Dearest H,

I know, I know, you told me not to put this on my blog. I understand that you’re nineteen and a college student and all, and being written about on your mom’s little blog could be pretty embarrassing.

But really, buddy, who’s gonna know? I don’t use your real name, so anyone googling you isn’t going to wind up here.  And if any of your friends read this, you can ask them why the heck they’re reading your mom’s blog anyway.

How did you expect me not to write about this? I mean, you come home for Thanksgiving telling your dad and me about this big project that you needed help with.  You knew we’d jump on it—we’ve been helping you with your projects since you first encountered play dough at two and didn’t know how to roll a snake.  We’ve helped you make a trebuchet, a model of the Duomo, scale papier-mâché planets, a Lord of the Rings game terrain, endless costumes. To name just a few.

And we’ve always loved helping you on your films. Whether we’re scouting out the farm location you need, or making a costume for a boy-king, or hitting up friends to act, or doing nothing more than fetching burritos for your crew.

And this project was cool. You know how much I love The Royal Tenenbaums. I fell hard for that quirkfest when it first came out ten years ago, when you were just nine and still worked  up over the first Harry Potter movie.

Ten years later you’re filming a scene from the movie for one of your film classes. Specifically the scene with Ritchie and Margot in the tent in the living room. And you needed a tent.

Not just any tent, but a tent that could be hung from the rigging (is that the right term?) That would be tiny and tent-sized at the back, but would widen gradually at the front, to accommodate three cameras. And that you could fold up and bring back to New York in a duffel bag. No problem, right?

Hey, if we could make a model of the Duomo out of foam core with no plans, surely we could make such a tent. So off to the fabric store we went, with your sketched plans. Twenty yards of purchased muslin later, and we were back in the family room, moving furniture, rolling fabric across the floor and trying to decide where to make cuts. I said I’d sew if you pinned. (I hate pinning.) You thought I was nuts for insisting on a French seam for the back of the tent, but that seam showed up in your film, didn’t it?  Mothers know these things.

I loved watching you and your dad trying to figure how and where to hammer the eyelets. Felt like the old days, watching you build duct tape sabers together.

You went back to school, and we were all happy and hopeful that your contraption would work.

Still I wasn’t prepared for how much this texted photo would take my breath away:

It’s a blurry shot, taken with your phone in low light, but look at that thing! You can see the traditional tent lines at the back, but something about that splayed-open front strikes me as glorious. More impressive than I envisioned. Somehow a sea of muslin, some eyelets, rope and the right lighting came together into something grand.

That tent is some kind of metaphor to me. A metaphor for how people can come together and create something big with very little. Sort of like homeschooling: it’s really just a series of days made up of books and ideas and small projects, but somehow, over time, it becomes something more. It creates a mindset that says, I can make that winged tent that I’m imagining. I can dream something up, and I can make it real.

I’m being sappier than Wes Anderson, aren’t I? I’m sure this whole post seems a little ridiculous to you, but here’s why I wrote it (even after you asked me not to): Many of the people who read my blog are newer homeschoolers. And while they seem perfectly willing to come back week after week to read endless stories about your little brother–because he’s the only one who still lets me write about him–what really seems to inspire many of them are stories of what happens to homeschoolers when they grow up. (And dream up tents for films. And make them.)

Your dad and I loved helping you with your project. And now you’ve helped  me with mine.

Thank you for indulging me, sweetie. I can’t wait to see your finished film.

Love, Mama

So I have a new home page. Maybe you’ve seen it? You can check it out here, or by clicking about me in the menu above my header.

The home page is at patriciazaballos.com, where the blog used to live. The blog now gets moved next door to patriciazaballos.com/blog. I’ve been assured that the change shouldn’t effect my blog feed, meaning that if you subscribe via email or RSS feed, you should receive updates as usual. Hope so. Please let me know if it’s not working out for you. Resubscribing may be necessary.

Apparently I’ve become something of a code geek. Not that I know much, but I’ve definitely learned to speak a little PHP and CSS in the two months I’ve spent redesigning the blog, and setting up that home page. I thought that the home page would be fairly easy to put together, but it took even longer than the blog redesign, simply because I had to really tweak the blog template to make the page look as I wanted it to. Do you have any idea how complicated it was to set up those buttons linking to Twitter, Facebook and Flickr? I could tell you a whole story populated with image sprites and sprite generators and Firebug menu item numbers. But one sentence is boring enough–suffice to say that those cute little buttons took about three hours of my life.

Perhaps I’m a slow learner. Nevertheless, the whole endeavor brings us to the topic of do-it-yourself learning.

My home page isn’t just DIY in design; it’s DIY in content. Which has me thinking.

The page is, I suppose, an attempt at professionalizing what I’m doing these days. I used to be a credentialed professional, but my teaching credential is long lapsed and honestly, my teacher training has very little effect on my current life as a homeschooling parent. Less and less as time goes on.

Instead, I’ve been working towards my own goals, outside of institutions and without credentials to prove my accomplishments. Is it audacious of me to assert myself as a writer when I’ve only had a few pieces published? Does the fact that I was paid for some of those pieces make me a professional? If I’d spent two years earning an MFA in Creative Writing, would that earn me more respect than the twenty years I’ve spent studying writing on my own? Does it make a difference that I write in some fashion most days, that I think and read and look at the world through the lens of a writer?

I’ve also begun listing my speaking engagements on that page. I’ve been paid for some of those engagements, but not all. Does that make me a professional speaker? I’m likely hired, in part, due to my  yellowing teaching credential, although what I speak about has little to do with my experiences as a credentialed teacher. Instead, I speak about what I’ve learned from my kids in our lives as homeschoolers, and my own research, and my own experiences as a writer. A quasi-professional writer.

It’s a home page mostly based on my own DIY learning, and that feels a little cheeky of me. But at the same time, what kind of a homeschooler would I be if I didn’t value DIY learning? Do I think my kids are lesser learners because they spent most of their childhoods learning outside institutions? Absolutely not! I think they’re learners in the truest sense of the word. Their DIY learning has had a profound effect on who they are as people, and it certainly hasn’t hindered them when they’ve chosen more traditional, institutional learning for themselves.

I believe in DIY learning for my kids, and I believe in it for myself. I can’t really confer on myself a credential or a degree, I suppose, but I can make myself a home page! I can announce to the world what I’ve been doing and where I’m headed.

And that’s what my little home page is all about.

So, it’s November, and you’re certainly Halloweened out. You’ve probably moved on to pureeing pumpkins and writing novels. Still, in the name of DIY projects and for the love of duct tape, I wanted to share Mr. T’s Halloween costume.

(If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen this costume more times than you care to. I still haven’t figured out how my new phone is posting my photos to Twitter without me realizing it. Upstart phone!)

You may remember that in the spring, T and I fashioned some hoplite armor from duct tape for our homeschool group’s history fair. That was when I realized that you can pretty much make anything from duct tape. (Winter boots? Baby slings? Turkey platters?)

When T mentioned that he wanted to be Thor for Halloween–the Avengers’ Thor, mind you–we Googled up some images.

(Image from fanpop.)

Immediately the duct tape portion of my brain started humming. That helmet! That armor! We could make it!

We used the same technique that we used for the hoplite armor, taping over an old sweatshirt and its cut-off hood. More detailed explanation on that hoplite post.

For the helmet’s wings and for Mjölnir (that’s Thor’s hammer, if you need to brush up on your mythology), we headed over to The Foam Factory. (Who knew that such a place existed, not ten minutes from our house? And that they have a bin full of foam scraps for whatever crazy project you may dream up, available for less than you’d pay for a pack of Pokemon cards?)

If you keep adding layers of duct tape, and trimming them to size, you can build up practically any shape you imagine. Those big shoulder protrusions? No problem! (We ran out of time for making the arm bands and those wacky boot extension thingamajigs. But we could have fashioned them with duct tape too, easy.)

I went to three stores in search of fabric for the cape. Found nothing, even at the third, until I got to the remnant bin. Then I scored a huge piece of absolutely Thor-ish crimson fabric for $7.70. I already had the cape pattern at home, and the pieces fit along the selvedge with an eighth of an inch extra. Honestly. Meant to be.

About a week before Halloween, I found myself in one of those terrifying Halloween superstores. I actually came across a few pre-made Thor costumes, complete with ginormous plastic Mjölnirs, (one already busted at the handle.) But they were expensive and so, well, tacky. (I know, I know, what’s tackier than duct tape? Har, har.)

I could have pulled a piece of plastic from my wallet and been done with it. Yet there’s something so satisfying about getting an image in your mind and asking How could I make this? And when you bring your kid along for the ride, not only is the process fun, but the kid learns that no matter what you dream up, you might be able to make it real.

Hiya! Welcome to my remodeled digs! Grab yourself a cup of tea and come snoop around!

This here Wonder Farm has been begging for redecorating for a while now. Things have looked pretty much the same since I first hung my header at the top of my home page, more than three years ago. Everything was feeling a little cramped. I wanted to do away with those wide, empty margins. I wanted to shift stuff around to make it more user-friendly. I wanted to bring a little hand-written-journal love to this pixelated place.

I wanted to fill up the screen!

Whaddya think?

It wasn’t easy to make the space look like the one I envisioned. I switched from my old WordPress theme to Thesis, which bills itself as a DIY theme. Meaning that you gan do a lot of customizing just by ticking boxes, but if you know your way around PHP and CSS, you can make your website look pretty much however you want it to look. Do I know my way around PHP and CSS? Absolutely not. Which is why I’ve spent the last month or so staring at online user guides and lurking around the Thesis forum, getting help from people with screen names like Godhammer and Girlie. (The Thesis forums are amazing. You can post a ridiculous question like, “What code do I need to change the font in my fat footer widget, and how can I make each of the columns a different color?” and someone will not only know what you’re talking about, but they’ll respond with precisely the code you need. Usually within 15 minutes.)

Still in the works is a new about me/homepage. But I was getting tired of waiting and wanted to invite you all in!

You may have noticed that there’s a new Facebook link up above the header. It will take you to what I’m calling my “practically robotic Facebook page”, an indulgence for my Facebook-addled friends who miss my updates here because they never climb down from their walls. I’ll be using that page to post website updates for those folks–but don’t expect me to start friending and liking and tagging old photos of me sitting on top of a pay-phone kiosk in my cheerleading uniform. As I say on the page, if you want some interaction from me, you have to come to the Wonder Farm, or climb a tree and tweet with me.

So please stay a while and poke around. Let me know if links don’t work, or pages take forever to load, or if things just look wonky on your screen. I’m sure there’s still some straightening and shuffling to do, but meanwhile, I’m so glad you’re here. Put up your feet, and tell me how you take your tea.

What do you do when your kid saves his money to buy a month-long subscription to the Lego Universe online game, and wants to talk of nothing else?

You go with it.

You look through some almanacs together (another recent obsession) and talk about graphs and charts and brainstorm how Lego Universe might lend itself to an intriguing graph.

That’s when he decides that a chart of the universe’s Nexus Force would be a most excellent diversion.

So you set him up with a blank Creately project page and watch him go to town.

Mr. T and I discovered Creately a few weeks back, when he wanted to make a digital tree of the cat family. We searched for a drawing tool for making flowcharts and found some good links on two pages I linked to recently: the infographics post at Langwitches and Troy Hicks’ informational writing wiki.

Mr. T and I sat together, setting up the chart and figuring out how Creately worked. Before long he was working on his own, toggling back and forth between his chart and the felidae family page on Wikipedia, copying, pasting, linking boxes and choosing colors.

Click on the graph to see a larger image which you can zoom in on.

I never have been able to keep all of those leopards, cougars and mountain lions straight. I’ve never seen them all laid out in such a visual way. It’s a useful document, this thing my kid made.

(I wish I’d started T on a tool other than Creately. I had no idea how much he would take to the platform. It’s free for the first five graphs you make, but from then on you need to pay a monthly fee to use it, which doesn’t seem practical, given that we’d likely use it only sporadically.)

Back to that Lego Universe chart. This time T wanted to incorporate images, so I showed him how to do a Google image search, and how to save his finds to our desktop, and then import them into his chart. Do kids pick up on this stuff quickly? Only as quickly as they pick up a bottle of maple syrup when faced with a plate of pancakes.

This chart is also clickable.

Mr. T made another graph recently, this time by hand. This one came about during yet another recent fascination: The Avengers animated series, which he’s worked his way through on Netflix. One day, when he wouldn’t stop talking about Hawkeye, I showed him this page on Figment.com, of wacky charts based on the Harry Potter series.

Go look. The charts and graphs made us giggle. I love the notion that kids can take information from something they’re reading (or watching!) and analyze it with a sense of humor.

I asked T if he’d like to make a similar Avengers-themed chart, and he decided that it would be fun to note how much he liked the various characters throughout the episodes (inspired by Potter chart #3.)

(Click it!)

Once again, I was amazed by his tenacity with this project. He researched the name of every episode and transcribed them on his graph. (His idea, not mine.) I appreciate the home-spun, hand-drawn feel of it. He’s still planning to add more Avengers, and to go over all of the episode titles in pen. The graph has led to conversations about T’s likes and dislikes with the series, and the notion of character development. (What’s up with The Wasp anyway, and why does she get so boring as the season goes on?)

So, what has he learned from these projects?

• How to choose a topic that lends itself to a chart or graph.
• How to share information in a visual format, rather than with pure prose.
• How to research information.
• How to structure that information, in a visual that makes sense to the viewer.
• How to work with new platforms, such as Creately.
• How to import various media to his projects, and to toggle between web sources.
• The role of good design in visual projects. (Check out my thoughts on Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind to get a sense of why design is such an important skill for kids to acquire.)

All good stuff. In Mr. T’s mind, though, he was just having fun, exploring some of his current interests in a new way.

Who says you can’t learn from video games and cartoons? Instead of separating popular culture from what kids are learning, I’d argue that we ought to embrace it. I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll keep saying it until I’ve typed off the letters from my keyboard: kids learn best when you start with their interests. Which doesn’t mean that all of their learning has to be based on Thor or Lego space marauders.

But sometimes, it can.

Over at her Foothill Home recently, my friend Molly posted her summer to-do list. Inspiring. Mr. T had already started his list, so I combined his with mine, and here’s what we have so far.

Swim with friends and family. Often.

Have a puzzle going at all times. (Stolen from Molly. Check!)

Make good things with our homegrown ollalieberries and plums. Use Blue Chair for inspiration.

Collect rocks with Mr. T and learn about them. (And make some heart stones.)

Set up our tent in the backyard.

Visit an orchard and pick all-time favorite fruits–cherries. (Friday, M and A!)

Take out the sewing machine and finish those curtains for the office before summer guests arrive.

While the sewing machine is out, finally make a picnic quilt from the family jeans, saved for over a decade.

Go to the county fair (and spend a little time in my childhood hometown.)

Make stuffed and fried zucchini blossoms with the recipe learned from cute Italian nonna at Spannocchia (and enjoy every fried bite, without thinking of bathing suits.)

Read adventure books to Mr. T (another borrowed from Molly. Suggestions, anyone?)

Get better at pulling my own mozzarella, before the tomatoes come in.

Sketch with T. (Underway!)

Clear those sprawling rose shrubs and finally make a space for a hammock. When it’s hung, christen it by relaxing there with a tall pastis.

Get back in the habit of capturing it all through a lens.

What’s on your summer lists, my friends?

I know I’ve written a few times about the history fair our homeschool group hosts each spring. (Last year I wrote about Lulu’s One Hundred Years Of Food project.) This year I thought I’d describe in more detail how we structure the event, in case any of you might like to try something similar with your own friends.

And you should. Because it’s a whole lot of fun.

We call our event the Trip through Time. Basically, kids choose their own historical topics of interest. Anything goes, from feudalism to the Great Depression; from the history of Broadway musicals to the history of Hot Wheels. Kids prepare displays on their chosen topics.

Some kids dress up.

We encourage kids to come up with not only a visual display, but also a way for visitors to interact.

They might give visitors a chance to dig for dinosaurs.

Or play a harp.

Or make a chariot.

Or take tea in the manner of Jane Austen.

We also provide passports for the exhibitors. These are small booklets in the size of an actual passport. They hold about 40 pages, and also include a photo of the exhibitor. (I’ve taken to using Instax instant photos because I can take them the day of the event.)

After kids visit an exhibit, that exhibitor stamps (or stickers) the visitor’s passport.

Some kids use the same passport year after year, which makes them seem particularly well traveled.

We divide kids into three groups ahead of time, and designate those groups with a color dot placed on their passports. Then we take turns visiting exhibits. The first group gets 20-30 minutes to visit exhibits; the other two groups stay at their displays and receive visitors. Then the next group gets to visit, and the other two groups speak with visitors. And so on. This set-up encourages interaction. In the early days, we tried a more free-form history fair, in which the displays were set up, and everyone visited them all at once. This meant that everyone was visiting, and no one stayed at his or her own exhibit and discussed it. And the kids were finished looking after about ten minutes and ready to move on.

With the rotating set-up, presenting one’s topic becomes an integral part of the event. My favorite part of the day is chatting with kids who are fired-up about something they’ve learned about!

We also leave time for performances related to the exhibits. This year we were treated to a performance of Klezmer music.

I especially love how this sort of a fair provides an audience for a homeschooler’s work. Over the years, all three of my kids have passionately dug into topics, and spent much more time than usual creating interesting ways of displaying those topics, knowing people beyond their own family would see them. (Remember H’s model of the Duomo? Or Lulu’s Indian kitchen?) The fair has always been a tangible motivation.

One year our group hosted a science and math fair, but really, there are infinite possibilities: how about a literature fair, or an art fair, or an invention fair? Just pick a date, find a space, and send out an invite. The kids’ enthusiasm will take over from there.

…he might not have needed that forge.

This is Mr. T’s costume for our homeschool history fair. (More on the fair coming soon.)  Like any good fan of The Iliad, T wanted his own hoplite armor. Like any good bricoleurs, we figured we could make it.

We started talking duct tape, and suddenly I remembered some instructions in Custom Knits for making a personal mannequin from duct tape and an old T-shirt.  And no, this knitting book has nothing to do with armor-making, but I thought a similar technique might work for T’s project.

T put on an old T-shirt–with nothing underneath–and I began to wrap duct tape around him. Lots of duct tape. After I’d wrapped the shirt in two or three layers of tape, I loosed T from the contraption by cutting straight up the back, through both the shirt and the tape. I cut off the sleeves and shaped the neck, armholes and bottom a bit with scissors, and then added a smooth layer of duct tape around the edges. Here’s what it looks like from the inside:

It worked! It’s fairly lightweight, it has a soft T-shirt lining, and it forms to T’s shape perfectly, just as hoplite body armor would do.

We decided to try the same technique for the helmet. This time we used the hood from an old hoodie. Again, T wore the hood while I taped around his head. Once I’d built up a few layers, I added a duct tape nosepiece and cheek guards, and shaped the helmet around the eyes with scissors.

T wanted a “horsehair” crest, but our hardware store quest for attachable, flexible broom bristles was fruitless. Eventually crepe paper came to mind, and a Google search for “crepe paper fringe” pulled up some easy instructions for stitching together layers of crepe paper with a sewing machine. Perfect! I suppose I could have tried gluing the layers together but the sewing machine trick turned out to be incredibly simple and durable—and look at the cutesy-pie things you can make with crepe paper and a sewing machine!

For each bunch I stitched together six strips of cheap-o crepe paper streamers. I made six bunches, then glue-gunned them together into a single thick bunch, and attached them to the helmet with yet more duct tape.

Voila!

Mr. T and I envisioned making a shield or hoplon from something like a garbage can lid, plus foam and duct tape, but alas, no surplus lids could be found. We decided instead to start with a small round of cardboard because we had it—and because the painted Cyclops was the part of the shield that mattered most to T anyway. Then we maximized it by adding—yup—more duct tape to the edges.

Of course the hoplite needed a spear. And yes, you can make a spearhead with duct tape. You just can’t kill a boar with it.

T is quite aware of the fact that hoplite armor would have likely been made from bronze, but our hardware store lacked bronze-colored duct tape. (No bronze duct tape, no flexible broom heads, no spare garbage can lids–and they call themselves a hardware store!) I Googled around for a type of spray paint that would stick to duct tape, but decided that any product with such an ability would probably not be a good thing to breathe. And anyway, when your helmet has a horsehair crest crafted from crepe paper, you aren’t really going for authentic.

This was definitely a shared project. I would have liked it better if the design and the carrying-out belonged more to T. But building armor from stuff you find lying around the house is no simple task. Nor is cutting through multiple layers of duct tape. Plus, much of the costume required T to stand unmoving and play mannequin. Still, it was T’s vision: he did the research on what the armor should look like, he sketched and painted that fearsome Cyclops, he made lots of the little decisions. And he is very pleased with his new Greek gear.

Achilles, there’s a new hero after your heel, and his name is Mr. T.

Look out!

Recently I got a new itty-bitty 11-inch macbook air. I pretty much ran my last laptop into the ground. I actually typed many of the letters right off the keys, and that spinning rainbow wheel and I spent far too much time together in the past year.

I thought it might be nice to cloak such a high-tech baby in some low-tech handmade.

I’ve never felted anything before. It always seemed too much of a gamble: you knit something far huger than what you need, only to have to shrink it, crossing your fingers that the size comes out right. But I’ve always admired the laptop cases in Alterknits, so I thought I’d give one a shot. A very scientific shot.

I had to adapt the pattern because these air laptops are smaller in size and wafer-thin (and so don’t need a gusset), and I wanted my case to close. I knitted a 4″ swatch and felted it. I measured how much it shrunk, both widthwise and lengthwise. I figured each ratio of shrinkage and applied it to the final measurements I hoped for. And then I promptly forgot that to make the stripes come out vertical, you have to knit the case sideways, meaning that I’d mixed up my ratios when I cast on, and I had to start over.

Anyone who says that you never use algebra in real life has never tried to plan a felted project.

Guess what? Algebra works. The fit is perfect.

(details on ravelry)

I did do some actual baby knitting as well. Cashmere socks for a friend’s new baby. Doesn’t every baby deserve cashmere socks? (Although I don’t have a pair of cashmere socks.) This pattern came from More Last Minute Knitted Gifts, a real drool-inducer of a book.

I’m also knitting this pattern from the same book, the Big Lace Scarf, on size 17 needles. Lace on 17s? Crazy! But fast. And cozy.

It was funny to be knitting the tiny socks and the gonzo scarf at the same time. Sort of like knitting in Wonderland, growing larger and smaller.

After slogging through a single project for months, it seems I am on a knitting binge.

This was the sloggy project, and I love it so much it was worth it. I’m calling it my Look At Me! cardigan because the color and the pattern can’t help but call attention to themselves. The pattern is the Que Sera cardigan, a free pattern from Knitty.

I promised to knit Chris an Icelandic sweater, but while waiting for the (real! Icelandic!) wool to arrive, I’m distracting myself with this.

It’s the Simple Yet Effective Shawl. I’m making it in a smaller, kerchief size. And since those jelly belly colors aren’t gaudy enough, I’m planning to add bobbles to the edges. (But I promise not to wear it with the Look At Me! cardigan. I have my limits.)

More ravelry links here.

Oh, and we actually do have a new baby around here.

Meet Sorrel. I’d knit him some socks, but he already has some very sweet white ones.

There’s so much to set a person atwitter in December.

rendering my beeswax: For the first time I melted down the bits of wax I’ve collected from my girls. I got a nice golden prism–enough to make into two (count ‘em!) candles. I was hoping to be able to make more for gifts, but I’ve decided to save the wax from my abandoned hive for next year’s bees. Stefaneener told me how to keep it critter-free in the meanwhile with the help of a heavy-duty trash bag and a chunk of dry ice. Such smart friends I have! My remaining hive is still going strong, harvesting nectar from my just-beginning-to-bloom-in-California rosemary…

good books: How could I forget how much I love Lorrie Moore’s writing? Maybe because she hasn’t published a book in ten years? Chris gave me A Gate at the Stairs last Christmas, and somehow I didn’t start reading it until now. Dumb move. The book is fabulous. No one manages to be both snarkily funny and lyrical like Moore does. Just appreciate how she writes about a fortune cookie: “I had one elegantly folded cookie–a short paper nerve baked in an ear.” Lorrie Moore, you kill me.

cookies, cookies, cookies! We’ve only just begun (sing along)…to bake! Yesterday Mr. T and I made up the dough for our annual gingerbread tiles, which longtime readers may remember from two years ago as contender for the best Christmas cookie ever. Next up will be the other cookie that tries each year to claim the throne: David Lebovitz’s Almond and Chocolate Chunk Biscotti. (This is the first year I’ve found the recipe online and sharable!) I’m still considering a few upstart contenders for the batch after that. Maybe Remedial Eating’s version of Flo Braker’s Drei Augen (also known as linzer cookies or red currant jam sandwiches)? Or perhaps Orangette’s take on Alice Medrich’s Whole Wheat Sablés with Cacao Nibs? Or maybe her now famous rendition of Peppermint Bark? (Not a cookie, I know, but I wouldn’t kick it out of the cookie jar.) Perhaps you have another stellar cookie to recommend?

thrilling text messages: Not that I do much texting. But when you have a kid in college all the way across the country, you pick it up pretty fast. A few weeks back I received this ebullient message from that kid: “Joel Coen is speaking to my film class!” Wow. Guess all that battling with the college application monster of last December was worth it. (I’m not sure whether I was more excited with the content of the message or the fact that he cared to share it with his mama.)

fast knitting projects: The knitting really slogged this fall. Swimming lessons got me deep into my crazy gold Que Sera cardigan–but then the lace combined with decreases made for not-so-good Park Day knitting and it was as if my production button had gotten stuck on slo mo. With Christmas coming and a cold boy in New York, I put that project aside and started up a scarf–and suddenly we’re in fast forward. The stitch pattern is manly and 18-year-old-guy-approved and it lets the scarf lie gloriously flat. And the whole long thing is almost finished!

decking the halls: The advent wreath is aglow with three candles at this point in the season, but our advent box could use some more slips. (Either we all need to work harder at sharing our light, or we need to work harder at remembering to record it when we do.) The tree is wearing the equivalent of an unadorned little black dress: it’s done up in nothing but lights and garlands. Not that we’re minimalists around here–it’s just that Lulu and Mr. T want to wait for their big brother to get home before breaking out the ornaments. Which is rather sweet. There’s nothing like a Christmas tree to get you all sentimental.

turning turntables: Chris got his old turntable hooked up and is revisiting his old record collection. He only plays Rush when I’m not home to tease him about it. (Sometimes I catch him.) The other morning he cranked up Van Halen and said, “I have a song for you.” And proceeded to blast “Hot for Teacher.” Ah, the man knows all the backstreets into my heart.

You knew I’d ask: what has you all atwitter?