Nerd Crafts: Sneakers

Remember when me and my kids made super geeky Halloween costumes? Well, we have come to dearly love nerd crafts. Last month, I saw this image in my Facebook feed and showed it to my oldest daughter and she was like: OH YES. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

from FanBoy Fashion

We did this over winter break and it was really fun. If you guys are getting pounded by snow days and feel like you're going to lose your mind, I'd like to humbly suggest picking up some cheapo sneakers and some fabric Sharpies (regular Sharpies work, too) and making an afternoon of it. We had a blast and nobody whined or yelled at each other for like - at least 45 minutes. All supplies cost about $30 and we all ended with a sweet new pair of kicks.

I failed this test and now I'm not special anymore.

I'm getting my very first pair of glasses and it's making me feel full of sadness and forlornery. I used to have awesome vision. It made me special. I have boasted to my husband over the past 20 years that while he was practically blind, my vision was a stellar 20/10 - which is practically like having a super power. I could read menus at tables all the way across the restaurant. Street signs were so easy, even a block away. Annoyingly small print? Yeah... Tiny print had no power here. You could shrink the font all day, but I could still read it without squinting. 

But not anymore because my stupid left eyeball has suddenly decided to stop working correctly. I'm used to it though, my metabolism did the same thing a few years ago and that's why I only like wearing stretchy pants now. I'm so disappointed in my left eye. It got lazy and stopped cooperating and now I'm not special anymore.

Happy New Year!

Happy new year everybody! This is a note explaining why the blog is going to be a little bit different moving forward. First off, I think I'm going to be losing a whole lot of you due to some changes at Facebook. Starting in this month (January 2015), they will begin charging pages for sharing their content. Since maybe 90% of my readers get here through Facebook, that's going to be a pretty big change.

The second thing is that I've really been struggling over the last year with how to write about my kids now that they're older. The bottom line is this, my kids are no longer at an age where it's cool for me to joke about them being little terror suspects anymore. I've written some pretty good stuff in the past few months but sadly, I don't think I can publish any of it. My kids would be embarrassed if the people that they know in real life (their classmates, or their friends' parents, or even their teachers) were to know such sweet, silly, or personal details. 

Horrifying School Projects with Mini: The Snow Globe

As many of you know, Mini is now a big girl who goes to kindergarten. The kids in her class are precious and adorable and kind. Her wonderful teachers have made me love them so much that I may marry them. She is learning many interesting things. She has however developed a very tedious habit of questioning everything I tell her, raising one eyebrow and looking skeptical. Then she surreptitiously tests the things I tell her to see if they're true. All of this serves as a backdrop to this story.

I went to go pick her up a little early today and noticed that each of the children in her class had completed a lovely project called "If I were Trapped in a Snowglobe with my Buddy". The results of these projects were proudly displayed in the hallway, where everyone could admire them. There was a picture of each child and their buddy under a clear plastic plate, with white stuff around the edges to make it appear that they were happy creatures inside a snow globe. Underneath the photo, they were supposed to write what they would do while trapped in the snow globe with their buddy. Most of the responses were really sweet. They said things like: "We would make snow angels!" or "I would go sledding with my buddy!"

But not Mini. Of course not. Here is what she wrote: