Toddler-Proof Lift-the-Flap Books

I worked in public libraries before I worked in a college library.  Part of my duties involved time spent in the children's section of those libraries.  One of the first things you realize when you are working with children's books is the fact that "lift-the-flap" books will NEVER come back unscathed.  Whoever invented those types of books had a cute idea.  Children LOVE to lift flaps and discover things underneath those flaps.  However, they also love to tear off those flaps.  It's just inevitable.  So it was no surprise to me when I observed my little granddaughter enthusiastically ripping off the interactive flaps on her little storybooks.

I happened to be working on putting together a fabric book for her sewn from pre-printed fabric story frames.  Hmmm, was there a way to modify the book to indulge her love of lifting flaps while keeping those flaps intact?

 I decided to cut out some felted wool squares and sew them securely over key pictures on the pages.  If you wanted to try this yourself, you could use other fabric such as batik cloth, which is densely woven and not prone to unraveling or a heavy felt.

All you have to do is decide what you want to cover and then cut out your flap big enough to cover the picture you want to hide.  Then sew it securely on the top edge only so that baby can lift up the flap easily.

Here's a little bird hiding under a flap, just waiting to be discovered.  Of course, half the fun is for the reader or child to provide the sound effects of the bird when the flap is lifted.

This little mouse is just waiting to squeak a "hello" when its flap is lifted up.  I'll be taking this little book with me when I go off to visit my granddaughter and I'll be sure to give you a full report on whether or not it passes the "childproof" test.

Revin' It Up!

My brother just purchased an ATV for the hunting land he has up north.  I guess he's had a long-time dream of owning one of these and finally he has one.  So this weekend, he decided that we all were going to take a turn learning how to drive it.

First up was my nephew, John.  He got the 5-second instruction on the controls and off he went.  Handled it just like a pro, too.  I was impressed.  Oh, oh....if he was slowing down then it meant that I was next up.

I headed off around to the front yard, just skirting the drain pipe and the flag pole, around to the other side of the front yard and then headed back off to the back yard.

By my second circuit around the backyard, I was whizzing and having a ball.  Whee!  I have to admit that it was a lot of fun.

It was the Commander's turn next and he took the "responsible" approach, driving sensibly and responsibly but even so, I could tell that he was enjoying himself, too.

My sister-in-law wasn't going to take a turn but we convinced her to have a go at it and off she went after a quick orientation by my brother.

She was a natural at it.  Last up was my brother who went to town, even losing his hat on one turn but by then my fingers were so frozen that I couldn't snap any more pictures even if I'd wanted to (sorry, John!).

And before the ATV was even back in the garage, most of us were back inside the house waiting for the kettle to heat up so we could get some hot tea into us and warm up.  It's always good times when our families get together.  It's a chance to laugh, act like kids again, and make more memories. 

One Man's Junk

My brother has a knack for finding unusual things.  I think it's a gift that our family has -- finding the absurd in this world.  Anyway today he came out into the living room and said, "Hey, you've got to see my latest find."

Oh, boy!  I thought to myself that it was probably going to be something.  I was right.  He disappeared down into the basement and then bounded back up the stairs with a lamp that had the base of a parking meter.  And it was a REAL parking meter.

"Where in the world did you find that?" I asked.

"I saw it sitting in someone's trash along the side of the road up North," he replied.  "There were two of them so my buddy got one and I got one."

"It gets even better," he continued.  "Try holding it."

He set it in my hands and the darn thing was HEAVY!

"Jeepers!" I exclaimed.  "What in the world?  Is it full of coins?"

"Yes," he said.  "I jimmied the back and look at this."  John pried open a little slot in the back and pulled out a container that was filled with coins.

I couldn't believe it.  Someone had thrown away this "gem" of a lamp and it had been filled with money.

"Now," he said, handing me a coin, "put this in one of the coin slots."

I did as directed and darn if the lamp didn't light up.  Wow!  What a conversation piece.  Have friends over and let them feed your lamp.  Make a little money on the side.

"If you put in a nickel, the lamp stays lit for an hour.  Put in a dime and you can have light for 2 hours," he laughed.

And to think that someone threw out a treasure like this!

Looking for a Loop in the Donut Hole

Happy Thanksgiving to All!   On this day when I traditionally overeat, I thought it might be a good time to confess that I have fallen off the donut wagon.  Yes, I had successfully been donut-free for almost 2 years and then, in one wonderful bite (well, maybe MORE than one bite) I undid all that great work.

It's amazing how easy it is to fall right back into an addiction.  My "Waterloo" are glazed white-cream filled donuts.  Just like an alcoholic, you tell yourself that you can manage it....you can eat just one and then go right back to a "no-donut" policy.  Heck, I'm here to tell you that it just isn't so.   One bite leads to two donuts which lead to a week of lunches consisting of 4 donuts at each lunch.  But in my defense, a donut lunch IS a very efficient lunch.  Typically, I am running around like a dervish on the days that I go to visit my mum in the nursing home.  By the time I can eat lunch, it is already 2 p.m.  The last thing I want to do is come home and take the time to fix a healthy lunch.  It's so much easier to swing by the store, grab a bag of donuts and then head home, sit down with a good book and voila!  Twenty minutes of sheer culinary bliss with NO waiting time from the minute I walk in the door.

But I know I have to claw my way back on the wagon if I want to continue my weight loss journey so I've tucked my cream-filled donut demon back into the closet again.  I've been donut free for 5 days now.  Boy, do I miss them.  According to my "rules,"  I can still eat other sugary treats but NOT donuts so there is some light for me as a sugar addict.  Well, time for me to go cube bread for the Thankgiving dinner.  No donuts on the menu today though!

T-Minus Two Weeks and Two Days

I've been a poor blogger lately but I think I might have a pretty good excuse.  You see, I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to get ready for my upcoming trip to Indonesia.  The bed in one of our spare bedrooms has become a staging area for things I am setting aside to take with me.  So far, the bulk of the things on this bed are items either sent over from other family members for me to take over or things I'm gathering from a list of items that my family overseas wants me to pick up for them.  Boy, I wish the Commander was going with me.  I could use an extra set of hands.

Since I'll be gone for 5 weeks and missing Christmas and New Years with my family in the States, I've also been trying to get Christmas presents finished before I head out.  This has necessitated turning my other spare bedroom which doubles as a sewing room into a fabric staging area/assembly area.

Fresca the Wonder Dog has gotten used to me spending hours in this room running back and forth between the ironing board and the sewing machine and she now heads straight over to the futon and curls up on it to watch me patiently.

And I'm making progress.  I'm almost finished making my special pillowcases for the family.  Each year I gift family members with pillowcases geared towards a specific hobby or event that holds meaning to them.  It's always fun to try to find fabric that fits each person's personality.

So that's why I've been "hit-or-miss" up here.  Bear with me.  If my son can get his internet working overseas, I promise to be a very regular blogger of my adventures in Asia.  In the meantime, I hear that sewing machine calling my name.

A Closely Guarded Family Recipe

Just returned from a weekend scrapbooking retreat.  My daughter was able to join me for some mother-daughter bonding time over the albums and photos which was awesome.  And I got entirely too little sleep which probably explains why I came down with a migraine on my way home.  Ugh!  Haven't had one of those horrible things in several years.  In fact, I got so rattled that when I got home, I dashed to the medicine cabinet for my migraine medication and grabbed the wrong medicine by mistake.  I didn't realize my error until I had already taken the pill.  What I took was a Boniva, which is for osteoporosis.  It wouldn't have been a biggie since I was overdue on taking my monthly Boniva except for the fact that the Commander was on his way home with lunch for the two of us.  With Boniva, once you take the pill, you aren't to eat anything for one hour.  Drat!  I grabbed the correct medicine and downed that but then noticed that it was past its "Use By" date.  I told you that I hadn't had any migraines in several years and apparently I had failed to get refills when I should.  Luckily the meds worked anyway and I feel better.

Back to the subject of this post.  I had a good chuckle during the retreat.  Our scrapbooking consultant had specifically asked me to bring the same type of cookies that I had baked for a previous scrapbook get-together.  No problem.  I picked up the necessary items and spent most of Thursday and Friday morning baking batches of cookies.

On Saturday, one of the scrapbookers asked me how I was able to bake such delicious cookies.  She said they tasted just like the "cookies you buy in a bakery."  I told her it was no big feat since all I had to do was go to a grocery store and pick up the cookie dough in the dairy case and then break off the little chunks, put them on a cookie sheet, and bake them according to instructions.  She was flabbergasted.  Here folks had been thinking that I was using some secret family recipe when all along I was pumping out these fabulous cookies courtesy of "Uncle Nestle."  That became one of our inside jokes the rest of the weekend as ladies would come up to me to ask for my secret recipe.  Ha!

If you haven't tried the Nestle Toll House Ultimate Chocolate Chip Lovers and Peanut Butter Cups, Chips and Chocolate Chunks refrigerated cookie dough that come in the yellow packages in the dairy case, you might want to try them out.  The dough is already scored into squares to break off and put on your cookie sheets.  Couldn't be simpler but oh, are they tasty.  The Pillsbury Big Deluxe Classics cookie dough in the blue bags are also quite good.  Give them a try.  You might end up with a new "family heirloom" recipe.

So THAT'S How Sardines Feel

This past weekend the ladies' prayer group that I belong to headed off (with spouses) to see the annual Christmas show at the American Music Theatre in Lancaster.  Gas prices being what they are, we thought it was prudent to meet at one location and then carpool to the show.  How I wish I'd thought to bring a movie camera.

Oh, I'm not talking about filming the show.  I would have loved to have had the camera to have filmed us all trying to fit into one van.  There were nine of us and seven were trying to fit into the van.  Two had elected to drive separately.  I was one of the ones who volunteered to sit in the 3-seater section way in the back.  I'm here to tell you that the back seat of a Kia van is NOT meant to seat 3 adults.

I crawled into the back and opted for the middle, in order to give the outer seat to one of our older ladies.  I figured it would be easier for her to slide into that seat.  The fun began when I tried to get myself seatbelted in.  One friend who was already in the back said, "Oh, we won't need seatbelts.  We aren't going to be going anywhere if we get in an accident."

Nope, I ALWAYS wear a seatbelt in a car so we started fumbling around to find the seatbelts.  We decided it would be best to get the first lady belted up before getting the middle person (me) belted.  After much fumbling, shuffling to the left and right, and false starts, I finally got the darn thing to click into the locking mechanism.  I looked at my friend.  Her face was turning purple but I couldn't tell if that was because she was laughing so hard or because the shoulder strap of the belt was tight up under her chin.  You see, she is not very tall but quite chesty and we all could stand to lose some weight.  I unsnapped the belt and we tried again.  After several more tries, we finally got the belt loose enough that it wasn't choking her.

Then it was my turn.  If it had been a good-looking man, it would have been rather thrilling because I was getting goosed plenty as my friend tried to help me get the darn clip into the lock.  We fumbled with it for what seemed like 5 minutes as we laughed like fools and finally I was safely belted in.

That left us with one lady left to go.  She worked her way to the back of the van and looked at the ten inches that we had left for her to squeeze into.  OK, time to do a little shifting and squeezing and then, by golly, she had 12-13 inches now to sit.  She was a good sport and managed to squeeze into the seat.  Finding the seat belt connections was another story.  She just couldn't get the hang of pulling on the shoulder strap in one long, smooth motion.  Instead she would abruptly jerk on it and of course, it would lock up.  We had quite a few false starts before she managed to get it pulled out long enough for me to grab the end and clip it in.  Unfortunately, she hadn't grabbed the slack of the belt over her chest as I was fumbling on the seat so once it was clipped in, she was plastered tight against the back of the seat and looked about as comfortable as a captive tied to a stake.  We unclipped the belt and tried again.  After about 5 tries, she finally understood how to grab that extra length of belt so that she could adjust it comfortably afterwards.

There we were, trussed up tight as sardines in a can and laughing like hyenas.  My hubby stood outside the van just looking at us and shaking his head.

"This isn't going to work," he said.  "Dee, let's take our car, too and then there will just have to be one person in the back of this van and two can sit in the middle."

Another five minutes passed as we extricated ourselves and everyone got rearranged in the proper seats and vehicles.  Sheesh!  It's a good thing we had given ourselves plenty of time to get to the show.  We certainly used up a lot of that leeway just preparing to get on the road.

Did Hell Freeze Over?

OK, I know it's not Spring because my calendar says "November."  I'm pretty darn sure that I'm not pregnant and ready to go into labor so that rules out the extra burst of energy that pregnant women get right before that trip to the hospital.  So I can only conclude that hell must have frozen over.  How else to explain the fact that I got a sudden urge to clean out my pantry closet and my refrigerator?

Before I started, it was a jumbled mess in here.  This pantry is really quite an inefficient pantry because the shelves are so deep.  Sure, you can put a lot of things on the shelves but you just can't see what you have beyond what is in the front of those shelves.  And I'd gotten lazy so had just been throwing things in there and then kind of forgetting what I had.

I went through things and threw out a lot that was long past it's "Use By" date and then set about organizing what was left.  In the process, I was able to take the canned goods that I'd been storing on our table in the kitchen and move them into the pantry.

We don't eat at this table and it really has become just a "catch-all" place.  I had been putting whatever canned goods I was going to be using for the week's menus here on this table.  Plus when we got our gas oven, we lost some storage space in the bottom drawer of the stove so we'd been storing the broiler pan and griddle on this table, too while we tried to figure out where we were going to put it.  Now that I've cleaned out the pantry, I can fit it all in there.

Next stop was the refrigerator.  I had been getting pretty tired of all the containers of leftovers clogging up the fridge.  My method of eating leftovers is to eat it each day until it is gone.  That's not how the Commander does it.  He "contains" it and then forgets it.  So I fix something different each evening.  Plus I was tired of looking at jars of food that had been in there for ages.  I'm telling you, I was ruthless.  I dumped a lot of jars of pickles down that drain....so much so that the vinegar smell was making me choke and my eyes burn.

 I also found some real winners among the "expired" foods.  Here's one that I purchased in April 2008.  Sheesh!  Obviously I wasn't doing much cooking requiring pesto sauce.  I think the winner was a can that had an expiration date in 2007.   It's gone now.

And that's the extent of today's clean-up.  If it is feeling a little cooler out your way, just consider the possibility that perhaps hell really HAS frozen over.