The Jessie Tree and the Limit of Sanity

 In my quest to bring liturgical living into my home in a way that doesn't break the bank or my sanity, we've had some interesting adventures. I haven't had anything break the bank yet, but I have had my cheapness and strange overabundance of ambition run headlong into the boundary between reasonable efforts and the limits of mental health. 

The everlasting Advent candles dipped repeatedly in melted crayon neared that line and stuck a toe over it. The avoided hassle and expense combined with an excuse to put a serious dent in our broken crayon collection was nearly outweighed by the hassle of chipping and scraping cooled wax out of a ceramic bowl and peeling all the tiny bits of paper off broken pieces of crayon (and then finding them all over the house for a week). 

The peg doll swap incident went to that line and sat on it with their legs defiantly sticking out. I enjoy painting, but painting 23 identical depictions of an obscure beatified martyr from Oklahoma no one is familiar with, a tiny detailed stole, shirt, and face on each one, instead of someone simple like pretty much ANY Franciscan saint (brown body, tan line for a rope cincture, circle of brown on the head for a tonsure, minimalistic dots for eyes. Ta da.) was a really not-intelligent idea. 

But I really think this Jesse tree thing takes the cake. Never has a project had such a serious fake out near the end, suffered from lack of advance planning, or morphed concepts of execution quite as much as this one. This one went up to the line, crossed it, turned around, and taunted me. 

 First off, it was a bad idea to do this with a six month old baby in the house. 

Bitty Baby has been going through a definite clingy phase lately where she either wants to be nursed or held CONSTANTLY. She's also gotten interested in tasting everything and being grabby. While I can balance her on my hip or manage her in the carrier for most things, things involving mess or paint really don't fall under that description. 

So as I was trying to shape this thing and bring all the elements together (a process that involved paint, spray adhesive, and a hot glue gun), I was either holding baby and angling my body in such a way that she couldn't reach or running back and forth between the project and a fussing baby. Not a relaxing process by any stretch of the imagination. 

My second mistake was being unfamiliar with my chosen materials.

 I found a recipe awhile back for homemade air dry clay. You mix cornstarch, baking soda and water together over medium heat until it comes together, let it cool, and then shape whatever small, simple figure you want with it. I already had the stuff in the house, and it seemed perfect. I mixed up a batch, rolled it out like cookie dough, punched out 25 circles with a canning ring, punched a hole for string to hang them and figured I was good to go. 

What I neglected to write down when I found this recipe, and thus didn't plan for, is that this stuff takes days to dry and harden. In true procrastinating fashion, it was already a couple days into Advent by the time I had these things rolled and cut out. I was seriously beginning to doubt I'd have them ready by December 1st. In desperation I tried tossing them into the oven, but all that did was turn some of them brown. They didn't harden at all, they just got brown burnt looking spots. 

One thing that surprisingly turned out right was having the kids help. Turns out it's a little easier to supervise with a baby on your hip than it is to paint stuff yourself. I spread newspaper on the table, filled a palette with acrylic paint, and let the kids paint the dry-on-the-surface-but-still-kinda-bendy disks. Not perfectly, but enough. 

Little Girl also proved pretty adept at gluing the drawings on the disks once I had those complete and colored in which was a godsend because Bitty Baby chose that moment to need ALL THE NURSING. 

Those drawings...not my best work. Very rushed. I basically consulted the list on this page (same page had a very nicely drawn printout of all the ornaments for sale. Did I even consider buying it? Nope! Hubris abounds) and did my best to do a small drawing of each symbol. 

Some turned out great...

Others not so much. 

That thing on the right is supposed to be a camel. 

But that's ok. You can more or less tell what they are, and that's what matters. 

The final stage was figuring out where to put the "tree" part of the Jesse Tree. Our house is tiny. It's cluttered. It houses five people, two of which have a gift for various degrees of destruction (and another of which is developing a gift for it). I was thinking of using a tree branch from the yard, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out where to put it. There was no open space. 

Then I realized that the front of the fridge is an open space. I shoveled off all the old school notices, outdated hurricane tracking chart, and the motley collection of receipts and taped up a "tree" made out of two pieces of oversized green construction paper and a cardboard truck. Then I took the STILL-kinda-soft ornaments and hot glued some round magnets salvaged from a failed project awhile back. 

As I was gluing and running back and forth between the project and the fussy baby, it suddenly occurred to me that I could have used that open box of defective canning lids I've been saving for a project instead of probably much more defective homemade clay thingies. 

Dangit. 

I finished them up, wrote the number order on the back of them, and we started using them the next night. 

Miracle of miracles, the darn disks finally dried. They're hard as a rock now, and I'm MUCH more confident this thing will actually last the month. 

It's actually a success as far as the kids are concerned. They're enjoying taking turns putting them on the tree and listening to the corresponding Bible story every night. Said Bible stories are pretty simple at the beginning- creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark. Tracing down the basic narrative of salvation history through the Old Testament. 

But then they get into prophecies that aren't really included in most children's Bibles. And not all children's Bibles have all the stories. I'm having to go through our collection, write down which ornaments go with which stories in which books, write down when none of them have a corresponding story and I need to use a Bible verse (and Google which freakin' Bible verse they go with...I'm not working with a Master's in Theology here), and figure out what the heck I'm supposed to do with the one that just says "Bethlehem". I'm actually still working on that bit. 

The moral of my story? If you have scant amounts of sanity to spare, spend some time figuring out the simplest way to do the thing....and then spend a little money and let this lady do a good chunk of the work for you. And use this devotional instead of playing Biblical scavenger hunt. 

Whew!