To Philadelphia and Back in 22 Hours

How are we already here again? Two years ago exactly, my older kid and I were on a whirlwind tour to see one last college before she made up her mind about where she was going to go to school. 

That feels so long ago, but also like it was yesterday, you know? That kid I took on her last college tour before Decision Day was still a kid. Just two years later she's still my baby, but she's no longer a child. She finished growing up there at college when I wasn't there to see it.

Now I'm supporting my younger kid as she makes the same kind of agonizing decision, and she's simultaneously the most grown-up, confident, sophisticated human I've ever had the privilege to know and also my precious four-year-old in a thrifted velvet dress, butterfly wings strapped to her back, mashing dandelion flowers into a pretend pie in her backyard mud kitchen.

How can I let that tiny little sprite out of my sight, much less drop her off and leave her at a college 700 miles away? Wasn't it just last week that she sat on Santa's lap and told him that she wanted a kitten for Christmas?

How about we just try not to think that far ahead for a bit. Let's just think about not forgetting where in this massive Economy Lot we're leaving the damn car:

Then we'll just think about the following:

• airport security
• napping during the flight
• finding the SEPTA station at the Philadelphia International Airport and buying rail tickets for later (the station in the college town apparently doesn't have its own ticket kiosk? Because... reasons?)
• booking and riding in my very first Lyft (super smooth process, but our driver did treat us to an anti-Philadelphia screed while also spurning the highway in favor of only surface streets, making the ride take so long that the Lyft app sent me a push notification asking if I was okay or was I in peril)
• getting dropped off at the campus gates and then immediately hoofing it to the nearest Starbucks for caffeine and a breakfast wrap
• taking one sip of my chocolate cream cold brew and realizing as soon as the stimulant hit my brain that we were about to be late for the Welcome event
• hoofing it back to campus at double-speed

And then, of course, exploring this beautiful college campus and learning about the school and meeting some students and staff and watching my kid make friends with the other kids on the tour. 

This school has a literal cloister why?

The kid is more of a sucker for the Collegiate Gothic architectural style than I am. Who wouldn't want to have class inside a castle?

Just between us, and knowing what y'all know about this kid, I'm pretty sure the fact that this school is basically a poorly-disguised cult for worshipping Athena is its biggest draw for her...

Statue of Athena, at which the students leave offerings. Tell me it's not a cult.

When we were given a little free time, the kid and I OBVIOUSLY beelined straight to the library. College libraries are some of my favorite campus buildings to explore!

Check out the original statue of Athena up high where students from the rival college can't reach her, and also plaster casts taken from the genuine Parthenon metopes on display at the British Museum. I'm just gonna leave this right here.

So envious that they have a whole room of puzzles! They also have a craft club with its own permanent, dedicated studio and an art club, also with its own permanent, dedicated studio. 

I read this book in grad school!

I'm telling you, the owl iconography is INTENSE. I kind of wanted to ask how this impacted their enrollment of students from certain Native American nations, but I'd already asked soooo many weird questions that I felt I should probably leave some weird questions for other people to ask.

Tell me that this is not a shocking number of owls, though?!?

I am SO glad that I'm not seventeen years old and trying to figure out where I want to go to college. The amazing choices that she has are a blessing, a luxury, and a direct result of the hard work this kid has done and the phenomenal person she is, but it's also an awful burden to have to decide.

Let's spend the next few hours not thinking about it, and instead thinking about how to navigate the SEPTA system, especially because Jefferson Station booted us out into a shopping mall with no discernible exit, and it took us at least 20 minutes to find our way out to the street. Also, while I was standing at one of the big maps and figuring out our route, a kind stranger came over to gently point out that I was tracing the trolley line and not the rail line. Because apparently Philadelphia also has trolleys!

I'd wanted to see Chinatown, browse a couple of bookstores, walk around the Independence sites, etc., and we had plenty of time to do that, but I'd neglected to take into account that by the time we got downtown we'd have been up and at 'em for approximately 14 hours, and shockingly for me when confronted with a tourist site, I was starting to fade.

Imagine! ME!!! Forgetting to so much as take a snapshot of the Chinatown Gate as we walked under it! Unwilling to walk a few extra blocks over to the bookstore I'd Pinned! Too tired to make the extra effort to take a close-up photo of Independence Hall!

Not even the facts of my own exhausted near-tears and the kid who dances on pointe six days a week admitting that her feet hurt could stop me from paying my respects to Ben, Deborah, and Francis Franklin, though:

That was the last tourist thing we did, though. After that we trudged straight back to Jefferson Station, caught the train back to the airport, did the whole security theatre dance number one more time, and collapsed at our gate, where the kid proceeded to sleep as soundly as if she'd been in her bed back home for the remaining two hours until our flight.

I, on the other hand, finished my book (Peter Darling), started another (Beartown), and discovered that, gasp, the Philadelphia International Airport only stocks Pepsi products?!? NOOO!!! Mama needs her Diet Sprite!

I reluctantly nursed my... Starry? WTF is a STARRY?!?... and made it last until we got back to our home airport, at which point I'd forgotten that I'd even taken a photo of our parking spot. Thank goodness for the teenager, who just flat-out remembered where we parked in her head, and who loudly sang our personal mash-up of "Party Rock Anthem," "California Girls," and the entire Percy Jackson musical with me to keep me awake for the drive home. 

I want her to go to absolutely the BEST college, y'all, and also I never want her to leave my side for a second. 

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Eighteen Eclipse Buntings in Thirty Days

Because it's very important to teenagers that you stay humble, my own teenager was quick to inform me that, despite the unexpected and fleeting popularity of my handmade eclipse buntings in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, I was not, and likely never would be, "viral."

Whatever. I still enjoyed my brief moment in the #girlboss sun!

I also finally finished The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel while I sewed, ending up with exactly 8 minutes left in the series finale at the moment that I cut the last thread on my last bunting, so that's yet another big accomplishment.

Now I'm watching that Duggar documentary series while I sew marble maze fidgets, and hoo-boy is THAT a wild ride! I did watch that show back in the day, when I was more entertained by secondhand cringe than I am now, although my REAL secondhand cringe favorite was Jon and Kate + 8. I could still happily endlessly chew over every single one of those episodes, snarking away about all the horrible adults. Remember the time that the family got a free trip to Disney World and then they got free ice cream and Kate wouldn't let the kids eat it? Or when they got the free trip to the Crayola Crayon hands-on place and she wouldn't let them do most of the activities? I'm STILL made on the kids' behalf!

I definitely didn't do any of the things that I probably should have done when blessed with a suddenly popular (not viral! Never say viral, at least not to a teenager!) listing. I'm pretty sure I should have done... something to further market or build on or... something. So maybe I didn't exactly #girlboss after all, lol. Oh, well! I mostly gave up my #handmade #girlboss dreams back when I gave up craft fairs.

Sewing all those bunting orders was really fun while it lasted, though! 

P.S. I actually wrote a tutorial for this bunting, so you can make your own!

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That Time I Made Everyone Play Senet With Me

The set we're playing is from the university library (because of course it is, lol!), but this is it.

This might have been my quickest speed-run through a Special Interest yet, but for a very little while my entire mind was fixed on learning how to play Senet, teaching everyone else how to play Senet, and then wheedling those people into playing Senet with me.

It was fed by a couple of other low-key Special Interests, that of Historic Games and of Reskinning/Redesigning Games. I just think it would be really cool to pick a historic game like Senet, reskin it to look more like something that would be a family interest or family joke, and then construct it and give it out for, like, Christmas or something.

Part of that is that I like the historical time periods of my favorite games, Ancient Egypt for Senet and Mesopotamia for the Royal Game of Ur, for instance, but also they're always so pretty! Look at some of the beautiful Senet games in the Met!

I also like how generally simple the games are to learn, and how satisfying they are to play. Do you, too, get weary of trying to learn new games with a billion fiddly rules? Senet is SO much simpler to learn, but there are all kinds of interesting strategies to figure out. Also, we don't really know the actual rules, so my family and I like to make up our own rules. 

Playing Senet in 2013 at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California, and DEFINITELY making up our own rules!

Here's the most accepted way to play Senet, with a bonus link to a printable Senet board and instructions.

Here are some DIY Senet board games:

• 3D Senet. This one is the biggest score! This public library's website links to a pdf for a cut, color, and assemble cardstock Senet game. It's got the graphics printed on it, as well as helpful fingers pointing the directions you're meant to go at every turn. If you didn't want all that detail, you could use the pattern as a template and draw your own designs.
• cardboard and painted figurines. Cardboard is my favorite, most accessible crafting supply! I love the use of miniature figurines, all of which you could probably find in your nearest toybox or thrift store.
• chessboard Senet. This is such a clever idea! I LOATHE using the Dollar Store as a source of craft supplies, but a thrift store would be just as cheap and easy.
• kid-made Senet. I don't think the fabric worked out great, but otherwise it's a lovely example of how even younger kids can DIY board games. And they're all so creative!

I think I'd want to make one on a nice sheet of wood, perhaps woodburned and watercolor stained or full-on painted in acrylics. The traditional game only has a few decorated panels but I think it would be fun to decorate every panel, maybe keeping to a storytelling theme like illustrating the progress of our England family vacation or the travels of Frodo Baggins.

I also kind of want to make a 3D one, box and all, out of Perler beads, though. Or maybe a quilted one that could also work as a placemat? How about one that masquerades as a book until you open it to see the game, with room to store the pieces inside?

Brainstorming a project is my favorite part!

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I Read Act Natural and Now I Feel Better about My Own Parenting, Ahem

Okay, if you’re just reading the reviews and you haven’t read Jennifer Traig's Act Natural yet and you’re wondering why so many people are griping that there’s a ton of talk of infanticide in this book--um, yes. There is a TON of talk of infanticide in this book. You might not have expected that if you were looking for a history of parenting, because, well, obviously, so here’s your friendly neighborhood trigger warning: there’s tons of talk of infanticide here!

But also… it’s super interesting! And also relevant! Like, Traig claims that the early medieval constant reference to “overlaying,” ie. rolling over onto your baby and accidentally smothering them while co-sleeping, was often a euphemism for infanticide. I would be very interested to know if there are any actual, verifiable stats on this, because I think it would be an insightful addition to the current co-sleeping controversy. How unhappy would that one already-unhappy NICU pediatrician have been when, in response to his lecture about the dangers of co-sleeping that he made me sit through before releasing my baby to my custody, I’d informed him that many of those historic references were actually murders? My baby would have been in a foster home by the end of the day!

Most of the infanticide discussion is in Chapter 1, the ancient history of parenting, and the context, then, is why there would be so much infanticide in a world without modern medical technology. The answer, in part? In a world without modern medical technology, you don’t have reliable birth control, and also don’t have the ability to get a reliable abortion. Combine that with the already abysmal infant survival rate, and I, at least, can see how entire cultures came to the idea that newborns weren’t exactly locked in on existence right at first. Just imagine me doing the little hand-gesture towards my brain and making the explody noise, because that blew. My. MIND!

Also exposing children to the elements, or to whatever animals might want to eat them or whatever other adults might want to snatch them up. And sending them to baby farms to be slowly starved to death out of sight and mind. Traig reports that in Paris in 1780, there were about 21,000 infants born. Seven hundred were nursed by their biological mothers. Three thousand had in-home wet nurses or were placed into Parisian “nursery homes.” SEVENTEEN THOUSAND were sent to baby farms elsewhere in the country. Oh, and also orphanages and foundling hospitals! People used orphanages WAY oftener than I thought they did. Traig reports statistics of over 40% of infants being abandoned to foundling hospitals in certain geographic areas over specific periods of time. I have since worked into my casual conversations the common surnames for foundling children: do you know anybody with the surname Columbo, Esposito, Vondeling, Temple, or Iglesias? If so, I have some bad news for you about one of their ancestors… You could tell Traig was high-key gleeful when spilling the tea about all the famous Western dudes we’re supposed to respect who actually dumped most or all of their kids off at orphanages. For instance, Jean-Jaque Rousseau had five children, and ABANDONED ALL FIVE TO FOUNDLING HOMES. Like, yikes!

I think I would have picked all of the above, though, over being a medieval European baby mummified in filthy swaddling for 24 hours at a go and hung on a hook or propped near an open fire where I was likely to burn to death. 
The one flaw in Traig’s book is that it is mostly a white European cultural history of parenting, and doesn’t much address other cultures than those. That’s fine, obviously, because otherwise the book would have to be nine times as long, but the lens isn’t specified in the title, so it would be understandable for a reader to be disappointed at the lack of other perspectives. 

Because Traig’s cultural history is necessarily too brief to thoroughly flesh out all the hot goss and scandalous tidbits that she drops, my favorite thing about her book is all her references to the historical works that I can now go find and read myself. I’m most interested in the craziest-sounding of the parenting tomes, so apparently I’ll be flipping through several early 20th-century parenting books and cackling about all the cocaine use. I’m also interested in the mid-1990s hippie birth and parenting books, especially when contrasted to the other extreme also coming around then: we’ve got both twilight sleep, which I already knew was a Whole Thing even before I watched that one Mad Men episode, and that stupid “your birth is not progressing” timetable that I am now learning was made up by one bored dude killing time by tracking a whopping total of 25 women over the course of one overnight work shift when he’d rather be elsewhere. 

Tangential shout-out to Channel to a New Life, the hippie birth film that I watched on VHS during one of my hippie birthing classes, and that I later walked my best friend over to watch with me at the hippie parenting center because I literally NEEDED him to experience this with me. It involves an outdoor water birth, of course, aided by one guy playing the drum and another guy holding a crystal that has had dolphin song channeled through it, and ends with the newborn’s preschool-aged sibling stripping nude and hopping into the bloody birth pool to play. The video was “lost” (I promise it wasn’t me!) long before the parenting center eventually shut down, and I’ve never found another copy. If you ever see one, pleasepleaseplease snap it up for me!

My other favorite thing about this book is the random miscellaneous factoids that Traig drops throughout. Such as: did you know that Dr. Spock has an Olympic Gold medal? Or that L. Ron Hubbard wrote a recipe for baby formula that some people still use?!? Or that the original edition of Aesop’s fables featured some VERY suss tales? Or that it was a terrifying evangelical children’s author, Favell Lee Mortimer, who invented both the flash card and the titling trope of [insert topic] Without Tears? I also really enjoyed finding connections to some of my other Special Interests--I already mentioned Dr. Sears, who I used to be OBSESSED with and would now actively enjoy gossiping about, but Traig also references the Satanic Panic scare of the 1980s that led to those messed-up accusations that the McMartin Preschool was conducting Satanic rituals with young children that led to the equally messed-up made-for-TV movie Do You Know the Muffin Man, which was released exactly in my unsupervised TV watching wheelhouse era. Here it is on YouTube:

I would have had an absolute cow if my own under-tens had been watching that on heavy rotation. Like, Good Lord, did my parents care about me AT ALL?!?

In conclusion, I guess I’m just really glad that I live in a time in which my obstetrician didn’t show up and dive right into my vagina with bare autopsy-hands…

Just kidding--I had a nurse-midwife, and actually she was super mean to me! That’s probably a future chapter of Traig’s, how the dummies of the early twenty-oughts were so obsessed with “natural” medicine that they’d choose a body-shaming midwife over a perfectly nice obstetrician. Sigh. But don’t worry--Traig also has a lot to say about Dr. Sears!

P.S. Find me on Goodreads, where I'm reading 104 books this year!

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

There Was an Eclipse Over My Backyard

Seven years ago this August, I wrote the following in my blog post about driving to Carbondale, Illinois, with my family to watch the 2017 eclipse:

I don't know what mood I'd be in if I didn't know that there's another total solar eclipse coming in seven years, but there is one coming, and I am buoyant. Better yet, Friends, my town is in the path of totality. 

Lemme just repeat that: MY TOWN IS IN THE PATH OF TOTALITY. MY HOUSE WILL SEE AN ECLIPSE!!!

You can come stay in a tent in my backyard, and I'll haul out the lounge chairs. The little kid, who will be graduating from high school the next month, will decorate us eclipse-themed doughnuts. The big kid, home from college for the weekend, will read and ignore us. And we'll have another powerful encounter that's beyond belief, in just seven years.

The little kid, one month from graduating high school, scored her homemade sourdough loaves with sun shapes for us. The big kid, home from college for the weekend, worked on her Environmental Science essay instead of a novel. All the out-of-town guests stayed in hotels instead of tents, but we did have the lounge chairs, sidewalk chalk, basketball and cornhole, and jump ropes out.

And my house, and all who stood on the driveway outside it, did see a total eclipse!

I played around with both my camera's phone and my Canon DSLR with this sun filter that I impulse-bought a couple of weeks prior. They both worked pretty well, but I was so worried about spending all my time fooling with photos instead of being in the moment that I didn't really use either to their full potential, and somehow, even with a sun filter and the sky going dark, I managed to over-expose every single photo.

Ah, well. The eclipse is happening somewhere in the middle of that white light and lens flare!

Here's the altar to Zeus we'd been working on all the previous week. Everyone in the family contributed nice things from their personal collections, and we lit the candle and incense daily while telling each other how much we appreciate the wonders of the universe and wouldn't it be nice to see the majesty of Zeus in an eclipse.

Trusting in the power of Zeus hadn't been enough to quell my fervent and rabid anxiety about the weather, however, and my regular eclipse anxiety dreams ratcheted up to a fever pitch during the full week of regular downpours we got prior to the eclipse. I dreamed the weather was overcast, I dreamed I got the day wrong, I dreamed it was raining and I couldn't go somewhere else because the car didn't work. One night I even dreamed that I saw the eclipse and then forgot what I'd seen the second it was over--I mean, what on earth?!?

One last downpour the night before the eclipse might have finished me off if I hadn't been distracted by the Trashion/Refashion Show, but thankfully, the day of the eclipse couldn't have been a more perfect day. Praise be to Zeus! 

I did miss, a little bit, the 2017 camaraderie of hanging out together in a parking lot, but spending a beautiful eclipse day in and out of our own house was objectively a lot more convenient. We had everything from Sun Chips and Cosmic Brownies to Oberon Eclipse beer on offer, and the yard toys got more love than they'd seen in the past five years or more. I even found the Spotify playlist I'd made for the 2017 eclipse and yep. It still rocks!

How magical to have one more beautiful day to play with yard toys and draw with chalk pastels with my daughters!

And imperceptibly, the sky darkened:

Did I get a sunburn right smack full on my face on this day?

Why, yes. Yes, I did.

My camera looks like it's set up to do a way better job than it did. Oh, well...

Proper exposure is for calmer people than I!

Just like seven years ago, our shadows became delightfully sharp as the light source grew smaller. You can't tell from the photo (SIGH!!!), but you can see every strand of the kid's hair in that shadow, and when she turned her eclipse glasses sideways, you could see the paper-thin shadow, deep black, of the cardboard frames.

At one point my college kid was reading the inside of the eclipse glasses and said to me, "You're looking away every three minutes, right?"

ME: "Um... Wut."

Because here is literally me for four entire hours:

Notice the cones at the bottom of my driveway to keep random people from pulling in and running us all over. Traffic wasn't crazy busy, but it was busy enough!

My kid literally had to Google it right then and be all, "Okay, our glasses are certified so you don't *really* have to look away every three minutes, but I think you should anyway." It's been a week, though, and I don't seem to have a blind spot in the center of my vision (...yet), so I think I'm good!

Look at the light around 3:00!

Check out the lens flare at 4:00 to see what the eclipse ACTUALLY looked like, grr. Even upside-down, the lens flare did a better job of photographing my eclipse than I did!

Here's the light at 3:04, including the neighbor's automatic outdoor lights. Check out that horizon!

And here's what we're all looking at!

It wasn't quite the same experience as in 2017. In 2017, when the Moon eclipsed the Sun, I was SHOCKED. I don't think anything can prepare you for that visceral feeling the first time you see a total eclipse. This time wasn't *as* shocking--although I think it always will be somewhat shocking, because the human mind, at least MY human mind, can barely comprehend it--but it was still beyond anything I've ever seen, wondrous and awe-inspiring, and beholding it remains, again, one of the best moments of my life. 

And again, just like in 2017 although it was nearly twice as long, it was over far too soon:

The waning of the eclipse was a great time to fool around with various pinhole projectors and lenses and my colander:

I was a little disappointed that the chickens hadn't seemed to react at all--they always put themselves into their coop at night, and I'd been looking forward to seeing them march themselves inside when the light reached some threshold known only to them--but I think the whole thing just happened too fast. 

The shadows were still predictably delightful, however:

Luna didn't do anything weird, either, but she also hadn't during the 2017 eclipse. She just hung out with us and wore her eclipse glasses like a good citizen scientist:

I watched through my own glasses (still not taking a break every three minutes, oops) until the Moon had completely finished its transit and every speck of the Sun was back in place, and then I made myself an enormous sandwich, tossed it, the rest of a bag of Sun Chips, a Cosmic Brownie, and an Oberon Eclipse beer into a bag, grabbed the rolly suitcase that I hadn't unpacked yet, hollered for the college kid, and by 5:00 we were in bumper-to-bumper--smooth but bumper-to-bumper!--traffic back to her college, where she had a science lab the next day that mustn't be missed. 

Squeezing in four more hours of kid-time, listening to Gastropod episodes and debating the deliciousness of every fruit we've ever tried, was the BEST way to continue this perfect day, and the ending was also the best possible ending: me in my jammies in a hotel room, face massively sunburned, noshing a giant sandwich (on homemade sourdough bread, no less), chips, brownie, and beer, casually starting the first chapter of a fantasy novel I'd been eager to try, and you'll never guess what I found on the hotel TV:

And just like that we circle back around to my Titanic Special Interest right in time for its 112th anniversary!

And don't worry, because now that the eclipse is over, my anxiety dreams have made a smooth transition to the next big thing on my list. Last night, I dreamed that I was traveling with my kid and lost her and couldn't find her and she was in danger. Sending her off to college is going to be SO FUN FOR ME!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!