crooked house

Our Easter Tree

Luke and his beloved Gramma at work on this year's model. It's much more dramatic than last year's.

Trompe L'Oeil Shopping Bags

You could pay $32 for this canvas Anthropologie bag.

Or $9 for this organic cotton one by showpony on Etsy. She offers five different versions.

Or you could pay $1 (Canadian!) for these Joe shopping bags offered by my local grocery store. (Sorry for the blurry photo. Clearly the cost of the photo styling affects the price.) They come in about six different colours.

The Irrestistible Henry House

Sometimes you read the description of a book and you know you have to have it, no matter what the reviews say.* Author Lisa Grunwald was inspired to write The Irresistible Henry House when she happened upon these photos of Bobby Domecon on Cornell's website. Bobby Domecon was a practice baby who lived in a practice apartment at the university, where he was mothered by a rotation of Domestic Economics students for at least the first year of his life. Apparently there were many such practice babies, plucked from orphanages, at many universities throughout the states for around 40 years, until research in the 1960s began to demonstrate that infants needed to attach to a primary caregiver in order to develop normally. Grunwald wondered about how the babies raised this way would have fared later in life and her novel is an exploration of one such fictional baby's life. The first part of the book, about Henry's early childhood, his real mother, and the head of the practice baby program, is riveting. The later sections, in which Henry grows up and become an animator for Disney (working on the Mary Poppins movie) and then moves to London to work on Yellow Submarine, wander a little -- Grunwald obviously did a lot of research on the era and you can sometimes see the seams -- but the book is more than worth a read. It made me curious about the lives of the actual, real-life practice babies. I did some googling and discovered only a proposal for a documentary film about them, nothing more.

Of course, the children who stayed in orphanages would certainly be likely to develop attachment disorders as well. What makes the case of the practice babies so interesting is that they were considered to be superior candidates for later adoption because they were being raised using all the latest, most scientific methods and techniques.

Grunwald lists some of the books she read while she writing Henry. I've added the following ones to my own to-read list:

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

 Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children

 Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers

Dr. Spock: An American Life

Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession

*Most reviews of this book are mixed but tend toward the positive. I was surprised to read both a very negative and a very positive review of the book in The New York Times. I'm not sure what the point of this is -- while it was probably a relief to Grunwald to have such a great review follow such a bad one, surely there are so many books that deserve attention that the editors should have been loath to devote so much space to one book.

Some Like It Scalding

For my dad. From design student Rachel Dangerfield's blog. Would also work really well as "Some like it hot. Some like it hotter." Happy birthday Dad!

Some New Pop-Up Books to Covet

 

Popville is almost too beautiful to let the kids play with. See more photos and read about the book, which follows the development of a city from a lone church in the middle of a field to a huge metropolis, here.

Ray Marshall talks more about Paper Blossoms, his book of paper floral centerpieces, here.

And my favourite, the Guide for the Unlucky. Watch a video about it and then don't miss out on the rest of artist Kyle Bean's fabulous site.

A Day in the Life of Miss Sylvie

How to Make: The Ocean in a Bottle

Luke's been on a how-to kick for the last couple of days. Here he demonstrates how to make the ocean in a bottle.

Ji Lee's Parallel Worlds

Ji Lee's Parallel Worlds. Love this, of course. Via swiss miss.

Check Out the Bedhead

Over March Break We Travelled... Back in Time

One of our favourite places to hang out nearby is Ross Farm Museum. It's a working farm and one of those "living" museum sites where the staff pretends they are still in 1850 or whatever. I don't know what it is -- maybe my penchant for fiction -- but I'm a total sucker for that stuff and often drive the workers nuts by peppering them with questions, trying to get them to perform in character. If I were one of them -- and come to think of it, I'd love to be -- I'm sure I'd irritate the hell out of them all by refusing to ever break character.

Teenage Co-worker Playing My Daughter: I might have to leave a little early today because I have to get my car to the garage.

Me As Farmer's Wife: First of all, Adelaide, you can't leave the farm unchaperoned. What would the Reverend Palmer think if he saw you?! And secondly, what on earth is this "car" of which you speak? I let you sit in the sun without your bonnet for five minutes and now you're raving. Let me get you some essence of tansy wort.

Teenage Co-worker: My name is Britney.

Anyway, we spent two days at the farm over March Break.

 

In these photos, Luke is embossing a strip of leather the old-fashioned way -- with a wooden mallet. The guy in the scratchy hat who taught him how to do this was very brave. And Luke didn't hit his finger even once.

Here's a shot of the scrapbox I made with these photos and the piece of embossed leather. I'm going crazy with these scrapboxes. Our entire house is going to look like a living museum soon.