Break it Down...

Darn stop sign just wasn't wide enough for that second "M". Oh well, spelling issues aside I still had to laugh and then circle the block so I could get a picture.

365 - Week 2

DAY 8

Monday July 5, 2010

The pool has arrived. This isn't a brand new pool as it was set up at The Husband's office so it's got a few dings and scratches, but it's our pool and it is cheap! We are quite excited!! My poor husband took apart the pool and loaded it all into the truck himself and then drove it home and got it all from the street to the back yard basically by himself as well. Each panel is over 80 lbs. He worked hard. K-Girl and I helped some, but we weren't much help when it came to the heavy lifting.

Day 9
Tuesday July 6, 2010

I've started the Couch to 5K program. I thought it was only fitting that I take a picture of the sneakers. They are rather old and worn out, but till I make sure that I'm going to stick with this they will have to get me through a few miles before going into retirement. Tonight I jogged and walked a total of 2.8 miles. I was very proud of my feet tonight.

Day 10
Wednesday July 7, 2010

It's been hot, much too hot for me. I'm of the mind that you can always put more on to get warm. I'm happiest in jeans and a sweater. It was 102 at 6:00pm...at 9:00 it was still 97. Ick. There were also many power outages around which made travel across town quite an experience.

Day 11
Thursday July 8, 2010

What a night! And I'm not saying that in the good sense. K-Girl fought bedtime and I ended up grabbing Gabby from downstairs because she was barking. I put her in my bed with me, but then K-Girl called again. In the 2 minutes I was gone Gabby decided to pee in my bed. Through the comforter, sheets, and just on the mattress pad. At least it didn't make it to the mattress, but 10:00 at night is not when I care to be stripping my bed and doing laundry.

Day 12
Friday July 9, 2010

Meet "Agent C". I don't know if you're familiar with Phineas and Ferb or not. If you are then you'll get the reference as the secret agents are named by the first letter of what animal they are (Perry the Platypus = Agent P). This kitty has adopted us. We're not sure if it's a she or a he so it's got a name that doesn't matter. After three days of this kitty hanging around our house we've started feeding it. I know I know. But I guess we now have an outdoor cat. I just couldn't not feed/water it when the temperatures have been so high. Agent C will come out when we're around, but if we pay it too much attention or come close it will take off. I managed to get these pictures the day after I started feeding it. I feel bad about it's boo-boo under the eye but I'm not sure what I can do about it as it won't let me get closer than about 4 feet before it takes off.

Day 13
Saturday July 10, 2010

Grocery shopping (and a Target run)

Day 14
Sunday July 11, 2010

The goodies I made for my Thirty-one party this afternoon. They were delicious. Possibly the best brownies I've ever tried. I don't think I'll ever be able to use a box again.
The recipes...
Brownies, as They Should Be
Congo Bars



Hosted by Chris


Hosted by Cecily and Momma

Crafty

I thought I'd take a moment and share with you some of the crafty things I've been working on other than the items for my shop. If you'd like to see items for my shop you can follow the link on my little widget over there to your right. <--- Or it's WhimsicalStitches.Etsy.com ;) But anyway...

I'll start this at most recent. I mentioned that I started the Couch to 5K program. I got a new iPod for my birthday this year as my old one didn't work properly. I'm excited to have it to run with, but I didn't have one of those arm bands for it. So what did I do? Made one of course. :) Don't mind the poor quality as these are cell phone pictures. I already have them and don't feel like getting other ones. It worked pretty well, but I think I might make one more to fix a few issues I have with it. But definitely not bad for a first run making it up as I go. :) It's just too bad I found that they have the C25K app for my husband's phone so I may be running with his phone (which does not fit) instead. Oh well excuse to make another for his until I'm up to running longer times and don't need the walk/run cues.

I bought this wool at our local yarn shop with the thoughts that I would make a market bag. I found a pattern like what I was thinking of to make life easier. But the bag was very small. I edited the pattern as I was going, but the end result was still smaller than what I was meaning for. It's cute and it's usable, but I'm glad I still have a lot of wool left over. I'll be making another larger bag out of the rest. To give you an idea of size. I have 14 clementines in that bag.

I also made a few owls. I don't know if I shared any of these here or not, but since I haven't been around much, I'm guessing no. Momma Owl on the right was my first of these three. She's for me. Then K-Girl said she wanted me to make the Baby Owl for her. So I made the baby on the right. Then I decided that I wanted to try to make myself a keychain owl so I got some of the thread yarn or whatever you call it. It's kind of like embroidery floss but it doesn't separate and it's not as soft. I used the pattern for the mommy owl because I like the proportions better for that one. It just about killed me making it though. Tiny needle, tiny thread, cramped hands! But I love the way it came out. I had this little knit sweater that was a holder for a gift certificate The Husband got me for Christmas which had this little beaded hanger on it. I just cut that and removed a few of the beads to give me room to tie it and it matches my owl perfectly. It's a bit bulky to carry as a keychain so my little momma has found a home hanging from my rearview mirror. I love it!

I made this bag for a friend and then ended up making myself one as well. I love these bags. They aren't that hard and I don't start hating them until I get to the strap. I'm not a fan of single crochet. I don't like anything that I have to tightly stitch as it ends up really bugging my hands/wrist.

This is my friend's bag:

This is mine:

I also made E-Man this little puppy...

I also made myself this headband and then decided to make them to sell too. I love headbands!!

I'm sure there's more but that's a few that I found pictures for. :) Thanks for looking.

Take 2 - 365 Week 1

Oh, hi there! Yeah it's me again. I fell off the 365 wagon back in April. I missed a whole week and picked it back up only to fall off for good. So 2 weeks ago a few of my friends were talking about doing the 365 challenge on the mommy's message board I belong to. I thought this was the perfect time to pick back up. I'd really like to complete this challenge, because it was really great. I love looking over the pictures and getting that idea of what happened. When I'm not actively doing the challenge I'm not carrying my camera around and in turn I'm missing a LOT. I'm still at the stage where I'm trying to train myself again. It's hard again. But I'm going to keep going. So this time I started on Monday June 28th. Each week I'll post my Monday - Sunday. Maybe that will be good for me too as I won't be hurrying to get the post up. Maybe I can work on drafting it through the week so all I have to do is hit publish come Thursday/Friday. We'll see. Even if I fall off the blogging wagon, I do hope to continue this challenge though for me personally. So here's hoping! And congratulations to those of you still going strong from the original start of 365!!

DAY 1
Monday June 28, 2010

The Husband worked an auction tonight so after dinner was cleaned up the kids and I decided to have game night. We kicked it off with Candy Land (K-Girl won). Followed it up with Chutes and Ladders (E-Man won). And finished it out with Guess Who (K-Girl won).

Day 2
Tuesday June 29, 2010

Yes, I'm a Twilight geek...and I'm proud. ;) Luckily a few of my friends are just as bad as I am. We got together to enjoy our evening prior to going to the midnight showing of Eclipse. We played Twilight Scene It twice. "R" won the first time and I won the second round. And Eclipse at midnight - fantastic! :)

Day 3
Wednesday June 30, 2010

So it was K-Girl's birthday, and can you believe I didn't take any pictures other than this one?! When I realized I forgot she was already in bed! Bad mom!! This was part of our gift to K-Girl. She's completely Chihuahua obsessed. We finished out her birthday with popcorn and this movie. Very cute!

Day 4
Thursday July 1, 2010

The kids have been attending this 2 week long summer camp called Safety Town. This is the first year we've done it, but it has been a lot of fun for them. They are learning a lot of great stuff that is really beneficial and if gives them something to be away from the house and doing in the morning. They have learned about stranger safety, poison safety, fire safety, water safety, etc. Each day they have a different subject. Some days they take their helmets and they ride bikes or big wheels. And they theme the days for a different color each day. Today was red day at Safety Town. On Friday they "graduate" and we'll all be a bit sad. Not to mention that the kids have been having a great time, Momma's been enjoying that 2 1/2 hours of alone time each day too. ;)

Day 5
Friday July 2, 2010

Celebrating their finding of another "buoy" - part of the summer reading and get outside program by the county's libraries. The buoys are actually little sign posts with a plastic piece on top that you can do a crayon rubbing on to prove you've found it. You have to follow the directions from starting point to each of the steps to find them. There are 30 in all and you have till Labor Day to finish. We only have 5 so far as the heat has killed us. I'm so not a hot weather person! But they range from easy to hard based on either the length or difficulty of the hike. The hardest we have done was a medium and it was 1.6 miles and that was quite a distance for the little legs to go. E-Man ended up in the carrier for some of the way back to the car.

I don't know if this is a "good" picture or not, but I just can't help but love it. And the reason I love it is because it's basically just their silhouettes. I think if I knew how to play a little better with photoshop I'd completely darkened them out, but I can't figure it out without killing the color everywhere else. Ah well.

Day 6
Saturday July 3, 2010

My little beach bunny. Haha! She was so proud of her outfit - everything coordinated right down to the collar on her little puppy. We were on our way over to our friends house for dinner and some water play for the kids.

Day 7
Sunday July 4, 2010

Waiting on the fireworks to start. E-Man thinks it's great to climb up and look out the sunroof.

The kids just loved the fireworks, although E-Man wanted his ears held shut the whole time. He's not a fan of really loud noises. After a while we decided it would be easier just to get into the car which muffled the noise enough that E-Man didn't need to cover the ears. The display was really good though. It started at 9:30 and wasn't over till nearly 10:15. It made for quite the late night for the kids though. ...and no they didn't sleep in, not that I really expected them to.



Hosted by Chris


Hosted by Cecily and Serious Krystyn

K-Girl's Super Mario Bros. Party

K-Girl is BIG into Super Mario Bros. right now. She (and E-Man) love playing it on the Wii. So she wanted to have a Mario party this year. There were a few other ideas in the runnings but I told her since she was inviting so many boys that they would like this idea the best. We started working on the party a few months ago.

This was the outside of the invitation. The inside was just the typical who, what, where, when party info. I put this together in Photoshop after downloading the Super Mario Bros. font and grabbing pictures on Google Images.

For each party I like to have the kids in an outfit that fits with the theme as much as I can. I didn't really get to do it for Scooby Doo, but for K-Girl's Hello Kitty Party and E-Man's Umizoomi Party and his Monster Party I did have fun making sure their outfits matched the theme. About an hour before the party I threw together these shirts for the kids using iron on transfers.

I made all the decorations. Most of them are just printing images out on the printer onto cardstock. I made a Happy Birthday Banner with the help of my Cricut. I made the circles, glued the letters on, put holes in the circles and put them onto yarn. For the ends I drew pictures of 6 of the "bad guys" and colored them. I also made her a Happy Birthday poster to put on her bedroom door after the party. E-Man has one from his Umizoomi party so she wanted one too. I also had two white balloons that I put spots on with green sharpie to make Yoshi eggs.

OOOH and I have to share this, because it was the weirdest thing. About 30 minutes before the party started this dog showed up at our front door -

Last year a little while before K-Girl's Scooby party was about to start this SAME dog showed up at our house. A while ago K-Girl said how weird it would be if the dog came back this year. And then it did! So it's a really nice dog and I found out where it lived seeing it tied out front of the house. So I put it in my car and I took it home. I knocked on the door - which the big door was open and cars were parked there. I knew they were home but I knocked three different times and no one would come to the door. I went to their immediate neighbors and although I saw a lady she wouldn't come to the door. I went across the street to that house and no one would answer. So I went to the house directly behind them and their garage door was up so I HOPED they would answer. When she came to the door she said "Oh Ziggy!!" and I told her that the dog was at my house and I thought the dog belonged to her neighbor but that they wouldn't answer the door. She came out and went back to the house with me. She knocked and then yelled in the door. This old drunk guy finally came out and got the dog. They had no idea the dog got out. He did say thank you. When I got back the first kid was showing up. I had stuff still to do so that kind of put me in stress mode. *L* But I thought it was so weird that the same dog showed up both years now.

Ok so back to the party.

The favors for the kids were little Mario boxes that I ordered online. I put a sheet of stickers in them. They also had all the candy from the pinata (cow tails, starbursts, dum dums, and bubble gum) and some had prizes from the different games. And then the last favor I made them Mario "Bigs" - Mushrooms. I crocheted one for each kid - 15 in all. They took be about two sitting sessions, probably about 3 - 4 hours each. I've been working on them for the last 2 months - completing the first May 3rd. I didn't finish the last one until the day before the party - June 25th. I'm so relieved to be done with them. And I'm glad that the kids loved them. At the end of the party they were all up in the playroom throwing them around. :)

The first game we played was "Get the Goombas". The night before the party I used the air compressor to blow up 72 balloons and then I drew the faces on with black sharpie. Prior to blowing them up, we put little paper mario coins (found the image on the computer, shrank it down, put about 70 or more on a page and printed out a couple pages and cut them apart) in each balloon. Some had 1, some had more up to 5 coins. I gave the kids a little white paper bag with a question mark on the front with their names. They needed to pop the balloons and get the coins. The kid with the most coins won. The winner had 29 coins. K-Girl who didn't like popping them only had 3. The average was about 10 - 15.

The next game was "Pin the Mustache on Mario". I made a Mario using a projector The Husband brought home. Then I made mustaches with brown construction paper and wrote each kid's name on them. I used double-sided tape to stick them. I blindfolded each kid. I think it was too easy though because we had at least 4 or 5 kids that won. I only had 2 prizes so everyone got lollipops and we went on to the next game. Perhaps I should have had Mario standing on his head or something to up the difficulty a bit?

After that we played "Boo Races". I believe this is just modified red light/green light. I had King Boo around my neck and stood at one end of the yard and the kids at the other. When King Boo turned his back to them the kids ran. When King Boo turned to look at them they had to freeze. Anyone moving was sent back to the start. We played one practice run and then twice for prizes.

After the races we went in to play Mario Bingo. We played twice and the kids enjoyed that. Since I then already had them sitting we did cupcakes from there. The cupcakes I got just had red frosting and I took some white chocolate chips to sprinkle over them to make like the spots on the mushrooms. It didn't look great, but you get the idea. Afterwards everyone was stained red though. *LOL*

After the cupcakes we did the pinata. I made the pinata this year. I made the Mario Question Mark Box. I used a soda cube and cut out the faces of all the sides except for the top. So there was a frame of the cube. Then I wrapped it in a single layer of newspaper and then did two layers of paper mache over it. Once it was completely dry I painted it. It turned out so good. We were afraid of it breaking too easily, but it didn't. The kids did one round with blindfolds, and then another round without. By then there were some pretty good cracks, but nothing was budging. So I stuck my fingers in the cracks to make them loosen up and let K-Girl swing until it came open.

The last activity we did was The Husband's idea. He wanted the kids to beat Bowser with water balloons. The kids thought it was the greatest! I made The Husband a Bowser mask our of poster board and tied it on with yarn. And then the kids went to town. There were over 70 water balloons so they had a lot of ammo. ;)

And just so you know, The Husband wasn't the only one to be rockin' the Bowser mask. ;) My only regret with it was using washable marker. Once the kids started soaking Bowser, his face started running quite a bit.

OK so that's it I think. I had so much fun doing this party, but it's a huge relief that it's over.

I don't want to take credit for coming up with all the ideas. So to give credit where credit is due check out these links to the blogs and websites that had the ideas that help me put this party together.

I got the ideas for the Happy Birthday Banner and playing Pin the Mustache on Mario from this blog although I changed them up a little bit. I was also able to print out the playing sheets for Mario Bingo. A huge thank you to this blog owner!
http://www.executivehomemaker.com/2010/04/super-mario-bros-birthday-party/

A few others that I looked to for some inspiration...
http://www.coolpartyblog.com/mario_party/
http://www.chicaandjo.com/2010/05/20/super-mario-party-featuring-princess-peach/
http://aimeeaustin.wordpress.com/party-time-super-mario-bros/

I got the goodie boxes, plates, napkins, and stickers from:
http://www.birthdayexpress.com/Super-Mario-Bros-Party-Supplies/42092/PartyKitDetail.aspx