I took this video while playing magnetic paper dolls with Kelly in the Occupational Therapy Waiting Room.  Dare I say I look forward to Tuesday afternoons, from 4:15 to 5:00 pm every week.  It’s just me and Kelly, and the world is her conversational stage.

Moments after this video was taped:

Mommy: Kelly, I can’t tell the difference between Henry, Oliver, and Justin in your class (all names changed to protect the cutie patootie boys in Pre-K).

Kelly: That’s easy.  Well, Henry is the easiest to tell apart from them.

Mommy: How can you tell it’s Henry?

Kelly: He has a cavity.

Mommy: OH!  Of course!  Because that’s the first thing I’d notice.

Kelly: Oliver has a dark voice and Justin has a light voice.

Mommy: Do you mean low and high voices?

Kelly: No.  I mean dark and light.  As in…DARK…and…LIGHT?!

Mommy: Um, well, of course.  Cavity, dark, light…got it.

Kelly: Told you…easy.

I’m the only real MC around here.  The Original Rumpshaker.  Only for the HARCORE.  Strictly for the HEADSTRONG.  I’m about to make you jump. No diggetty.  No doubt.

*I had a much funnier post planned for today and then YouTube and I got into a formatting spat last night that has carried into this morning. I’d call YouTube by a nasty name, but with Wikipedia down, that makes them the douche canoe of the day.  Seriously Wiki.  How am I supposed to ask bizarre questions of the Information Superhighway today?  Ask.com is about as reliable as walking down a high school hallway and shouting out your questions.  Will a blood alcohol level of .5 kill the average human?  If I feel a tugging pain on the top of my head, is that cancer, or did I pull a muscle?  Has anyone ever succeeded in losing weight on a blueberry cake donut diet?  The IT cloud that sucked up my work from last week is still lingering…*

When winter finally arrived this week, we found ourselves 20 miles past the last turn to nowhere.  It was like being layered in peaceful, covered in a blanket of quiet, broken only by the cackling giggles of girls and their sleds.  Hello January.  You can be such a bitch-pigeon, but the party just isn’t the same without you.

Early on a sunny Saturday, Sara told me she needed to get busy “with her work”.  She needed cardboard…lots of it.  She needed the computer…now. What on earth?  I’m pretty sure I would have been notified if she had a project assigned at school.  This project was for her newly formed, “Fairy Club”, and she and her good friend had decided to assign each other the task of “researching if fairies are real”. Get busy, report back on Monday.

We found some “facts”.  Did you know fairies can’t go near iron?  And that they usually have green eyes?  It was on the internet, so you know it’s true.  Sara printed off some pictures, and then used her paper as a template to make a hardcover binding that Greg stapled together.  She inserted her pictures with facts and tidbits inside.

Off to school she went on Monday, where apparently the club commenced on Phase II of the study: making bookmarks.  Lots and lots of bookmarks.  Sara gives me at least 1 bookmark per day, and apparently she has an entire folder in her desk dedicated to nothing but bookmarks.  In case I forgot to mention, now that the Fruit & Nut Club has disbanded, they’re now in the Bookmark Club. This was all very 1st-grade-adorable…until the teacher sent an all-class email.  There was just a little too much chit chat going in class this week.  A few too many kids rustling around in their desks when they should be working.  I smelled something.  What was that smell?  An OFFENDER.

Turns out Sara isn’t so much “an Offender” as much as she is “a Trend-Setter”.  Nice way of putting it.  When I asked her about her behavior in class, her face immediately went into defense-mode, and I got a very fast argument about “The Club!”, and “But we’re just now getting somewhere with our research!”, and “We have to keep track of all those bookmarks!”

Mommy (attempting calmness and not at all laughing her ass off, which is very much what she wanted to do): Sara, if you need more time outside of school to meet with your Fairy Research Colleagues, I’m sure I can arrange that with their Mommies.  But you can’t disrupt class time with your extracurricular projects.

Sara: But Mommy!  It’s FAIRY RESEARCH!  It’s important.

Mommy: Sara, it is important.  But so is Language Arts and Math. Everything has a time and a place.  You can’t disrupt the class for your personal interests.  Do you think keeping all this extra stuff in your desk is helping you focus?

Sara (deflated and resigned, but in a blessing from God…reasonable): No. You’re right Mommy.  OK.  I’ll tell the Club.  Recess only.

Mommy: Good call Researcher.  Godspeed Baby Girl.

I never imagined I’d have to tell my 6 year old to step away from the data, and in my heart, I want to tell her this dedication to a topic will really pay off someday, but for now?  I need to get her to pay attention to her Morning Work (which she she answered randomly, literally with random letters, so she could look at her bookmarks and random what-nots in her desk). And please don’t tell Sara her teacher secretly high-fived me in the hallway, celebrating “normal” stuff going on with her.  I know a few of you reading this post understand this kind of joy.  Godspeed to you too.

I’m sure parents of non-special needs kids have the same emotion I’m about to describe here: I call it a “Case of the Nevers”.  I try to catch myself when I get into “The Never” groove, because it’s just a total waste of time, even if these fears are only whispers in my head.

“Oh my gosh, she’ll never be able to grip the pencil.”

“We’ve been at this for a year.  She’s never going to learn math.”

“What if she never learns to read independently?”

I have more mainstream “I Never” days as well.

“They are never going to learn to sit still in restaurants!”

“Will they ever pick up their stuff in the minivan, or will my car floor look like this forever?!”

“These children NEVER listen to me!”

Kirk Martin over at Celebrate Calm does a good job reminding parents to stop fretting about the “nevers” and to remember that kids change at an unbelievable pace.  Who they are today isn’t at all who they will be in a year, or 2 years, and certainly not who they will be when they march off to college.  His reaffirming words have been critical to our peace the nights Sara’s brain is simply overloaded.  One bad night does not predict a lifetime of failure and unhappiness.  In fact, the only thing it probably predicts is that a tired little girl needs a good night’s sleep.

And because life throws us all a bone now and then, Sara learned to Hula Hoop.  I don’t even know how to Hula Hoop.  Her cousin taught her how to do it in 10 minutes.  With very expensive therapy and a year of work, she still grips a pencil likes she’s strangling it to death, but she learned to Hula Hoop in the blink of an eye while wearing a futzy Christmas dress.  Life is funny. With every little step, and with every passing day, Sara hears her own whispers of “I will never” being drowned out by “I think I can….I think I can…”….

*Per the Good Housekeeping Rules of the Information Superhighway, I am paid for Celebrate Calm posts.  My readers can receive a discount on Celebrate Calm Parenting CDs by using the code “LB50″ at check out. I endorse these products upon my personal request to the company after using their techniques and experiencing phenomenal results.*

This is a picture of Sara holding Sage and Mint she picked from our garden on Saturday.  S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y.  In J-A-N-U-A-R-Y.  Um, yeah…we live in Indiana. January is pretty much Armageddon around here.  Wind chills of 20 below, ice storms, snow drifts that kiss our mailboxes…January SUCKS in Indiana.  Today, January 10th, and let’s record this here to make it official, I mopped the first floor (all day dag-gummit…it’s takes me all day), with the back doors and windows open.  While I was at it, I went ahead and cleaned the back porch.  Without a coat.  Or gloves.  Or hat.  Or boots.  Or full body parka that withstands subzero temperatures. When I closed the house back up, my thermostat read 73 degrees.  The sun was shining so brightly into the house that I couldn’t cool it down.  I didn’t dare turn on the A/C.  Why?  Because the state would explode and John Mellencamp would stop singing and all of the basketballs would bounce right out of the state.  Some things are simply NOT DONE.

If you recall, I created this drama.  This balmy-oddball weather is totally due to the insane amount of money I spent at Lands End this winter on the girls outwear.  I predicted this very winter right here.  You read it.  You laughed.  You should have bought some sunscreen. If this keeps up, Missy on the West side of town owes me some rain coats.  I won’t hold you to it Missy, but I will let you buy me a cup of coffee.  The day before the blizzard hits in late April.

I’d like to introduce to you to Jakarta.  Don’t be scared…he’s made entirely out of felt, and I made him…so I can break him if he gets frisky.  Now why on earth would I make a snake of such unusual size, you might be wondering?  That story to follow, along with the oddest crafting tutorial ever written.

Every year, the Pre-K class at the girls’ school studies “Habitats” in January.  On the Zoo field trip, the kids go crazy for a gigantic replica of the largest snake ever discovered.  It was found in Indonesia in 1912; a 32 ft. 9.5 inch Reticulated Python.  But the replica is coiled, and it’s hard to get a visual of a coiled snake.  So the Pre-K teacher, last January, knowing our little Kelly would be in the next year’s Habitat Unit, asked if I would be interested in creating an uncoiled version.  WOULD I EVER?!  Hello?!  And thanks for the 12 month lead time, because I needed it.

I started by going to the Zoo and taking pictures of the replica.  It was oddly colored, so I just did my best when picking fabric.  I cut 400 inches of 12″ black strips of wool felt, divided into 4 sections.  A Reticulated Python is covered with inter-connecting organic shapes, so I made as many as my sore thumb could tolerate.  Interconnecting these bad boys would have taken another year.  I free-formed them and laid them out.  Oh.  Nope.  Boring.  Back to the fabric store:

Isn’t that far more authentic?  To recreate the free-formed shapes in grey, I first traced their yellow counterparts onto the dull side of freezer paper:

I’m not sure if you can see a faint tracing on the right, but tracing is pretty Elementary 101, so you get the idea.  Next I ironed the shiny side down onto the grey wool felt:

With just an average heat, it will stick right onto your fabric.  In case you weren’t aware, wool felt can be bought on bolts at fabric stores, not just in those 30 cent sheets.  Those are mostly polyester, so the wool felt on bolts is a much higher quality, far more durable, and much easier to use.

Your tracing is now staring right at you.  Just cut into the form, giving a nice border around the edge for the yellow to show, and cut away, kind of tracing the original shape with your scissors, inside the lines.  I like the word “organic”.  It’s a nice way of saying, “I don’t like to measure things”.  It’s like when my dinners turn out messy; I say they are “rustic”.  Organic and Rustic…nice ways of saying “I’m winging it folks”.

The next step is to applique the grey onto the yellow, and then the full shapes onto the black strips.  DO NOT applique the yellow on first.  Then you’ll have to maneuver those 100″ strips through your machine twice.  In total, I think I appliqued something like 36 pieces.  Oh-so-boring!  I think I can hear the chunk-chunk-chunk of my applique setting in my sleep.  But there is just nothing cuter than applique.  Smarty Sara asked why I wasn’t just hot-gluing them down (she gets that from her Father)?  Because in a class full of 4 and 5 year olds?  That would last about 10 minutes.  STURDY girls.  We go for S-T-U-R-D-Y.

I’ve been asked how much fabric did this take?  Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t measure.  Which is WHY you can see my leftover pile would probably be enough to make a 2nd snake!  I bought the fabric months ago, and I’m guessing I bought 6 yards of black?  Maybe 2 yards of yellow and grey?  Black felt is dirt cheap in the summer months, and all in all, this was one inexpensive project.

So that brings us to my Opus…the head.  I knew I’d have to free hand the picture I had created in my head, and I’m embarrassed to even publish my sketch.  Not because it’s horrible, but because it’s so ridiculously sexual, to be quite frank, that it’s damn near Rated R:

If this picture doesn’t conjure up any images for you…you’ve lost your sex drive.  I’m just sayin’.  The curves on the edges were additional pieces I decided to make out of grey, because I knew I’d be using black eyes.  Black eyes on black felt?  What’s the point?

Using the same freezer paper method (for the grey sections as well), it came out looking like this (the bottom half is all black, and lying beneath the head):

Oops…glaring problem.  I know you know what’s wrong.  It doesn’t take an experienced Crafter to see the error with my snake head:

It was boring.  Fatal mistake in ginormous snake making, everyone knows this.  One more applique never killed anyone…yep…much better.

Right sides together, sew the head underbelly to the top, leaving the mouth open, and it looks like this:

You may notice the extra grey pieces that appeared on the neck.  The neck was originally 12 inches around, to match the circumference of the snake.  About this time, Greg got involved.  When does he appear in my crazy projects?  About the exact time I yell downstairs, “GREG!  I’m stuck and I need your help!  Will you help me please?!”  When he joins the team, things change, but always for the better.  But I warn you: once he joins my team, he’s with me to the finish line.  My projects are like car wrecks: he simply can’t look away. He decided that a snake with a 12″ circumference would be way too small.  What?!  Then he rattled off something about Geometry, Radius…BLAH BLAH BLAH…more math….Blip and Blah.  He saw my mind wandering, as I desperately tried to recall anything from High School Geometry.  My teacher was really skinny, and unassuming as a person, really.  Until the day Dania had a Grand Mal seizure, right in the middle of a lecture on vectors!  He DASHED across the room, screaming the name of the fastest cross country runner in the class to get the nurse, cleared desks away using all of his available limbs, and THEN! She turned purple and stopped breathing.  He immediately started CPR, and thank God our school shared a yard with the hospital, because they had her in the ER in minutes.  Where she came to, and went on to live a normal and healthy life. THAT is what I remember from Geometry.  My nameless, dark-haired teacher was a hero, and there were numbers and shapes in a book I carried around for a year. But I digress.

Greg decided my snake should have a black underbelly, which now created the need for side seams and a pull through, which with 32 feet of fabric, I was far too squeamish to try.  He convinced me his plan would work.  I went about cutting 400″ inches of 10″ strips.  How is that leftover pile of fabric looking now?  Measuring is for suckers. With a new circumference, my head originally cut to 12″ needed about 10″ additional inches.  So I created the grey flanking pieces and added them to the neck.  I just threw the head down on freezer paper, drew in the missing pieces, cut them, did the whole ironing thing, and they slid right into place. Attaching the head was a neat trick.  The whole thing has to be inside out, pin the right sides together, and we worked it through the machine a few inches at a time.  I was really uncomfortable not being able to feed the body under and around my sewing machine base, but let’s face it…that wasn’t going to fit (special note: I was attaching the head to ONLY the first strip of black. AFTER attaching the head, you can attach the first strip the remaining 3, otherwise, you’ll be attaching a head to 400″…a much harder task.)  I had to hold the seam out and just be super careful not to catch any fabric as we gently attached the head:

With the head now attached to the body, I realized, this snake needs a tongue.  If you deliver a snake WITHOUT a tongue to 4 year olds?  Forget it; you’ve alienated your core constituency:

I used red felt, and just sewed it to the bottom.  No one is going to see black thread against black felt on the underside of a 32 ft snake.  I then sewed up the head, because apparently, we were going to attempt a pull through.  I started to sweat.  Greg then tied a climbing rope to Jakarta’s head, and we turned the right sides together, with the climbing rope stretching the entire length of the body and exiting at the open tail.  Now, the entire snake was inside out. I sewed up the sides (again, inside out, right sides together), which probably took no more than an hour, but sewing 800 inches of black felt together felt like an eternity.  How much thread?  Over 500 yards…there…I measured something.

Here is a picture of poor Jakarta’s head, being prepared for the pull-through.

With only the tail open, and the snake still inside out, with the sides sewn together, we stretched him out and with the end of the climbing rope sticking out through the tail (with the top of the rope tied to his head), I gently started pulling.  Greg was right.  It was as easy as pulling silk (see him smiling?  That’s his “I told you so” face):

I still can’t believe that worked.  Now with a fully right-side out snake, we were onto the crazy cool part: we had to stuff this bad boy.  Let the stuffing party begin!  I ripped a few inches on a side seam about every 8 feet or so.  Kelly’s teacher had done a great job of collecting stuffing over the summer, and I had a few bags too.  He’s stuffed with probably 6 different kinds of stuffing.  All in all, we probably used 6 or 7 bags.  I wanted to overstuff him, but Greg pointed out, oh so cleverly, that if he couldn’t coil, he would be impossible to store.  Ah…yes.  Practicality.  I didn’t get that gene. My cheerleaders took a break from their massive play-fest to help:

How I love my helpers.  You can see their pile of “please fix its”, waiting patiently in a bucket in the background.  Fixing toys and taking in pants and skirts is practically a full time job at our house.  Oh well, busy hands keeps me out of trouble.  Here is a picture of the stuffing holes:

NOW, if I were a “real” seamstress, I would have whip-stitched those holes together with a hidden stitch done by hand.  I fixed a tiny hole elsewhere on the snake with that method, and it looked amazing.  And would have taken me forever.  A) I’m terrible at hand work, and B) I have a bad thumb joint from overuse.  Go figure.  Those holes were going on the machine, ugly seams or not.  Plus…STURDY.  Remember…young children…gigantic stuffed animal.  This guy is going to see some hugs.  And pouncing.

Getting a fully stuffed snake on my machine was a neat trick.  I had to sew him standing up, making ugly straight seams much uglier, but at this point, I was sprinting for the finish line, not pulling out sewing manuals.  I tucked and pinned the tail and straight stitched it shut as well.  Those seams actually worked out better, because they gave the tail a bit of shape, as opposed to looking like a pillow.  Wait…ORGANIC shape…let’s be clear.

One quick session with my lint brush, and voila!  Jakarta was ready for action.

As it turns out, 32 feet 9.5 inches is pretty long!  You see?  We asked the question, and NOW WE KNOW.  IT’S LONG.  We fit most of him inside a lawn and leaf bag and carried him into school this morning.  Within 30 seconds of his unraveling, I turned around and watched 12 kids descend upon him like Christmas had come again.  Screams!  Squeals!  Cameras flashing!  Yes…I knew it.  They loved him too.  How could you not love the world’s largest snake?  What’s more lovable than an Indonesian Reticulated Python?  Not much my friends…not much.

Full week back at school.  Long days.  Hard sleeps.  Furry companions missing their playmates.

(“This moment” posts are inspired by Soulemama, who encourages her readers to savor a singular moment from the week.)

If you are trying to figure out if this is Syd or Cy, the answer is, I have no clue. Even with an 11 lb weight difference, I have to pick them up to know.

The cats staged a sit-in under the tree, once they realized I wasn’t “rearranging” the ornaments.  It was sheer panic until Syd organized the gang, and then they took shifts, keeping vigil in their favorite clubhouse.  Max even tried puking on the tree skirt, as a statement of protest. Today, with the tree packed away, the “Occupy Christmas (Tree)” cats have scattered.  They are probably texting each other, making snide comments about being squelched by the 1%.  I feel the need to tell them if we are doing a weight-based ratio…we are more like the 92%, and they are about 8%.  Which is why we didn’t have to pass any special measures with regards to squatting or camping in the park.  We just picked up our protestors and moved them. Humans: 1, Cat Occupiers: 0.  Sorry guys.

Mommy: Hey Kelly!  Your half birthday is coming up.  What do you want to take to school as the treat?

Kelly: FINALLY!  I’ve been waiting and waiting.

Mommy: Do you want to take the Milkshake Cupcakes you took last year?  Those were cute.

Kelly: I want to take chocolate chip cookies.

Mommy: Oh yum!  Do you remember the time we turned them into icing sandwiches and rolled them in sprinkles?  Do you want to do that?

Kelly: No.  Just plain chocolate chip cookies please.

Mommy: No..icing?  No half-dipping them in contrasting colors of chocolate?  No…SPRINKLES?!

Kelly: No.  Really Mommy.  I just want to take plain chocolate chip cookies.

Sara: Do you KNOW HOW to make plain chocolate chip cookies?

Mommy: I could DO IT.  YES.  (Moment of hesitation while my children looked at me skeptically.)  AND THEY’LL BE DELICIOUS!  The greatest chocolate chip cookies ever made!

(More skeptical expressions….)

If any of you tell me the recipe is on the back of the Nestle Tollhouse Bag, I’m driving to your house and TP’ing your trees.  Hang in there with me friends.  I can DO THIS.