This is supposed to look like Lord Voldemort. On a pumpkin. I found the template here. This was the first time I tried to carve a design more elaborated than the usual cut-three-triangles-and-a-mouth-like-shape-thing, and it was quite fun. Easier than I thought, actually. I got some cheap carving tools from the dollar store, and my kitchen knife, and got carving. It took me about three hours, in which Tim read Terry Pratchett to me and the girls, until both girls fell asleep snoring on the sofa.
So, how are your celebrations going? We´re having 5 children here for a sleepover, so there will be 9 children alltogether in our house. I´ll take them for a little trick or treating through our neighbourhood, read them a ghoststory in the dark and play some creepy music. We´ll eat some cookies...
(Yeah, very halloweeny, I know ;) ), and bob some apples...
(even more halloweeny!), and giggle till it´s past midnight. And with this, I...
... raise my glass to you. Mine contains raspberry tea ;) Wishing you great parties!
...that´s how I feel right now. I´m back from 16 hours nonstop entertaining children from 2 to 16 years, and I feel warm and fuzzy and bubbly right now. I just came back to my messy, dirty house, it´s past midnight and everyone´s asleep, I´m sure tomorrow I won´t be able to move one single bone, but right now, I feel perfect. So, goodnight everybody :)
Never in my life have I been so occupied with Halloween preparations as I have this year, and I love, love, love it. I worked in school this week, and even though I enjoyed the space I had during fall break, nothing beats working with children. We made paper pumpkins...
(I got the idea from this blog, and they are perfect for school, because they are easy, cheap, non-messy, you can fold them and carry them in a schoolbag, and I like the "Wooo-hoo!" when the kids get to finally open their pumpkin), and we also made napkin ghosts...
and read ghost stories and sang creepy songs and painted lanterns... well, I spent about 8 hours in school this week, and at the moment is almost feels like I should pay for it, because it´s so, so good.I t feels like a permanent exchange of encouragement. I tell the children how absolutely genius and perfect they are, and they reward me with waiting for me everyday and bouncing around me and hugging me whenever I enter the room.
I also spent some time in kindergarden this week, because I volunteered to organize a Halloweenparty. So I assembled decoration and music, carved pumpkins (again!), thought up games and iced around 50 monstercookies:
and as soon as I finish this post, I will head back to the kitchen, to continue with my strawberry ghosts. And to have a look at my vampire cloak, to see if I find a way how to remove all those cat-hair... and no, the laundry didn´t help a bit. Any ideas?
But this is just small stuff, anyway :) The best thing, the so-to-say pinnacle of my non-existent career as a library girl is the upcoming .....
.......
Twilight-Night!
So, tomorrow night, I´m going to host the Twilightnight in our local library, an event I´ve been looking forward to for months. I labelled my blood-bottles...
(I found the lables, and also the cupcake wrappers below on Maggies Dinner Dates ), I made, of course, cupcakes...
and decorated them...
and even found some hilarious eclipse popcorn in the Dollar store:
I washed and ironed my nice black dress, picked the chapters I´m going to read, and we´ll rock the library. We have a button machine and are going to print T-shirts, I raided the internet for tons of cheesy pictures, we´ll make bookmarks and, of course, got the legal rights to show the movie in public. I´m so looking forward to discuss this book, that really touched me , however strange that is, with a group of 20 teenage girls. Seems like a dream come true :)
So, what are you doing this Halloween? Any celebrations going on? Anybody out there in rotation and bliss at the same time, too? Leave me a comment, okay?
And, musically, I´ll leave you... well.. not with a song from the moovie, because I didn´t like the soundtracks. I´ll embaress myself even more by confessing I really, really like Taylor Swifts new album speak now. It´s predictable, sweet girl pop, and I feel comfortable in it. Did I tell you I got up at six in the morning on Monday so I could get tickets for her concert, in the front row, for me and Eva? Think I didn´t :) Tell you, that is. I got the tickets, and Eva and I annoy the crap out of the rest of the family by telling them how ultimatly cool this is going to be :) So, I think my favourite from the album is:
Yep, of course it is. Such a lovely, creepy waltz. I can really imagine dancing a nice living room waltz to this, if only the lyrics weren´t so disturbing... but that´s what makes it intresting, right? :) And it is almost 7 minutes! Very nice, so I don´t have to press the replay button every three minutes.
This was one sweet and shiny week, full of smiles, and I think I should better write them down, because I tend to forget such precious little things. Like, watching my boys play on the kitchen table, and listen to the cute stories they develop while playing, and the way they make the train talk.
I really had to smile the other day when they got lollipops, and were licking them, in the grocery store, making it a challenge how long they´d manage not to bite on them. They were boldly exclaiming "Look, mine is smaller!" "But, mom, mine really is the smallest!", and all the old ladies in the store were chuckling :)
Watching Ronja draw on her grandparents´ doorwindow (is that a word?) and being really cute also made me smile,
or the pride we all felt when Mehmet tried to write his first word, all by himself:
Eva sat next to him and helped him form the phonemes, and when he wrote what they interpret as "Opa", Eva was so proud you could think Mehmet was her own firstborn child :)
Speaking of Eva, she also made me smile this week when I was listening to Alanis Morissette, and she honestly asked me "Mom, since when are you listening to Miley Cyrus?" ----- um.... seriously... my daughter is mistaking ALANIS for... well... that made me feel old and start to ramble on about how ultimatly amazing Alanis Morissette is :)
With fall break here and all kids being home all day long, free from all sceduled dates, we found the time to spend each afternoon working on something else at our kitchen table, and that made me smile, too. Finished projects are so satisfying.
So we continued working on that bath-fizzie, lipgloss and soap project, and for a day, our house smelled like lavender and peppermint, cocoa butter and natron, until...
we made it smell like chocolate and macadamia nuts and cinammon the day after...
and like beeswax the day after that, and we even got to finish the swingset we began to build to weeks ago:
Though I must admit that wasn´t really my work, except for keeping the children out of the way and taking pictures and feeding men. That makes me smile, too.
It makes me smile that fall is in full color, even I usually hate when it´s getting darker and colder, but right now, it just feels beautiful...
even though I lack the basic photographic skills to capture it...
It made me smile cuddling on the sofa when all the kids were asleep, watching Simpsons with my husband or analyzing the new Potter TV-spots that pop up all over the internet, and then picking the norwegian version from the shelf and giggling while reading it.
Seems like I compensate posting less with posting longer.
Musically, I´d like to leave you with some Taylor Swift song. You know, Eva is the world´s biggest Taylor Swift fan, and we spent a lot of time this week getting our hands on scraps and glimpses from her new album, translating the lyrics and trying to play them on guitar and violin, but whatever youtube video I could post here, youtube takes them down within minutes, and the album will only officially be released tomorrow, so...
...I go for education instead:
This. is not. Miley Cyrus. But if I had to assemble a soundtrack of my life, it would probably include the whole Jagged Little Pill album :)
for more than a few days, even when it was my resolution.
But hey, it just doesn´t work when I...
have such a beautiful town to share...
made entirely from wooden blocks we just stole from the twins...
...well, we didn´t exactly steal them without them knowing...
or at least, enjoying...
See, ladies, I just had to pass on the inspiration I got today from Hundertwasser and Creative Jewish Mom, so now, grab your rests of drying acrylic paint and everything small and sparkly you can find among your craft supplies, and get to work! :)
And, also please don´t tell that my music for today is Owl City...
because I usually avoid them because of their exaggerated use of autotune, but this song just feels right today.
And, psst, that hug from Saturday still makes me glow :)
...blogging to show off my gorgeous, toothless daughter is acceptable, right? Once a week...
...showing you how lovely the last days of indian summer in our garden, in the not-yet-finished-playtower are? Once a week...
...posting pictures of the butterfly Ronja brought into my kitchen? Once a week...
...blogging to tell you about the trip to Cologne I took with my girls yesterday, and how beautiful it was to see them admiring the mosaik-artwork, hear them squeak about the view from the bell tower, talk to them about Romans and the stoneage and Vivaldi and how awesome it is to be connected to the past?
I sure think it is :)
Hannah, thanks for your comment! As soon as we´re out of the experimental stage of how to make bath fizzies, I´ll write about it. sically, it works through a reaction of Natron and Citric acid, but we need something liquid enough to form the fizzies, and solid enough not to cause the reaction. I don´t know if that makes sense. But Martha Stewart is, as usually, a great resource for this.
My music for today is: Makes me count the seconds I´m spending here to type this :)
I´m really, really looking forward to this weekend - tgif!
Less blogging, more
-Folding paperboats and fortune tellers
-Building swing sets and vegetable gardens
-Stirring mean smoothies and chinese food
-Enjoying hugs around my waist
-Debating our political system, (if there is such thing as a system)
-Flying away in a chalk painted spaceships
-Drawing on marshmallows
-Writing heartwrenching prose
-Mixing bath fizzies and homemade lipgloss
-Taking walks in the dark with sparklers
-Trying to change the world, starting with the smallest things
- And thinking about life.
I think I´ll still be blogging, from time to time, I just like it too much to quit it completely, but I´ll stay a little abstinent from now. If you want to contact me, you know, I´ll check my comments on a regular base. And my emails. And my twitter. So, I won´t completely dissapear. Just a little :)
...really made me happy. I mean, usually the town just overwhelms me, but that might be because I´ve never been there all by myself. Usually, I´m together with someone. My children. My husband. Friends. People who talk to me, whom I have to take care of, who seek my attention. And Cologne is, just like any big city, a huge puddle of life, and contrasts. So when I went there alone, for the first time in my life I had the chance to really see it, and appreciate it. Like, this art installation, meant to encourage people to see life in pink, featuring lots of pink glasses. Next to...
a silent vigil calling attention to executions in iran. And, maybe 20 metres away from this,
Clowns. Really. And it wasn´t like this was any special occasion. It´s just the ordinary Cologne atmosphere, you know, homeless people next to shops where you can spend 300 Euros on a package of bathing foam, the smell of urin in an elevator next to the smell of the most delicious mango smoothies, drug addicts lying in beautiful parks, only metres away from the playground, the most artistic chalk paintings on the pavement, loud voices everywhere, and it´s always windy under the cathedral.
And I love this. I love all of it, as soon as I have the possibility to really see it.
Of course I enjoy living in our paradise-like yellow semi detached house, with a huge garden and fields around. But it´s a bubble we created to raise our kids in, and I appreciate to take a step out of that bubble from time to time. Makes me feel more alive. So I enjoyed my time in Cologne, tried to take it all in, donated money to the homeless, signed the petition against death penalty and deeply inhaled in that expensive store for bathing foam.
(Where I also marvelled over the handmade soap, of course :) )
I bought the new graphic novel from Audrey Niffenegger, sat down in a small cafe and melted away reading it. If you havent´read Time Traveller´s Wife yet, I´d highly encourage you to do so, because it´s one of the best books I know, seriously.
And then, after wiping away the last book-tears, I went to see Lifehouse :) Now, that was one pretty awesome Saturday I had, and I´m thankfull my husband was so kind to babysit our children. It was strange going to a concert all alone, though. I don´t mind being alone, it was just bewildering being crushed between couples who were all cuddling and snogging through the whole concert. Gave me an insight how the world must always look from the perspective of a single.
But hey, Lifehouse really rocks. They are live a lot better than on my kitchen CD-player, and with every song they played I thought "Yep, this is my favourite". It´s hard to choose an actual favourite, maybe it was this one:
or, thinking about it, it´s probably this one: This might qualify as my favourite song of the year. There´s hardly any other song I´ve played so often in the last six months. I adore the contrast between the silent, quiet parts, and the parts where you just have to bounce and jump around. And I love love love the lyrics.
...I collected plenty this weekend, but right now I´m just too tired to share. This are Miro and Ronja in Wuppertal, and a little editing in picnik:
I went to see Lifehouse yesterday, as to be expected they were awesome, and I feel so flooded with music that I could post twenty songs of the day. But I saw this one girl busking in Cologne yesterday, and as she totally made made my day, here she is:
Allright, I know she messed with the lyrics, but I really like her voice, and her sense for rhythm, and the way she smiles.
I think I´m back tomorrow in the morning, now I´m off to soak in the tub.
