That Time During the Great Depression That Canada Stole Five Identical Babies and Put Them in a Baby Zoo and Made Them Do Brand Deals

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The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets by Sarah Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

WTF, Canada?!?

Just… every part of this story that comes after the children’s birth and first weeks--truly a miracle that the kids all survived without long-term complications!--is so messed up. The kids’ lives were the worst combination of overworked child actor and infant ape stolen from the wild and raised like a human for science. The way they were taken from their birth family, actively prevented from forming healthy sibling relationships (with their other siblings and with each other), raised with asylum standards by employees with a high turnover rate, and used for publicity stunts and brand deals and media attention is all so obviously wrong that I can’t imagine how anyone went along with it. And let’s be honest--the only way those kids managed to get out of that institution is because they, like sitcom child actors everywhere, grew up enough that they were no longer perceived as cute enough to stay kidnapped. And even then they had to leave the only home they’d ever known and go live with people who resented them and were jealous of them and abused them in a multitude of ways.

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Also just… the ABSOLUTE NERVE of the Canadian government and their official “guardians” to take custody away from the Dionne parents because they’d made a publicity deal with the Chicago World Fair--a publicity deal that they made to, you know, GET THE CHILDREN LIFESAVING MEDICAL CARE AND MONEY TO PAY THEIR BILLS--and then themselves go on to high-key expose those kids to publicity stunts and brand deals and advertising schemes for nearly a decade, all for money in everyone else’s pockets. The kids had to pretend to open Christmas presents months before Christmas so that the magazine layouts would be ready for the holidays. They were required to act in a movie years before they were allowed to sleep in their family home. They had to shill specific brands, and be in their doctor’s Christmas card photo with him instead of his own son.

What a bunch of assholes!

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The children’s upbringing really sets off the difference between surviving and thriving, and for whom. Sure, that early intervention is absolutely what allowed those babies to survive, but continuing it for months longer, then years longer than that emergency warranted may have been marketed as the best thing for the children’s continuing survival, but the only people thriving in that arrangement were those making money off the kids’ marketing deals and trust fund. Even if anyone involved in their care thought they were doing the best thing for them--which I’m pretty sure nobody really and truly thought that--sacrificing the children’s potential to thrive, to have big lives full of friends and family and experiences and normality, feels like too big a cost.

I found some of the old newsreels and footage of the kids (although I can’t find that movie they had to act in), and I guess we’re just more savvy about our reality television these days, because it’s obvious to me how often the kids look towards someone behind the camera to get instruction. That’s not even reality at that point--that’s an episode of Full House!

Random moments that horrified me:

• The nurses weren’t allowed to kiss the kids or show them physical affection, and their siblings were rarely allowed to visit and their parents weren’t left unsupervised with them. Was Canada TRYING to raise them as psychopaths?!? It’s a separate miracle that everyone managed to grow up as mentally healthy as they were able to. Annette, Cecile, Émilie, Marie and Yvonne Dionne are some of the most resilient human beings I’ve ever read about.
• People complained when they’d line up to watch the kids play in their custom-build playground that served as a panopticon/baby zoo and the kids didn’t look super cute like they did in the magazine photos, so the nurses had to dress them up and curl their hair before both their morning and afternoon yard time. And people would get pissed if they didn’t see all five kids or any of the kids were just moping around, so the kids had to go out even when they didn’t feel like it, and they had to “romp.”
• The trip to go meet the Royal Family when the kids were five was the first time they’d left their property since they’d been moved there as babies. Seriously, WHAT?!? No trips to the seaside or an amusement park or a zoo, much less to the hardware store or their parents’ farm or on a picnic? The kids had never even seen a cow before!!! How did anyone in charge of them think that would be good for their brains?
• When they tested the children while they were still institutionalized under Canadian guardianship, they discovered that the kids were developmentally behind, especially verbally because they’d lived in the same few rooms their entire lives and had nothing to ask questions about and nothing new to talk about, and physically because they never had to try anything new or develop independence.

Although I wish I’d been told more about the adult lives of Annette, Cecile, Émilie, Marie and Yvonne Dionne, I actually appreciated that I was not, because that’s clearly the better and more ethical choice. Those kids had their privacy stolen from them, and as adults they definitely deserved to be free from all the looky-loos who made their babyhood kid zoo so popular. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have burning questions that I didn’t try to Google on my own, ahem! But at least I had to do my own work for my gossip. I even Googled to see if anyone had ever found Cecile’s asshole son, Bertrand Langlois, who stole the rest of his elderly mother’s fortune and disappeared.

I hope you’re dead in a ditch somewhere, Bertrand!

P.S. View all my reviews.

P.P.S. Want to see what we're going to do with a bushel of apples, a gallon of cider, and two Jack-o-lantern pumpkins, one very large and one very weird? Follow along on my Craft Knife Facebook page, where cider cocktails and caramel apples are made, and teenagers are in charge of the applesauce!

Senior Pictures of the Jack-o-Lanterns, because the Real Senior in the Family Won't Cooperate

If YOU were a senior in college you'd let me take senior pictures of you, right? You'd let me coordinate cute outfits for you that go with the several picturesque locations I've planned out (I know where soooo many nice bridges are, for one thing!), and you'd be super into all the whimsical and flattering poses I've thought up, and you'd keep forever all the lovely photos I made of you as mementos of your magical senior year.

You'd definitely not be like my kid, who cares not for the frippery and folderol of the senior year season of life. Admittedly, she's stoked for some of her college's senior year traditions, like the few days between finals and graduation when apparently the seniors just get to run around campus, eat free snacks, and get their photos taken sitting behind the president's desk and standing on (GASP! The taboo of it!!!) the college's seal. You know, the one that you're not supposed to step on or you'll be cursed and won't graduate? I guess the curse can't take you after your final grades are in! 

But the year-long build-up to that last fun week? My college senior says no, thank you to that. She's got resumes to update and applications to fill out and comprehensive exams to study for and her last eight classes to pass. There is no room for whimsical nostalgia, much less a photo shoot that may or may not require several location changes and outfit changes and possibly more than one single instance of doing what her mother has asked her to do.

So sometimes you just have to pretend that you're taking senior pictures when you've got a kid pinned in your viewfinder, even if all you're actually doing is taking some snapshots while y'all carve pumpkins over Fall Break:

I love how ever since they were both little, one kid--the same kid each time!--has always tried to find the largest carving pumpkin in the pumpkin patch, and the other kid--also the same kid each time!--has always tried to find the smallest pumpkin that can still reasonably be carved.

I think this year is that kid's smallest pumpkin yet!

I don't know what kind of magic was used to make those cheapo pumpkin carving tools that you always see everywhere, but they randomly work great and last forever!

This weekend will mark our yearly tradition of finally kicking the Jack-o-lanterns over the edge of the wall so they can compost in peace under the bushes and we can put Christmas decorations there instead, so I thought I would memorialize their last week with us with a set of proper senior pictures just for them:

After this, they get to collect their free bagel, get their picture taken behind the president's desk, and finally stand on the school seal, and then it's off to new adventures!

P.S. Want to see what we're going to do with a bushel of apples, a gallon of cider, and two Jack-o-lantern pumpkins, one very large and one very weird? Follow along on my Craft Knife Facebook page, where cider cocktails and caramel apples are made, and teenagers are in charge of the applesauce!

10 Witch Hats for Halloween... Just Not Necessarily *This* Halloween

One improvement that I could easily make to my little hobby etsy shop is to anticipate seasonality.

Like, I'm literally the one who bitched every single year of my kid's Nutcracker years about why on earth the ballet department always acted like they had to reinvent the entire damn Nutcracker wheel every damn year. Y'all, you have done this thing before! Why is the children's dressing room never reserved and nobody has the elevator key and casting a dozen nine-year-olds in the same roles they held when they were eight takes three freaking weeks of daily emails saying that the casting will be out tomorrow? And yet here I am every year being all, "Oh, gorsh! Is Halloween month! Should I... make something Halloween for my etsy shop?" And then I have time to make maybe three things before Halloween is over.

Also me, sitting here on November 18 with nothing in my shop for Thanksgiving and nothing in my shop for Christmas

But you know what I DO have in my shop right now? The five handmade witch hats that I finished AFTER Halloween! The five that I managed to bust out before Halloween sold so quickly that I figured that this time I would get ahead of the game while I was thinking about it and my mind and my hands were already in witch hat mode.

I really like this hat that I fussy cut from a thrifted batik of the seven chakras:

I also got through quite a bit of previously thrifted formalwear for those pre-Halloween witch hats--

--as well as a successful experiment with facing a witch hat with burlap:

My big helper here just happened to be home for Fall Break right when I needed a witch hat model!

--but my absolute favorite hats, and the ones that I ended up making multiples of to get that jump on next Halloween, are these hats sewn from the last scraps of a vintage cutter quilt that I've had kicking around my fabric stash for over 15 years by now:

I'm a little sad to have used it all up with these hats, because I've never come across another old cutter quilt since, but I suppose that we mustn't hoard our resources, sigh.

It just sews up SO prettily!

These last four witch hats sewn from that vintage quilt are already listed in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, because who am I to tell you no if you want to buy one in the off-season--

--but what I really should do, and what I am firmly telling myself TO do, is to sew a couple more hats from unique fabrics every month, so that by the time next autumn rolls around I'll be fully stocked with seasonal items.

But not this week. This week my goal is to figure out how to sew re-usable fabric chains, probably with Velcro fasteners, because I think it would make a really cool--and eco-friendly! And heirloom!--holiday decoration. And obviously I won't figure that out and have any sets finished until it's past time to reasonably decorate for Christmas, sooo... I guess I'm really committed to getting a jump on next year's holiday products!

P.S. Want to see what we're going to do with a bushel of apples, a gallon of cider, and two Jack-o-lantern pumpkins, one very large and one very weird? Follow along on my Craft Knife Facebook page, where cider cocktails and caramel apples are made, and teenagers are in charge of the applesauce!

It Took Me Eight Months To Cross-Stitch Two Things, But I Think I've Got the Hang of It Now!

Creepy Cross-Stitch: 25 Spooky Projects to Haunt Your Halls by Lindsay Swearingen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I didn’t think that I wanted to learn how to cross-stitch, but apparently I just needed a gateway book. Because now that I’m two whole projects deep, I love it!

Although it did take me a while to get there… I actually checked this book out from the library early this year---like, pre-Valentine’s Day early--thinking it might be cute to do some of the projects and set them aside for Halloween decorating.

Yeah... no. I finished my first project from the book, a little ghost with a floral background, a couple of days before Halloween, and the process only really started to click in mid-October. But then I zipped through the finish, immediately started my second project, a Jack-o-lantern cauldron, and finished it a week later.

Here are the things I learned:

1. The x’s touch each other. With my first stitches, I put the x’s next to each other, but not, like, in the same holes, and I had to sit there and stare at them for a while, comparing back and forth with the illustration in the book, before I finally realized how you’re supposed to place them.
2. Counting is really, really, REALLY important, and also weirdly hard? My little ghostie is actually a huge mess, especially all those little flowers, because I absolutely could not figure out how to count all the little squares of dead space to the next flower. It took me forever to realize that the pattern has darker lines every five squares, which made the counting maybe 5% easier, but I still feel like I have to count the pattern squares about fourteen times, then the squares on the fabric about twelve times, then check back to the pattern to make sure it’s right, and then to the fabric again to make sure I wasn’t crazy the last time I counted. WHY IS IT SO HARD!!!!!
3. You don’t actually have to use the exact colors of embroidery floss that the pattern calls for. With the first project, I bought all the exact correct colors and it was fine, but for the second project, I was all, “Aha! I can use these two random oranges that I already own!” So I only had to buy the greys, and I consider that a huge win.
4. You ALSO don’t actually have to use the store-bought Aida that the pattern calls for. I HAAAAATE the feel of the black Aida I bought for the ghost (I also feel like it was stupid expensive, Michael’s!!!), although I’ve since learned that I could have soaked it in water to rinse away the sizing that was apparently making it so stiff. But anyway, I did my Jack-o-lantern cauldron on burlap, and I am obsessed with how it looks and feels. I might have to experiment with dyeing burlap, because a lot of the Creepy Cross Stitch projects definitely need to be stitched onto black.
5. I am maaaaaaaybe too myopic to excel at cross stitch. I keep having to peer over my glasses and hold the fabric about two inches from my face, although I’m definitely getting better at not having to do that for EVERY stitch--just the tricky ones!

Here are the things I still don’t know:

1. The embroidery hoop dented my Aida and made me afraid to keep using it, so I’ve just been sort of holding the fabric by hand. Are embroidery hoops a huge time-saver, and if so, how do you keep it from creasing your fabric?
2. How do you pull a strand of embroidery floss from the skein without tangling everything? Is there a specific end you pull? My numerous skeins of tangled floss would like to know.
3. I don’t understand how you’re supposed to figure out where to place your stitching on the fabric so that you’ve got enough room for it but you don’t waste a lot of fabric, either. I wasted a bunch of the black Aida by placing my little ghostie in the center, so now that I’ve cut it out I’ve got just a bunch of scrap Aida that’s only good for tiny projects, but I had to restart my Jack-o-lantern cauldron because I started it too close to the edge.

I absolutely want to make most of the projects in this book, but now that I’ve got two finished (that I need to figure out how to mount and display…), I’m going to take a little break from Halloween stitching and check out some other cross-stitch books from the library. So far I’ve got waiting on hold for me one with national park icons, a feminist one, a literary one, and a Star Trek one. I think I’m going to be spoiled for choice!

P.S. View all my reviews.

P.P.S. Want to see what we're going to do with a bushel of apples, a gallon of cider, and two Jack-o-lantern pumpkins, one very large and one very weird? Follow along on my Craft Knife Facebook page, where cider cocktails and caramel apples are made, and teenagers are in charge of the applesauce!

You Cannot Read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Self-Insert Mary Sue Fanfiction as a Historical Document

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

Wilder Weather: What Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaches Us About the Weather, Climate, and Protecting What We Cherish by Barbara Boustead
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To me, the hardest concept to grasp about the Little House on the Prairie books is that they’re fiction. And to be honest, that’s because they’re not completely fiction! But also, they are! Confusingly for fiction, the main characters all have the names of the author and her real family. Confusingly for non-fiction, the characters don’t adhere to the timeframe of the author’s life. But confusingly for fiction, they operate in a similar timeframe. The stories that are told most resemble fanfiction, i.e. the retelling of a canonical story in a different way to achieve a different effect or result. And because Wilder wrote them about herself, I guess they MOST most resemble self-insert fanfiction, although even that isn’t quite right because the canonical story IS about Wilder. Does Laura sometimes come off better in the stories than she did in real life? Then maybe she wrote self-insert Mary Sue fanfic. Or should we just ignore the self-insert part? Then maybe she wrote AU fanfic.

Or we could just admit that Wilder invented, and is nearly the only author within, a specific sub-genre that conflates memoir with fiction. The other authors within this genre are the ones who claimed they wrote memoirs but then got caught lying in them. It’s interesting that Wilder chose to overtly fictionalize her story rather than push her memoir forward, but of course that’s the fault of those who wouldn’t publish Pioneer Girl as-is. BUT it worked out for the best, because her Little House books are much stronger than Pioneer Girl. And so back we go to the scenario in which Wilder invents a new sub-genre of literature!

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

All this to say that I did find it problematic that Wilder Weather sometimes seems to conflate fact with fiction, or rather, doesn’t always overtly distinguish between the two when discussing the Little House books and/or Wilder’s actual life. There were absolutely some acknowledgments, but the awareness didn’t feel explicit on a case-by-case basis. An example that stuck out to me was the discussion of the scene in These Happy Golden Years in which Laura and Almanzo see a tornado. Boustead writes, “In These Happy Golden Years, Laura immediately notices the heat and humidity on Thursday, 28 August 1884 (not a Sunday as her book narrative would indicate).” That reads as a clear acknowledgment that the Little House books and Wilder’s life are not the same, but it doesn’t feel like an acknowledgment that Wilder did this on purpose, or that perhaps she simply made no effort to verify a specific date because it didn’t matter in her work of fiction--it just as easily reads as if Wilder made a mistake with her dates.

The day is important because this is the day of the tornado. In These Happy Golden Years, Almanzo and Laura are out riding in Manly’s buggy, when a storm begins to form in the distance:

“Almost overhead now, the tumbling, swirling clouds changed from black to a terrifying greenish-purple. They seemed to draw themselves together, then a groping finger slowly came out of them and stretched down, trying to reach the earth. It reached, and pulled itself up,and reached again.
“How far away is that?” Laura asked.
“Ten miles, I’d say,” Almanzo replied.
It was coming toward them, from the northwest, as they sped toward the northeast. No horses, fast as they ran, could outrun the speed of those clouds. Green-purple, they rolled in the sky above the helpless prairie, and reached toward it playfully as a cat’s paw torments a mouse.
A second point came groping down, behind the first. Then another. All three reached and withdrew and reached again, down from the writhing clouds.”

Boustead notes about Almanzo’s estimate of the distance to the tornado that “[h]is memory was probably quite accurate; though Wilder tended to exaggerate distances in her books, Almanzo had a clearer sense of distance.”

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

Here’s the thing, though: that version of the tornado anecdote is from the fiction book. The Almanzo who estimated the distance is a work of fiction, his placement in a buggy with Laura as they witness the tornado ten miles away is also a work of fiction. There’s no indication that the real Almanzo’s memory was consulted for this fictionalized anecdote, nor that the real Wilder’s authorial estimates of distance were “exaggerations” and not purposeful components of her descriptions of her fictional world.

Here’s the anecdote from Pioneer Girl, Wilder’s memoir:

“One afternoon we saw a bad storm rising in the northwest. It came up for awhile, then turned and swung around passing to the west of us going south. The large bank of clouds was first black, then turned a queer greenish, purple color and from it a funnel shaped cloud dropped down until its point touched the ground. With its point on the ground and the large end of the funnel in the cloud above it began whirling and traveled southward with the purple green cloud above it.
Then a second funnel point dropped, touched the ground and followed the first, then another and there were three under the cloud and traveling swiftly with it.
The wind was almost still where we were and we stood in the dooryard and watched the cloud and its funnels pass on the west of us.”

The memoir narrative is clearly describing the same tornado (there’s even a photo of what most academics assume to be the tornado being described--it was a famous tornado!), but in this narrative, which is intended to be factual, the “we” is likely referring to the Ingalls family, and they are at home, since they stood “in the dooryard” and watched the tornado pass to their west. Unless there is some kind of correspondence or interview notes that also support the factuality of the These Happy Golden Years anecdote, it feels like an odd choice to discuss the factual accuracy of minor details in the fictional account when there’s a fact-based account that could be discussed. It would have been super interesting to theorize whether or not that famous tornado’s path could have been seen from the doorway of the Ingalls’ homestead!

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

Boustead also mentions the floating door that merits a story of its own in These Happy Golden Years, noting that it “stretches credulity.” The door story is told a little more sedately in Pioneer Girl, but as hear-say, not witnessed by Pa and Almanzo as is told in the fiction book. Whenever there’s an exciting incident in the Little House books that doesn’t happen to Laura, I always wonder if that was a part that Rose Wilder Lane authored, since she was the sensationalist.

Also, the Pioneer Girl anecdote would have better supported Boustead’s claim that the tornado they saw was THE famous tornado, since it’s much more likely that the family would have been in their dooryard on a Thursday than that Laura and Almanzo would have been buggying about the plains on a Thursday. Laura and Almanzo courted on SUNDAYS!

Tangent, but when I went to look up the tornado anecdote in These Happy Golden Years, I saw that it was very near the end of the book, so I obviously sat down to keep reading, and omg the scenes in which Laura is preparing to leave her home and family to move in with Almanzo, feeling sad and nostalgic and homesick even though she hasn’t left yet, excited about what’s to come while mourning everything she’s leaving behind--well, I don’t know if you need to be putting those words in front of perimenopausal empty nesters, because I cried so many cries for a Tuesday afternoon! It was beautiful in a way that I absolutely did not appreciate until this read-through.

Ingalls Family Homestead, 2014

All that being said, I was VERY interested in reading about all the historic weather events and patterns that occurred during Wilder’s life and that informed her books. It’s obvious from page one of Little House in the Big Woods that Wilder has a mind for detail and a knack for description, and it was fascinating to see how many famous weather events can be matched to their fiction counterparts just by description alone. It was also interesting to see points where the factual accounts didn’t match the fictional counterparts, and it made me wonder what other authorial purpose they were then serving, what Wilder might have wanted to convey differently. Why, for instance, would she have Laura and Almanzo witness that tornado from Almanzo’s buggy? Perhaps because, unlike in the previous books in which Laura is a child and her family comprise her other main characters, in this book she saw Almanzo as the other main character, so the most exciting events should happen in his company? Or perhaps because those Sunday buggy rides actually read as pretty boring, and this was a more exciting way to convey that the courtship is still happening?

I also thought that the discussion of the climate during Wilder’s time, both in itself and vs. our time, was incredibly interesting, and I wouldn’t have skipped reading this book for the world just for that info. It was heartbreaking to learn that those Dakota tree claims that gave the Wilder family such agony during their four-year homestead duration would never have worked… although Pa’s cottonwoods at his own homestead did survive. I’ve seen them!

P.S. View all my reviews

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

In Which I Turn a Trip to the Apple Orchard into a Hostage Situation

And not just a regular hostage situation, but one that required my partner changing clothes TWICE beforehand, because he kept walking out of the bathroom wearing something stupid.

Sir, this is the first time I've had all four of us together in a picturesque location since June, and we likely won't all be looking this cute together in a cute spot until January. You are not wearing trackie bottoms OR your Voltron T-shirt in my good photos!

And so, everyone looking cute as buttons, off we went to the same place we've gone every autumn since these kids were actual genuine kids:

As always, we drove straight into the middle of the orchard and then dove headfirst into the middle of all the apples we could get our hands on:

The little kid has two months left on her braces, so she was less this--

--or this--

--and more this:

The big kid, though, basically spent the entire trip doing a shot-by-shot remake of this:

I wore my brand new witch hat that I sewed from a vintage quilt top, and good thing, too, because requiring someone else to take the camera to take some photos of me in it made sure that there was genuine photographic evidence that I was on this trip, too!

To be fair, though, the actual real star of the apple orchard show was Luna. We spent the entire afternoon at the orchard, but nevertheless, when I got home and saw that I'd taken over 500 photos in the span of approximately four hours, I was pretty embarrassed and was like, "Yikes! I am doing TOO MUCH! My poor family, how I have tortured them by forcing them to pose for 500 photos!" However, when I started editing the photos I realized that at least 450 of them were of the dog, and then I was all, "Oh! That's totally fine!" Because obviously when I'm taking photos of Luna, I have to take 1,000 shots at a time to try to get one where she's looking at me, and when I'm taking a group portrait that she's part of, everyone else has to continue to look pleasant and hold their pose (hence the hostage situation...) while I take those 1,000 shots.

But it's so worth it, because look how pretty and joyful she is!

And then another 1,000 photos of her looking sweet but NOT at the camera--

--and you see how it can quickly get out of hand.

We were never all in the same place at the same time last autumn, much less at the apple orchard, but the previous two or three years when we've gone, there had been a series of bad apple harvests and therefore not many apples left on the trees.

But not this year!

I was going for the Twilight vibe, and if I'd taken the photo in portrait instead of landscape, I'd have cracked it!

I don't know if you can tell, but Luna's favorite treat is apple, a fact that we discovered at this very orchard!

Having a kid with braces brings a new dimension to our constant apple noshing, because we get the opportunity to see how pretty all the apples are on the inside!

My other favorite thing about this orchard is that it's on the flight path to the local airport. Vaguely wondering what airplane it was that just passed by low overhead? Don't worry, because I'll tell you, and then I'll try to make you look at a zoomed in photo of it on my camera!

This one is from FedEx!

This, though, is my ACTUAL favorite thing about the orchard:

Combined with picking out pumpkins to carve--

--fighting the bees for our fair share of apple cider slushes, elephant ears, and apple dumplings--

--petting every llama in the petting zoo, and buying a gallon of apple cider and a pumpkin roll in the apple barn, it's almost enough magical family memories to see me through until Winter Break.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!