Magic

Our five-year-old great niece, Miss V, paid us an overnight visit this weekend.

A visit from Miss V is always full of many activities. She's a girl who loves to keep busy and explore the world around her.

When she wasn't expanding her water coloring skills...

...or searching for "fairy hats" as we walked Molly,...

...or coloring or reading or helping me knit by holding the skein of yarn, she was enjoying the "magic trick" I showed her.

I got this idea from "The Mother Huddle," a website that Miss V's mother shared with me, and have been saving this particular trick for the next time Violet visited us.

The next visit finally happened, so I got out the food colors, 8 spoons, a plate, a tray, some vinegar, and some baking soda. Oh, and some water.

Here's what you do:

Put a drop of food coloring in each of 8 spoons. Cover each drop with a mound of baking soda.

Half-fill the eight cups, some with water only, some with vinegar only. Don't let the child know which is contained in which cup! The first time we did this trick, I divided the water/vinegar cups 4:4; the second time, realizing the overflowing, bubbling cups were way more fun than the plain water cups, I went with an 6:2 ratio, 6 being the cups with the vinegar.

Place the tray of water/vinegar cups in front of the child and let him or her go to town.

The cups holding the vinegar will erupt like Mt. Vesuvius when the baking soda/food coloring is added. It makes a wonderful mess, but the mess is contained in the tray.

The cups holding the water will simply turn a pretty color.

And when all of the cups have received their dose of baking soda/food coloring, the fun is not over. Oh, no. Violet spent another half hour or so mixing the filled cups with one another and creating an even more spectacular mess.

We had so much fun with this simple activity that we repeated it the next morning.

My treasures

I mentioned in a recent post that I've been on a sorting and tossing binge this month.

In the large closet behind the upstairs bathroom are a few of my childhood treasures. I came across them as I was de-cluttering, but they have not been thrown out or donated to Goodwill. No, siree! These are my very special treasures which have followed along with me whenever I've made a move.

First, my scrapbook of the Royal Family. I was definitely hung up on the Royal Family of Great Britain when I was in my early teens. I saved every magazine and newspaper clipping about them. I bet you didn't know, for instance, that Prince Charles had an appendectomy at age 14. My scrapbook contains a clipping announcing that momentous incident. (I should admit I had a slight advantage over most other Royal Family-obsessed Maine teenagers, if, in fact, they existed: my New Brunswick relatives subscribed to a magazine or two that never failed to mention their Queen and her family; a yearly trip to NB gave me the opportunity to scour Grammy's or Aunt Jean's back issues and clip articles for my scrapbook. I'd come home with priceless loot every time.)

You can probably imagine my shock and delight the day I went to our mailbox and found a letter from Buckingham Palace. I'd felt the need to send the Queen a congratulatory note after the birth of Prince Andrew. I certainly didn't expect to get a response, but a lady-in-waiting sent

this note to me. This was such a big occasion in central Maine that an article about my "letter from the Queen," or practically the Queen, appeared in our daily newspaper. My fifteen minutes of fame, as it were.

My obsession with the Royal Family cooled a bit when President Kennedy took office here in the U.S. I say that because the second half of my Royal Family scrapbook is actually filled with clippings of the Kennedys' every move.

Apparently I sent the President a congratulatory note when he became president, because I have a response here to prove it.

And, sadly, when President Kennedy was assassinated, which happened during my senior year of high school, I must have sent a sympathy note to Mrs. Kennedy, for the black-edged acknowledgment below was a sent by a member of her staff.

Also in my little stack of childhood treasures is my report on the State of Maine. According to the date handwritten inside, I wrote this report while taking Maine History from Mr. Gilbert in eighth grade. I suspect every single word of the report, detailing Maine's population, Maine's natural resources, Maine's this and that, I meticulously copied verbatim from the "M" volume of the World Book Encyclopedia. Yes, plagiarism was alive and well back then, too.

It isn't my plagiarized report that has caused me to treasure this school project, however; it's the report's cover. My oldest brother, Win, must've spent a great deal of time with plywood and jigsaw, carefully cutting a front and back cover in the shape of the State of Maine. Had we been living in, say, Wyoming or Colorado, which are run-of-the-mill rectangular states, my report cover wouldn't be half as impressive. But we were living in Maine, for crying out loud, with its wonderfully irregular coastline. I'm sure my report deserved an "A" for the cover alone, never mind the plagiarism inside.

A few tips

I love easy, money-saving, environmentally-friendly tips for housecleaning, caring for plants, you name it.

A few days ago a house-cleaning expert on the Today Show recommended baby wipes for cleaning wood furniture. The lanolin in the wipes is good for the wood, she explained. So I promptly bought a box of baby wipes and have been happily cleaning our furniture every day since.

Yesterday a money-saving expert mentioned, again on the Today Show, that microfiber cleaning cloths are much less expensive when purchased in the automotive section of a store.

Boy, was she right! Yesterday I bought 8 large microfiber cloths at WalMart's automotive department for a mere $5. I then went to the housecleaning department to compare prices, and the cloths were anywhere from two for $2.99 to $1.99 each.

I love cleaning and dusting with microfiber cloths, so I feel quite smug now that I have eight new ones on hand at a bargain price.

Here are two more tips at no extra charge:

To keep sterling silver from tarnishing, wrap a piece of chalk in cheese cloth and put it in your flatware drawer. It works!

And, to clean your dishwasher, fill the soap dispenser with lemon Kool-Aid or lemon Tang and put it through one washing cycle.

Yes! Orchids bloom in Maine...and other "stuff"

That's one of my phalaenopsis orchids in the header; it's just coming into bloom. I have another phalaenopsis that's sending up a flower spike, so it'll be in bloom by the end of the month. I love orchids and have about fifteen of them, but not all of them are cooperative with blooming. Once an orchid does bloom, the flowers last about a month, maybe longer. I think that's quite remarkable.

That's my new yarn storage area on the left. I saw an ad in a yarn magazine for a storage hanger like this, for $60. Then I spotted a similar one at Sam's Club for $39 and bought it. THEN, I went to TJ Maxx and saw yet another one for $3.99. Needless to say, I returned the $39 one and bought the one at TJ's. Good old TJ's: it has come through for me so many times.

My sister arrived here a couple of weeks ago sporting a brand new scarf she's knit, in red. I loved it. I had to make one myself. The pattern is called "Meandering Ribs" and is a freebie at the Lion Brand Yarn website.

The pattern is written in the most confusing way imaginable, though: "Row 12-See row 1; Row 13-See row 2," etc. My sister kindly rewrote the directions, making them much easier to follow. And now I have a Meandering Rib scarf of my own, in a rich blue.

My niece Rachel pointed out to me some cute headbands made by gluing crocheted "flowers" onto purchased headbands. She dropped a strong hint that her daughter, Violet, would enjoy some headbands like these. They're designed after similar headbands sold at Anthropologie for $32. I purchsed five headbands for $3 at WalMart, crocheted some flowers, glued them to the headbands, added "pearls," and commissioned Molly, who was napping in front of the wood stove, to model one for me. Molly's a good sport.

I LOVE this hat pattern. It's called a "Thorpe" and is a hat design I've been searching for for ages. This pattern knits up quickly, can be made for a child, youth, or adult, and is an attractive design.

Here Douglas the stuffed dog models one of my Thorpes.

And here, a lampshade models the same Thorpe.

I see many Thorpes on my knitting needles in the future.

Finally, I heard or read recently of a new book entitled How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One.

My first thought was Oh, my, has it come to this?

My second thought was soon we'll need a book entitled How to Drive Your Car without Texting or Talking on Your Cell Phone.

And one entitled How to Write in Cursive.

And yet another entitled How to Express Mild Pleasure without Using "Awesome."

Despite the rain and snow forecast for Maine tonight and tomorrow morning, spring really is on its way. I can smell it in the air; I can hear it in the treetops; I can see it in the receding snowbanks. Honest.