Maybe in France: *A Town Called Panic*

Things that happen in the animated stop-action film A Town Called Panic, featuring lurching plastic toys prone to voluble shouting in French, available streaming on Netflix: For Horse’s birthday party, a little temporary bar is set up in the basement and everyone drinks too much.  Afterwards the policeman’s wife comments, “I should’ve charged more for [...]

Secret winter fairy house

Activity for an MLK day holiday afternoon (no service component here…). Materials mostly gathered on walk to park: sticks milkweed (or something) fluff seeds berries acorns one round box Tools: saw, hot glue gun. And here is the finished product, so far, the house of two fairy children and their pet mouse Rollo (made from [...]

Dear Ester Bunny, Don’t Forget Your Umbrella

D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths

The girls have been very into the D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, which Sarah got out of the library in hardback duplicate.  A little greedy, maybe, but the girls were so excited about it initially that they each wanted a copy to read in bed.  We’ve read through the whole thing and now at bedtime [...]

Dear Tooth Fairy: I Cannot Find My Tooht, But Pleas Give me a Preset

Iris’s note for the tooth fairy. We lost teeth on successive days– it’s killing us!  We ran out of cash, didn’t have any ones the second day.  And the worst part is that we somehow got ourselves into this pattern where when Twin #1 loses a tooth, she gets a present (or “preset”) for both [...]

Recent movies: American Psycho, Heat, Wizard of Oz

In the last couple weeks we saw two movies I’d been meaning to watch for a while. Michael Mann’s Heat was fantastic.  The glittering surfaces of Mann’s fantasy L.A. define a really original noir setting in which Pacino and DeNiro maneuver with melancholy anger until one inevitably destroys the other.  Pacino comments in a DVD [...]

Snow (day) candles

Our school district closes school at the drop of a hat… or a snowflake.  Last week we had a “rain day.”  To be fair, the predictions were for serious snow, but it was just rain that sometimes got a bit flake-y, with zero accumulation.  Now we actually do have a few inches, so natch, no [...]

Valentines

Today’s project was making valentines for school (classmates and teachers).  I gave them a big pep talk about how much better homemade ones are — they seemed to buy it. Target was predictably disappointing.  There’s a whole section of the store now dedicated to Valentine’s Day stuff, but no colored construction paper to be found [...]

Live-blogging IU women’s basketball vs. Florida State

Tuesday.  Girls come home all excited about a visit to their school from Sasha, a player on the IU women’s basketball team.  Aka “Big Sash.”  There was a special promotion going on in which each kid was sent home with an adult ticket for the game on Thursday night (kids are free anyway I think).  [...]

Ballet, rainbows, magic, fairies, and jewelry

Sometimes it feels like we’re continually being hit up for money via the girls’ kindergarten.  What I don’t like about it is the sense that the school or the PTA are using the kids for fund-raising — invoking the nag factor to get us to pony up.  If they wrote directly asking if we could [...]