Beautiful Irony

I know I've been away for a while. I've had life. You know, the basics of laundry and child rearing and summer camp and 1st grade and Pre-K starting... Lest you think I've been all work and no play and thus become a dull girl, I'm going to tell you a tale of two books. They are beauty, they are the beast, but not a Tale of Two Cities.

The first is "Universal Beauty". It's the Miss Universe Guide to looking beautiful. And it's chock full of great advice on skin-care and such. And it's not really that geared towards the Pageant Girl.

The other great book I read was The Photoshop Elements 6 Book For Digital Photographers.

I've always wondered how and wanted to learn about making a good picture GREAT. Well, that book tells all! And how...

The irony of it all? There's not ONE picture in the first book that was NOT manipulated SOMEHOW using the techniques in the second. Take a good look at the cover. I promise it has been enhanced.

The Best Thing About Homeschooling

You want to know what the best thing about homeschooling is?

The fact that when Mama doesn't feel up to numerous iterations of workbooks and educational videos, she can just give the kids some paper dressed up as a "book" and let them have at it and it COUNTS! It's educational, I promise. I gave them a "project": Write a story and illustrate it. I think we're covering art, grammar, spelling, punctuation and creative writing as well as the all important "leave Mama alone so she can blog about you deal with her overreactive gallbladder" subject.

Here are the books BEFORE the Princesses Ella got hold of them:

The Younger Princess Ella is the one in the pink Sleeping Beauty Nightgown

You should only know how long it took me to FIND this picture once I uploaded it from my camera to my hard drive. Why it got sent to my VIDEO folder, I've no idea. Anyhow...

What I did to make the books:

• Find card stock in pile on desk.
• Let girls choose their own color from about 20 choices (the Elder choose purple, the Younger chose the pink)
• Grab handful of printer paper (there's a reason I buy this stuff at the warehouse store)
• Stack all paper together and cut roughly in half on the long side of the paper (exactly half would have been 5.5" but who's counting?)
• Find 3-hole punch and arrange puncher thingies so that it punches 3 holes down the "long" side of the paper
• String 3/8" wide grosgrain ribbon to make book
• Field exactly 3,874,089,152 questions about what the books are and are not
• Take picture and hide in office to blog about it while the girls knock themselves out creatively

Life is good. Except for my mother-frelling gallbladder which makes me irritable and tired and nauseated. It's days are numbered. Poor my kids. Little do they know that once Mama is done recuperating, their days of watching PBS all day in their PJs and eating Scooby Snakcs for breakfast are O-V-E-R. But I'm not telling them that. Let them have their little fun.

The Uterus as described by The Elder Princess Ella

My daughters are quite prolific when it comes to drawing and now to writing "stories". Especially about things they have recently seen or heard. So it should come as no surprise to me that after watching a PBS show on babies in utero, that the Elder Princess Ella would want to draw a picture of a uterus and then wax poetical about it. After all, she's not quite six. Below is the picture she drew and her commentary [verbatim] on it:

This is the uterus.
The lines are the insides of the uterus.
The food is important for it.

[commentary by the Younger Princess Ella: Food doesn't go in the uterus, it goes in the tummy]

This picture has the brocolli [top of picture - outside uterus - looks like a bizarro carrot] to take good care of the uterus.
It scrubs the insides.
The inner cord protects it.
When the baby is in there when it moes it's legs back and forth then the uterus grows.
When the babies come out the uterus will shrink back to it's normal size.
The middle core and the outer core help make the uterus stay together.
When they [baby] grow big, it's time to come out.
That's all.

The second picture is a sign made yesterday in the throes of "touching" angst and a sever desire NOT to leave the house to go to lunch at the Crapper Cracker Barrel (which I blogged about yesterday). Apparently, the Younger Princess Ella was impinging on the personal space of the The Elder and so she needed to make a sign. Translation below picture.


No sisters touching sisters and nobody is going nowhere

The third, and final picture is from today and details what the girls will be doing on Sunday evening (the night before my pre-op for gallbladder surgery). I would like you to note the correct use of apostrophe in this picture. Mama is teaching her children well. Translation follows picture:


Sunday night we spend the night at GrandCharlie's [my mother] house. Gabriella and Anabella