Sidewalk chalk in a plastic tub is good enough for me. However...

Isabel and James have discovered the marvel that is sidewalk chalk. (I saw an article about how to make sidewalk chalk (can't find the original, but here's one) and am afraid I reacted the same way I did when I heard about how to make marshmallows, that is, "Um, ready-made is good enough for me.")

James wears his blue chalk down to the nub making patches of intense short strokes, and huge, whole arm circles. Isabel scribbles and makes different sized circles and asks me write the names of everyone in the family as well as their alternate names (she's been fascinated that Mama and Daddy are also called Rachel and Marco). Then she wants a story. So, I draw a story about two rabbits who have a nice cozy dome-shaped house with a vegetable garden who like to go on boat trips down the river to the ocean, where they put up their sail and visit an island where the bunnies unpack their picnic lunch and then come back. The next episode involved bunnies in space. I kind of like sidewalk chalk too. I am a little tempted to make sidewalk paint, because the chalk makes my fingers feel so dry and shriveled, and because the paint looks pretty wonderful. And I have all the ingredients. Okay. I'm sold.

Knock-knock joke payback

We've got a homemade puppet theatre set up in the living room. We're getting a lot of knock-knock jokes. (Mostly courtesy of the special feature on one of Signing Time's downloads, starring Lucy and Zack. The DVD is here.

Isabel's making up a lot of her own jokes, and laughing hysterically at them, and even James tells them. He does the rhythm and the tone just right, just--no words! I'll have to try to capture this on tape. :)

In case Mom and Dad are keeping track of the Curse of the Parent--"may your kids do to you what you did to me", I'm definitely getting payback for all my knock-knock jokes of yesteryear. (In case you didn't have the lucky experience of listening to these marvels of preschool humor, the punchline was always, inevitably, "a bottle-nose dolphin!")

Yet more evidence that my mind begins to fail every night at about 9pm

I have a lesson from the trenches. Don't start sewing a child's dress at 8:30pm. Because, by 10:30 you're thinking, "I could finish the armholes tonight before I go to bed, just another half hour...", and then at 1:40 in the morning you're still looking up "finish armholes whipstitch" because WOW did that go badly. Maybe sewing better be an "Isabel woke me at five am yelling about a bunny before she drifted off again and now I can't get back to sleep thing" rather than a "kids and Marco are all in bed. I know, I'll start a late night project that involves lots of manual dexterity and a high frustration tolerance!" thing.

I'm not a night owl, can you tell? Or maybe I'm a night owl that tends to smack into trees.

Any advice is welcomed on whipstitching armholes without bias tape for a dress for a three year old . I can handle a couple of inches and then I get a creeping feeling that my head has completely compressed my neck and is fusing directly with my collarbone. Also that I need a chocolate croissant and a large glass of milk.