Best Easter Playdate Ever! Part Two: The ABCs of a Good Time

As promised here is part two of our Easter playdate extravaganza. For ease of consumption, I've broken the event down into three simple components. Thoughtful and sweet, am I.


A is for Arts & Crafts

Want to entertain a crowd of pint sized humans? I have two words for you: glitter glue. It's that simple. Really. 

And bonus, you'll end up with lovely pieces of art for your home. Here's an Amaya Original:

And a limited edition ChaseEraser:

B is for Buckets

  Sure, they're great for collecting things,

 but they're even better when they come pre-filled with sugar and toys.

While making these playdate favors, it occurred to me that I was quite selfish in naming my daughter Amaya--that's 3 A's for one tiny person! A's don't grow on trees you know--I specifically know this because I ran out of them. Which is why Chase's bucket had an upside down V with a Z tail for his A, and poor Vivian's bucket was simply labeled Viv. So let that be a warning to you folks--think very carefully about how vowel  greedy you want to be when naming your children. If you fail to heed this advice, it will surely come back to bite you one day when you find yourself having to label 8 Easter buckets.  Or um something.


C is for Chaos...like mad yo

This was some kind of seek and destroy mission involving a giant flyswatter and lots of shrieks and giggles. 

This was a snake hunt. I heard one of the girls saying: Here snakey snakey snakey! I am pretty sure it was Amaya. Which is odd, since that is the last thing her mother would ever do. Actually try to entice a snake to come closer? Insane. 

This was bumper slide with the added element of trying to pull Allie back onto the ramp.
 

It ended like this:

Like I said, mad chaos yo.

Warning: Cheese Ahead

When this post goes live, I imagine I'll be ordering a before dinner drink with my fellow escapees. I plan to continue the celebration by ordering a savory, calorie-laden meal and a delectable dessert. I'll follow that with the inhalation of late night munchies as we sit around the hotel room waxing poetic about the kid-free atmosphere. Of course, right now I'm sitting in my family room counting down the minutes until the start of girls' weekend, so I figured why not share a little tip with you to help pass the time?

Now this is a Mellon tip which means that it's just a way to cut corners. If you want real tips, you'd have to visit the blogs of more together Mamas. But if what you're after is ways to make being lazy even easier, then you're at the right place. 

I've mentioned my plethora of scrapbook supplies before. The presence of this collection of papery bits is the direct cause of an on going battle being raged in my psyche. The lazy part of myself just wants to grab a handful of all occasion greeting cards while I'm at the grocery store to have on hand to give as needed. But the frugal side of myself can't justify spending the money on a pre-printed card when I have on hand supplies to create enough greeting cards to fill the neighborhood Hallmark. Guilt makes laziness somewhat less attractive as an option.

Sometimes, I can get the frugal and the lazy to agree on a compromise: mass produce handmade cards. This requires little thought as you just keep repeating the same steps over and over and over. But how to know how many birthday cards  you need to make to last you until your next assemblage? 10? What about thank you cards? 15? It was a conundrum for sure. Until I set my cheese free. 

The answer was bears. Make all the cards with bears on them. Then on the inside you can make it say whatever you want: Thank you Beary much, Have a Beary Happy Bearday, I can't Bear to be apart from you--the cutesiness knows no end. And if you're feeling especially corny like I was when I made the card pictured here: We can Bearly wait for baby's arrival! 

 

And if you're going to be a cornball, be a great big, cheese-coated one and decorate the envelope to match. It's Beariffic!

How did this happen?

I worked so hard at being prepared this year that I just can’t figure out how I ended up cobbling together teacher's gifts late the night before the school Valentine party. Maybe if I run through the events leading up to that last minute craft-a-thon I’ll figure out where it all went wrong.

Remember how I handmade all of those Valentines? Yes the classmates' cards were done, but I'd used up all of my fans. So I had to figure out something else to do for the teachers. And I had a plan. No really I did. Amaya hosted a playgroup last Thursday.  So I devised a craft involving glitter and hearts for all of her little friends and their siblings to do in between running around the basement laughing like jackals. My thought was to use the project my kids made as cards for their teachers that could go along with a store bought chocolate treat. Teachers--unlike preschoolers--are old enough to decide when they've had too much candy, so I have no qualms about giving them tempting treats. It was a good plan since it took care of multiple items on my to do list and conserved valuable resources—like my sanity.

The execution required the creation of a tray of wonders that would delight the little artists. I knew I'd been successful in my endeavor when I watched their little eyes light upon spying the glue, the glitter, the stickers, the stamps, and the markers that work on any kind of paper instead of those vision-limiting "wonder" markers that require special paper. It was like the lost treasure of the ancient Mayans had been deposited right in our suburban home. 

Before the words "Have at it" had completely formed on my tongue, a craftpalooza was unleashed in my basement. During the process, I was too busy trying to keep Amaya from eating the glue to take pictures, but I did remember to get a shot of the end result.

  Perfectamundo! Stick a box of chocolates on there and you have a perfectly acceptable Valentine for a preschool teacher. So I walked away from the project feeling like I had everything under control. I think that here is where my plan started to go awry.

What got me off track? Snopocalypse. That's what. The stupid snow came Thursday night and then AGAIN on Tuesday night. So I never made it to the store to get the boxes of chocolate.  Suddenly and without warning,  it was the night before the school's Valentine's celebration and there I was scrambling to put something together .But hey, at least I remembered this year, right?

I was saved by three things:

1. A well-stocked scrap room that has enough supplies to make cards for everyone on the planet with paper and ribbon to spare.
2. A great collection of bookmarked blogs that never fails to inspire me.
3. A husband who thinks that 9:00pm is the perfect time to go put air in his tires and is also willing to hop into the convenience store and pick up some Hershey Kisses for his perpetually scatterbrained wife.

When those three ingredients are mixed together at 11:00pm, you get this:

 I was so tired when I took the picture that everything looked blurry to me. I didn't realize that the picture itself was blurry until just now. Sorry about that.The adorable zebra valentines printed for free courtesy of Bunny Cakes--a truly great idea blog.Since the sheet printed 6 cards, I went ahead and made six treat bags to pass out. Everyone appreciates a few kisses, right?

So, I guess that's how it happened. Maybe I should go ahead and start on next year's batch now. You know, just in case?

Would You Be My Valentine?

I'm about to share with you one of my deepest, darkest secrets. Are you ready? First we must travel back to a specific moment in time when I was pregnant with Amaya and Chase was going to school a couple of days a week. Perhaps you remember how I was when I was pregnant? The term basket case would seem appropriate here. I can't really be blamed for my insanity as it was directly caused by the alien that was growing inside of me. I maintain the theory that the little gremlin was spiking my blood with some sort of elixir that turned me into a scatterbrained, energy-less droid. I think she did it via reverse osmosis or something.

Did you catch my attempts at building up an excuse there? Preemptive strike, that's my preferred MO. I hope it worked because what happened two years ago is this: I completely forgot to send Valentines to school with Chase. No wait, forgot would imply that I actually had thought to do it at one time, when in truth the red holiday was nowhere on my radar. What’s really sad in all that is that I was an elementary school teacher for heaven’s sake. It’s not like I was unaware of the protocol. So there you have it--my deep, dark secret. I am that mother.

So last year, I overcompensated by stuffing treat bags so full of chocolates that the seams were near bursting. Then I felt another wave of guilt as I looked at all of the junk that came home with Chase February 14 and nearly hyperventilated. No kid needs to eat that much candy especially on the heels of Halloween, Thanksgiving, & Christmas.

So this year, well I just nearly lost my mind is what I did. I scoured the Oriental Trading catalog looking for something not food related to give as Valentines. Sure, there were lots of really cute stuffed bears and whirly gigs, but since I had a list of 60 students between Chase & Amaya, that wasn’t really what you could call cost effective. What to do, what to do?

This is what I came up with. I just printed out the circle labels, made enough copies of each, cut them out, backed them with the scallop circle and then adhered them with glue dots to the fan frame. I was a bit bummed that the red background copied as that washed-out color, but hey the kids are 3 & 1—will they really care or even notice? Of course not, it’s only my perfectionist inner demon that is screaming its displeasure. So I put in earplugs and ignored that sucker.

I made the tags so that the fans can still open and close because I wasn’t sure if the boxes would be big enough to accommodate an opened fan. The fans were a fairly frugal find from Oriental Trading, but if you’re super industrious, you could always make those yourself too.

I’m beginning to feel a little less guilty about my slacking two years ago. It would be awesome if I’ve completely forgiven myself by the time the cherubs are in elementary school. If not, I’ll settle for being guilt-free enough to just smile and hand over boxes of conversation hearts.

And now that you know my awful secret, do you think you'd still consider being my Valentine? I have no qualms about bribing adults with chocolate if that makes your answer any different.

This post is linked up with Cop Mama’s Mama Guilt Mondays. Check it out to add your own post or read other guilty tales.

It's a good thing--Mellon style

When plasma TVs first came out, I was so excited. Finally, you could hang the contraption on the wall so that you didn't need to have an entire piece of furniture taking up precious floor space just to hold the squawk box. Even though I know that most aesthetically leaning ladies detest TVs above fireplaces, I was actually quite happy to have it placed above mine. Now, I could watch my favorite show and a roaring fire at the same time--perfect!

Well perfect until I realized the decorating dilemma that formed: what to put on the mantle under the black rectangle? It had to be something low, but still appropriate for the scale of the room. It was a conundrum that plagued me for the 2.5 years we've lived here, but it may have at last been solved. Behold:
And do you know what the best part is? This entire display cost less than $7.00. Seriously. I found the four frames at a thrift store for $.59 each and then made the monograms from scrapbook supplies I had on hand. The votive holders were part of the Martha line sold at Macy's but I found them untouched in their box at another thrift store for $4.50. Quandary solved for a bargain price--that's what I call a good thing.

Now if I could just find a way to hide that blasted speaker the man thinks he needs to have...

I am not just a nitwit

I was so excited by my excursion into the realm of actually using my scrapping supplies rather than simply collecting them that I spent all of my free time today surfing the net looking for sites that are dedicated to card making. I will admit that yes, I have a tendency to be a wee bit obsessive. Shocking, isn't it?

On my blog hopping travels, I stumbled across the cuttlebug spot. This wonderful little slice of webdom offers weekly challenges and ideas for creating darling little stationery for all of one's greeting card needs. I have to be frank here: this website is giving chocolate a run for its calories when it comes to inciting massive Mellon endorphin release. I was so motivated that I decided that I would go ahead and attempt a creation for this week's challenge. I do so love that little thrill that is brought on by stretching one's crafting comfort zone. And hello bonus--the challenge is Christmas in July, so I'm totally annihilating procrastination now.

Here is what I made. Again, I used only odds and ends that have been gathering dust in the land of my misfit craft supplies. (I can be forgiven for another Rudolph reference since it is the theme of the post, right?)



Now will I muster enough creativity to make a handmade Christmas card for everyone on my list. Umm. No. You see my obsessions tend to ebb and flow, so by this time next week I'll no doubt be over the whole mess. Well over it until the next time I get an itch to cut and paste that is. Until then, you can just imagine me as a busy little elf in her card shop crafting away. Ho! Ho! Ho!

Slaying the Procrastinator in Me

Hello, my name is Laura, and I'm a procrastinator.

My normal preparation for attending a birthday party typically involves last minute gift wrapping followed by stopping at a store along the way to buy a card. If I do make a handmade card, it is thrown together in the fifteen minutes before the bus pulls out of the station. It isn't even enough to say that I put off today what can be done tomorrow. No, my motto has for sometime been: Why do tomorrow what I can put off indefinitely?

But tonight, I have made great strides toward killing that devilish beast in me that puts things off until the very final second. I made a birthday card for Amaya's friend Sophi, and her birthday isn't even until next week! It gets even better because I only used bits of paper left over from completed scrapbook projects to make it. Trash to treasure baby! But I didn't stop there. Nope. I made a second card for whosoever birthday comes next--again using only scraps destined for the landfill. I am not organized enough yet to know who that lucky soul may be, but I am feeling confident that he/she will appreciate my efforts immensely.

So, on that future party day when I'm frantically scrambling around looking for gift bags and bows, I won't have to bother fretting about the card because it will be sitting right there ready to go. Well,that is if I remember it's there. While I may have won the battle against sloth, getting a handle on my short term memory is an entirely different war.