Kids Crafts

Despite liking to do handicrafts myself, I'm not much of a crafty mom. But sometimes I get my act together and the kids get to glue beans on construction paper.

Alabama Chanin Bandana

This was SO FUN to stitch.

I am definitely hooked and planning my next, bigger project.

Also, a couple of interesting clothing-related items via Alabama Chanin I want to file away for further thought and also when I'm back in a stable size:

Seam Allowance: make 25% of your own clothing
Project 333: reduce your wardrobe to 33 items

Elsewhere

I wrote a little thing about how to be a localist anywhere. Here's my favorite line, if I do say so myself:

But to say therefore that it doesn’t matter who cleans a toilet looks at the matter strictly from the toilet’s perspective.

There and Back Again

After 2600 miles, stops in five states, a conference, a wedding, and a visit with dear friends, we are home. Whew.

From the Library

MotherStyles by Janet P. Penley

I am kind of a temperament nerd, so when I happened across this parenting book based on Myers-Briggs types, it came right off the shelf. Honestly, I didn't expect too much when I started to skim it that evening, but I found myself reading half of it aloud to Bob. I love that the goal of this books is not to present a particular ideal of motherhood, but to give you tools to understand your mothering personality and the strengths and weaknesses that are particular to you. The descriptions of the INTP's "struggles" had Bob and I cracking up: "noise and confusion of family life" and "routines."You don't say?

Mothering, like the rest of life, is largely about making choices - we all know we can't do it all, but how do you decide what to do? The insight I have gained from learning more about temperament has really helped me think more clearly about what kind of choices make sense for our family, to stop striving for things I'm unlikely to ever be able to pull of well, but also how to better take care of things that I have to that do not come terribly naturally to me.