Ordinary Time

This before and after I can take no credit for, because I want to show you M.' shed/tiny house that is not 90% complete. I think it is phenomenal! First, remember the shed itself. This is so M., who is 27, has a place that is private. Because it can be hard to live at home after being on your own at that age. This is what it looked like on the inside before anything was done to it. This is midway through the process, after the wood stove was set inside. And finally, the finished result. Attaching the stove pipe and running it up through the roof as well as installing the fire board around it is that last thing to be done. Every material M. used on the interior was obtained second hand or was cast off and recycled. (Well, except that stove.) Pretty impressive, huh? M.'s cats are moved in as well. One is quite happy with the situation, the other, not so much. Horses, which can be seen from the window, were rather a surprise...

M. messaged me the other day and said, "So, if you're ever needing something blog to about, you could share my tumbler page." Hint, hint. Well, I think today qualifies so here it is: Flying Tadpole Creations . Be sure to look at the video of the bird mask with the hinged jaw that she just made. This is what she does when, for the first time in weeks, she is home without a deadline for a show opening hanging over her head. And since we're sharing, you could also read my newest article at Adoption.com, 3 Ways to Help Kids from Hard Places Succeed in a Homeschool Setting . You could even share it... and then my little tiny paycheck would be a little less tiny. Thanks.

Number of days we have lost with our daughter due to the negligence of the state of Illinois : 30 Today my oldest turns 22. I had to check that I got that number right because she and I have discovered that recently I've been getting her age wrong and telling her she's turning 23, which isn't right. Anyway, she is in her 20's. (This seems odd to me since on some level I feel as though I was just in my 20's... ) M. is a remarkable and talented person and we love watching what she creates and is interested in. Right now she is being offered a nice amount of theater design jobs, especially for someone just out of college. It does make for crazy sorts of schedules and hours, but she likes that. J. and I are learning the ropes of parenting an adult child and on some level it feels a little like starting all over again at this parent game. Have you notices no one tells you this? We'll have a party tonight for her. She has invited some college friends who are in ...

M. has been doing an independent study this semester on puppets and puppetry. (Yes, she thanked me for teaching her how to make a class about anything. Homeschooling teaches you a lot of things.) She designed the class herself and studied puppets and puppet traditions from around the world and her final project was to create an original puppet. She designed and built this 8 foot tall puppet which takes three people to make work. The puppet man is dancing with the woman in grey. I wish I could show the short video I have, but it has someone's very cute little toddler in it and it's poor form to put someone else's child on a public blog. As part of the project, the puppet has two performances... this is from yesterday. That's, M. with the blue hair. At least it's blue in back... she's looking very colorful these days. My talented girl.

This is what happens when you let your oldest daughter, who really likes power tools, to babysit while you are gone one afternoon. She cobbles together a sulky using an old lawn chair. Parts of this were left over from when she first tried to make one many years ago. M. had seen a very expensive one in a toy catalogue and wanted to try to make her own, and so she tried. It never worked quite like she envisioned it. Yesterday, after having rolled around different plans for how to remake it in her head, she came up with this. It's pretty sturdy and can hold an older child or adult. Or it can hold two smaller children. I anticipate this gets a lot of use over the rest of the summer.

The play ran this past weekend, so I am now allowed to post pictures of the dinosaur puppets M. made for it.  Let's start with the Velociraptors. Here is the working prototype she started out with. Since the dinosaurs have a major role in Jurassic Park, they were to be worked by actors and needed to be able to be moved and manipulated. Nearly all of the dinosaurs are made out of cardboard and other found materials. ( And this is why I was walking through the store navigating very large pieces of cardboard I had found .) This is still more of a prototype and not the final puppet. (P. is modelling.) You can see it now has skin and how the actor would hold it. Here is the inside of the body. Those two rings attach to cables which make the mouth open and close. The head on one of the final puppets. And both of them together. On to the Dilophosaurus. This is a little guy who runs around (he's on wheels) and has neck frills that fly open. With ...

 Today is M.'s 20th birthday. Twenty! How did that happen? Her spring break also started yesterday, so we celebrated last night. We had bun cha for dinner ( our very favorite Vietnamese dish , though it somehow seems wrong to eat it when you're not hot and sweaty). And then we sang and M. blew out her candles. She chose pie, so we were back to the hold-the-candle-thing. She didn't want to be 16 again , so A. held four candles. I don't know why four except that it seemed a good number. And then because A. and M. are like that, there was a brief moment when A. wouldn't get close enough for M. to blow out the candles and M. started to chase her down. P20 came to help celebrate. It was cherry pie because that was the fruit which was on top when I went down to the freezer. (Interestingly, H. decided that she REALLY  didn't like cherries. P. happily volunteered to eat hers for her.) See what the pies say? M. is 20. And then there were...