Crazy Eight

My baby turned eight today. She was so excited for this day, in spite of the fact that I kept begging her to stay little. The little snot doesn't listen to a word I say. There's a reason why we call her Stinkerbell.

I had one of my secretly proud, probably shouldn't be proud, parenting moments yesterday. On the way home from school she told me that a little boy in her class put her in a head lock, and she turned around and punched him in the stomach. I know I should have said "We don't solve our problems with violence, sweetie."

But I didn't.

I said, "I hope no one saw that." As in, I hope you didn't get caught because, You Go Girl! Tell that boy not to mess with you!

My Little Flower, she is not. That's Zoe Bug. She's a Delicate Flower. Stinkerbell . . . is a Scraggly Weed.

The red silky shirt you see The Stink wearing is actually Zoe's shirt. Annika has been coveting it for two years. She begs and begs Zoe to let her wear it. Finally today, for the momentous occasion of her eighth birthday, Stinkerbell was permitted to wear the Coveted Silky Red Shirt.

She was so happy.

We had her birthday party after school at the movie theatre. You know what that means . . . I didn't have to clean my house.  Whoo hoo! I love me a good off-site b-day party.

We saw the movie "Hop" at the theatre, and let me tell you, it was silly. The animated characters were adorable and had cute personalities, but the main human character was a little hard to take at times. Peanut Head and I had to pause for mutual eye rolling and exaggerated pretend vomiting several times.

We were the adults in attendance.

The fun part for me was making the party favors. I found the cutest digital kit, Kate Hadfield's Movie Night, almost a year ago. That's when I decided that Annika's next birthday party was going to be a movie party.

I am quite experienced at creating the Kodak moment around the coordinating scrapbook sticker, and this was just another version of that.

"I have a Potty Training Sticker Sheet and we are going to potty train if it kills me. I don't care if you're only eighteen months old. I own the sticker sheet!"

I may or may not have done that.

I scored the popcorn containers at the Target Dollar Spot, two for $1.

I filled the popcorn containers with Hop-worthy items.

Then I stuffed the whole shebang in a clear goodie bag and tied the digitally created tag on with a piece of ribbon.

I love my digitally created artificial Kodak moments.

Birthday Paint Can Inserts

As with everything else in my life since I went back to work, these little guys are laaaaate. I made them for two of my BFFs who had birthdays over the last month, Smashley and Girl Genius.

My negligence is so bad, you won't even believe this. I called Girl Genius up on her birthday to tell her that I needed her Girl Scout cookie money, and I didn't even say Happy Birthday. Doy.

I called her back a couple days later when I realized what a L-O-S-E-R I was, and I told her I was a bonehead and that she shouldn't even associate with me anymore. Then I took her to lunch and grovelled some more. She's so nice, she forgave me on the spot. I only wish I had one of these ready for her then. It took me three weeks, but finally I gave it to her. 

Smashley doesn't have hers yet, but she doesn't read my blog so I don't have to worry about her seeing this. Not that it matters as it's already three weeks late.

I know she won't see it though, because she's not super tech saavy. In fact, she was so excited to replace her five year old cell phone recently, that when she went into the Verizon store and bought a new one, the manager told her that now she's only three years behind on technology. She's doesn't care though. She's just excited that now she can text without having to use the number pad and scroll through the letters.

She's still kind of slow with her thumbs, so I've had to send a lot of pointless text messages to her to give her practice.

Whassup?

Why aren't you texting me back?

Are you mad?

What did I do?

I was dying, it was so funny. She was sitting right next to me, and still trying to respond to the first message, and I was sending her text after text. Not that I'm so fast or anything. Being a teacher I feel I should always text with complete sentences and proper punctuation. After all, I'm representing my people. The teacher people who live at school and don't have lives of their own.

This is all the more challenging when you are limited to 140 characters or whatever random number it is that we are limited to. It just ticks me off and I'll say Fine! PERIOD. Then I'll send another one to finish up what I was trying to say in 140 characters or less. Heaven forbid I should make a typo at the beginning, because then I'll backspace to eternity until I can fix it, then have to retype everything.

No matter, I still beat Gimp Thumb Smashley, and I got to watch her get all flustered. 

Then she sent me a not very nice message wherein she called me a B with an itch. And it was in all caps, so that meant that she YELLED it at me.

Smashley is so sweet, so that made it even funnier. She's like a bunny rabbit, she's so sweet.

Um, except that bunnies can be mean and they kick really hard. Not that Smashley would ever do that. She's too much of a Delicate Flower, and I could take her just by sitting on her. She probably weighs 105 pounds. Which I think I weighed in eighth grade.

Geezo, how do I get off on these tangents? I was talking about birthday paint cans.

I used Kate Hadfield's Bring on the Cake kit for these cans. I seriously love her doodles.

I made a little mistake on the templates, and one of them came out about an eighth of an inch too short at the top. That's why I put the ribbon around the tops of the cans with photo tape. It covers up the free edge of the template that didn't fit under the lip of the can.

This is an example of one of those mistakes which turns out well, because I really like the ribbon on the outside. 

I'm such a problem solver.

Birthmarks

Let's talk about birthmarks, shall we? Well, birthday bookmarks, that is. It seems that a few of you thought it might be a good idea for me to make some holiday bookmarks, and I love that idea, I really do, and I'm going to get right on that, but I don't want anyone slinging any blog snot at me for putting my Christmas pretties up before Thanksgiving, so I'm going to hold off a bit.

In the meantime, I thought these little guys might hold you over for a bit.

I'm totally giving these to my sixth graders for their birthdays. It's a perfect teacher gift, don't you think? I think it would be a nifty party favor too. Or a great gift with a Barnes & Noble gift card. Or a fun little somethin' somethin' to stick inside a birthday card. Oh heck, just make some for yourself and celebrate your birthday all year long.

You can't have a birthday without cake, right?

I tweaked the one on the left a wee little bit, so if you're wondering why it looks different down below, it's because these are my prototypes and I thought the one was a little blah.

Oh dear, how did these get in here? You weren't supposed to see these.

Close your eyes and don't hate, okay?

Remember how I made my last batch of bookmarks with freebie magnets from the phone book? Yeah, well . . . I ran out so I had to go and buy some magnets.

And just between you and me, I'll never go back. These are worth the ten cents per bookmark because they have the adhesive already on them and they are STR-O-O-O-NG.

Notice that it's a box of 50 magnets. And each magnet is good for three bookmarks.

And, oopsie, I used all of those (yes that means 150 bookmarks, but really, who's counting?), and I had to go out and buy the gigondo box of magnets so I could bring you some more magnet love.

Can you believe it? I'm a little magnet happy lately. You could say that the kids in my life aren't lacking for bookmarks and you wouldn't be wrong.

As I was saying, I looooooove the self-adhesivity of these babies.

Remember I said that I can get three bookmarks per magnet? This is how I cut them up. I cut them in half, then each of those halves into thirds. I'm reeeeeeeee-al good at fractions. A fact that my sixth graders do not appreciate one little bit. They sort of hate fractions.

Then I cut a little extra off the edge of one of the pieces for each magnet. I do this because the little suckers won't line up perfectly for some dang reason. They go all magnet-mind-of-their-own on me and repel each other when I try to stack them perfectly lined up.

So I had to smother my symmetry issues and deal by making one of them shorter. It still bugs me.

Here's the longer of the two magnets.

And here's the shorter one on top and ready to be stuck to the opposite side of the bookmark.

Smackdown! And there you have it, another magnet bookmark. Bet you needed one too.

Here are the jpgs for you. In case you didn't see the last batch, print these as 4x6 photo prints, cut them in half lengthwise so they are 2" x 6", then fold over for a magnet bookmark.

Also, don't forget to click on each image before saving them to your computer so you get the best resolution.

Happy Birthday!

Pretend, okay?