WIHTWH: Activity Days Girls

The 8 to 12 year old girls from Primary come over to our place once a month for an activity. They get to help pick it. The first one was making cake with "creme"; we decorated cupcakes with chocolate butter frosting. They wanted to do the same thing the next month, but I learned quickly to double up whatever I was doing for teen club with the these girls. In addition to making frosting, we have learned kinda-almost one-off screen-printing on fabric






and wax-resist drawing.







When I get in a technique groove, nobody is safe: we do it for Little School, visiting children must give it a try, it gets morphed into a teen activity for Teen Club, and then the girls from church give it a whirl. I call it efficient creativity.

Three is a magic number

We prepped for the big day for several weeks.


When I admitted to myself I wouldn't finish making Baby KhaKah a new wardrobe by hand in time, I borrowed a sewing machine from a friend and hired a tailor for the day, who freehanded two dresses, two pants, a skirt, and a matching apron and hat that look suspiciously like an antique uniform. Scout was enraptured.



For little school we made a pinata, one layer every day.


Finally, we picked candy and stuffed it like a turkey.


But oh, disappointment! The morning of the party, Scout crawled into our bed with a fever, then slept the entire day.


Precious, who had been as excited by the preparations and the promise of the candy you get to collect, as I think a seven-year-old can be, had to settle for playing in a bucket of water with the little boys while Scout slept on.


But it did happen the next day, and a couple friends could even make it despite the changes.









Dear Scout, your birthday will also always be my birth day, and I love April 21st for both inseparable reasons. Most of all I love you, my girl, inseparably, beyond reason. ox, Joh

Little School

This year I’m resolved to making home patterns and schedules. In the afternoons (right after an attempt at Quiet Rest Time—any tips on making this quiet and/or restful appreciated) Scout and I are doing Little School.

It’s a current-generation rip on what my mum did with my older siblings; fun learning stuff at home with toddlers.

It’s taken a bit of ingenuity, as it’s difficult or impossible and expensive to find common art and crafting materials here, but that’s good too. Don’t you always find you come up with some of the best stuff when you have the most limitations? You’re forced to think more creatively.

We started by making books to add to the stash we brought with (and the delightful refill Amy brought at Christmas—thank you!), modeling them on our favourites. (So fun to be making books again!) Since Scout is in love with letters, we started with an alphabet book. She folded and helped cut the papers (scrap, so we wrote around the printing; she didn’t seem to mind) and helped cut a Rice Crispies box into a cover. She helped measure out and cut the string, though I did the two stiches it requires to sew the book together. That was boring for her.

But then we wrote a letter on every page and it was fun again. Next we came up with a word to draw that started with the letter.

Finally, a few weeks later, we went through and hid Waldo on every page.

Inspired by this mention of a book about children’s book illustrators, we also made our own Brown Bear Brown Bear, except it was Black Puppy Black Puppy. And even though it has yet to be bound (this one originated as a sit-still help while eating out—Ethiopian food), she has loved reading it as a bedtime book, maybe more than the original.




Little School starts with a song. It’s all I could think of and not terribly inspired: “Here we are together together together, oh here we are together in our Little School. There’s Scout and mama and mama and Scout”…you get it. But just like our scrap paper and cereal box books, it doesn’t seem to matter much the quality of the material, but that we’re doing something novel and together.