nicholas, Nicholas," calls Hugo.

"Look, I've found your lunch box." Nicholas runs to Hugo.

Nicholas hugs Hugo.

At first, I was just charmed by the weird layout and the flying lunch box and the desolate landscape of the park, and Nicholas's snappy overall-and-pageboy-cap outfit (and his little square book bag, it's so cute!). But what's really wonderful about it is that Nicholas is sad, he's having a crappy day, he sits down for a little cry (like you would), then his friend comes along - having found the lost lunch box - and Nicholas gives his friend a big hug. And there's nothing weird about it! Most of the time when you have a book with a boy crying, there's always this tone of, "Nicholas is crying because he's sad, now let's talk about how that's okay." Or if two boys hug, it's always, "Nicholas and Hugo are hugging, and that's nice, because everybody likes hugs, right?" Here, it's just taken for granted that crying and helping and hugging is what boys do, because they're people, that's what people do. Ah, how refreshing! And from 1977, no less.

Dress and doll and... boys

I'll bet you've been just dying to find out what happened to the little dress I made for Craft Hope Haiti, right? Well, it was bought for a very sweet little girl... and the people who bought it are people I know! And, I was excited to learn, they actually live in my neighbourhood. In case you hadn't figured it out by now, St. John's is a fairly small city, and the community of artsy craftsy people is smaller yet, and we tend to gravitate toward certain areas of town.

So this morning I bundled up my little package and dropped it in the mailbox up the street and down the road.

If you think that package looks a bit puffy for just a dress, well, that's because I added a little extra present. See, the recipient is going to have some growing to do before it fits, so I made a little something to keep her occupied until then.

I made a snoozy Black Apple doll (from the Martha Stewart tutorial) with scrap fabric from the dress (and some soft flannel, and some felted sweater for hair). The pattern is super easy, although I should mention, if you are making one of these gals for the first time: add seam allowances! Those gangly little arms and legs don't leave much room for machine stitching. I was, of course, thinking this as I laid out the pattern, and I, of course, forgot in the 5 seconds between pinning and cutting. Honestly. Other than that, though, it's easy as pie.

I stitched on her sleepy eyes and her little smirk, because I don't trust myself with paint. I'm no great embroiderer, but I think she turned out pretty sweet.

Hey, did you notice the big smudgy bits in all the photos? I thought there was some gunk on my monitor while I was loading these, but it turns out that, no, some little small person got a hold of my camera and stuck some grubby little fingers all over my lens. Hrrrmmm.

On another, slightly less girly note, you may have heard by now that February has been declared Month of the Boy by super-crafty-blogger-types Dana (of MADE) and Rae (of Made by Rae), and they have been featuring some really cool tutorials for crafts for the wee guys in our lives. Not to go all gender-binary on you: I am sure there are loads of little boys who would love a huggable doll (as they should - how else are they going to learn how to be awesome dads?), and plenty of girls who go nuts for dinosaurs and excavation equipment (I know a bunch). But, by and large, the crafts-for-kids world tends to lean toward the pink and frilly, and, by and large, the boys in our culture tend to lean away from the pink and the frilly. The princesses get all the fun stuff. I imagine that this is probably because most of us who are craftsy moms are a little on the frilly side ourselves, and so we jump at the chance to frouf it up. But that's hardly fair to the denim-and-canvas set, now, is it?

In celebration of things boyish (and of her own little boy, Baby M, who is too cool for words), Tara at Mushy Peas is hosting a giveaway of one of her super awesome Munkehs! Yay! And you should all enter, even though that reduces the likelihood of my winning. I'll take that hit. Just look at this guy:

Oh, he just cracks me up! Tara will be doing a few more giveaways over the course of the month, so add her to your reader or follow her blog or do whatever it is you do to keep on top of these things.

And now I'm off to pick up one very girly girl from school. How she went from primary colours and gender-neutral everything to this is a mystery to me. Further proof that kids are born knowing who and what they are, and there's no sense trying to convince them otherwise. Luckily, pink is kind of growing on me.

Blizzard, cupcakes, presents

It started snowing Thursday night, and it kept snowing all day Friday, and it was still snowing by noon on Saturday. A proper blizzard: even the shopping mall was closed on Friday, which is really saying something.

On Saturday, a friend of Miss B's came over to play and I made cupcakes for them to decorate. They opted for blue and neon green icing, naturally (or unnaturally, I suppose), and went nuts with the sprinkles. I actually like the green quite a lot. The two girls played in the snow, painted pictures, and played happily (more or less) all afternoon, and I could have forgotten they were here if they weren't so thumpy and laughy up there in the bedroom.

Sunday was another classmate's birthday. The classmate in question is a now-seven-year-old boy who continually surprises us with his mastery of the art of disguise. Hence the choice of gift:

The messenger bag is made from stash fabric. The black was picked up at a yard sale two summers ago, and the chartreuse is a heavy upholstery-weight cotton from an Ikea sofa cover. The mustaches and eye patch are from felted sweater scraps, with shirring thread for elastic. The present was a hit and, I am happy to say, involved no plastic at all. Hooray!

I don't always make gifts for Miss B's friends, but when they are kids I know, I can't really help myself. So far they've always appreciated it. There's a practical element to the whole thing: I don't drive, so getting out to any of the stores is a huge hassle and takes hours. Meanwhile, I have a sewing room bursting with fabric upstairs. Since my mother-in-law dropped a ton of stuff at my place after de-stashing her own sewing room, I even have super weird fabric that I can see no other use for than as strange gifts for various children. So I can either take three or four hours to go to the mall or wherever, during which time I have to find someone to watch my own kids, end up spending way more money than I should (a pregnant lady at the mall's gotta eat, you know), and usually end up frustrated beyond belief because I have no idea what kids other than Miss B are into these days. Who needs it?

So now, after a magical snowy weekend, it's back to work. I suspect I have a dreadful workweek ahead, if today's e-mail exchanges are any indication. Ack. Can't help but love the world of arts administration. Full-time work for half-time pay. Add into that the double-time work and no pay at all of parenting, and, well, I sure could use a vacation. From either one, really. Or both. That would be nice.

The Skirt of Ridiculous Ruffles

So I had these maternity pants that were so ill-fitting they truly boggled the mind (or at least my mind, which is, I'll admit, somewhat boggled most of the time). For one thing, the elastic at the waist was this 3" band, let loose within a 3 1/2" casing, so it was all bunchy and useless. Why did I buy these pants? Well, they were grey, and soft, and I bought them when I was pregnant with Bear because they were on sale. We have all of one maternity shop in the entire province. The entire province, people, which includes two distinct, large land masses, and many wee islands. There are lots of pregnant ladies here, and we have virtually nowhere to shop. It's maddening.

One of the frustrating things about shopping for maternity clothes is that you have no idea what you are going to look like in six months, or in three months, or even in a week. The shops have these strap-on belly pillows, but they really do nothing to give you a sense of whether your mammoth gut will be high or low or wide or what, or whether your arse is going to double in size or disappear altogether. Never mind the bust-inflation issue. Gah.

Anyway, these pants never fit right during any part of my last pregnancy or the long postnatal still-can't-wear-normal-clothes period. So I made them into a skirt.

First, I anchored the elastic inside the casing with two rows of zigzag stitching around the waist. I unpicked the legs and the crotch seam like last time, then cut out the crotch curve and stitched everything down flat. Instead of doing a horizontal band to lengthen it, I used wedges from the legs and made a diagonal sort of effect (the back of the skirt is pretty much the same as the front). Then I realized that it was way too short, and I thought, "Well cool, I'll just add a ruffle." Because ruffles are all the rage these days, right? Yeah, well, I over-ruffled, the fabric was too stiff, the ruffle was too short to hang properly, I made the seam unnecessarily French, and all these factors combined to result in a ridiculous ruffle that sticks straight out.

I was going to take it off and come up with a new solution, but I was in a hurry to get out the door (I made this a few weeks ago), so I left it on, thinking that the ruffle might relax after a nice walk downtown. No such luck. Neither has it relaxed with washing. But I've grown kind of attached to it. I've worn this skirt a few times now, and it kind of makes me laugh. And people always comment on it. In a nice way. So I think I'll keep it the way it is, ridiculous as it may be.

I also made a top out of another jersey bedsheet. I always buy jersey sheets when I find them at the thrift store, because they're so soft and cottony. But then when I cut into them, I realize that they are completely wonky and parallelogram-shaped. Which is, I guess, why they end up at the thrift store in the first place. I end up having to cut things funny, and then the seams go kind of twisty. Then again, that's what everything from American Apparel and its ilk comes out like, so perhaps I'm just on top of the crappy-laying-out-of-pattern-pieces trend.

I used an old sweater for a template and chopped and stitched, no magic. Zigzag, mostly. Super comfy. I dig it. And it is neither black, brown, or grey, which makes for wild times in the closet.

Sweet Mother of Pearl, look at me. I look like a flippin' harp seal. And not one of those big-eyed fuzzy pups that the PETA crowd are always exploiting for fun and profit, either, but a big grey sluggy frigger, with a pointy little face, lolling about on the ice, barking up a racket and waiting for some sensible animal to come along and eat it. Honestly, I can't figure why people find seals so enchanting. But I digress. I look like a marine mammal. Three and a half more months of this. Send help.

Skills

Bear: eating yogurt and being quite delighted about it.

Miss B: writing a story. It's called "Greta and the Full Moon."

As for me, I made this recipe in the slow cooker and it was awesome. It would be more awesome if it had been happy grass-fed beef (or happy woods-tromping moose) instead of sad grocery store beef, but there was a roast in the freezer that wanted cooking, and so there you go. I didn't have pomegranate juice, so I used some pomegranate molasses and topped it up with white wine. Approval all around. Miss B even had seconds.

Little boxes, little boxes

So, remember my scary closet of craft supply hell? Well, folks, I have actually begun to get it under control. Miss B's artistic cravings can now be satisfied without having to dig for supplies through the world's scariest pastel-purple bedroom.

I had absolutely no cash to spend on doing this, but was luckily in possession of:

• a large-ish, underutilized storage closet with shelves, hooks, and a light,
• seven wooden clementine orange crates (and miscellaneous other containers),
• white craft paint,
• a tub of wallpaper adhesive,
• an old curtain,
• a roll of hockey tape,
• a sharpie, and
• a hanging shoe organizer (dropped off by my mother-in-law, bless her heart).

First of all, Hubby C sawed down the clementine crates to make the sides even - I had figured he could just zip through them with one of his power saws (yes, there are several), but apparently the crappiness of the wood/particle board meant that the saws just chewed the things to bits. So he used a hacksaw.

That's the wallpaper adhesive there in the tub. I used white paint to dull the print on the ends of the boxes, because the fabric I was using was a pretty loose weave and it would have shown through. The paint was leftover from decorating Miss B's room, and cost about a dollar.

I actually took some time to select the fabric I was using. You know how all those "keep your life organized" books and websites are always saying that you should create a sense of unity among your storage gear? Well, the other stuff from my mother in law was a neutral/unbleached cotton with red trim. The closest I could come was this neutral cotton with a line-drawn flower print, which was once a living room curtain, but it totally works. I painted on a pretty thick coat of the wallpaper glue and then slapped the fabric around it.

Here they are, drying. You can still see the staples and stuff, but, you know, I'm on a budget here.

I used hockey tape to cover the edges and label the crates. If you, like me, grew up more into books than body-checking, you may have spent much of your life oblivious to the awesomeness of hockey tape. I was first introduced to it by a friend when I was about fifteen. She was using it to patch a hole in her Chuck Taylors. How cool is that? It's a fabric tape, so it's very flexible, it's very sticky, and relatively inexpensive. Obviously it's available in colours other than pink (the pink is just because Canada is hell-bent on raising its girls to be as thuggish as its boys, and because the purported plague of childhood obesity is the new terrorism and people are freaking right out and making kids take gym twice as often as they take music... grrrr...). I labeled the boxes with a Sharpie, which was probably not the best choice, as it bled a little. Some day I might get a proper fabric pen and rewrite these (sure I will... sure...).

Now, will you look at that? How orderly can you get? It's remarkably difficult to get a photo of the inside of a closet, but bear with me. The shelves above these are being filled up with board games and puzzles, and below there's a bin of paper and a crate with notebooks and activity books.

The shoe organizer is hosting some squishy friends. I plan to make drawstring bags to hang on the hooks there, for blocks, Tinkertoy, that kind of stuff (the hooks are at kid height).

Miss B's easel hangs perfectly on the inside of the door. I don't think I properly showed this to you before: Miss B asked Santa for an easel this year, and he totally delivered. He even sub-contracted Hubby C to make it, but don't tell Miss B. Hubby C used a tutorial from the web, and if you're interested, I can find it for you. It's kid-sized, without looking like it's from a pre-school (important for the mature, more established six-year-old artist).

There are still a few things that need doing, but I'm making some major progress. I did throw out a garbage bag and a half of rubbish, and I set aside another full garbage bag of things to donate to next year's school bazaar. Although, depending how much stuff I accumulate over the next few months, I may give it to the first charity that comes knocking. It's a long time until next December.