Due to popular demand, I am doing a tutorial on the Magic Boxes I showed off in some previous posts.
To begin, choose your paper. You need six sheets of matching paper (preferably a heavier weight). Choose one for your outside, a contrasting one for your lid, and 4 to create the inside boxes. Cut as follows (all measurement are in inches):
Outside: 6 x 11 3/4ths
Lid: 8.5 x 8.5
4 inner boxes: 8 x 8
The only challenging part of this project is creating the lid and inside compartments. The good news is, they follow the exact same process.
1. Draw a line from corner to corner on the back side of your paper. 
2. fold the tips of your paper in so that they meet at the center. It will look as though you are folding an envelope. 
Fold in all four sides, and then unfold. 
3. Fold the tips up to the folded line on each side. 
This fold gives you the sides of your box. Do it on all four sides. When you are finished you should have creases all the way around. I have taken a marker and drawn lines on my creases. This is not neccesary. This is to help you see where there should be folds. The first two lines you drew will NOT be creased.
4. 
I have also colored four triangles. Cut those out. You will be left with this:
5. 
See the arrows? Cut those lines up to the tip of the arrows. You should get this: 
6. You have created two sets of tabs. Bring them together to form a wall of the box like so: 
Now fold the flap over those tabs. 
Do the same thing on the other side.
7. 
Your flaps won’t want to stay down on their own. Fold in the other two flaps and press the corners in firmly. 
Once all four corners are in, the box will stay together without any glue. 
Repeat this process on your 8 inch and 8.5 inch papers. You should have 4 boxes and the lid.
Now for the outside.
1. Take the 11 3/4ths x 6 inch paper and fold it in half.
2. Open it up and fold the ends into the center. You should have four perfectly even quadrants.
To put the boxes in, first adhere one to the very top right corner, making certain that you are flush with the corner of the outside paper.
Adhere the next one to the bottom left corner, once again flush to the edge.
Align the inside two boxes so that they are in centered in their own quarter of the paper, but not overlapping each other so you can still fold the box shut.
Once the glue is dry (I do reccomend a liquid glue to extra staying power) you should be able to close your box and the lid should fit perfectly on top. One corner of the box will remain open, as no part is designed to overlap. To remedy this, I like to tie mine up with ribbons. You can embellish them any way that you like.
Here are a few that I’ve made.
transparency
Posted by Lou on January 30, 2008 @ 6:11 pm | 28 Comments
Hello! My, my, my, Lou is feeling a little scattered. Seriously. I have days (heh, weeks) where I could be perfectly happy never leaving my house. Now, I know I need to leave my house. There are errands to run, groceries to buy, people to please- and here I sit, totally unmotivated. I even canceled a dental appointment I had this morning because I don’t wanna move my butt.
This is probably because I spent all of last week running nonstop. I have found that I have one week out of every month where every thing that I need to do will be scheduled. The other three weeks I could spend sitting on my couch picking my nose, and the world wouldn’t care. Last week I had 2 dentist appointments, a school appointment, two kid appointments, visiting teaching, and then because I wasn’t pooped by Saturday, I went and taught four classes at the Nook. It was great, but I’m out of energy.
Tonight I’m teaching a scrap class for some people in Chris’ squadron. Do I have any idea what I’m doing yet? Um, not really. They weren’t overly specific about what they wanted and so I’m kind of making it up as I go along. I think it will be a card and a small project- focus on techniques, not pages. . .or something like that. Hopefully I have a few brain cells left tonight.
I went to a great church meeting on Sunday. I got there early to make sure that I would have a seat, and while I waited, I took all of the obligations swirling around in my head and I put them down in a list so I could focus enough to listen. It worked, but now I’m terrified of a seemingly innocuous piece of paper because looking at it will make me have to get up and do something.
I have no commitments tomorrow, but as soon as I look at that list I won’t have a minute’s peace. Thursday, on the other hand, is so packed that it requires a sitter, which I still need to find. Oddly enough, the following week is shaping up hectic as well, and it is forecasted to remain that way through February 16th! What gives? I thought I had no life.
Posted by Lou on @ 9:58 am | 4 Comments
I just read The Natural Superwoman by Dr. Uzzi Reiss. The book is based on finding natural ways to deal with many of the common complaints from women such as depression, weight, energy levels, libido, etc. He offers very good, sensible advice on how to eat, focusing mainly on cutting down on calories while still eating a meal that is satisfying. He also spend much of the book focused on bioidentical hormones, which unlike the Premarin and Provera that has been headlining in the news of late as cancer causing, are actually hormones identical to those which the body naturally produces, which make them not only safer but much more effective.
Reiss walked down the list of symptoms that a woman might experience when she has a lack of estrogen, progesterone or testosterone. Many of the complaints on these lists were quite familiar to me, especially in the estrogen arena. However, I am not sold on this.
Do you want to know why? It is because I have spent years going to doctors and telling them that I’m tired, I’m feeling anxiety and emotionally flat, my periods have gone from normal to near hemorrhaging every month, I have headaches and I’m just plain irritable (especially in the two weeks prior to my period when my estrogen is naturally diminishing) and they have labeled me a number of different things, given me the drugs and admonished me to exercise or not, eat such and such, or not, and told me that I WILL FEEL BETTER. And then I don’t. Or they do the blood test and come back with, “Nope, guess that wasn’t it, how about some more tests that do nothing except display your remarkable ability to bruise.”
In the past year I have been told that I have depression. It looks like a cortisol deficiency. It is all in your head. It’s all in your diet. Must be your thyroid. It’s PMS. I have Fibromyalgia. I believe the fibromyalgia- do you know why? Because it is just a label for a group of crappy symptoms with no real treatment and no discernable cause. The basic advice is “you can try all of this stuff, but it probably won’t work. We can give you painkillers and other drugs to mask the symptoms, but it won’t make them go away. Basically, you should just slow down, get some sleep and resign yourself to functioning way below par. Forever.”
So, forgive me, if when I see a huge list of symptoms that are ever so familiar along side a really easy solution (Reiss’s estrogen cream, applied lightly on estrogen heavy days of my cycle and heavily on days when my estrogen is depleted), I am totally skeptical. Oh, I want to believe. I want Reiss to personally work me up and really fix me. Everything he says sounds good. Very logical, cause and effect, and well thought out, and I will 100% agree with him when he said in the book that he is pretty sure that no one is suffering from a Prozac deficiency. I know I’m not.
After years of tracking my cycle and my overall state of being, what he wrote makes more sense than anything else I’ve read, and so I will make an appointment with my doctor and discuss it. Now, the chances that the military medical people will agree to trying out bioidentical hormones- not good. But still, it is worth a shot.
The one thing the book never mentioned was how all of these hormones applied during pregnancy. Many case studies discussed were of women of childbearing age, so I would have hoped to have seen that discussed a bit.
All in all, it was a thought provoking book, and I recommend it.
Posted by Lou on January 29, 2008 @ 9:26 pm | 4 Comments
The View (you know, the show with Barabra Walters) has teamed up with author Stacy DeBroff and Kimberly Clark to offer a $25,000 room makeover to 16 lucky winners. Seriously. Sixteen people. Have you signed up yet?
Living in fabulous, well maintained, roomy (note the dripping sarcasm) military housing, this doesn’t hold much sway for me, but man, give me my own house and that much cash and that is HUGE! Good Luck!
Posted by Lou on January 27, 2008 @ 1:08 pm | 5 Comments
ok- the random number generator chose # 78
78. I’ll admit, I’ve been lurking again but here I am!!
Joni
Comment by Joni Kuehl — January 20, 2008 @ 3:44 pm
Congrats!
And thanks for all who stopped by! I’ll do another drawing soon!
Posted by Lou on January 24, 2008 @ 1:41 pm | 3 Comments
We have struggled with Jonas’ behavior shortly after he stopped breast feeding at just under a year. Although I made pretty gradual changes as I found what worked and didn’t work for him (he had to have soy milk for another six months because he couldn’t handle the cow’s milk), eventually his diet increased to contain more and more foods, and I felt relatively good about what he was ingesting. This was a boy who would eat green beans as a snack, who loved prunes and fruits and veggies! Once we stopped introducing most major foods and were sure that he wasn’t frightening allergic to any of them, I relaxed and became relatively laissez-faire about food.
Within six months of Jonas’ diet expansion I began to notice remarkable changes. He has always been an very intense little kid. He is ecstatic when he is happy and miserable when he is sad. He is high energy, extremely intelligent and creative. All of these temperamental qualities can be used for good or for greying your mother’s hair, and Jonas went both directions often. The problem was that some days Jonas was a sweet, energetic, goofy kid, and other days he was extremely emotional, angry, and occasionally violent. He would be nothing but cuddles and kisses one day, and the next day he would literally throw a chair at me.
I blamed the military separations. I blamed all of the moving. I blamed my own parenting skills, or lack thereof. We saw therapists who confirmed that Jonas was an intense little guy, but that he had no markers for ADD, ADHD or a number of other issues that can seriously tweak a good kid’s behavior. My parenting was evaluated and found to be quite good, heck, I was already doing everything the therapist was suggesting, and after several evaluations he strongly suggested that I make it a point to hire frequent baby sitters so I could get a break! This was not comforting to me.
I had a suspicion that there was a dietary intolerance causing some of this crazy behavior, but I had no idea where to start. I would go for brief spurts dropping eggs or gluten or sugar from our diet (boy that sugar one didn’t last long at all!), but they never did anything but make everyone cranky that they couldn’t have what they wanted. I dropped preservatives and saw some improvement, but it wasn’t consistent enough to prove anything.
We had about three years of having no idea why we had a reasonable child one day and an angry child with no impulse control the next. We continued in this cycle and I would try to look at what he ate prior to taking a three hour screaming tantrum ( I may be given to hyperbole, but I assure you that when I say three hour tantrum, I kid you not). I never found any dietary consistencies. One day it would be pizza in question, so I would feed him pizza again and watch him like a hawk, only to get nothing. We did this over and over with a whole variety of foods.
My enthusiasm for this odd science project waxed and waned as frequently I was just plain too exhausted from all of the craziness to see straight. Finally, I had a major breakthrough.
A few months ago when my husband was deployed, we went to the commissary and hit a great sale on Fruit Loops cereal. Now, I’m normally more of a Cheerios or Kashi buyer, but for fifty cents a box, plus two free funky plastic cereal bowls, I was sold. I bought four boxes, drove home, and immediately came down with a nasty virus. I was absolutely out of commission, and Jonas was so excited about his Fruit Loops that I let him eat them all day long. For breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, my boy had pure food coloring, and then he morphed into a monster.
He screamed. He hit his sister over nothing. He threw chairs at me. He broke toys, threw himself on the ground and tantrumed as though he had been possessed by demons. I was sick, exhausted and at my wit’s end. I finally got him into bed that night wondering how we had all managed to live through the day.
The next morning I went to the bathroom where I found that Jonas had already been there. As little boys are want to do, he had neglected to flush the toilet and I noticed with amusement that his bowel movements were bright green from all of the food coloring in the cereal. Suddenly a light went on. I continued to monitor his waste over the next few days. His behavior was still very erratic. The day he returned to his usual sunny self, his waste showed no signs of dye.
I kept him very dye free over the next few days, and then I tried it again. I think I gave him fruit snacks, if I remember correctly. A few hours after the food coloring, he was out of control, and I was suddenly very, very in control.
I spent the next few months slowly learning which foods had colors added (quite a few), and what natural things would go over well. I made several dietary changes, and they worked. His first few weeks at school were pretty rough, but as our food routines changed, we saw a lot of improvement.
The biggest challenge has been getting everyone on board with these changes. Chris has gotten very good at choosing natural snacks for Jonas, and I’ve learned that I need to show up to school parties to moderate what Jonas eats. (You should have seen his Christmas party- it was a food coloring buffet!) His teacher wasn’t much help in moderating the children at snack time, and there were days where Jonas would come home cranky because he had shared fruit snacks and rainbow goldfish with his friends. One of our biggest challenges was teaching Jonas that he simply couldn’t eat food coloring. It was hard for him to hear no so often, but even he has gotten good at asking which foods he can eat.
As I had done some research on food coloring intolerances, I found that some dyes were bigger culprits than others. Red Dye 40 had a particularly bad rap, so I decided to see if Jonas would be alright with other colors. His teacher gave a him a huge bag of leftover Christmas candy, so I separated the candy into colors. I let him have all of the green and white candies, and then I observed. I saw no change! We retested the experiment again a few days later, with good news. Both Jonas and I were so excited! We have slowly gone through other colors and determined that for Jonas, Red 40 is not his friend.
This discovery has changed a lot at our house. Not only do we have a more even, pleasant kid and less stressed out parents, we have started being even more conscientious about eating more whole foods. I think this will be to everyone’s benefit.
It took over three years of frustration to get here. I know other families who are still fighting with similar circumstances and who haven’t found a solution. I strongly encourage you to take a good look at your child’s diet, particularly where food coloring is concerned. A little investigation could make all the difference.
Posted by Lou on January 21, 2008 @ 11:36 am | 28 Comments
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