Stuck at home. Everyone is sick. What to do? Emit a cloud of noxious fumes from some craft beads, of course!
A recent trek to the IKEA, brought us some great finds to bring home. We only go to IKEA once or twice a year, so we make the best of it when we go.

Who could resist this giant jar of craft beads? The kids have been playing with them, as well as using them for crafts. The beads are good for measuring, pouring, scooping, counting, stringing, and gluing. They are also small enough that if the odd bead gets popped into the mouth of a passing toddler, mamalibrarian might just turn her head the other way and pretend she didn’t see anything. Mostly because any more calls to the Poison Control are no doubt going to warrant some kind of uniformed personnel showing up at the door.

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Anyway, we embarked on the bead melting project one afternoon, when I was trying to keep everyone calm. It took a long time and a lot of dexterity to get the beads placed on the melting peg boards. (also from IKEA) The only instructions showed a woman with an iron and a piece of wax paper, so I had to wing it. I just set the iron to low and placed the wax paper on top of the beaded board. It took at least 2 or 3 minutes of the iron resting on top of the wax paper and beads to get them to fuse together. Then we let them cool, pulled off the wax paper, and removed them from boards.



I also picked up this cute hippo? fabric. With IKEA, you just never can quite tell what the animal is exactly. Flodhäst is what we are calling it. I am not sure what I am going to do with it yet. It is a little stiff feeling for clothes, but a little A-line jumper experiment would be awfully cute. In case you are in need of a chart with the translation of hippopotamus in many different languages, here is a link.



And for my friends Average Jane Crafter and Haiku Mama, I grabbed these market totes. I am anxious to see what kind of crafty gear Average Jane Crafter puts in hers.

In school, especially elementary school, math never seemed like much of a big deal. It was just one of those things you had to work through. Worksheets with pictures of money on them, fractions, and lots of counting pictures were the standard. I am not sure things have changed that much. It is hard to get my son, H, excited about math. Recently, C has been complaining that she doesn’t know “hard math” like her older brother, so I started looking around for some of our good math resources to get us started.

One of our favorite books to get in the mood for math is A Million Dots by Andrew Clements. Filled with facts such as, “It would take 464,000 school-lunch cartons of chocolate milk to fill a 20 by 40 foot swimming pool.” Or “The sun has a diameter of 864,948 miles-wide enough to fit 109 earths.” The book also contains one million dots. The dots are tiny and overlay each picture. At the bottom of each page is a tally of the number of dots represented up to that page.

We have two fantastic math games, Magic Cauldron and Potty Professor. I purchased these from the UK company, Orchard Toys. I believe Magic Cauldron is available from domestic sources. Magic Cauldron is an addition and subtraction game, and Potty Professor is its multiplication and division counterpart. Both have these awesome heat sensitive cards that you rub to reveal the answer. Sometimes we do not play the game, but just solve the problems and rub off the answers on the back. There is just something so appealing about rubbing off the answer, then having it “disappear” again. The kids can’t resist this math game.



I found these flip math books by Anna Neilson called I Can Add and I Can Subtract. C prefers some quiet time and self-directed learning, so these are a good choice for her. C likes these because she can study them on her own. Each flip card has a picture representation of the problem and it flips over for the answer in both picture and numeric form.

I was reminded the other day of a collection of Granta issues that we have on a shelf. It made me start thinking about collections. What things we save and what things we don’t. Generally, I am not a saver. When my parents were moving to their new house, I sorted through all my old high school stuff and threw most of it out-old boyfriend love letters and all. I have archived all of the emails my husband and I sent each other before we were married, and I have a big book that chronicles my tennis playing.

As a librarian, I am attracted to buying and keeping books, but I try not to do that too much. The library is a wonderful place for getting and sharing books. There are a few exceptions, the Grantas being one of those. Granta is like a little treasure of reading. You can pick it up and find something new to read every time. The stories and essays transport you to other places.

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Another collection I have been unwilling to part with is my old Martha Stewart Baby and Kid magazines. They are no longer publishing these, and I have hung on to the old ones for the wealth of fun projects, recipes, and ideas that are contained within them. It is true that some of her projects are insanely complex, but I can usually think of a way to make them simpler for our purposes. We once made my son a lovely, bald eagle Halloween costume inspired by one of her designs. We melted crayon bits into heart shapes to give as favors. And cookie cutter sandwich shapes are still a crowd pleaser with the kids.

I seem to be amassing a pretty good collection of crafty books as well. Those are a weakness, I seem unable to resist.

Books and crafting, crafting and books.