These Late Summer Days

Well, we're into our second week of homeschooling and for an update about that, head over to the organic learning project, but be advised: it's not feeling so organic these days!

I love these late summer days - still warm and crackling dry, but the light is different - the shadows more stretched out and it's quiet. Ahhhh. No more baseball games, no more summer sports camps in the field adjacent to our house. It's blissfully quiet and we're spending these long afternoons enjoying our home and the yard. The last two afternoons I've spent sewing while the boys play outside.

Things really have changed for us. The boys play so well together and literally spend hours creating various set-ups and scenarios with their legos and all kinds of random stuff they decide to use. One day I see them "driving" my crocs across the room with a load of mini-figs on board and then like today Yogi kept coming up to me and calling me "boss" which cracked me up even though I'm not sure what the story was! We've been having some issues with our aging Subaru and for a few days the mini-figs kept having urgent conversations involving the "engine light!" coming on. It interesting to see how driven they are to play like this.

And so I've had a little more time to keep up with the housework, laundry, and even get some sewing done. Speaking of sewing,I've made two new kinds of bags. The first is a free pattern I got from Quilting Arts Magazine. I love the size and shape of the bag, but I had a very hard time trying to sew the sports zipper around the curve. The directions for that part said, "attach zipper" which wasn't too helpful! I made it as a present for a good friend so if you're Lisa, keep your eyes closed because here's a photo of it!

And the other bag is a pattern I found from a crafter blog called happythings. Now, I love this pattern because it's super simple, quick, and turned out perfect on my first try. I lined my drawstring bags with soft flannel so when the kids open them up and stick their hand in, it's yummy soft. These bags will hold sets of "story chips" which I've been working on lately. You can see them in the photos which we'll post in the next few days.

Other than that, Chris is making progress on our table. The legs are done. He used 6" x6" beams and they're pretty beefy. He also bought some cherry wood to make a contrasting border.