First day of school mommy blues

So ... yeah.  First day of school.

My kids (five of them, ages 11 down to 6) have been driving me mad all summer.  See they LOVE school.

This is a good thing, of course.  All five are - despite my dumb-arsed blunderings - very good students.  Boy and Bitty have never been off the honour roll, ever, and Boy, Bitty, and Bulk (say that three times fast) are all in AGP (advanced / gifted blah, blah, blah). THCTD is a consistant A/B student and tests well. She just skates riiiiight under the line to be AGP.

Oh and did I mention that one (Bitty) is autistic (PDD NOS) and three of them are Dyslexic (THCTD, Bitty, and Bulk).  Bulk suffers the most - sometimes flipping whole words mirror image when he writes them - AND he has attention issues.

Yet they are all happy, well adjusted, keen students.

Wow.  How did Bodog and I do this?!

Both of us were mediocre students at best.  I could do English and Science passably without studying at all (and so I did not) and struggled with maths so badly i had to be tutored at one point and take summer school at another.  I hated school.

So when my freshly minted middle schooler, Boy, acted nervous this morning, I was floored.  After all, I have taken him to class the first day of school for 6 years now and walked blithely away, leaving him - and me - relaxed and confident.  This morning he was clearly upset and acted as if he was on the verge of tears.

WTF?

Long story short, I told him I loved him and I left.  Like I always do.  I despise those moms who cling and cry and beg their kids to be brave - whether it's first day of school or getting a shot at the doctors office - thus upsetting their kids even more and perpetuating another generation of crybabies and drama queens.  You gotta learn to stand on your own two feet.  The folks at the middle school will take good care of my boy, I'm sure.  I want to mother him but like the professor in Pokemon always says "there's a time and a place for everything, but not now!"

Have a good day, guys.  Momma loves you!

L to R; Fiver (yes he asked me to put his hair up like that), Bulk, Boy, Bitty Girl, and The Human Crash Test Dummy,

So I've been experimenting with some fabric art ideas gleaned from teh interwebz (Specifically Pintrest.  I am ADDICTED to Pintrest!  There are so many folks out there with shocking amounts of innovation and talent.  I'm definitely a wee fish in a big, scary [but awesome] pond.)

I started with some white glue resist, and combined it with this tye-dye with sharpies technique.

The glue did just fine with the sharpies (which you drop rubbing alcohol onto to make them bleed). In fact it was wonderful except for two stupidities of my own.  #1: I tried to crosshatch the colour on with the sharpies (to save time) but you could still see the lines after bleeding and it looked crappy.  The lovely dots in a circle that the Moments With Maisie folks did looks MUCH better. #2: I am an eejit and I failed to read the line in the instructions that said "let the alcohol dry".  I foolishly washed it wet and (DUH!) all my sharpie colour washed out. :(

Next I tried this spray bleach technique and had a world of problems.  Lil Blue Boo's stuff SO awesome and mine went south.  I first tried cutting my own stencil:

That's just thin cardboard.  And it worked out OK - I sprayed the bleach on it with a squirt bottle - but there was a lot of bleeding.  I expected some, but the bars on the bottom half of the kanji character were almost indistinguishable.

I also attempted the bleach stencilling that she did with a sponge and made a mess of it.  The stencils that I used were plastic (that might be the problem) but despite careful dabbing on my part the bleach bled all up under the stencil and just left a blob!  Below are the shirts my daughters made for themselves. We used the same plastic stencils and fabric paint on top of the 'ruined' attempts.  If you look carefully, you can see the pale halo of where the bleach stenciling failed!

Do any of you crafters know what I did wrong?  I just love the idea of bleach stenciled lettering but I don't know how to get clean, sharp edges.  Any ideas from those of you who do fiber art?  Help!

And now your random kitteh pic from Cool Shade Farm Cat Sanctuary!

L to R: that's Georgie, and his 'sister', Scarlet.  Scarlet and her brother, Pinky, were the only survivors of a litter that Old Momma had, and Georgie was abandoned by his still feral mom after all her other kittens died.  He was filthy and - literally - starving.  He was a wee bag of bones covered with yellow fur.  Now he's grown a huge amount and you can no longer feel every rib and bone in his spine.  He clearly loves his adopted sister, too!