Lingering Autumn

We are having a really long, lingering autumn. At least by Colorado standards. It seems that many years, snow falls before the leaves. This year there is still no snow. And the leaves are falling. Noah is still wearing shorts. Daily.

This dahlia: I planted it two years ago, and never dug up the bulb. Dahlias are NOT suppose to last overwinter in Colorado.  (You are suppose to dig them up.) But sometimes, somehow, you get lucky. This year it bloomed! I credit the weather.

I am especially looking forward to Halloween and Trick or Treating. Fritz spent the last several years chairing a department retreat that always occurred within a week of Halloween. It was difficult to do Halloween as an almost single parent, with Fritz worrying about his own stuff. I'm really enjoying – and looking forward to – his presence this year!

We are putting out a Teal Pumpkin. (Well, it's sort of teal. I tried to mix the color myself. Uhhh... no future for me as paint mixer, I think.) None of our kids have food allergies, but I think this is a really important topic. Idena wrote a really great post about her son and food allergies a few years ago, and it opened my eyes to how food allergies must make a child feel quite excluded. No child should be excluded on Halloween! Beyond that, we have an awful overkill of candy every year. We've been giving out play doh for several years. I'm always shocked how many kids actually seem to PREFER the play doh when given a choice to choose their treat. So: putting out a teal pumpkin was no biggie. (As long as we don't talk about the part where I tried to paint the damn thing teal. Grr.)

Food

The kids have been really miserable eaters lately.

Actually one kid has been miserable, one has been picky, and the other is okay.

[Removed photo.]

But let me tell you, the miserable one is taking all the fun out of food by complaining about everything that is available to eat in our house. He's subsisting on yogurt, graham crackers, and the mandatory "try-one-bite." Every time I think I've found something that he will eat, the next time it's offered he doesn't like it. About a year ago we drastically cut back on sugar in his diet and discovered that our very whiny child became even-keel. It's been great.

Except now it feels like he's fighting back.

It's no fun to expend the energy making food only to get it thrown back in your face with a big YUCK.

I think it's a 4 year-old phase. Right? Please tell me that your 4 year-old is or was picky, too.

Wallpaper Cards and a True-as-Told Story

Fritz's grandparents owned a construction business in Germany in the 1950s through the mid 1990s. As part of their company, they had a small store that sold paint, wallpaper, and basic craft supplies. After Fritz's grandfather passed away in the mid 1960s, the business was run by Fritz's grandmother and Fritz's mother. The story, as it's been told to me, is that being a women-owned construction business in the 60s and 70s was difficult. But Fritz's grandmother was smart as a whip. She talked her daughter into getting a degree in the trade, as a contractor, rather than attending the college-bound high school. The two of them proceeded to run the business for several more decades while raising Fritz and his brother.

By the time I met Fritz, he and his mother were long burnt out by the construction industry. After working construction in high school during the summer, Fritz couldn't wait to get as far away from physical labor as possible. He went into science. When we met, he told me "I went into science so I could pay someone else to do physical labor." And he did stay comfortably distant from construction until he met me. {Wink.} Fritz's mother eventually went to art school and today supports herself as a professional artist. The family business was eventually sold, but the company store sat untouched for decades. Only Fritz's mother used the aisles of the store to hold her larger sculptures and paintings. Otherwise, the store looked the same as the day it closed, plus some dust and cobwebs.

After Fritz's grandmother passed away, we began the slow and sometimes surprisingly painful process of clearing out the company store. Some things, like old cans of paint, were obvious to go. But some things, like the wallpaper, were so intriguing! Fritz and I were drawn to the crazy patterns and dated designs. (I've started selling them here. You don't need to buy; just looking can be fun.) What to do with all of it has been a bit of a puzzle. There were many times we thought we should just be minimalists and let it go. But then there have also been lots of times when digging into the wallpaper pile felt like an exclusive shopping experience, minus the money and time. Over the years, we've used the wallpaper to make artwork for our first apartment (some photos of those here), wrap gifts, design cards, do large kid-paintings and create garland.

This is one of my favorite cards, a Christmas card from when we were still living in Germany. I ran across it the other day while I was looking for an old Christmas photo. The wallpaper is NOT pre pasted, making it easy to run through an inkjet printer. I even made envelopes out of wallpaper. Obviously, this was before children, when I had a lot time on my hands.

Tree printed on the backside of the wallpaper.

Wallpaper design is inside the trifold card.
That would be the wallpaper on the left and the story of the Christmas tree on the right.
The story of the Christmas tree was designed and printed on back of the wallpaper by me.

Inside of the card and wallpaper. No idea who these girls are in the photo.
I didn't have any of the photos we originally used, so I substituted with a photo from an ad. 

"Back" of the wallpaper. Printed with inkjet printer.

For several years now, I've been purchasing photo holiday cards. But this year, I'm thinking about making cards again. Some times I really miss how personal and intimate handmade items can be. There's also something special about this long, circuitous story by which wallpaper comes to be a handmade card. There's something comforting about an actual physical item attached to a story, especially in a world filled with electronic data that may or may not be genuine. And between the story and the time and the item itself? Well, it has a complexity that surpasses a empty dollar amount. That's kind of cool, right?