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.

Halloween Treats--CHEEEEEEEEAAP!

So the girls and I got their treat bags put together for their school Halloween parties. The parties which I will not be able to attend this year since I'll be working.  Sniff, sniff.

Anyway, I made these little tags for their treat bags, but I really wanted to post something that might help you make your Halloween a little more special. Last year I posted these treat toppers, that you can still use if you want.

But, I've been racking my brain, trying to come up with something new and cute for you, and it finally came to me tonight.

This is what I came up with.

Do you want to know what they are?

They're BOO!k marks. Ha, ha, ha

I kill myself.

Seriously though. I designed these things to be printed out as 4x6 prints (hello photo center of the cheap prints), and then you can just cut them vertically into 2" x 6" bookmarks.

You can leave them like this . . . the old fashioned way, functional, old school.

Whatever.

Or you can fold them in half so they are short and cute like this.

I just looooooooove the spider.

I actually detest spiders in real life. All spiders must DIE. But this one I could hug.

I like the cute little ghostie guy too.

Eeek! They're killing me.

So, as I was saying. The cute little short bookmarks actually are not done. They need to be magnetized.

Do you have any of these freebie magnets still lying around? Or is it laying around? Cripes, I'm supposed to know this stuff.

So, as I was saying . . . . Geez, do I keep saying that? I'm sorry. As I was saying, go find your freebie magnets and cut them up. You need two pieces for the bottoms of each bookmark.

Adhere the magnets to the inside of the bookmarks with double sided adhesive. By the way, that is a roll of magnet tape that you see there, and I didn't use any of it. It was there just in case I ran out of the free stuff.

Once you get your magnets on . . .

SHA-ZAM! You have a bookmark.

Does anyone else remember that 70s dude, Shazam, or am I crazy?

I mean, besides me being crazy, am I alone here?

Never mind. Forget I said anything.

Here are some bookmarks for you to give it a go yourself. Don't forget to click on the picture before you save it to your computer, so that you get the highest resolution. If you forget that step, you might get blurry bookmarks.

Have fun! I'm going to bed.

Carnage from Two-Song-Singing-Hannah Festivities

By now you're probably tired of hearing about my baby who just turned six, so I'll try to keep this brief. For her birthday, Stinkerbell requested a Hannah Montana party, and after denying my girls the opportunity to dress up as Two-Song-Singing-Hannah for Halloween, I figured using it as a lame party theme would be okay. Sort of the lesser of two evils.


So here was the party invite. It's all Hannah, but with Stinkerbell's picture instead of Hannah-Miley-Whatever. I don't know why I'm so cranky about Hannah, it could be worse. I'll take Hannah-Miley-Whatever over Britney Spears any day.

Anyway, I really was going somewhere here. We got a little crazy and invited Stink's whole class. Eeek! Thankfully the class is smallish since it is Kindergarten. I think I got daring because we decided to have the party at one of those kid places where they get to run around and scream their heads off. The kind of place where you can't leave without a sensory overload headache.

The part I was most worried about with inviting so many kids, was getting that many presents when we really don't need one more toy in this house.

I let the girls know before the party that they weren't going to be playing with any of the new toys until they went through their toys, decluttered and got rid of some of their old toys. Plus, they couldn't touch a new toy until a thank you note had been written for it. Aren't I mean?

I know. It's so much fun being a Mama sometimes.


So here they are, tearing the place apart and deciding what will go.


"YOU CAN'T KEEP EVERYTHING, ANNIKA!"

Can I just tell you how much my heart swelled with pride to hear Zoe say this?


"Blah, blah, blah. Whatever."

Annika is such a cucumber.


"There's a snake in my boot."

At first I was a little sad to see Woody in the discard pile, but then I decided that we'll give him to a friend who actually looks like Woody and the girls even call him Woody. They don't even know what his real name is. Woody will get a good home.


Eeek! Freaky doll head! Decapitated Donna is no longer loved? How sad. We must be ruthless though. I really just had to stop watching because I wanted to jump in and rescue toys. How pathetic is that?

We'll take the toys to the thrift store though, so hopefully there are kids out there who will be thrilled with these toys.


I was surprised at how quickly Stinkerbell jumped into the thank you notes. We tend to spread them out, so the toys are sitting in the guest room and coming out one at a time, as the thank you notes are slowly written. What surprised me, I mean really surprised me, is that the girls didn't even argue with me about this. I feel like I won the lottery or something. Or like maybe they think I know what I'm doing with this whole parenting thing. They're so gullible.


Oops, my pictures are a little out of order. I'm lazy though so I'm not going to fix it. This is just the girls putting the party favor bags together.


Once the bags were stuffed, I stapled treat toppers to them and then punched a hole in the corner for attaching a balloon. We didn't attach the balloons until we got to Leo's and I'm glad for that. They would have been a tangled mess otherwise.

I took pictures of the party, but I don't feel like I should post pictures of the kids without their parents' permission. And I'm too lazy to put happy face heads on all of them. So just believe me when I tell you that the party was a blast for the kids, and quite painful for the adults.

That's a wrap for birthday week. Tomorrow I'm going to try to put my Cinnamon Roll recipe up. If you're dieting, you might just want to stay away from Sabotage Station for the next day or so. Sorry.

Holiday Treats for Classmates

The girls and I put together treat bags for their classmates over the weekend. Of course it's a little early yet, but I'm procrastinating on doing my Christmas cards and letter, so this is a good stand-in.

I found the cute snowman bags at Target.

We kept the contents of the bags pretty simple with just Nerds, a candy cane and a pencil.

And a cute tag, of course.

I let the girls assemble the bags by themselves. It's tedious work, but they didn't seem to mind.

It took Stinkerbell forever to finish her bags. Zoe was nice enough to help her finish.

But not without her usual commentary.

She had to instruct Annika in the correct way to assemble the bags. Annika just ignored her though, as usual.

Here are the tags that I made for the treat bags, my contribution.

I made them in my StoryBook Creator Plus digital scrapbooking program.

Which, by the way is on sale, here, until December 20th. The regular price is $59.95 and it's on sale for $47.96.

So if you've had your eye on it, now would be the time to snap it up.

Or tell your sweetie to snap it up for you for Christmas.

Halloween Treat Toppers

I made some little treats for Thing 1 and Thing 2 to give to their classmates. Before you go thinking I'm ahead of the game, let me just confess that I'm freaking out, I have so much to do. These little treat toppers are the sort of thing I do when I'm procrastinating other, much more important things.

Like maybe Croptoberfest this weekend.

I have my house to clean, a menu to plan, groceries to buy, blah, blah, blah. And life goes on with all its messes and obligations, and here I am, in La La Land making Treat Toppers.

So typical.

And I'm not sorry. This is the sort of thing I enjoy doing so I guess it's my way of making time for the fun stuff too.

I had another reason for getting these things done a full two weeks before Halloween.

It's these little treat toppers I made just for you.

They're jpgs, so you'll want to use your mouse's right click to save them to your computer or just drag them onto your desktop. Then you can copy them into a word document and size them the way you want before printing. To size them, click on the picture and pull (or push) at one of the corners of the box that you see outlined after clicking on it.

After I printed out my treat toppers, I cut them just a little bit wider than my treat bags, folded them in half, then punched the edges with the new Fiskars border punch.

By the way, this punch isn't on the Fiskars website yet, but it is being sold in Michael's stores, which is where I got mine. It retails for $14.99 but it was on sale this week for around $9. You could also use one of their 40% or 50% off coupons.

Finally, I stapled the treat toppers to the tops of the treat bags.

Enjoy!

Now, would you like to make some Caramel Apples?