Nothing says Christmas like goats and Darth Vader

I could tell the story about this year's Christmas parade by starting at the beginning, but I'd rather start with the picture of me in a goat costume meeting Darth Vader. When I saw Star Wars guys setting up next to us before the parade, I ran over to get a picture with Darth. I didn't realize he was 7 feet tall until I got right up next to him. It was a little scary! His costume even had lights on the front panel; it was a convincing portrayal of the biggest movie villain of my childhood. Good thing he didn't have the real voice or I might have run away.

This is as close as Gameboy got to the parade this year. I'm dropping him off at his dad's office. I think it was the costumes that dissuaded him. We had to choose to be a goat or a troll to march with the Sons of Norway's "Billy Goats Gruff" float. I guess neither sounded appealing. Too bad we weren't doing Star Wars.

We had cocoa and sticky rolls while the decorations were put on the float's bridge.

The girls made some little friends.

Children's book author and troll expert Lise Lunge-Larsen told the kids stories as we waited in line for the parade to start. She's a wonderful storyteller, talking about scary stuff that kids like, hungry trolls and man-eating cats. She teaches the kids how to defeat trolls, too. They'll turn to stone if they get in the light or injure themselves, you know, and they're easy to trick. Cookie said if she sees a troll, she'll tell it there's a mosquito on its head. When the troll swats its own head, it will turn to stone. Lise taught her that one.

Princess got her own picture with a Star Wars guy, too. Cookie was too scared.

It was girls' night out.

High marks — well, mark

  My kids take several classes about town that are for homeschoolers, and one of them was today. Gameboy had homework returned to him from the last class, a list of vocabulary words he had to define. They were things such as "sustainable" and "renewable," for a class about environmental issues.
  He saw an "A" on the top and wondered if it was a grade. He saw another kid's list with a "C" on the top and realized that, yes, it was a grade. At age 11, it's his first.
  Perhaps the teacher would be amused to know this, that he gave the kid his first-ever grade. Perhaps he'd think it's strange. Homeschoolers don't have much need for grades, though. We know what the kids know, and I know Gameboy would be getting A's in school. I don't need a teacher to tell me that. And I don't need a report card to believe he's learning.
  Still, the "A" on his paper was fun. It's going in his file.
  I'm not too far away from the day when I'll have to produce a high school transcript to use for college applications. I'm hoping that by then, he'll be taking college classes as a high-school-age student, and the transition to full-time college student will be easy. It's funny, but I'm not at all worried about him doing well in college classes or getting along socially. I'm just worried about the paperwork.

Learning from thin air?

  I am writing again about spelling. I have said before I'm not the world's best speller, but I work as a copy editor, so I have trained myself to care about how things are spelled, gotten in the habit of looking up words. Over time, even I start to remember this stuff.
  I think back to elementary school spelling tests, and I remember words such as "leprechaun" and "chrysanthemum" being difficult to memorize. I cared about my grades, so I worked hard and learned the words.
  I was a senior in high school when I was taught the difference between "accept" and "except." I was in college when somebody taught me that "its" as a possessive has no apostrophe. I learned to spell "forecast" after an embarrassing moment at my first job. Same thing with "exercise."
  I was a straight-A student and graduated from high school as a really lame speller.
  I'm thinking about spelling again because Princess, my daughter who learned to read early this spring and will be 8 next week, is good at spelling. She's always carrying a journal with her, filling it with drawings, stories, diary entries and songs she wrote herself. I'll peek inside and am surprised by how much is spelled right. It's another one of those wonderful unschooling moments where I wonder, "Where did that come from?"

2022

  The city parks and rec department has been offering free indoor ice skating at a local rink. I'll emphasize free, because this is code for "this is going to end up costing me money."
  The skating experience was pretty new for the kids because the few times we've gone to outdoor rinks, it has been so cold that we didn't stay long. It's either freezing and windy, or it's warm and the ice is no good. Getting the opportunity to skate on an indoor rink, however, got Princess wanting to take skating lessons.


  As luck would have it, right after she started talking about this, I heard that a local skating club was offering lessons during the school day for homeschoolers at an affordable price. I told Princess she could do it.
  Then there's the issue of her little sister.
  Cookie doesn't listen well. She gets fussy and changes her mind. Her temperament being as it is, I didn't want to waste money for her to have lessons, too. Plus she just turned 5, so I figured going to free skate would be enough.
  But she said she really wanted to do it, and for now we're only signing up for five lessons. So OK, whatever, I signed her up, too.
  And this is where the story gets awesome, because at our first lesson, the girls were divided into little kids and big kids. The little kids had their lesson while the big kids skated on their own. Halfway through, they switched. And Cookie was instantly promoted to skate with the big kids!
  She is fantastic! She did everything they asked, even skating around the rink three times with her arms straight out. "Use the side of your skate," the teacher shouted. "I don't want to hear any toe picks!" Around and around she went, her stubbornness working to her benefit. She was working hard, and I caught her looking at me a couple times from the corner of her eye. Other moms were asking, "Is that your daughter?" and instead of saying yes apologetically and whisking her away, I was all, "Yes! Yes. She. Is."
  So now I have paid for lessons for both girls, and I bought Cookie a pair of used skates. Princess will probably need a different pair, too. So much for "free skating."

  But we're totally going to be ready for the 2022 Olympics.

That girl does everything her own way

  After trick-or-treating with a group of about 15 friends, we went back to one friend's house for the great candy exchange. The kids spent about an hour trading and eating candy — mostly trading.
  Driving home, I asked the kids what they were trying to trade away, and what they were trying to get. Princess said she was trying to get popcorn balls and red licorice, and she was trading away Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Snickers.
  I had to suppress a "What? Are you crazy?!"

Happy Halloween, 2009

  It has rained a lot lately, the cold, almost-freezing kind of rain that makes you think it's the worst possible weather. As Halloween approached, I prepared by assembling an Alaskan fisherman costume. Turns out, the weather was great, and I didn't wear my raincoat. I still wore the huge pants, though, and yellow hat I made from leftover fleece from Cookie's Wolverine mask.

  The kids were Gandalf, Wolverine (from the X-Men, of course), and a witch. Princess really wanted eyeliner and red lipstick for her costume, and if I added it up, it's possible those two things cost the same as all the other costume pieces for all four of us: seven dollars for liquid eyeliner and six dollars for a lipstick. How do women afford to wear makeup all the time? This isn't even expensive makeup. She looks great, though. Notice how the auto-focus on my camera seems to know that she's the one who should be in focus?
  The girls wore snowpants under their costumes. Everyone wore long underwear and turtlenecks. It wasn't too cold, though, and dry. Perfect weather, or at least as good as we could ask for.
  I have not written about how I broke my pinky toe two weeks ago, but yeah — ouch. Trick-or-treating up and down our hilly town was a what-was-I-thinking experience, but Halloween only comes once a year, right?

  No worries about paperwork. The haul has been documented by Gameboy and Princess. Cookie saw these tally lists and said she wanted to write one, too. "But I don't know how to write!" she lamented. I told her I'd help tomorrow.

Gandalf hat is done

  I finished Gameboy's "Gandalf" hat today. That means I have completed all the costumes. Yeah! I don't want to waste my big day off on Halloween stressing out about sewing. We'll take a group photo tomorrow.
  I used to remember what the kids had been each Halloween. I should give this more thought and write it down. Things like that are the kinds of meaningless details that make me feel like a good mom if I remember them.
  I didn't use a pattern for the hat. Sewing with fleece is forgiving, it doesn't ravel and stretches well. The rim was too floppy so I went to the fabric store to get something — I didn't know what — to make it stiff. The staff was incredibly unhelpful, and I ended up looking at boning, which is used in wedding-dress corsets and such. It occurred to me that our answer would be found at Menards, our local hardware store.
  Sure enough, $1.50 later I had a coil of wire that worked great. I sewed a hem around the edge of the brim, bent over the wire and snaked it through. I cut it to the right length and hooked the two ends of wire together so there's no pokey end, and it's a connected hoop.
  It might be true that all the best costumes are a combination of secondhand store, fabric store and hardware store.

  Putting Cookie into another postscript, she spent part of the day reading a comic book while sitting inside a big box.

Kix butt?

  Like so many earth-mama mothers these days, I don't buy sugary cereal for my kids. I didn't eat much of the stuff when I was a kid, either. Rather than being your everyday breakfast, cereals such as Lucky Charms and Trix were eaten only occasionally, or for special events such as your birthday or Christmas. So I do know what these cereals are like. And I fondly remember Boo Berry, which isn't made anymore.
  Except that it is!
  There it was: Boo Berry, sitting beside its cousins, Count Chocula and Franken Berry, at my local grocery store. Turns out, it's a seasonal thing. I did a google news search and found this nice review of the three on a blog on the website of a community college in Utah. These cereals really find their niche with college students.
  So what did I do? I bought a box of each! Coincidentally, right before I saw the cereals, I had sent Gameboy back to the store's entrance to pick up the coupon flier. When he got back, we had turned a corner. He came down the aisle, then started to leave before he saw me and stopped. He started to laugh.
  "I didn't think that was our cart because I saw those," he said, pointing to the boxes of cereal.
  When my husband got home from work, he got all happy when he saw the Boo Berry, too. He said if he'd seen it in the store, he would not have bought it because of me. So he's happy with his box of Boo Berry. It's different than other sugary cereals; it's a weird color, and it sticks with the one flavor, unlike fruity cereals such as Froot Loops or Trix, which try to please everyone with a variety of colors and a hard-to-place taste. Boo Berry makes a statement: "I taste like artificial blueberry flavoring. That's it. Take it or leave it."
  The funny end to this story is that the kids don't want to eat the cereal; only one of them even tried it. Gameboy ate some Boo Berry but didn't finish it. I ate a couple bites from the bowl he left behind. I think I'm attracted more to the box and the color than the actual food; I didn't even finish his leftovers. I'm beginning to think I never did eat it as a kid. Maybe I just saw the commercials and thought it looked cool.
  Princess isn't much interested in eating anything that isn't a salad. Cookie wanted a bowl of cereal the second we got home from the grocery store: a bowl of Kix. "I want the circle kind," she said. I asked why she likes it. "Because it's so crunchy and so delicious," she said.
  I need to get her in a commercial.