The Holiday Handmades: Part 2

This year, I received an early Christmas present. It came in the form of a phone call from my little sister saying, do you know what you're getting Mom and Dad for Christmas, because I have an idea. Her idea was simple, sentimental, and perfect for all the grandparents on our Christmas list. It was practically wrapped in a shiny red bow. I performed a happy dance (well, in my head I performed a happy dance, being too exhausted or busy pulling jumping children off of couches or both to physically muster said happy dance). Then, I crossed "fretting" off my to-do list and replaced it with "make garden pavers". Then I did nothing, for weeks, until Jason finished up his traveling for the year and took a two-week vacation, at which time I began frantically searching the internet for DIY garden paver tutorials. I found this. I prayed it would be as simple and straightforward as the directions made it look, because our margin for error was narrow. I could count the days until Christmas on one hand. I tell you, the man's a genius. Here's the process, in a very condensed nutshell:



First, we put poster paint on each child's right hand and made a print on the back of a cardboard cereal box. This is brilliant - 1) it takes the stress out of worrying if the child is going to scrunch his fingers into a ball in the concrete rather than make a flat handprint, and 2) you can do this with multiple children in rounds (we did Audrey's while the boys slept, then each boy on his own after he woke up) and then get your concrete mixed and poured all at once (after the children are in bed!!).



Second, you line the bottom of a cake pan (we had a few slightly rusty ones, just waiting for such a project, on hand and then bought a few more for a couple bucks) with a piece of paper. Ours is taped down with double-sided tape. On top, tape or glue down the handprint (that you've cut out of the cardboard) and any names or dates you want to include, assembled in a backward-fashion so that it appears the right direction when viewed in a mirror. Brush the whole shebang liberally with vegetable oil.




Next, mix and pour your concrete into the cake pans. Let them set at least overnight (possibly two days if you don't procrastinate and wait until the last possible second to attempt DIY projects for your relatives at Christmastime). Take the hardened pavers out of the pans. Peel any cardboard pieces from the concrete that might have stuck during the drying process (note: ours had most of the cardboard pieces still in the pavers when we took them out, but they were easy to remove). High five your spouse with exuberant disbelief at how well they turned out.



Finally, paint them with an outdoor patio paint and (after that dries) seal them with a coat or two of poly urethane. Marvel at your children's odd handprints. Stack the pavers up with a circle of felt in between each, wrap a pretty bow around them, and lug them to your family's Christmas celebration. Promise that you'll make a set of your own when it's warmer outside and you've had more sleep and you've figured out what you're doing with your backyard. High five your spouse some more, just because it feels good.

Tress Control

I've never been what one would call hair savvy. God knew this, which is why he gave me hair that resembles a Crimp 'n Curl Cabbage Patch Kid. You curl it around your finger and it stays. Stick a pencil in it, it stays (the boys who sat behind me in high school Physics had a field day with this experiment). Once you got past the shock of the sheer volume of it (no pun intended), the directions of what to do with my corkscrew curly hair were pretty freeing - don't blow dry; wash-and-go; finger comb it; and for the love of Vidal Sassoon, whatever you do, don't try to brush it out. Oh, and cut it, ahem, once or twice a year as the mood hits you. It grows out in corkscrew shapes, for heaven's sake, that takes a while. (That last piece of advice is my own lazy, too-cheap-to-pay-for-frequent-haircuts advice. I'm sure my stylist - if I had such a thing - would disagree).



But God has a sense of humor. Enter my beautiful daughter with striking blond so-straight-and-slick-you-can't-keep-a-barrette-in-it-without-the-assistance-of-duct-tape hair. Other than shaking my head every time I dropped another few dollars on yet another package of soon-to-disappear barrettes, I didn't think much about it. In fact, I thought nothing about her hair maintenance (other than shampooing it) until I won a free gift certificate for a child's haircut. And so, we went for a mother-daughter outing to get her hair cut for the first time. She was, ahem, three.



Funny thing about straight hair. It grows. Fast. So, now (cough) a year later, she was in desperate need of a cut, to the point where she's been asking for one. I had passed a book called How to Cut Your Own Hair (or Anyone Else's) by Marsha Heckman, Cathy Obiedo, and Claudia Allin one day at the library. So when it came back into circulation earlier this month, I grabbed it.



After the confidence that comes from reading two pages of hair-cutting instructions, I got down to business. We laid out my tools of the trade on top of a receiving blanket and wrapped another receiving blanket around Audrey's shoulders (so many uses for those receiving blankets). I squirted her hair with a spray bottle (an act she found funny and asked for again and again) and began to snip away a few inches. I'll be honest. I can't tell if it's straight or not, she never stands in one spot long enough to be sure. But the shorter cut suits her and her heart-shaped face. And, it's a good cut for dancing, which is what four-year-old hair is really about.



I thought that would be the end of our hair adventures for the week, until I cut open an avocado to find it less than guacamole-perfect. In the spirit of waste not, I decided to give it a second life. This week, I began reading Ashley English's Canning & Preserving. I discovered she has a blog, which has a link on it to this avocado hair mask. I didn't have sour cream in the house, but if there's one recipe for an avocado hair treatment online, surely there are two, right? So after a popping a few words into a Google search, I found a Revitalizing Avocado Hair Treatment that required an avocado and honey. Bingo. I combined my two ingredients and lathered the mixture into my wet hair. I combed it through, from scalp to ends, and wrapped my hair up into a shower cap. Then I set a timer for twenty minutes, cranked up some Tony Bennett (shush, I love him) and got to work on a project. Between Tony and the work at hand, I let the timer get away from me. It beeped and another twenty minutes went by. I was snapped back to the treatment at hand when honey began dripping down my neck. A quick rinse and the treatment was complete. My hair feels better today, although, it could use a cut - not that I'm ready to take that on myself. Yet.

Easter by the Roadside

Some of you may have grown up with or read the Mercer Mayer Little Critter books to your children. Do you remember the one entitled I Just Forgot?

"Sometimes I remember,

and sometimes I just forget.

This morning I remembered to brush my teeth,

but I forgot to make my bed.

I put my dishes in the sink after breakfast,

but I forgot to put the milk away.

I almost forgot to feed the puppy, but he reminded me.

I didn't forget to water the plants. They looked fine to me."

That story describes me as well as any other. "Sometimes I remember, and sometimes I just forget." We left the house early yesterday. "I'm forgetting something," I said. It wasn't until we were several miles from the house that I remembered. "It's the camera." I had remembered the bottles, the extra changes of clothes, the thank you note, the checkbook, the diapers. I had forgotten the camera. And to fill up on gas. Sometimes I remember, and sometimes I just forget. Actually, I didn't even forget the last one - technically. I had remembered several days before. I just chose not to fill up. I was driving - who can remember where? I noticed the tank was half-full. I began carrying on an internal dialogue. It went something like this: They say you get better gas mileage if you keep your gas tank full. I should probably start filling my tank up when it's half-full. When it's not raining. Who are they and how do they know so much? [For those of you wondering how often I carry on silent conversations with myself, I hate to admit that I'm pretty much a non-stop internal dialogue machine. Have you seen The Informant? I am that man (minus the criminal shenanigans and deception) with fewer random facts and more fake interviews with Oprah and explanations to nonexistent police officers as to why it was necessary to have just run that red light.]

Well, I didn't think about that now-not-so-half-full gas tank again until Sunday when Jason told me to remind him that we needed to fill up after leaving my parents' house. Sometimes I remember, and sometimes I just (ahem) forget. Which, is how we came to be parked by the side of a farm-lined highway less than three miles from a gas station with an empty tank come Easter evening. It wasn't all that bad. The weather was perfect - a breezy warm spring (as if meant for stuck-on-the-side-of-the-highway folks) sort of day. The children were on their best behavior. More importantly, they were funny (always a plus when entertainment street-side is in short supply). The view wasn't shabby: fields, farms, and the sprouting of spring. And, Jason's mom and her boyfriend were ready with a gas can and willing to come to our rescue. I would show you a picture of our roadside stop, but um, you know.

Needless to say, I have no Easter photos for you today. No shots of pink polka-dotted Easter dress ruffles, or babes in blue knit hats, or brimming baskets of eggs. Nope. Today, you get the other snapshots of our weekend, those I did manage to capture: plumbing and planting.





Somewhere in between the spats of forgetfulness, a couple projects found their way to completion. First, a dripping faucet lost its leak. I should be embarrassed to tell you that we've had the hot water turned off on one of our sinks for a month due to this leak (but I admitted that I have lengthy conversations with myself, so I think we've passed the embarrassment threshold, no?). It's one of those hang-in-limbo projects: too easy to call the plumber about but not the sort of thing your mother teaches you over chocolate chips cookies while growing up. So it waited until I had sufficient time to search the web. At first, my search was fruitless. When I looked up leaky sink, I found how to fix everything but a simple faucet leak. Then, it dawned on me. I don't know how or why (but can you imagine the conversations she could hold with herself?), but Martha Stewart knows practically everything. From how to bake the perfect cake, to etching glass, to proper jail cell etiquette - she's your girl. Sure enough, she also knew how to fix a leaky faucet and demonstrated with beautifully photographed images. (You can check out her handy plumbing how-to's here.) A simple switching out of a washer (the circular black do-dad in the picture) and we were hot water happy and drip-free.

So just how do you celebrate a roadside rescue and plumbing success? By planting pumpkins, of course - our first planted seeds of the season. Now if I can just remember to water them. Hmm...