Pig

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig
Home again, home again, jiggedy jig.
And then a new litter bring forth in the spring
Shalt she, the new mother of sweet little things!

Bit of self-disclosure now: my absolute favorite animal
is the pig. There is something innately charming about
their geometrically simple body shape and piggish snout.
(Wearily) Yes, thank you for pointing out that they are pink,
but how many animals do you know that can be caricatured
by a circle? Eh? Round is supreme. Shape trumps color.
And if you've ever watched Babe (or read Dick King-Smith's
The Sheep Pig, from which the movie was adapted), you'll
know that pigs are smart. They roll in brown mud to cover
their pinkness. Haven't you heard? Brown is the new black.
Even pigs know that.

But back to the farm thing.

Meet our sow!

She has a new litter of piglets who look just like her

Seven* of them

including the spunky little runt.

She gave birth to them in the spring by C-section

and already their appetites are insatiable.

They drive her crazy,

but she's a mom, so she puts up with it,
because it's what moms do.

More than twenty years ago, my brother made me a
present of a perfectly round orange pig, with a zipper
in its belly, enclosing little round miniature piglets.
I think it was then that I remembered how to be a child
again. I still have that pig today - her name is Pig -
and she was my inspiration for this sow (although Pig
wasn't a nurser). I thought that, since I'd done those
oviparous chickens, I should do a viviparous pig.
And throw in lactating as well.
Might as well give the kids the full story.

Kate turns two this week, so BigPig and
her family were her birthday gift.




Kate immediately sat on her (of course)
and called her Humpty Dumpty.


We also plan to use her as an ottoman sometime.

*There are only six piglets in the photos


Because one of them is going to a new home!

So many of you were on the right track in your guesses,
and a few of you came really close to the full picture!
So I picked the commenter who said it first -
congratulations to Angie (commenter #15 on Day #2),
who wrote:

okay, so those do have to be little b***** n****** and it
does have to be a pig to go with your chicken. this
zipper is it's backside where the little baby piglets
are born from and i bet they will have little velcro-y
snouts to stick to their mommy's n******. oh, i do hope
it's a pig! i grew up next door to my grandpa and
his pig farm and i helped him with the pigs every day...
i love pigs (especially the sweet little piglets) and
have always had a hard time eating pork. :)

Angie: I love pigs so completely that I eat them
on a regular basis. And chickens, too. And cows.
Shoot me an email with your name and postal
address and I'll ship Piglet to you!

Thank you all for playing along - you are such good
sports! I've gotta say, though, that some of your guesses
made me blush! Those little fleece circles with velcro centers
were piglet snouts.

SNOUTS.

See?


More livestock coming up, but not quite so soon.

Fox

I cannot remember which of the kids asked for this fox. When you make almost 20 different animals, everything about the process feels fuzzy. And not just literally.

And speaking of fuzzy, it's astounding how imprecise my impressions are of specific animals. I mean, when I was designing their features, these were what my useless memory told me:

• pigs have triangularish ears and circular snouts. 
• cats have triangularish ears and bottlebrush tails. Some have stripes. 
• penguins are ovoid and white and black and there's yellow somewhere.
• frogs have webbed feet and are green. Are their hands also webbed?  
• foxes are rust colored. They have fat tails. The tails have white tips. They also have white somewhere on their faces. Er, what kind of noses have they got?

Total rubbish.

So then I had to google actual images of real animals for enlightenment. I was shocked at how wrong I was about so many animal features. For example, pigs do not have perfectly circular noses (duh). And cow ears stick out at the sides of their heads, not the tops. And not all cows have horns, crumpled or otherwise. And foxes sometimes have black socks. And kangaroos have standy-up ears that are dark inside. And pandas have a big black waistband, like a negative tapir. And dragons! And, apparently, dragon eyes are not anything like snakes'. Which is all obvious until one has to actually draft templates, at which point one sits, with pencil poised over cardstock, second-guessing oneself because one suddenly and inexplicably cannot distinguish between, say, a beaver and an otter. 

But anyway, here is our fox (whom Emily has since claimed as hers). 

And which, by some miracle, did not end up looking like a wolf. Or a pig. Or a pterodactyl. Thank heavens for google.

Pig

Lesson learned about pigs: their noses are oval, not circular, and are slightly upturned.

They also have bigger and more triangular ears than I thought,

and are more often devoid of, than covered in, mud. 

And a piglet sitting on its haunches 

is the cutest posture I have ever seen.

Kate's Minecraft Party

This little girl and her Minecraft party. . . !

Let's just say that it was quite the learning experience for me.

I broke all kinds of rules, though. 

Like this poster - with all its no-such-thing-as smiley Good Sport Monsters.

Totally wrong.

Also this lunch setup with no themed tableware and not a single Minecraft decoration.

I tried, though.

I bought vials

to make drinking potions (for whose magical ingredients the girls' contributed ideas and coloring services).

And -only because my kids insist these are a party staple just so they have an excuse to bake - cookies. I was personally very unhappy making square pigs. They are the roundest animals on the planet and making them square felt like a travesty. 

Then there was the issue of cake. Which Kate does not eat. And our favorite gelato shop CLOSED DOWN last winter, so we could no longer have our go-to stand-in blood orange/raspberry sorbet/chocolate gelato pie. 

So we had Birthday Brownie instead. Which, while I would ordinarily never dream of desecrating with frosting, I frosted. The children said it looked like Minecraft terrain this way. And since we were already breaking all the Good Chocolate Confectionery rules anyway, we put square mushrooms on it, which were mini Starbursts dotted with white frosting. Yes, more frosting; at this point, why exercise restraint?

Please note the total absence of any indication of any theme - let alone Minecraft - in the picture below.

Also note the ROUND balloons with ROUND spots. The children asked me if I'd deliberately bought them as an act of rebellion. I confessed Yes. They giggled and said Mom Is So Silly. 

Okay, now that we're done sharing how I utterly failed at the whole Matchy-Matchy Themed Party Atmosphere, let's move on to the activities.

Incidentally, please don't feel bad or slighted or whatever if you happen to love the themed decoration/food/cutlery/drinkbottlelabel approach to parties. I think it makes for fantastic photoshoots, personally. Especially if it isn't raining cats and dogs like it often threatens to do whenever I plan parties. 

My children, however, have told me in no uncertain terms that the most important thing at their parties is the activities. They don't care if the food matches the napkins. In fact, they don't even care what the food is, as long as it's not squid. And often, they want to rush through the tragically non-coordinated lunch portion of the party just so they can get to The Actual Fun Part. 

So. . . Main Event coming up. Be warned: here follows the kind of happy insanity that can only result from collaboration with children. 

First, the filler- and ice-breaker activities. 

Bookmarks -

which my children adore coloring, no matter how old they get.

Instead of the usual printer-paper substrate which we then laminate post-coloring, these we printed on cardstock. We set up the Activity Center in the garage and let the guests color whenever there was a lull in the proceedings.

One of my kids suggested this next game with the Perler bead square heads they'd been making. Originally we'd considered Minecraft bingo, but immediately decided it would be a ridiculous amount of work to make different bingo cards, so we turned it into an indoor scavenger hunt instead, which doubled as an Inclement Weather Contingency Activity. Jenna hid the square heads around our basement living room and the kids were given photo cards and pens to check each off as they found them.

Anyone who turned in a completed card got gold nuggets. It was wonderful watching the older kids help the younger kids find all the square heads.

Then we made mosaic diamond pickaxes, which were foamboard bases

onto which the kids stuck these foam tiles

(it was an exercise in patience, and a good opportunity for visiting)

to make this.

The kids thought it was very cool that they had their own pickaxe to wield. A diamond one, the children informed me, trumped all the other kinds of pickaxes. 

This next activity is my favorite, because it's so crazy.

Minecraft, I've learned, is about being resourceful. You collect things and build and create while surviving against monsters and general evil. One of the ways to amass resources is by mining and trading (hence the pickaxe).

Here are homemade ores. These have emeralds in them, which are a currency for exchange.

We set up these ores in the sandbox and had the kids go collect them

in buckets (to contain the mess, because I don't enjoy cleaning up),

and smelt to obtain the emerald, which is a fancy way of saying, "crumble the thingy with your fingers to get out the green gem." The kids loved it so much that they went back to the sandbox after the party was over to mine the surplus ores to get more emeralds.

Armed with three emeralds apiece, they went out to trade them for other things

with Villagers,

who were Emily

and her older cousins

who'd graciously offered to role-play for us.

Each Villager traded something different for an emerald: a sword key-chain;

a grass block,

which was a kid-painted "blind" box

containing one of these store-bought figurines;

and a packet of edible jewels

which are easier to make than they look!

Another way to obtain things, according to the children, is by Crafting. Which is a dreadfully misleading term for the non-Minecraft-initiated who are more familiar with the more traditional scissors-glue-sticky-tape manifestations. Minecraft-style Crafting apparently involves a recipe and instant gratification, performed on a magical platform known as The Crafting Table (which, humorously enough, you also have to Craft into existence. Long story.).

We Crafted golden apples. The children claimed these have rejuvenating properties. Like caffeine, I guess. 

We made these stickers of non-amazing red apples and gold nuggets

and the kids stuck them in this special configuration on a 3x3 representation of the top of a Crafting Table, which goldenifies the object in the center. 

Then they presented their Crafting Tabletops to Grandma, who did her King-Midas-thing

and swopped them for golden apples. 

To contain and organize all that loot, any self-respecting Minecraft devotee must have a Chest. 

Which is a cardboard cube that opens for storage,

which we mass-produced because cardboard in small amounts is just no good.

These we hid in the yard - according to my expert consultants, in Minecraft, you obtain Chests by Just Finding Them In Random Places. 

And that was a wrap.

It was a perfect day with perfect weather with the only hitch being way too much food so that the kids were too full to eat the birthday brownie after the song was sung and the candles blown out. The grownups, however, sat down after all the guests had gone home, and ate it with copious amounts of ice cream (I scraped off all my frosting) and continued celebrating Kate. 

Happy birthday, little one!

(And I still haven't played a single minute of real Minecraft.)