New Feature . . . Labels

I've added a new feature this weekend to the blog . . . LABELS. At the end of each entry, you will see the word LABELS, followed by names. If you click on a name, you will get every blog entry containing that person. I'm putting all the labels at the end of this blog entry so that you can give it a try.

Sharing Butterflies, Sewing, and Butterfly Surprises

The butterflies have now lived past the time we read they should live, so we think we should let them have at least a day or two of freedom before they reach the end of their short lives (about 4 weeks total). But first we took them out and had some fun holding them and looking at them up close. Sunny and Ida are so wonderfully gentle with them. Here are the two sisters sharing a butterfly, pasing it back and forth.

Later in the day we did some sewing.

The sugarwater-soaked paper towels that we had placed in the butterfly pavilion had what looked at first to me like spores of mold. However, after calling Insectlore, the company that provided me with the five original caterpillars, I learned that the spores were actually butterfly eggs!!!

They were extremely tiny. Here is just one (sorry it's out of focus) next to a penny.

After my phonecall with Insectlore, I looked more carefully, and some of the eggs had actually hatched!!! There were little miniscule caterpillars all over . . . and they were so tiny, that they could go right through the holes in the net of the pavilion.

Here's one next to a penny. So tiny!

I learned that they like to eat thistle, which fortunately grows plentifully in my garden. In no time they made the thistle leaves look like lace.

Playdough, Pippi, och Prickar

Pardon the Swedish word in the title for those of you who don't understand Swedish. I was going for alliteration. Prickar means "freckles", so it is very appropriate, if you read on.

I didn't get around to pulling the camera out during the actual play, but I thought the table afterwards merited photos. Today we combined the play dough with small plastic animals.

Sunny had all of hers in a circle around a clumb of dough . . . sort of a surreal watering hole of sorts.

Josephine slowly and carefully lined up a whole row of animals down the entire length of the table.

And somebody left this imprint of a scorpion in a piece of dough.

Later in the day the girls dressed up (well, they are actually dressed up all day long, but they changed to new costumes).

Ida was transformed into Pippi Longstockings. She insisted on having her horse along as well.

Here I've tried to zoom in on their faces . . . pardon the poor resolution, but I wanted to show that they all wanted to have freckles, so out came my lipliner pencil. It all began with a dire need for freckles on Pippi, but then everyone else was so enthalled with the look that we ended up with freckle-faced princesses as well.

Wedding

Yesterday all the baby dolls were baptized in the sand/water table. I so wish I had taken photos. But today there was a wedding, so I did get some photos of that.

Bride: Josephine Mårtensson
Maid of Honor: Sunny Bjers
Flower Girl/Ring Bearer: Ida Bjers
Officiant: Rachel Mårtensson (thank goodness I could not take photos of myself . . . they made me wear my grey houserobe)

(I must add that the green dress that Sunny is wearing is the flower girl dress that I had worn over 30 years ago . . . my grandmother had sewn it herself, without a pattern, to match the dresses of the bridesmaids. Her hat is one that belonged to my mother and was worn in the 60's. Josephine is wearing her Lucia gown--traditional mid-December event.)

Orange Sorbet, Pomp, & Circumstance

We started out the morning by making orange sorbet from the juice we had previously squeezed from our tree.

Then while it was hardening in the freezer, we went to Josephine's preschool teacher's house for her preschool graduation. It was a very fancy affair, complete with caps and diplomas.

Here Josephine receives her diploma from Teacher Monica.

The highlights for Sunny and Ida were the popsicles and the swinging bench.

Polymer Clay, Orange Popsicles, and a Gingerbread House

This morning Josephine and I went to Michaels and got some new packages of polymer clay, so the first thing everyone wanted to do when Sunny and Ida arrived was to try it out.

Sunny made a tadpole and a heart, amongst other things.

Josephine also made a tadpole and several beads.

Ida made . . . well, you can see for yourself . . .

Next we picked oranges from the orange tree, squeezed them, and made popsicles from the juice. They were very refreshing later in the afternoon . . .

In December I optimistically bought a gingerbread house kit from Trader Joe's, but since we spent a few weeks in Sweden over Christmas, we never got a chance to build it. Things have been really crazy since then, so the kit, marked with an expiration date of August of this year, has sat unused for all this time. So today we decided to build our gingerbread house (pepparkakshus in Swedish) . . . in MAY!!! What fun!

It began with beating the egg whites for the icing.




Once the icing was finished and it was time to construct the house, Sunny announced that she had to change clothes first. I thought perhaps she wanted to change out of the bat costume and into her real clothes first, but then she emerged from the bedroom dressed from head to toe as a princess! Apparently bats make icing, but princesses build gingerbread houses.

Sunny started building the house, using the icing as glue.




Ida just wanted to eat the icing.






Jo also did her part in gluing the house together.


Here sunny is adding icing icicles as decoration.

Josephine adds icing-coated gingerbread shapes as decoration.

Now here is the point where the lovely creativity of children really takes over. Sunny then announced, once the house seemed to me to be complete, that they really needed to have cotton to use as snow. I took out a bag of polyester fiberfill, and in no time the yard was filled with very fluffy snow. Then Sunny once again announced that they needed to sprinkle sugar over the house, for more snow. I took out the confectioners sugar and a strainer, and . . .

The masterpiece:

Since it is May, and I have no desire to have a gingerbread house sitting around, I quickly gave in to their ample requests to eat the house right away. Here Ida starts with one of the figurines.

In no time the house was leveled, and three girls sat groaning on the couch, complaining that they couldn't eat another bite. The funniest part is that when you look at the remaining pieces, there doesn't seem to be much missing!

Drawing Together and Feeding Worms

Today the girls drew together on a big sheet of butcher paper.

Later we went out and fed the worms.

Ida and Sunny both loved holding the worms.