crazy for crepes

I'm not sure what possessed me the other day. But I woke up thinking that I could not allow my children to go another day without experiencing the crepe.

Crap? they said.

No, my honeys, crepe.

Crop? they said.

I had to stop everything and sing Le Poissons from The Little Mermaid.

So we made crepes.

Crepes with jam (for the older child), crepes with applesauce (for me), crepes with butter and cinnamon sugar (for the younger child), crepes with sliced banana (for me again. Hey, I was hungry). Really, can you have a wrong filling for a crepe? Turns out, black pepper isn't all that enjoyable (older daughter discovered this).

And by 8:30am, we had had our daily cultural experience and could move on with life.

I never expected to own this much

Thread.

Music Man's grandmother is a very generous woman. And she's downsizing.

Hoping to move into a smaller home in the next year or so, she is doing something very healthy. She's downsizing. And giving all her thread to me.

Actually she sent me home from a recent visit with bags of elastic and lace, jars of buttons, rolls of fusible adhesive, and even her I-mean-business sewing machine. But what really intrigued me were the spools and spools of thread.

There are threads in almost every color, even clear. Some spools are wooden. (can you say 'dollhouse furniture'?)

Some have price tags (this one reads '35 cents.')

Did I mention that there are even many matching bobbins?

Thanks, Gram, for this treasure!

gardening in January

While gardening doesn't usually start creeping into my thoughts, dreams, and to-do lists till February or March, this year we were in for a surprise treat.

A dear friend bought us the Wee Enchanted Garden for a Christmas gift. Actually the gift was for my daughters, but I quickly confiscated it and became the gardening foreman.

The kit is adorable, rustic, and very user-friendly. You can paint the dish, rocks, toadstools, and even the cottage. You place them in the dish over the sparkly dirt (I've never seen such clean dirt in all my life). You scatter the seeds.

You sprinkle some water and, in a few days, this appears:

And here is the garden after two weeks (or is it three weeks? darn, and I was going to be so scientific about this):

You have to really look to catch of glimpse of our cheerful gnome, Dirty Feet.