Hello dear citizens of the realm! Julius has returned to his place of schooling (ish) and the Colton household is filled with much rejoicing! Three cheers for school and an uninterrupted work day. Hip, hip, huzzah!
No, but in all seriousness I’m as happy as a clam, and so is Julius. He told us today that he loves his temporary location (a church) because he “got to play hide and seek in the pews!” When I asked him “what?!” he explained to me what pews were. Guess this is the sort of thing you must learn in parochial school.
Despite Julius getting frustrated with us for being cooped up at home for 3 weeks of half neglect while we worked, he is still such a sweetie. Yesterday I was explaining to Julius what it meant to be sued (long story, only will further convince you of my craziness) and I may have impressed upon him that it’s when you get in trouble for something and a lawyer takes all your money (I swear I explained the concept more than that, but it seems that’s what Julius got out of it). After the conversation he came up to me and whispered in my ear (so no lawyers could hear?) “if you run out of money, I have money that you could have. I have two quarters!” It was just so adorable I didn’t even know what to say!
Another cute happening, was that while Patricia was eating breakfast (Julius was still asleep) I saw a herd of deer crossing through our yard. I grabbed Patricia from her seat and ran her over to the window so she could see them. She watched in silence as they crossed our yard and I wasn’t sure she understood what I was pointing out. Afterwards I asked her if she saw the deer and this was our conversation:
Patricia: “yeah, I not crying, I all done crying.”
Me: “You aren’t scared anymore is that what you mean?”
Patricia: “yeah.”
Me: “Deer are gentle they won’t hurt you”
Patricia: “Reindeers pet me?”
Me: “They won’t pet you but they are nice.”
Then she proceeded to run around the house and show me how the deer had run “really, really fast”. It’s so baffling to think how toddlers are still not quite sure what their emotions mean or how to categorize them.
And have I mentioned how emo Julius is? He frequently makes himself sad for the fun of it and draws pictures all the times with things crying. His artwork has soul. At some point last week Patricia was talking about walking on a cloud and I asked her if she thought she could stand on a cloud. She said she thought she could, and Julius corrected her with this piece of poetry:
“Clouds are only made of rain and paper. If you stand on one, you will fall.”
Julius was most heartbroken about Valentine’s day out of all the reasons he missed school. He asked a dozen times why he didn’t get any Valentine’s from classmates even though a couple classmates were sweet enough to drop off Valentines to him. I guess it was extra lucky that I made him the Valentine’s mailbox because he had something to look forward to, even if it was just from his mom. Even worse we made 20 Valentine’s for his classmates. You saw the penguins I made for Patricia. Those guys took me no time at all to make because I did them assembly line style. Julius loved them, but he thought classmates would prefer a DIY version.
So I had to figure out how to individually package paints for each kid and I thought of the brilliant(?) idea of putting them inside straws. So I got some old straws that people didn’t want off our buy nothing group and spent like 5 nights filling them full of paint (in my bathroom with the fan on full blast and a painting respirator on. I’m not going to lie, it was not the most fun use of my time and I will never do it again. The instructions also took me forever to make. And there are 17 of them still sitting on my table. On the bright side? They were dirt cheap! I hope the few people we gave them out to liked them! Julius and Patricia did!
Make your own Penguin Valentines
What you’ll need:
- 20 pegdoll blanks
- 2 oz orange acrylic paint
- 4 oz black acrylic paint
- 4 oz white acrylic paint
- 60 plastic straws
- 20 paintbrushes (mine were leftover from a previous valentine)
- 20 sheets of white printer paper
- x-acto knife
- double sided tape or tape glider
- a candle
- flat jewelry pliers
- a plastic syringe (I used one from a Tylenol bottle)
- stapler
- Valentine template here
- Valentine instructions template here
- Suck up 3.75mL of black paint with syringe. Clean tip of syringe. Insert tip of syringe into the straw. Squeeze into straw and remove using care to avoid getting the top of the straw dirty with paint.
- Pinch the bottom of the straw closed with pliers, 1mm from the end. Melt end over candle flame. Gently press the pliers on top of the melted spot to close it.
- Repeat the same for the other end of the straw, cleaning the top of the straw with a rag first if any paint got near the top.
- Repeat steps 1-3 for 19 more straws full of black paint.
- Repeat steps 1-3 for 20 straws of white paint
- Cut 10 straws in half.
- Repeat steps 1-3 for 20 half-straws of orange paint using only 1.25mL of paint instead of 3.75mL.
- Print 10 pages of Valentines.
- Insert Valentine pages in the printer right side up. Print 10 pages of templates. (They should be on the back of the Valentines.
- Cut Valentine sheets in half.
- Using an X-acto knife cut two 1/2″ slits above and below the penguin’s raised wing.
- Fold two sides of Valentines in towards one another, overlapping slightly at the back, to form a pouch shape.
- Put double sided tape on the bottom of the pouch.
- Press flap (without wording) down onto the double sided tape.
- Put double sided tape on the edge of the flap you just placed down.
- Press other flap down on top.
- Sign and address Valentines.
- Insert paintbrush through the slits in the front.
- Fill valentine with 1 black, 1 white and one orange tube and a peg doll. Staple shut
- Repeat steps 12-19 with the rest of the valentines.
Patricia paints her penguin
Julius painting his penguin.
“And have I mentioned how emo Julius is? He frequently makes himself sad for the fun of it and draws pictures all the times with things crying.”
Sounds familiar. We have a mirror in the living room, and you better believe that if either of the girls is crying, they walk right over to the mirror so they can see what it looks like.
Hahahahha okay this makes me feel better. Or maybe our progeny being emo says something about us.
Our kids loved painting them! Not sure if a casual observer could identify them as ‘penguins’, but they had fun
Hahaha same with my kids! They did enjoy it though. I couldn’t find them to take a picture.