Learning to apply make up

There is nothing quite as deflating to the ego as having young children. This morning Ben and Shira were standing next to me as i started applying my make up and seriously punctured my ego.

Shira watched me take out a brush and start applying concealer. She wanted to know what I was doing and I explained how it smoothed out the uneven color. She and Ben thought this was a really neat idea and proceeded to point out all my skin imperfections. Who knew I had so many blemishes? It must be those 8 year old rods and cones that are so discerning.

Shira was fascinated by the entire make up process and asked to be allowed to make up my face. My instinctive reaction was to say "no". However, then I realized that I have no issues with her using face paint on my face and hands. I let her turn me into clowns and butterflies, why not let her practice more subtle skills on my face?

I realized that I was having an instinctive response to an 8 year old and make up. She wasn't asking to put make up on her face, she was asking to put make up on my face. I had to get over my fear that she would want to start wearing make up if she gets to do my face. She's still young socially, so that's not an issue. For some reason, I see her face painting as an expression of her artistic skills and doing make up as a social skill. I need to think of this as a life skill and an artistic expression.

Tomorrow Shira starts practicing her make up skills on my face. Hopefully she'll have enough practice that when she is old enough to wear make up, she won't start off looking like a clown the way so many young girls do.

My little flower child

Shira recently learned how to make daisy chains. No patch of wild flowers is safe anymore.

The Krafts for Kidz Blog Carnival is up

Kidzarama has just published the secondKrafts for Kidz carnival. She published my entry about our Ooey, gooey, messy, summer art camp.

I'm looking forward to showing Shira the video on how to make a silly rattle snake. I can see a fun playdate in our future.

I realize, while I was watching this video, that I have not introduced my kids to the joys of glue guns. They have been taught how to deal with knives and blades safely, but I haven't really taught them how to work safely with hot tools. I think the time is right to teach them how to use a glue gun.

I bought Shira a bottle of fabric glue a few months back that turned her into a crafting terror. She is forever cutting up fabric and making things with her bottle of glue. Her latest exploits involved making "moccasins" for her dress up costume.



She's enamored with repurposing. The skirt is a hand me down she was given, the top comes from a knight's costume and the moccasins were made from a cut up baby blanket.

I noticed the other day that our craft cabinets now hold old pajamas that she's outgrown. She cuts them up and uses them in her crafts.

Shira's has an interesting method of dividing the year. The highlights of her year are Purim and Halloween because those are the two holidays that give her free reign to design dress up costumes. She's been making Halloween costumes ever since she finished with her Purim costume.

This child needs a sewing machine and a glue gun.

Essential for running away from home

Shira was playing a pretend game where running away featured prominently. She packed her bag, put it at the back door, then got bored with the game and did something else.

Marc stumbled on the bag yesterday and just had to have a look at what was inside it to see what Shira considers to be essential items for a runaway. Turns out she considers food, clothing and a library card essential running away items. I am so chuffed about the library card. Perhaps she is going to be a chip off the old block after all.

It's not true to life....

My kids crack me up. Ben and Shira cut a huge piece of butcher's paper and then traced Ben's outline onto it. Now they are decorating the paper to turn it into a magic flying carpet. Shira has drawn a turban on the person outline and told me that the man is Indian but that he isn't true to life, he's a www. type person.

Ben and Shira took ages to work out what color crayon to use for his skin. They did about 5 test samples to work out the exact shade an Indian's skin needs to be. Recently they've started realizing that people have different color skin and we've been talking about it a lot. They're finding the differing levels of melanin quite fascinating. The other than skin, they are fascinated by eye color. They've noticed how their eyes have changed color over the last year and now want to know all about it.

Shira just asked me if they used berry juice to tie dye in ancient days. I told her they used berry juice, but didn't do tie dye. Her response, "I suppose no one in the movies thought to make their ancient people do tie dye.". What on earth is going on in that child's mind?

Movie Star

Shira played dress up yesterday and decided to be a glamorous movie star.

I felt a weird pang when I looked at her all dressed up. She's growing up.

I was most impressed at her make up application skills. She has a really light hand and enhanced her features instead of making herself look like a child playing dress up.

Beading looms

I bought a children's beading loom on a sale a few weeks before I had my surgery. I figured that weaving beads would be a perfect activity for me to do with the children while I was not able to walk around.

Turns out that I was right. Shira has taken to bead weaving like a duck takes to water. Almost all her toy animals now sport beaded collars, her dolls sport beaded bracelets and anyone who makes her happy, earns a piece of woven jewelry from her.

Today she came to me and told me that it was time to develop her own patterns. Must say that her first attempt was pretty good. She wrote "I love you" in her bracelet. It's always so good when a plan comes together.

Ben has spent the last 2 hours bending my ears about what he desperately needs for his birthday. Shira OTOH doesn't seem to know what she wants other than HO gauge trains.

Perfect, totally perfect.

That was Shira's pronouncement about dinner. LOL. Marc's working late tonight and I had absolutely no inspiration for dinner, so I asked the chicks for their preferences. Shira asked for a tomato and basil salad, a red pepper and a banana smoothie. Tomato, basil, cracked black pepper and a smidgeon of EVOO happens to make Shira's favorite dish.

As soon as our pansies are over their best, we plan on filling the planters with basil plants. The basil is going to be Ben's and Shira's summer project. They have promised to water the containers through the heat of summer. I, in return, have agreed to find ways to include basil into our daily diet.

I took such pleasure watching her eat her salad. You could see the enjoyment in every mouthful. I can only imagine how much she is going to enjoy it when we can buy summer tomatoes.

Ben also thought his dinner was perfect, though he was the only one who thought so. LOL. Loraina made him some gluten free flatbread from Gluten Free Gobsmacked. We love this recipe. It takes 16 min from start to finish and you would never guess that it's gluten free. I used it to make him a wrap with tomato, onion, basil and a smidgeon of mayo. He also asked for fried eggs. To be specific, he asked for eggs that you make in a frying pan where you can see the yolks in the middle of the whites and where you can cut the yolk and make it run. He cracks me up. No matter how often I tell him those are fried eggs, he still insists on giving me the description just to ensure that he gets the right ones. To finish it off, he had a banana smoothie.

I used to love double thick malted shakes, not that I drank them at all often, but when I did, it was sheer heaven. I am sad that my children are never going to experience that particular bit of junk food so I set about making a healthy, gluten free, dairy free, soy free version.

My banana smoothie isn't exactly the same, but I think it tastes even better than the double thick malted shakes I used to love so much. In case you feel like treating yourself, here's the recipe.

Banana double thick smoothie
1.5 cups ice cold water,
2 cups ice cubes,
4-5 very ripe bananas,
3 medjool dates (more if you like food sweeter),
3/4 cup raw cashews
3 tablespoons of flax seeds (optional).
Blend very well.
Makes four 8oz servings

This isn't a low cal food, but every ingredient is good for you. It makes a wonderful desert, or hot afternoon treat.

I must admit that this turns out better when you use a high powered blender like a Vitamix. I couldn't imagine my life without my beloved Vitamix. The standing family joke is that if we ever had to evacuate our home, I'd grab my Vitamix before my children.

I was on a roll wrt smoothies today. I made the children a great one at lunch time. It was too sweet for my taste, but I've noticed that since I've been following Eat to Live I've lost my taste for sweetness. The kids had no such complaints. They inhaled it with gusto.

Tropical smoothie
1 orange
2 bananas
1 cup frozen pineapple
16oz frozen mango
2 tablespoons flax seeds
cold water
Blend until smooth and enjoy.
makes three servings.

Yikes, I was proof reading this post and realized that I almost OD'd my kids on bananas today. They had bananas with breakfast, lunch and dinner. Oh, well, they aren't going to be short of potassium today.

Going to a tea party

Shira's book club at our co-op is reading the Felicity series from American Girl. This month they are reading, "Felicity Learns a Lesson". In the book, Felicity has a tea lesson so today the book club girls are having a tea lesson. Shira is beside herself with excitement. She's dressed in a pretty dress and cardigan with the straw hat she made in a previous book club meeting. (hope the child doesn't freeze to death) and is waiting impatiently for co-op time. I'm sending her to co-op with my camera so that she can take pics of all the little girls having their tea party.

How different boys and girls are. The little girls are having a genteel tea party while the boys are learning to be pirates while they read Treasure Island.

Cheering up, 6 year old style

Candles play a large part in my children's lives and in Shira's in particular.

They live for lighting Shabbat candles and Chanukkah is a real fire hazard in our house as we don't limit ourselves to one chanukkiah per person.

When it comes to birthdays in the family we have multiple candle lighting ceremonies. On their birthdays, they light candles for a week. Last year I felt like i was baking cupcakes daily during that week. Oh, wait, I was, sometimes I baked them twice daily because we believe in birth weeks, not birth days. We had a week of parties. Their birth week is a month away and they can't wait.

On Marc's or my birthdays they get to have candles on their cupcakes and they like to do at least 2 different candle lightings for us. Last year on Marc's birthday we even had a celebration while he was at work. We turned our breakfast into a birthday party for daddy and didn't think it strange in the least that he wasn't with us.

Shira likes nothing better than to lie in the tub with a candle burning in the background. In fact, whenever she deems herself stressed, she takes herself off to have a long soak in my tub. She runs a deep bath, lights a lavender candle, switches on Lev Tahor and sips concord grape juice from a plastic wine glass. (ooh, I am a bad, bad mom to let her drink the grape juice from a plastic wine glass. LOL. Plastic is so bad for you.)

She's been very worried about me since the surgery and this week she made me a treat. She made a plate of fruit and veg and placed candles in the bananas.



She had a very earnest little conversation with me about how the candles will help make me feel better.

Conversations like these with my children often make me realize why and how the ancients started religions. I can see how candle light and the lighting of candles could easily take on a strange esoteric meaning for my kids. We've been having some great discussions based on Prometheus and how the ancient Greeks attributed the advent to fire to his theft of it from the gods. I thought this was a great way to jump into Jewish mythology. The story of Prometheus was a great lead into the story of Moses and the burning bush. They saw how unlikely it was that this story has its roots in fact. It's a slow process but I truly think the children are starting to understand that the stories of our culture are as based in mythology as the stories of the ancient Greeks were.

Watch One, Do One, Teach One

My kids have boundless self confidence. The latest example is tickling me no end. Last week Shira asked me to teach her to sew. We cut out a dolly from felt and I taught her how to sew a running stitch. She did her running stitch around the doll's outline and then because the stitches were rather large, I had her do another round.

The doll looked cute once it was finished. However, in her mind, she is now an expert. She is busy making herself another doll and has plans to teach our sitter how to sew tomorrow. I love it.

Self defense

Ben and Shira take karate lessons at our local Y. Somewhere in a lesson Shira heard that self defense is a very important skill for women. She asked me why this was so. I was at a loss, I didn't know what to say to a 6 year old so I told her that sometimes boys want to kiss girls against their will and knowing karate for self defense helps the girls stop the boys from kissing them. She thought about this for a moment and then said, "But mommy, sometimes you want the boys to kiss you.".

Revolting Rhymes

I bought Road Dahl's, "Revolting Rhymes" from Audible.com yesterday and we spent the afternoon after bowling, holed up listening to it. We laughed and laughed and laughed. Dahl has such a dark sense of humor. Shira was inspired to write her own dark poetry.

Bear in mind the kid is only 6 and these are her first attempts at writing poetry. She cracks me up. She has a gift for deadpan comments and now it looks like she enjoys dark humor as well.

Alien Conception

Shira has just written a post in her blog about cleaning. She purports to love cleaning. There is no way she can be my child, no way at all. I didn't realize that people existed who loved cleaning. http://misspriss-shira.blogspot.com/2007/12/housework-housework-housework.html

The Great Number Rumble

I've been reading a great book on math to my kids. It's called, "The Great Number Rumble: A Story of Math in Surprising Places." by Cora Lee and Gillian O'Reilly. It's meant for middle schoolers to read on their own, but if you read it to your elementary schoolers and explain new concepts and skip the ones that are just too complex, you have a really good text for them.

Before I started reading this book to the children, I was struggling to work out how to show Shira that the math we did in lessons had an application in every day life. It was as if she had compartmentalized lessons from life. She'd happily add and subtract in lessons but when I would ask her silly things like, "I need 10 apples to make this pie. I have 2, so how many do we have to buy at the store?", she'd look at me like I'd grown horns. However, during lessons, if I asked her the same question, or 10-2, she'd know the answer in a heart beat.

I've always read a lot of living math books to the children but somehow I had not managed to help them make connections between the books, math lessons and real life. Enter this book....

The premise is simple, the Director of Education, removed math from his school district as he said that math was unnecessary. A math geek in one of the schools disagrees and challenges the director to a debate. Sam, our young hero, uses some clever little math tricks to prove his point.

Sam tells the director that if he fails to convince him that Math is important, that he will work for the director, every day after school, for a year. They then agree that the director will pay Sam a penny for the first day, 2 cents for the second, 4 for the third, 8 for the fourth and so on.

Right there and then, I stopped reading the book and pulled out the beads. I had the children use beads to see how much money the Director would owe Sam in 2 weeks.

Using beads was a masterful idea. They got to see how quickly the numbers added up. It was cute watching the children laugh at the Director's stupidity.

Then the book showed how geometry is in everything. Sam used the examples of triangles iin bicycles.

That's all it took. Ben and Shira have been on a math tear ever since. We're now reading the book for plain old enjoyment. The connections between life, math and lessons have been made.

I saw that this afternoon. Ben and Shira were making pretend hamburgers and hotdogs out of construction paper for their animals. Shira told me that she had cut 7 hot dogs and needed to cut 14 hot dog buns. She told me that she had worked it out by skip counting in 2's for each hot dog. I thought it was neat that she worked that out because we haven't touched on mulitplication yet.

Right now she's polishing the trash can ( my daughter did not inherit this need to clean from me) and is asking me to give her mental addition problems. She specifically wants me to give her 2 and 3 digit numbers to add. She works out the problems out loud and it's fascinating to hear how she does it. She definitely understands place value because she breaks all the numbers into tens, hundreds and ones and then she has little tricks for other numbers. Tricks like when adding 8 and 5, she says, I know that 8 is 3+5, so that is 5+5+3 and that's 13 or one ten and 3 ones.

I am one happy mommy right now. We'll work on getting the math faster, but that's a minor issue now that I know she understands the underlying concepts.