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This is the angel Luke made at school as a Christmas present for me.
And here is the battle scene he drew at home as a Christmas present for me. Both were wrapped up and tucked under the tree on Christmas morning. I particularly like the detail on the left -- the man who loses his glasses as he falls out of the sky and uh, smashes his head into the ground. Happy holidays everyone!
It's too late to ask Santa for The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories
This letter to Santa, written in 1911 by seven-year-old Alfred and ten-year-old Hannah Howard, was found tucked inside a chimney in Dublin. Via A. N. Devers on facebook.
Vivi and I are already having disagreements about how much lipstick she should wear.
Here's a shot of the paper village we always put up around this time of year. Some of the houses -- the three-dimensional ones with pastel roofs -- I made a year or two ago using a Martha Stewart winter village kit
I've taken photographs of other houses in our neighbourhood, and ones of the houses of some relatives and friends -- you know, the people who don't actually live in our neighbourhood but we wish did. (Gramma, when you read this, please email us a photo of your house and Den's.) And, time permitting, I'm going to add those houses to our paper village, too. So that even if the real world isn't perfect, our paper one will be.
Or maybe not. If you look closely, you can see where the roof of our porch is starting to fall down, right above the steps. And unfortunately, there's another slight problem. I suggested to Luke that we might like to put little cut-out photographs/paper dolls of him and Vivi on the felt, next to that snowman say, and he thought that was a great idea. "We should look sad, though," he said.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because the house is on fire," he said. And unfortunately, it does look a little like that. Luke thinks the glossiness of the map behind the roof of the house even looks like smoke.
We could just go with that, I suppose. Add a toy fire truck and all.
All you need to make your own is a photograph of your house printed on a sheet of vellum, a battery-operated tea light or two (whatever you do, don't use real ones), and some tape. The glass vase or candle-holder is optional. If you don't want to use one, just fold the photo of your house in a kind of tube around a tea-light and fasten it with the tape.
Dear Denise Morrison, President and CEO of Campbell's Foods:
I am writing to warn you of a change in your consumer base that is bound to have grave repercussions for your company.
A recent Harvard study has revealed that concentrations of the chemical bisphenol-A rise around 1000 percent in people who eat one bowl of canned soup per day. Bisphenol-A is often used in the manufacture of plastics but your company and others who put food in cans apparently use it to make the material that lines those cans. I do not know exactly what this amount of bisphenol-A does in the human body and it appears that scientists do not exactly know, either, but they are making a lot of guesses that don't sound at all good. Apparently the chemical is an endocrine disrupter, which means it messes with one's hormones and has therefore been linked to cancerous tumors, birth defects, and other developmental disorders like learning disabilities, ADHD, and cognitive issues, as well as problems with heart disease, obesity and diabetes, and sexual development.
So far I have not noticed any tumors growing on my children but there is still plenty of time. And while I believe they are geniuses, I hate to think that they might have been just that much more intelligent, talented and well-behaved. It is not difficult to conjecture that, if my children had never ingested any canned foods, by now they might be working as highly paid child actors, like Dakota Fanning or Haley Joel Osment. We're talking about the loss of millions of dollars of family income here.
I have become convinced that canned foods are at the root of the disharmony suffered by many families as a result of the poor performance of the children. I do not know what Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
, fed her children but I now suspect she wouldn't have have had to push them so hard to practise their musical instruments if she had completely avoided serving them canned food. Because they probably wouldn't have had to practise so much. I'm guessing that, by now, her children would be supporting her -- and she wouldn't have had to write that embarrassing book in order to put them through college.
Furthermore, although my current goal is to slow my own children's sexual development for as long as possible, there is a slim chance that, once I am dead, they may wish to begin dating.
The Harvard study I reference above and and others like it have have led me to finally make the decision to stop feeding canned goods to my children. This is the event that is bound to have dangerous financial consequences for your company. Currently, my children eat 13 trillion cans of Campbell's Chunky Chicken Noodle soup per week. This is an estimate, of course, but not a very rough one. Let's just say my children eat a lot of that soup. In fact, they do not eat much else – perhaps a bowl of Kraft dinner now and then, or the odd chicken nugget. (And I ask you, what chicken nugget is not odd? What part of the bird do these uniformly pale lumps come from, exactly? But I realize that this is not your area of expertise as your lumps of chicken are pinkish, blotchy and veiny and are not encased in a tidy bread-crumb coating.)
It may surprise you to know that my two small children, aged two and six years respectively, ingest so much of your product and, in fact, you may be doubly shocked when I inform you that the younger child, my daughter, eats only the carrots. My son, however, will deign to eat the broth and the noodles and the other vegetable-like substances you include -- but not of course the weird chicken, we give that to the cat -- so so you could say that between the two (or three) of them, they lick the platter (bowl) clean. Of course, not literally clean. Nothing has been clean in this house since they were born.
As you can probably tell from the fact that your company has not already gone bankrupt, I have not yet completely stopped feeding the children your soup as I anticipate a few possibly unsurmountable problems as a result of this move. First, I am unsure whether my children will ever eat anything else. As an experiment yesterday, I tried to feed my daughter real carrots, boiled to a soft consistency. Although to me they looked and tasted almost exactly like the carrots in your soup, she refused to eat them, perhaps because they did not have that faint undertaste of plastic to which she has become accustomed. I fully understand, though, that this is not your problem. I am also fairly confident that, as their mother, I can somehow manage to meet their nutritional needs in some other way, perhaps through the use of Flintstones vitamins mixed in with a barley-based pablum in order to create the sensation of fullness.
However, I trust that you will share my concern about the imminent collapse of your company, once I stop my weekly purchases of approximately 13 trillion cans. And I am even more deeply concerned about the effect that the collapse of your rather large company will have on the already fragile global economy, which is why I am ccing the President of the United States, the Head of the European Union, and whoever is in charge of that weird hybrid of communism and capitalism in China. (I'll google it.) Because I plan to implement the radical change of no longer feeding Campbell's Chunky Chicken Noodle soup to my children THIS EVENING AROUND 5pm EST, I fully expect the world markets to tumble dramatically tomorrow morning. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the globe is plunged into a bleak economic (and mental) Depression, one to rival that of 1929, by Friday evening.
I am sorry. I realize that the Christmas season is an unfortunate time of year for bad economic news. But I have to bite the bullet here – the health of my children must come first. During the Great Depression, many people raised their own chickens and grew their own vegetables. I plan to do both. I assure you that I am not looking forward to the extra work, especially since I'll probably have to perform many other tasks I have never done before, like darn socks or even knit them from scratch. And I am determined to figure out how to grow noodles as well, so that I can make my children our own version of a Chunky Chicken Noodle Soup. Although it occurs to me as I am writing this, that while I'm making these changes for the sake of my children's health, I might as well attempt to raise slender chickens instead of chunky ones. At any rate, my version of Chunky Chicken Noodle Soup will not contain any Bisphenol-A.
I just wanted to give you a heads-up.
Sincerely,
Stephany Aulenback
P.S. You could always start using cans that don't contain any Bisphenol-A and save both of us a lot of trouble. Apparently this company does.
Bill Lobley and family's Chrstms crd.
This little crooked house, which is even more crooked than our crooked house, is on the grounds of the Indianapolis Arts Center. I found it on pinterest.
Here's a pretty photo of it after it has been weathered grey.
For anyone who has ever used their teeth to try separate two lego bricks that are stuck together, I give you: the lego brick separator
