A Sad Story About Advent Calendars and Rejected Toilet Roll Inners

Last year, you may recall that I got Conquering Christmas off to an eggcellent start with this Advent calendar. Around two weeks ago, I began to plan for this year's creation. I started saving toilet roll inners and calculating how to lay out 24 sections of toilet roll inners as a triangle shape to resemble a Christmas tree. This infographic shows the intricate plans that I made.

However, Z1 and Z2 saw Advent calendars in a shop and now they want them. I tried to remind Z1 how much fun we had making last year's but to no avail.


Giant Lindt ball with
mouse for scale

I am seriously contemplating making this one for me - 'twould be perfect for rationing out my Lindt balls from the giant Lindt ball that Husband kindly gave me for no reason at all and I could use up those toilet roll inners I've been saving.


From Recycling Bin to Train: A Sunday Story



A very happy looking train

An indicator that you may have let your daughter watch too much television on a lazy Sunday is that she starts squirming and looking for something else to do. At some point, you may realise that telling her to sit still and watch the movie is probably not the best parenting. Crafts are an appealing indoor alternative that, one can hope, will not involve having to move too far from the very comfortable sofa.

In fact, the initial material-gathering steps didn't require me to move at all. Z1, under my instruction, salvaged the egg carton (writing this post stirred up my carton vs. box internal debate once more and I had to read here to see what I'd settled on last year) from the recycling bin. I did assure her that the bin wasn't too yukky. She also got the scissors and Husband was intercepted on his way down the stairs with some items for the recycling bin, to see if he had any useful materials.

At this point, I moved from the sofa and, under direction from Z1:

1. got more cardboard (cereal box...cereal not quite finished so rolled up the bag and shoved it into the other open cereal box)
2. brought her a toonie and a quarter, so she could choose which size would be more suitable for train wheels (oh yes, she had decided to make a train by this point, forgot that important detail)
3. found the tape, which we keep on top of the microwave (of course we do, where else would one keep the tape?).



Side view

Her planning started well as she counted the dents on the top of the egg carton to see how many people she would need to fill them. However, once she started cutting out their bodies (rectangles of cereal box cardboard), she forgot how many she needed and just kept cutting until she tired of that task. I was drawing around the toonie and cutting out the circles which were to be wheels and people's heads.


She then instructed me to cut out the arms she had drawn. I pointed out that, as she had just drawn lines to be arms, I couldn't really cut them out. I was being a little belligerent at this point, truth be known. However, Z1 had a well of patience for me and my lack of initiative and cooperation. She calmly explained and demonstrated how to turn the lines into rectangles which could then be cut out to use as arms. Meanwhile, she was going through yards* of sticky tape to ensure the box would stay closed. I tried to just let her be but did remind her that wasting materials was not good craft practice.


T-shirts and trousers were then drawn and decorated by her, cut out by me and the assembling began. The once nude rectangles of cereal box had heads stuck on and t-shirts and trousers applied. She didn't bother with the arms I'd painstakingly drawn and cut. Pah. The chimney at the front was from Husband's old aftershave bottle and, if you look closely at the side view, you'll notice that one of the wheels had been destined to be a head to begin with.

Z2 asked where the driver was. Z1 told him the guy at the front was the driver. Everyone in the household is suitable pleased and impressed with Z1's train from recyclable materials. I trust you, dear readers, are too.

*I originally wrote "metres" here as I am a metric person but yards sounds better. Just thought you'd like to know.



Would pumpkin seeds be big for spiders?

Z1's plan

Mine, Z2's in the middle
& Z1's at the back

The first thing I must say is that Z2 was not impressed with the idea of hammering cookie cutters into his pumpkin. I really thought he would be as one of his first and favourite sentences for a long time was "I'll fix it with a hammer". However, now he is very big and three whole years old and he definitely wanted to use a sharp thing. Thankfully, the Dollarama pumpkin carving tools (oh yes, I have specific pumpkin carving tools, this is serious business) are not so sharp that I was concerned for his digits so he was allowed to wield one.
 Secondly, I should explain the title of this post. This was a question asked by Z1 during the course of our pumpkin carving. I was a little baffled by it so I asked her to clarify. It turns out she was imagining that the stringy bits of pumpkin guts that we gleefully hauled out with spoons and fingers were spider webs. As a result of this thought, she was wondering whether a spider the size of a pumpkin seed would be considered big. I decided it would be medium.

Z2's pumpkin, please do admire the eyebrows

 Thirdly, it is worthy of note, I feel, that the eyebrows on Z2's pumpkin were entirely his own doing - he poked the holes and wiggled that carving tool around sufficiently to make them. He had help with all other features. Z1 also mostly took the role of artistic director on her pumpkin. The bluntness of the Dollarama carving tools not only makes them relatively safe for big three year olds, but also makes it fairly hard work to carve a pumpkin with them. Perhaps next year I shall upgrade my tools.





 

Z1's pumpkin

The last thing which I feel I must mention to make this post complete is that I went to the trouble of removing pulp and string from the seeds in order to roast/toast/bake them as snack. Z1 had tried some last year when one of her teachers did this and it does feel awfully wasteful, even for the spookily good price I bought these pumpkins for, to throw away such bounty.  Initial feedback was good, Z1 asked for more and said they tasted like popcorn. However, the next day Z2 specifically requested, out of the blue, that he not have pumpkin seeds for dinner and Z1 did not eat any of the seeds which I packed, with some degree of satisfaction, for her lunch. I quite like them but I feel that some of them may be destined for the rubbish bin after all.


 

Preparations are afoot

While I may not have got further than the one bat costume that I reported on earlier in the month, I have managed to keep Z2 on track mentally to be a bat this Hallowe'en.

We have bought pumpkins - three: one each for Z1, Z2, and me. They were only 88 cents each which was spookily good value, I am sure you will agree. Husband is away this weekend so will miss out on the carving though I think he'd very much enjoy it if he got down to it.

Hallowe'en extravagance

I set Z1 the entirely unnecessary task of washing the pumpkins while Z2 napped on Sunday. We have set them on our steps as decorations, not yet in their full, carved Hallowe'en glory. We also have one black tinsel cat, one black tinsel spider, one strand of black tinsel with purple spiders, one hanging bat decoration and one hanging ghost decoration on our front porch. We are positively understated compared to most of the houses in our area who have decorated for Hallowe'en, with the house in the picture being the outright winner in terms of extravagance and exuberance for the celebration.

I have been pinning away a few templates of ideas for carving these pumpkins. These, I must admit, are mostly for me. I am much more excited by pumpkin carving than I thought I would be, something I discovered when I carved my first pumpkin in my first autumn over here in Canada.

I plan for Z2 to use his wooden hammer to bash cookie cutters into the pumpkin to carve his. I understand that this may be one of the points where my pumpkin carving extravaganza may not go to plan.

The sweeties to be given out to trick-or-treaters have been purchased and placed strictly off limits to all members of the household.

Pumpkin carving is scheduled for this Sunday. I will, of course, report back.

Black tops, bat wings and toilet trips

Having been to Dollarama to buy "bat teeth" and "bat ears" (actually cat ears and vampire teeth but I reckon with the wings, they will pass as bat ears and vampire bat teeth. I was prepared to make the bat ears also but these will do nicely and we got a bonus cat tail too) and having picked up a remnant of mostly black suit material for $2.99, all that was missing for the making of the bat costumes were the plain black tops. The outing to get these was postponed until Sunday after a lengthy Saturday afternoon nap on the part of Z2.

Map does not include detour to shop with lots of sparkly things where NOTHING SHOULD BE TOUCHED as I was a bit dizzy by then and can't remember where it was




Going to the shopping centre (or mall, if you will) requires, of course, plenty of preparation - the pre-car journey toilet trip, the setting down of the rules (no, we will not be buying any toys in the Rainforest Café but we can look at the fish and the pretend animals; we are going to buy plain black tops and look at tea for me, there will be no other purchases though we may get some kind of snack food if you are good), the route planning within the centre to ensure maximum efficiency... Actually, no, I did not route plan but that was mainly 'cause I didn't know where my fancy tea shop was. Also, even if I had route planned, it would have been quickly scuppered by Z2's announcement that he needed to go to the toilet and the fact that the first set of toilets we went to had a ridiculous queue so we had to go in search of some others. However, happily, we did find plain, black, long-sleeved tops in H&M as hoped. Hurrah. (However, the teas I wanted were not available which was

rather a devastating blow. Or, you know, slightly disappointing.)



What me? I forgot to dress up,      Mwa ha ha ha, I am
just wearing boring old black                 a bat!                 

Now, once the tops were purchased, Z1 was keen to make the costumes right-now-this-very-second. While I couldn't quite satisfy that request what with us being in the shopping centre and all,  I did get started once we got home and I even let her try it on when I had only done one wing. While doing the first wing was quite exciting and doing the second wing was rather satisfying, I now have to motivate myself to do two more wings for Z2's top and continue to foster their commitment to being bats this Hallowe'en. The advance planning bodes well for the former but will be a little trickier for the latter.







As summer melts into autumn

Back to school and slowly waning warm weather has been keeping us outside and busy in various ways. I make no apologies for soaking up every last drop of warmth and sunshine as the evenings and mornings grow darker.

That is not to say that craft and creations have come to a halt. There was a delicious apple cake which Z1 directed, funeral portraits for our dearly departed fish, a pirate hat for Husband from Z1 and we are currently planning for bat costumes* for Hallowe'en. 

I don't mind shop-bought costumes but I do maintain that there's a certain charm in homemade costumes that just doesn't happen with bought ones. Watch this space.

*links to other bat-mentioning posts, not brilliant bat costumes, you will have to wait for them.

Le Conquering of Les Crafts en France

 In the middle of August, me and the Zeds left work and school as usual one day and were driven by Husband to the airport. We took a 'plane to Paris, took a train to a town near our top-secret holiday hideaway and were collected by my venerable father and magnificent mother to be transported to the peaceful and green place in the picture. With multiple adults to watch the various children, warm sunshine, countryside and not much else, the pace of crafts here was considerably more relaxed than the 21 days of Christmas Conquering Crafts that started this blog.  In fact, though I was prepared to do more, we only really made a fairy house.




This was a scheme that I was rather more excited about than Z1 was. I thought we could do a stick collecting expedition as phase one with construction belonging to phase two but the phases merged. Z2 was good at stick-collecting but had to be persuaded to relinquish them as building materials as he likes to use them to fight bad guys.  The paint on the stones was from an outdoor painting project (painting sticks, in fact, using the stones as a palette for the paints) that Z1 did under my dad's supervision but they doubled up as good walls for the house.Interestingly, Z1 confirmed that she saw some items of fairy furniture, including a sofa made out of teeth, one morning when she checked the house. Unfortunately, I was unable to get a photo of this but it is, surely, a sign that the fairy house was most successful even if it didn't quite look like these .

Other relevant information:

• I did make the paper houses from this post with one of the other resident children
• I also made this delicious and delightful dinosaur cake but that was all my own work with limited baking resources.