It’s been a while, but WE ARE BACK! You might have noticed that the website looks all brand-new and that our shop looks all brand-new. One of the not-very-interesting things about what Matthew and I do is that we have to do a lot of it ourselves. Which meant that while I was figuring out how to make everything around here on the web look all spiffy, I had to stop doing blog posts because there are only so many hours in the day.
Our time figuring out the new site also included some time to think about how we could keep doing our themes but give you all a little more time to do them. As much as we liked getting new pictures and stories every week, I think it was starting to feel like homework for a lot of people.
So here’s the deal:
We will be introducing MONTHLY themes. More time to figure out stories and draw lots of pictures and to come up with interesting facts about the theme and share them.
We will be posting more frequently to the Bobbledy facebook page so that it’s easier to share your pictures and thoughts, and see everyone else’s.
So that’s the plan, hope you like it! Like the Bobbledy Facebook Page if you haven’t already so you can stay up-to-date!
Last weekend we went out and got our Christmas tree in spite of my aversion to starting Christmas before Thanksgiving has gotten a chance to recover. Due to a number of circumstances (Thanksgiving coming so incredibly late this year + Matthew’s mom being in town) we headed out to Simmon’s Christmas Tree Farm on the very first day that they were open for the season. This meant that we had the prime pick of the place, and pretty much instantly saw our perfect tree while descending from our complimentary hayride (all of this is to say, if you would like to get your own tree, you ought to go to Simmons).
At any rate, we got home after a long and exhausting day on Saturday, and told Alden and Kato and August we would do the decorating on Sunday.
Unfortunately, we hadn’t quite thought things through. The tradition around here is to bake butter cookies to decorate the tree with. Baking butter cookies is an all-day affair that begins with having several pounds of softened butter on hand. We woke on Sunday morning to find we were already behind, what with not having the several pounds of butter, softened or not. We put the lights on the tree and told the kids we would have to hold off on decorating until next weekend, when soft butter and firm resolve were more within reach. They were very disappointed.
Several times over the course of the afternoon, we were asked when we would be decorating the tree. After continual and relentless disappointments, the kids finally took matters into their own hands.
Without cookies or other ornaments on hand, they improvised (they get this from me):
All of August’s colorful stacking blocks went on the tree, as did Lamby (sometimes known as Apple Dumpling), whose cheeks flash a jolly red glow while he sings a song if you press the button on his belly (very festive):
After having run out of toys with natural hanging loops, they resourcefully found some Swiffer duster handles to complete the look:
I’m mostly astonished that we own more than one Swiffer duster handle, given how infrequently/never I Swiffer.
Though I think we’ll still do the cookies this weekend, I have to say that I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for the new ornaments. Perhaps this will have to become a holiday tradition. Here’s to many more years of rogue decorating!
I love Halloween. I think it’s my favorite holiday of the year (actually, I think it’s tied with Thanksgiving, but for the purposes of this blog post, let’s just say it’s my favorite for now). I’m not, however, one of those ambitious Halloween maniacs – the folks who come up with elaborate spooking devices they put on their lawns, or who go all out with the spider webs and jack-o-lanterns. I wish I were. Really, I do. But Halloween has a way of sneaking up on me and I’m never quite prepared for it.
This year was going to be different. Alden had been claiming since the spring that she wanted to be a princess fairy, and wear her Tinkerbell dress-up dress for it. Costume #1: done. It’s been done since May. Check. Kato has said all along that he’d like to be an airplane. Actually, specifically, a jet. So we have spent the last month or so discussing what we would need to make a jet. He’s been quite thoughtful about it. Well, all this discussion went nowhere until the 29th, when our Yankee Candle school fundraiser order arrived in just the right sized box to make a jet plane out of. We sprang into action.
I cut a hole in the top of the box for Kato’s head, and some small holes on the sides for his arms. We fashioned a tail out of a triangle of cardboard, and Kato advised me on the proper aerodynamics of the tail fins (I originally had much too long of a top fin, making the jet look more like a sideways rocket). It was such a flurry of jet-making that I forgot to take pictures. After ransacking our storage area for big pieces of cardboard that might work as wings, I found a bolt of cloth, and voila! Cut it in half and you’ve got two pre-fab wings.
Kato very carefully placed them into the slots I cut out for them.
We used the styrofoam packaging for a Yankee Candle jar to make the nose of the plane, and added the propellor from an old balsa wood wind-up plane that had been long broken. Again, I forgot to take pictures.
I also forgot to look after August, who announced that he had taken off his diaper and pooped on the floor. In the flurry of excitement following his announcement, I kneeled on my exacto knife, ruined a favorite pair of pants, and suffered a not-really-mortal flesh wound.
Because of the poop debacle, I only had time for a packing tape and paper towel bandage, but it seemed to do the trick.
Once we were back on track, Alden helped out with the taping.
We had decided to put duct tape over the entire cardboard construction to make it look more shiny, like a real plane.
We did not realize at the time how long this would take, given how impossible it is to keep duct tape from sticking to itself.
After a run to the store for more duct tape and several hours of dedicated service, the plane was finished.
Kato put it on, and immediately said, “I don’t like this.” And then took it off. Resisting the urge to scream, I asked what was wrong with it. He said that it smelled funny and didn’t have any wheels.
Well, wheels would have to wait. Not 100% enthusiastic, but bleeding from one knee and smelling of duct tape, we headed to bed, with a whole day to spare before Halloween.
After getting back from school the following day (Halloween Eve), we added some wheels, using the bolts for Iggy’s travel crate, so that they could be retractable.
Kato agreed that they were pretty cool. But he still wasn’t fully on board (no pun intended). A little more rummaging around produced a pair of work earmuffs that I converted to a pilot headset with the addition of a bendy-straw and ball-of-tape microphone. Instantly, Kato was sold.
Apparently being able to speak into a microphone and say, “Pilot to co-pilot, we’re ready for blast-off” cures all ills, including the funky smell of duct tape.
So, while Kato took his plane on a short test flight,
Alden began to fret. Her costume didn’t feel like much of a costume anymore. We had spent all this time on Kato’s costume, and she was just going to pull hers out of a drawer the next morning. I appreciated her sudden desire for craftiness, but couldn’t help but be a little annoyed at the timing. She still wanted to be a princess, but wanted to have a new dress. With about an hour to go before bedtime, we raided my closet. We came up with a few options, but they didn’t look quite princess-y enough (too cottony, perhaps, not enough polyestery). And then I remembered a piece of fabric I had – regal red with a gold herringbone pattern. And I discovered the most amazing thing (necessity really IS the mother of invention!) – you can make a fantastic princess dress out of a single piece of fabric and a ribbon – no sewing required.
And here are some vague-ish directions on how to do this, which you can skip over if you don’t care about princesses or princess dresses or how awesome it is to not have to sew a dress at the last minute when you can’t really sew:
So, these directions probably don’t make any sense, but it’s super easy. You cut a hole big enough for the head in the center of one side of the fabric, kind of close to the edge – that’s the neck hole. Put the fabric on, with the short part of the fabric towards the back. Bunch up the fabric that’s hanging on the back and drape it back forward over the neck (so it looks like a halter top). Then take the corner of the fabric that you just folded over to the front and pull it towards the back (under the arm) and up through the neck hole. Pull it tight until it tightens around the arm, making a kind of a sleeve. Do the same for the other side. The fabric that is pulled through in the back will make a bustle-looking thing, and you just tie the ribbon around the waist to keep everything in place. Note that relative to the kid, the fabric is actually a little bigger – for Alden it dragged on the ground in the front a little bit, because she wanted it to be long and princessy.
Again, I have no photographic evidence, because we were down to the proverbial wire. We cut a crown out of paper, added a wand with a paper diamond on top, made up a name for our princess (Princess Juliana!), and called it a day.
And then, it was Halloween! We were invited to a Halloween party after school. Once again, I decided to put together a costume for myself in the hour that we had after school before leaving for the party. I found two bags of indian corn under the stairs that the kids had brought back from a field trip two weeks ago and I had forgotten about. I decided to put it to use. With the help of a trusty construction stapler, some foam core and saran wrap, I made myself into a corn flake.
Get it?
August stuck with the old standby chicken hat:
(while Matthew stuck with the old standby “Exhausted Dad”).
I adjusted Alden’s ribbon:
And we were ready to party:
There were several great things about the party. One of them was lounging on the Adirondack chairs next to the fire pit:
And the other was getting away with forbidden love between man and cornstalk:
Oh, and of course, I forgot about all the pizza and candy we consumed.
And, perhaps best of all, the fake fangs that were in the goody-bags:
There’s nothing scarier than an off-duty pilot who’s turned into a vampire, unless of course it’s Princess Juliana come to suck your blood:
After the party we rushed back to our house to grab some candy and head over to our neighbors’ porch – ours is small and hardly noticeable, so it isn’t great for candy distribution. Donald and Ann have generously hosted us since Alden was a wee one – and we have so far successfully tricked the kids into thinking that giving candy out to trick-or-treaters is more fun than actually trick-or-treating.
We had a wonderful time and saw lots of great costumes.
Did I tell you how much I love Halloween? A LOT. I just can’t stop talking about it (no kidding!).
Hope you all had a happy, fun, and gratifying Halloween. Until next time,
Yesterday Alden called for an impromptu costume party. She had gotten a rainbow flag from Matthew’s mom, and thought it made a fab skirt. She wanted me to dress up as a princess, but I declined, arguing that a costume party ought to demand a little more creativity. After going through a list of things that she thought I should dress up as (princess, queen, mermaid, Merida, fairy, fairy princess, jewelled fairy princess) and being repeatedly rejected, she started, in despair, on a list of things she saw around the room (baseball, baseball bat, hat, socks, chair, a slice of pizza). Yes! A slice of pizza it would be!
We discussed what I would need to dress up like pizza. Something cheese-colored. We looked through my drawers and found a yellow-ish shirt, turned inside out so the logo didn’t show. We cut out a brown-ish piece of paper for the crust, and taped it to my forehead.
Pepperoni pizza is a favorite around here, so I cut out the first pepperoni to tape to my shirt. Alden found circle-cutting to be too slow and laborious, so started getting creative with the shapes.
We decided I would be a canadian bacon pizza, since canadian bacon comes in more irregular shapes. Really, quite irregular shapes:
Many pieces of canadian bacon were carefully applied to my shirt:
They aren’t kidding when they say that bacon sticks to the ribs:
While heading to the kitchen for our photo shoot, my pepperoni fell off. Apparently, pepperoni doesn’t stick to the ribs like bacon does. Alden did her last-minute fix:
We gave it the old thumbs up:
And were ready to pose for our beauty shots (notice the classy paper-clipped-to-my-crotch tip of the pizza):
Matthew, still under the weather, was not feeling as ambitious as I about his costume (I’d like to point out that my sinus headache and runny nose did not stop me. I mean, it’s a COSTUME PARTY!):
He and Kato both dressed as baseball players.
Opening ceremonies involved some loud declarations from Alden about how things were going to proceed:
Apparently, costume parties begin with marching. Kato took the lead.
One person marching was not enough, so we all had to head to the living room for some group marching (this was starting to feel less like a costume party and more like militant indoctrination):
After the marching was over, a game of Fly the Airplane From the Drawing Table to the TV Stand was in order.
I did not follow the rules.
And though things started out well for August’s flight…
…things went terribly awry when his co-pilot took over the controls, much to his consternation:
That was enough to ruin the game for everyone.
Alden announced the third (and final) event – Spinning the Blanket Over Your Head (Two Times):
Her demonstration was slightly misleading, as it appeared you were also supposed to spin yourself around…
… two times:
Matthew got the hang of it immediately:
I would include more photos from the rest of the party, but at that point Kato lost his pants, and all the photos after that are ruined.
But frankly, a party where nobody loses his pants isn’t much of a party after all. This was one for the ages. Wish you all could have been there –
About a year ago now, our friend Jiho Sohn came to Chestertown for a daylong photoshoot. On one hand, we wanted to get new pics for our press kit and the soon-to-be-launched Bobbledy web site. But on the other hand, we just wanted some nice shots of our family.
As it turned out, we got both. Jiho’s beautiful shots of our family have already appeared in our Bobbledy brochure, Chesapeake Taste magazine, and WIRED.com’s Geek Mom blog. One of them will also appear in the back of our upcoming book by Chronicle, Ten Thousand Stories.
What we did not expect from the shoot was a movie. But just last week, Jiho cobbled together the bulk of the photos from the shoot into a 90-second stop motion film of sorts. The result is enchanting.
Jiho is an incredibly talented photographer and a truly wonderful guy. I’d suggest you hire him if he wasn’t on the verge of leaving for an extended stay in Germany. Still, check out his site JihoNation.com if you love gorgeous images.
And if you love great music, you’re probably already humming the background tune from the video to yourself. The song is The New South from the album of the same name by the one and only Drew Bunting, our dear friend and resident rock star. You can get a copy of The New South via the Idiots’Books web site. As for Drew’s upcoming children’s album, all you Bobbledy kids will be getting your copy around the first of June.
And if you’re not already in the club, get to it, already!.
Some of you might already know that Matthew has taken all three kids and headed out to Kansas City for the next two weeks. Part of the reason for the trip was to visit Matthew’s dad and stepmom, and part of it was so that I have two solid weeks to learn how how to animate.
Ha ha ha!
I am trying to learn how to animate because apparently the new thing is for books to have book trailers (like movie trailers) go out before the books are actually published. A little video teaser. Of a book. You can tell I’m getting old because I think this is a weird idea. Our book Ten Thousand Stories is being published by Chronicle Books and will be released in October.
Here’s a book trailer of one of my favorite books:
We couldn’t afford this guy who, by his own admission, does “awesome book trailers,” so instead I am going to have to throw together some hinky thing by myself and see how it goes. If I fail, I fail, but I won’t know until I give it a try. And so, I’m trying.
Though the time alone to focus is great, it basically means that my house is EMPTY. No kids to wake me up in the morning. No Matthew to feed me at appropriate times. So far I’ve only spent about half a day learning animation stuff and the rest of the time cleaning the house, filing old paperwork, wasting a lot of time on Facebook, watching terrible romantic comedies, staying up till four in the morning and eating banana splits for dinner. In spite of all that, I must admit that I miss my family.
So it was lucky that yesterday some old (and young) friends stopped by to say hello and purportedly to get me to sign their copy of Bobby and the Robots.
Mostly, it was an excuse to take a nice walk in the park and then hang out in the studio a bit. Marley and Suki (whose full name is Sakura, the japanese word for cherry blossoms – which makes me so happy!) decided they not only wanted me to sign their book, but they also wanted to return the favor and draw me some pictures.
So, they sat down at the table with some Bobbledy Blobs (and Kato’s art kit) and did some drawing.
They both started off with a portrait of me.
Suki’s version of me is lean, with hairy legs (how on earth did she know?):
Marley’s version of me is round and jolly, with blue cheeks and a blue nose (it was rather brisk out yesterday):
I especially like how I can seem different to different people, even when I’m the same me. That really is what is so wonderful about art – everyone sees things differently, and it comes out in how we draw.
After portraits were done, the girls couldn’t be stopped.
Suki drew me a mouse:
You’ll notice the mouse also has hairy legs. Perhaps that is why I feel such a kinship to it. That and his jolly face. Who couldn’t love a mouse with a face like that?
Marley discovered the scissors in Kato’s art kit, and decided to create a deconstructed work of art.
My favorite bit was the little tiny sliver of paper. “A hair,” she revealed.
I could barely see that hair! I got out a magnifying glass so we could all get a closer look. We looked at the paper “hair” and then thought it would be fun to have a look at some of the pieces of drawn-on paper too. Suki did a thorough investigation.
And Marley reported that the crayon marks looked like dust. Which they do, kind of, when you see them up close.
And that’s another thing I like about art. Depending on how you look at it, it can look like an entirely different thing than how you meant it to look. Like a hair instead of a sliver of paper, or dust instead of a drawing.
So – thank you, Suki and Marley (and, yeah, you grown-ups who tagged along too). Thanks for reminding me how much fun it is to make art and how much fun it is to look at the world in different ways. It was a nice interruption to my newfound bachelorhood, and your creativity has inspired me to get back to work. My days of procrastinating are over—I’ve got to start learning how to do this thing. I’ll let you know how it works out.
