Sewing Halloween Costumes #1

Since my oldest daughter's first Halloween, my wife and I have always made our kid's costumes. It always seems to surprise and impress people that we do this. I've even had people say that they could never do it. I disagree. I think that almost anyone could make Halloween costumes for their children if they wanted to. Over the next month I'm going to go through the process of making one of the Halloween costumes that we're making this year. Hopefully this will give my readers a general idea of the process of creating a costume (or any clothing really) from a pattern, and will let them decide if they think it's really worth it.
To start, your child needs to decide what they want to be. We've had ninjas and goldfish and pioneer girls and an excavator and all sorts of things. My general rule is that nothing is impossible. If  you can dream it up, I can make it. Of course, it's helpful if what they want to be actually exists, and has a pattern available. Last year, in addition to Halloween, the family went to the Texas Renaissance Festival. It was there that the kids looked around at all of the people dressed up and realized that if they played their cards right, they could get double use out of their costumes this year. Suddenly knights and ladies are very popular.
The local fabric store is your friend during the whole process of costume creation, and that's where we started by looking for a pattern. All of the major pattern companies have sections in their pattern books for costumes. If one doesn't have what you're looking for, another one might. When you buy a costume pattern you always get a size range, and frequently you get patterns for more than one costume. This is good, because patterns are sort of expensive. It pays to watch and wait for them to go on sale. In the pattern pictured, we'll be making the dress in the upper left corner. It's labeled B. When you flip the pattern package over, it tells you exactly how much of what material you need to make the dress B. Trust me, it's there, even if it seems impossible to read. If you can't figure it out, ask the nice ladies at the fabric store. I've yet to meet one that doesn't enjoy teaching someone how to read a pattern and buy what they need to get started. They love to help. In fact, they're so much better at helping than I can possibly be, I'm going to leave it up to them. Get a pattern, and have them help you get your fabric and zippers and edging and everything else you need. When you're doing all of this you'll notice that it's pretty much impossible to save money sewing your own costumes. You'll have to decide if it makes sense to spend more money and a bunch of time to make something that you could probably buy. The weirder the costume is, the more this makes sense. You can't go out and buy a costume for a 6 foot long goldfish or a ninja turtle princess. If you want to satisfy you're kids weird requests, you've got to do it yourself. For normal costumes though, you've got to love it for it to be worth it.
Now is a good time to mention that you're probably going to need a sewing machine for this. Sure, you could theoretically hand sew anything, but not in a time period that makes sense. You also need thread and pins and scissors and such. As long as you can thread a sewing machine and sew a straight-ish line, then you can learn to follow a pattern and make a costume. If you're not quite there, then find a tutorial online or a live person to get you to that point. While you're doing that, I'll get started on this dress and prepare the next post.
Stay tuned.

Dress Up Clothes

Ridiculously busy today, but I thought I'd take a second to talk about dress up clothes. We have quite a big cabinet full of them, and they've been used extensively throughout the years. I might say that having dress up clothes is good for the imagination when picking out outfits, or that it teaches fine motor skills when sorting out unfamiliar clothing. Really though, it's about the pictures. I don't know how these pictures will be useful to me in the future, but somehow, I'm sure they will.

Boy on my Back

I'm not actually sleeping. Shhhhhhh. 

I've got a child asleep on my back
He's quietly sleeping up there
I want to sit down
I'm desperately tired
But stopping, I really don't dare

He was cranky this morn so we took a walk
We walked up and down the street
He settled down
And I have some peace
As long as I stay on my feet

Second Honeymoon Report

We're back from our second honeymoon and I've been getting some flak for ignoring my blog while I've been away. Something about enjoying myself being no excuse. Sorry about that, but not really. My wife and I had a spectacular time and I apologize for nothing!
It would be sort of impossible to type out a full writeup of the whole trip and tell all of the stories, even if anyone would actually want to read them. Instead, I've decided to give a bullet point summary and let you fill everything else in with your imagination. I hope that works for everyone.

Things we did in New York on our honeymoon:

This was so so fun and made our honeymoon wonderful. Thank you. 

Rode a city bus.
Rode the subway.
Walked around Central Park.
Played with an adorable baby.
Went to Liberty Island and saw the Statue of Liberty.
Went to Ellis Island.
Walked through the financial district.
Walked through China Town.
Walked through Little Italy.
Played with an adorable baby some more.
Took a New York cab.
Went out to eat at quite a fancy restaurant.
Saw Times Square at night.
Went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Went to the Museum of Natural History and got to carry around an adorable baby.
Ate dinner in Little Italy.
Went shopping on 5th avenue.
Saw the New York Public Library.
Saw Grand Central Station.
Saw Rockafeller Center.
Saw Times Square During the day.
Got to play even more with an adorable baby.
Had Chinese takeout in a New York apartment.
Walked around Central Park even more.
Came home.

I can't think of anything we could have done to make the trip more enjoyable. We're older and wiser and more comfortable with each other than we were when we got married. We have the income that allowed us to enjoy our trip without worrying too much about what things cost. We were able to visit with good friends and their adorable baby (did I mention that yet?) I can't imagine any way that a trip with my wife could be better, and I'm already looking forward to doing it again.

Honeymoon Picture

The picture you see on the right is the only picture I have of my honeymoon. Instead of a picture of my new wife and I in an exotic location, I have a picture of my very good friend and the baby of a different friend. Neither my wife or I are in the picture. Neither of us took the picture. I was waiting for my turn to hold the baby and my wife was 1500 miles away. It was a very untraditional honeymoon.
Like many young people, time off work was hard to come by when we got married. For my wife. I on the other hand had recently finished working 15 hours a day 7 days a week in a dusty town in North Texas. I had accumulated a month of vacation time and my boss insisted that I use it. Now, I could have stayed at home and cleaned the house and cooked dinner for my new wife. At the time I wasn't very good at cooking, and I've never been very good at cleaning, and I've never been very good at just sitting still for longer than about 3 days. Frankly, it would have sucked to spend the whole month sitting at home not matter how much I loved my new wife. With her permission I drove north and picked up my friend. We visited other friends and their baby. At the time they were living almost a mile from the nearest road in an 80 year old cabin in the woods with no water or electricity. It was pretty cool. From there we headed west to the Black Hills of South Dakota. We visited the Needles, Mount Rushmore, and Jewel Cave. My wife would have loved Jewel Cave. Too bad she wasn't there. It was cool. We had a really good time.
All of this happened a little over 11 years ago and my wife and I have gotten a lot of mileage from the story. People ask us if we have a secret to a happy marriage and we reply, in unison, "separate honeymoons". We're about to fix that. We're going to New York. This will be my second honeymoon and my wife's first. Oddly enough, we're off to visit other friends and their baby. It seems that if you want us to visit, having a baby dramatically ups your odds. The last trip my wife and I took with just the two of us was when we got married. I'm very excited to do it again.

Paralysis by Population

My big kids were invited to visit the local museums today with a couple of friends. They have two boys that are close in age, and that's it. No girls. No much younger siblings. Just the two. I'm a bit jealous of the decision making process at their house. If they want to do something, the just decide, and then go do it. Pretty much anything that is fun/interesting/appropriate for one is fun/interesting/appropriate for both of them. Totally jealous.

So many children. (One of them is not actually mine) 

I've got four. Two of each. Wildly varying interests. Wildly varying attention spans. Not wildly varying ages really, but the youngest is not too far removed from being a toddler and the oldest is trying awfully hard to be a pre-teen. We can't just go see a movie. It has to be not scary, but not too young, and interesting for a wide range of ages. They do make movies like that, but only a couple a year which makes spontaneous movie going pretty much impossible. Spontaneous anything is pretty much impossible. No matter what we think about doing, someone complains that they don't want to do that for some reason or another. With four, someone always wants to do something, and someone always doesn't want to do that exact same thing. Quite frankly, it's maddening, and that's why we seldom solicit our kids for advice on things to do. A lot of the time we end up doing nothing and just telling the kids that playing in the yard all day is good for them. Which it is, but there are other things that are probably just as good for them that we're not going to go do because we don't want to deal with the fighting and whining and accusations of favoritism. No matter what we do, somebody 'never' gets to do something they want to do. They 'always' have to do what other people want to do.
It's one of the tradeoffs of a big family. The kids really aren't bored very often because there is always someone to play (or fight) with if you're in the mood. The flip side of that is they pretty much have to play (or fight) with your siblings because figuring out where to take them, and then actually doing it, is so exhausting that it never happens.

Notes on Illness

So I'm a stay at home dad, and I'm sick. It's an interesting combination and it works to prove a few points. The first point is that my kids are awesome. Last night I made pizza, cut it up and told them to eat while I laid down. They did wonderfully. Then later they got their pj's on and brushed their own teeth. No, they didn't get flossed by me, but that's all they missed. They even tucked themselves in. So it appears that my kids are fully capable of raising themselves as long as they're provided with food. Interesting. That's not how I do things, but it provides interesting perspective.
The second point relates to the first. If indeed one can be an effective parent laying on the couch with a mild fever and a head that's in immanent danger of exploding, can one really justify having the working spouse take a sick day to take care of the family? I can imagine a case where intestinal issues would make it impossible to sit in the car rider line, so there's always that, and when you have little babies you do need to do more active parenting. I guess there are some situations when it would be necessary, but you need to be really really damn sick to pull in reinforcements when your kids are older and getting self sufficient. My wife feels bad and offers to stay at home when I'm like this, but I turn her down. If she stayed at home then I'd lay around and do nothing. As it is, I take the kids to school and then lay around and do nothing. The laundry basket is getting full and I'm only doing enough dishes to make it to the next meal, it's not like I'm working around here. Speaking of meals, those are much simpler than usual and are barely meeting nutritional guidelines. This is really some half assed parenting and I don't think that's a good reason to pull my wife out of work. If I couldn't parent at all, that would make sense, but it's just that I'm crushingly sick and am only doing the bare minimum to keep everyone alive and well for a few days. That's not so bad. Is it?
I need to take a nap now.

The Floor

You should know before you go
Before you step out the door
If you leave me home alone
I'm going to poop on the floor

You know I'm am a broken dog
My life was bad before
I simply cannot help myself
I'm going to poop on the floor

When you leave my by myself
I feel shame and anger and more
No better way to express my pain
I'm going to poop on the floor

I give you one last pleading glance
Before you shut the door
I'm sad, I'm bad - I can't stop myself
I'm going to poop on the floor

This poem was inspired by true events. Yay for rescue dogs. I guess I'm happy that it's about the dog and not one of the children. I guess. Not that I leave my children alone, I don't, but I still don't expect them to express any sort of fecal outrage in the future either.

Persistance and Bikes

My younger daughter can now truly ride a bike. She can start on her own and turn and stop and the whole bit. It all finally came together this afternoon. She's not our youngest bike rider, but she is the quickest to go from that first push on two wheels to really mastering it.
She was the first of our kids to start riding on what we call a scoot bike, or what most of the world calls a walk bike. It's basically a really little bike for really little kids with no pedals and no training wheels. She's been scooting around for years. She even outgrew the really little scoot bike and had to move to a bigger one. The idea behind this kind of a bike is that a kid gets used to the feeling of rolling and gliding and steering on two wheels. This is really the hardest part, pedaling is relatively easy. We have always had a tricycle in the house so we know she can pedal just fine. Once you can coast, and you can pedal, it's theoretically easy to learn to ride. Theoretically.
In practice, you're trying to accomplish two fairly complex tasks that have never been related at the same time. I can play the violin, and I can ski, and I bet I could ski while playing the violin, but I also bet it would be pretty ugly at first. That's where persistence comes in. Quitting is always easier than pressing on, regardless of the fact that you feel like you can't do it. The wanting to do it, and the keeping at it are very important. We had a couple of blow ups in the past few weeks as she's been trying to get it all figured out. She wants to ride her bike, but more importantly, she wants to ride it herself. This has led to some dramatic meltdowns as a combination of frustration and heat overwhelmed her and turned her into a sweaty sobbing mess. She'd had a taste of it though, and she wanted it all, so she kept trying. Today she did it. She asked me to come outside and take a break from washing dishes to see her turn, and turn she did. She did lap after lap up and down the driveway smiling the whole time. She missed a turn or two and had to start again, but she took it all in stride and was very proud of herself. I'm sure that as soon as it gets light tomorrow morning she'll be back on the bike riding up and down, back and forth, enjoying the payoff for not giving up.

Guilt Pop

Through a strange series of events my wife has temporarily abandoned me. She has to be in three different states this week, and only one of them is Texas. When she's actually in Texas, she gets in late, goes to bed, wakes up, goes to work and then after working a full day, is back on another plane. She's "home" for something like 20 hours and she has to fit a full nights sleep and a full days work in there. She's a busy lady. Busy and guilty. She came home from work the other day with this cute little four pack of premium root beer. I asked her if she was trying to buy me off. She claimed that it was mostly love, and only a little bit trying to buy me off. I'm not sure how much of that I believe, but it's delicious. Here's a toast to a long week. All you dads out there holding down the fort alone while your spouse heads off to parts unknown to bring home the bacon, just hold on, reinforcements are coming, I promise.

To Those in Belgium....

When not baking, she spars with toddlers.

To any of my readers that may find themselves in Belgium in the next few months, might I recommend that they seek out a restaurant and inn by the name of In De Wulf. It's.... well it's in Belgium. I tried to figure out exactly where but when I looked at the map I realized that you could fit the whole county in a triangle formed by Houston, Austin, and Dallas. Belgium has a rich history and all, but it's not very big. Just ask around, I'm sure you can find it. I've never eaten there. Probably never will, though it's supposed to be fantastic. It's quite fancy and expensive and they serve desert on rocks. The reason that I suggest you stop by (maybe make a reservation first) is to sample the food and say hi to my sister. She was invited to spend three months working in their kitchen and baking bread for them. The word is that they bake one very good bread in their wood fired oven, and she's going to see if she can help them develop more. That's her thing. Wood fired ovens and exotic old world breads. Cool stuff.
If you make it by, just ask for the tiny American baker. They'll know who you mean. Give her a hug and tell her that her big brother says hi, and that he's very proud of her.

Measured

The sidewalk I run on had some new chalk today. Mile markers. It's pretty much impossible to be a runner with a watch and not check to see how fast you can cover a measured mile, even if you think the measurement is bunk. In case you're wondering (and I know you are) I ran that mile part of my run in 8:25. I was running quick, but not at a race effort. I think whoever measured the mile was optimistic.

Gifted and talented. We could tell early on. 

That got me to thinking about how we measure ourselves. With running it's pretty straight forward, time. How fast can you run a mile, 5k, a marathon? That's one of the great appeals to running by the way, there's really no cheating. You start, you finish, how long did it take and who did you beat. Not much else in life is like that.
My kids are just starting to bring home papers from school with grades on them. The first homework, the first quizzes. Grades. Numbers. How did you do? What do you know? Important of course, we need to figure out what people know so that we can figure out if we're teaching well and they're learning well. Who needs help? Who needs more challenges? This is mostly all decided by grades and numbers. It's how we measure our kids, or how others do anyway.
My younger daughter brought home the test results from last year that were used to decide whether to let her into the GT program at school or not. Her ability measured and broken down in numbers. Singling her out from the majority of her peers for a different academic experience. All of this at six years old. It's something to think about.

Car Rider Line

Here I sit in the car rider line
Waiting for my kids.
I could have sent them on the bus,

READY!

But that isn't what I did

I like to see them off to school
To see that all is good
I make sure that they have brought
Their homework and their food

I wait in line to pick them up
Ask them about their day
I talk to them about their friends
The things they do and say

They'd do just find on the bus
There's nothing there that's bad
But I like them here in the car with me
To spend more time with dad

Shoe Box

Problem, meet Solution. 

I get some odd requests around here. I don't think this has anything to do with me being a stay at home dad per se, but I think it might have something to do with my obvious excess of mental energy. As I've said before, being a stay at home dad is often very tiring, but not terribly mentally stimulating. I used to run experiments like checking what happens when you let a two year old self feed dried apricots (there may be children that will eat enough to throw up), but my wife caught on to this and decided to re-direct my energies. The thought is that this would have several benefits. Primarily, it would eliminate the need to clean up dried apricot vomit. As a secondary benefit, it would allow me to stretch my brain, and if she worked her cards right, she'd get stuff out of it. This isn't a honey-do list, I wouldn't like that at all. I don't like being told to do things. I like solving problems. It's all about finesse. My wife is good at finesse.

Air holes to let out the funk. 

Recently she let me know that she had a running shoe problem. She runs a couple of times a week and changes and showers at the gym near her office. When she's done, her shoes go in her truck. The problem is that her truck isn't really a truck, being that it doesn't have a bed, or a trunk, or anything but the passenger compartment really, so the shoes went inside. Then they sit for the rest of the day baking and stewing. Upon opening the doors to get into the truck, one is met with the overwhelming sensation of trying to climb directly into a shoe. It's hot, it's a bit moist, and it smells like a foot. This was the problem.
I'll spare you the thought process that ended up in the solution presented here, but it's enough to say that there was a lot of:

Me - "I have an idea!"
My wife - "That's not at all what I asked for at all. Shoes outside the truck. Is that so hard?"
Me - "No, I guess not. I'll think about it more."

Finally, after much internet searching, store searching, and soul searching, I ended up with the fantastic little hitch mounted toolbox you see in the pictures. $12 for the box, some leftover steel and bolts from the garage and the hitch that I haven't used since I gave away my trailer. It was a fun project. My wife is happy and I had a good time. What more can you ask from a life?