The new AllState Commercial ... did they read my blog?

Innocently watching some TV the other night -- which is so unlike me because at 8:30 p.m., once the kiddos doze off, I'm usually on the computer or dozing off myself -- I see an AllState Commerical called "Off Day" and I couldn't believe I was watching myself on TV!

Vacuuming up the hamster? 
OK, so no I've never done this but I have vacuumed up socks and my son's Spider-Man Lego this morning (note to self: fish it out of the vacuum canister). And I do intentionally vacuum up the kitchen table after a messy breakfast (a little nod of the head to 1983's Mr. Mom).

Street clothes on your daughter for Ballet?
Um, so me! Except in my case it was gymnastics class. All the cute toddlers were in their cutesy leotards and my daughter shows up in her street clothes like Biff (I dunno why I use this term, a nod of the head to the bully in 1985's Back to the Future maybe?). Were we supposed to dress them like Mary Lou Retton? Does it really matter what she was wearing because I spent the entire class chasing after her as she expertly dodged tumblers, vaulters, and legs of all kind. I, on the other hand, chased her onto a mat (that she sprinted across like Legolas -- Lord of the Rings reference here) but that I sunk into like quicksand and sprained my ankle (reminding me that I weigh just a tad bit more than everyone else there.) The sad thing was that I did this about 3 times before yelling, "Uncle!"

My favorite Biff line, "Now make like a tree and get outta here."

Ripping apart fluffy Teddy in the washing machine? 
I haven't done this but my husband has just asked to take over Laundry duty. What man, unless he's Ryan Gosling or Crazy, asks to do the household laundry? This should give you a picture of how laundry is done around here when it's on my watch. Crummy.

itsblogworthy.com

Smashing your car into a lampost?
Well no, but I did smash my car into another mom's minivan after a playdate in a fake parking lot. I say Fake, because it's a dead end street used as a parking lot which right there should absolve me from any smashing of minivans, but hasn't because our rates went up anyway.

"I should totally start a Blog"
OMG! I have!

Did they read my post on how great a MOM I am and make this commercial in my image?  We even have the same hair! Ok, where are my royalties!?

The discontinued Winnie the Pooh Party

It all started with my daughter's love for Winnie the Pooh and an innocent search on Pinterest. 

"Innocent search on Pinterest." I can just keep repeating that phrase over and over again because women all over the world are losing sleep after having discovered Pinterest. I can just hear some innocent mom's voice crying for help .... "I just searched on Pinterest and now I'm up until 2 a.m. making fondant snowflakes for 3 dozen Frozen cupcakes. It looked so easy?! WTF am I doing?!?"

For me, as I said earlier, it all started with my daughter's love for Winnie the Pooh and that Innocent Search on Pinterest and ...

Of course! A cute Winnie the Pooh party complete with cute honey inspired brunch items, little Winnie-the-Pooh cups and plates in cheery yellow ...

...signs of the Hundred Akre Wood and maybe even a beehive piñata...

 The possibilities were endless, the pictures filled our hearts...

  

...and my husband and I gushed --this even made him gush -- over the possibilities. 

Our backyard was the perfect place to host this magical Winnie-the-Pooh party for our soon-to-be 2 year old darling.  We already had a sandbox (the sandy pit where Roo plays), a deserted area on the other side of the fence (Eyore's Gloomy Place), and a vegetable garden (Rabbits Garden), in addition to a bench under the tree (Pooh's thoughtful spot).  We were set.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the road to dreams, Reality & Pinterest have a head on collision which happened when I ran into Party City with a sleeping child slumped over my shoulder looking for their Pooh section and they told me they "discontinued Pooh." Who discontinues Pooh? Children all over the world (or at least under my roof) are sleeping with the "one who's stuffed with fluff," dreaming of honey pots and bouncing Tiggers. Discontinued Pooh? Really?

I did what any Mom with 15 minutes of free time would do and I bought yellow plates and napkins and then promptly ignored any reference to Winnie-the-Pooh and the zillion awesome pins from party professionals of the rich-and-famous and hoped the guests (and my kids) would forget that I sent out Pooh invites telling them to come to the Hundred-Acre Woods for a party.

Top Row:  1.My daughter stares at her stuffed Pooh from her pink tablecloth 2. If I stick Piglet between the yellow silverware, does that count? 3. It was a perfect day for a Pik-nik. I.e we didn't have enough seats.
Middle Row: 1. My daughter playing in the Sandy Pit Where Roo Plays. 2. Our brunch - ignore the absence of honey-themed foods and ignore the clearance table cloth with a Circus theme. 3. Does chalk on the walkway count for a sign?
Bottom Row: 1. Whole Foods won't put Pooh on a cake ... will bees and a hive count? 2. Party-girl. 3. Was there not a champagne bar in the 100-Acre Woods? Did you check Owl's house?

When Driving 11 Hours is Totally Worth It

I hate road trips.

So when I booked a small intimate resort 8.5 hours away (Lost Lake Lodge in Nisswa, MN), my husband thought I'd gone off the deep end. What's 8.5 hours when there are cabins to sleep in, a private lake to swim in, award winning food to stuff your face in, and most of all, family memories to create??  I failed to  imagine that when I booked this adventure, I'd have a newly potty trained 26 month old with us and that 8.5 hours would turn into 11 hours.

Did I mention how I always hated road trips?

There's nothing like that family memory of hanging out on the side of the road watching your daughter take an enormous crap in her baby bjorn when we had just stopped at 17 different flushable toilets each time she cried "POOPY!" (or WOLF).

Once we arrived to our idyllic resort nestled in the birch forest and saw the hammocks hung on trees and a private lake with canoes, we bolted from the car like clowns in a circus and ran straight to the beach.

This is the kind of resort where your kids make friends with the kids staying in the next cabin, where they can run free and you're only kind of concerned, and where you don't have to keep them away from the TV because there are none!

Breakfast & Dinner is included which means you don't have to cook or decide where our next meal is coming from. And what a meal! 4-course dinners and 2-course breakfasts make sure no one is walking away hungry or needing a lunch.  The small private lake and beach on one side is tiny and perfect for little feet in the sand or in a rowboat, and the lake on the other side is perfect for renting that Pontoon boat you always thought you might want to buy (um, no). Ladder ball, basketball, and badminton are at the beach too, along with a "Garage" with pool tables and old time video games. And let's not forget some classics like shuffleboard and horse shoes.

 When not at the resort ... Head out and rent bikes to trek the Paul Bunyan Trail, try go-carting and mini-golf, and make sure to stop for some small mini-donuts made fresh on the bike trail.

At night, enjoy your dessert after diner -- liquored-up coffee -- and light the bonfire at the beach. The best part is that when you go get the matches at the front desk, they give you a bag with everything to make s'mores too!

Our son asked, "Is this vacation?" It is, and we'll always remember it. And it only took 10 hours to get home.

Cats for Sale

Dear Cats,
I'm listing you both on eBay. I've had enough. I just got done extricating a huge poop out of my daughter's underwear, and I come downstairs to find that you vomited all over the family room carpet. Haven't I had enough disgusting bodily functions for one day? I get boogers wiped on my shirt, sneezes blown in my face, and demands to have 2 different asses wiped clean of crap. Do I need your vomit too?

Keep petting me until I tell you to stop, which is never.

And while we're at it:

• I'm not feeding you at 3 a.m. so you both can stop meowing at the top of your lungs.
• Thank you for ripping a hole the size of a chipmunk in the screen trying to get out of the house.
• No, I'm not going to pet you for 2 hours after the kids fall asleep.
• Stop leaving furballs around the house the size of mice.
• I'm sick of dropping $200 every time I have to bring you to the vet
• I'm sick of dropping $100 every week for your damn special cat food because you have damn urinary crystals that may cause you to either pee on our bed or die.

That's all I can think of now and I will for sure be leaving all of this off my eBay listing and instead describe you two as "very furry, very lovable, cats who enjoy laying in your lap [digging their nails into your bare skin.]"

Putting an ad in the paper for Mary Poppins

My daughter fell off of her chair last night at dinner.

The whole thing took place in slow motion, and yet I'm still not sure how it happened. Her entire chair fell to its side, taking my daughter down and her dinner plate up in the air. As my luck would have it, we were having quinoa so the airborn plate created a quinoa rain shower over the dinner table. As the person nearest to her, I reached out my hand and clutched her leg just in time so that her fall was a little softer. Nevertheless she still ended up face down, belly down on the floor covered in quinoa and chicken. 

In this house, I would expect nothing less than for a tumble off a chair to create a mess the size of the tri-state area.

I only have 2 children, but everything in this house seems to be louder, messier, crazier than a house full of Dugans (they have what, like 19 kids?)

One day my aunt stopped by after an acupuncture appointment.  She could only stay for a few minutes. Now my aunt's house is so clean and quiet it's like visiting Jefferson's Monticello. I'm pretty sure she she attaches velvet ropes across all her rooms and only allows her family to occupy 3 rooms in the house. You can drop by without notice and it looks like no one but a curator and people dressed up in period wear pretending to stoke a fire live here.

So my aunt visits and probably spends about 15 minutes with me and the kids in which they run around, play with toys all over the floor, messily eat lunch, and probably have a tantrum over what color their plate was.  To which my aunt looked and me and says, "You need Mary Poppins."

"I thought the mom in Mary Poppins was a suffragette," I began, "not just plain suffering?"

My aunt also has 2 children and claims that they both took 3-hour naps until they were 7 and never played with dirt and never got food on the floor and ... Well, we all know that parents suffer from amnesia when it comes to their kids. So I'm enjoying my messy house, my messy dinners, and my messy kids knowing that one day I'll be telling them, "I don't know why your children are Gila Monsters? You guys were so quiet and played so nice and never made a mess or threw your food."

One day.

Organizing Photos into a Photo Album

I completed my first Photo Album as well as organized my entire photo collection ... from 2011.

Alright, I realize it's mid-2014 here but I made a dent in the 14,000 photos taking up precious space on my hard drive, so I feel like I should be wearing a tiara or that crown from Burger King. Tackling these photos was a monster -- iPhoto is just another basement where I throw stuff I don't want to deal with.

What inspired this project was a Pin on Organizing Photos. You can read her post (which is awesome and in great detail, but she talks about printing photos which I gave up on), or you can read my version (the lazy blogger version). Take your pick.

How to:

iPhoto sorted by Month/Year

1. Sort Photos: All of my photos were in iPhoto already sorted by month/year. If yours aren't, do that first. (Also don't forget to grab your husbands phone and get his photos into your library).

 2. Cull Photos: This is the hard part, and took me a long time. I basically went through each month 3-4 different times at different time periods and deleted photos. For instance: August 2011 started with 275 photos, after 4 different deleting sessions over a few weeks/months, I got it down to 128. Some months I got down to 50, but that's like March when nothing happens.

I kept my progress detailed in my spiral notebook of which months I did, where I left off, etc so I could pick up at any time.

If you have time ... you can also crop and fix all your photos. I meant to do this but time just escaped. I agree that any photo I did crop looked better. Oh well. I'm not Ansel Adams.

How long did this take? I started deleting photos in December 2013 and finished March 2014.

3. Start Photo Book: There's a few to choose from. I made mine through Shutterfly choosing the softcover, Year in Review model. Now if I thought deleting photos took a long time, making the book took even longer. It's online and ended up being 94 pages so it crashed a lot on me and was also slow to load. Then creating the pages themselves just took a lot of time, effort, and brain power -- which I was working mostly after 9PM and my brain officially shuts down at 5PM.



This I also kept detailed in the spiral notebook, listing which months were made vs which months were now finalized.

I started the book in March and finished June 1st. The book arrived today: June 11th.

Notice the 1st page where I left the stock wording ...


4. Back-up photos: Once the book was sent off to the publisher, I resized all the photos (some were like 3MB) and then put them all both on a DVD and on my external back-up drive. And they came off my computer.

Some notes on making a Photo Book:

1. Online the photos look smaller: Seeing the pages now, I wish I hadn't done some of the 2-photo pages or the larger photos. The small sized photos looked like postage stamps online but they ended up being perfect size to capture a series of photos from a vacation, or holiday.

Like did I really need this ginormous photo of my cat?


2. I like the pre-done pages: This party page was a pre-set idea page you can choose and I like how that turned out. It's hard to have the time to stylize 94 individual pages.


Here's another one -- vacation.


3. It's expensive: Look for coupons and deals. If you don't need it right away, sit on your finsihed book until a deal comes. Mine was ready around Father's Day so there was free shipping and discounts. Even then, the 94 pages came to over $60. But I figures, printing each photo and buying books would be around the same thing.

4. I wish the spine wasn't blank: This will end up on my bookshelf so I wish the spine had the title from the front.

Final Verdict: I like the book a lot but I like trying other things so for 2012, I'm trying MyPublisher. So far it's not as "cutesy" as the Year in Review pages and doesn't have pre-done pages with their "bling" but I'm okay with that. I can compare them when I get this done ... next year.

The Money Pit strikes again

This winter we celebrated 9 years of living in The Money Pit. My husband and I can't believe we've lasted this long: this house is one big headache. But something called "excellent schools" and "terrible resale value" is making us stay put and the house is very happy eating away at our savings account one check at a time.

This week I wrote out a check for a new, professionally installed window well cover.

This window well used to hide under a splintering, decrepit wood porch that we finally took down 2 years ago to make way for a patio and now it's exposed for our kids to jump on. So we put a cover on it. Done.

before

Two years and many rain storms, heat waves, and -20 degree days later, we finally had a nice day with the kids playing in the backyard. Nice, until Caligula my daughter took one look at it and decided to pretend it was a bounce house ... and fell right through --- 3-1/2 feet down into the well!

With Cerberus, her Trio of Bears on guard

Luckily the bottom was soft-- or at least that's what my husband said from inside. He saw the whole thing happen and dove in to rescue her -- right after throwing his glass of beer up in the air.  We were so lucky the cracked piece didn't cut her ... I'm still in shock over the whole thing.

Anyway, after kindly refusing my dad's offer of covering it with a sheet of plywood which he would gladly bring over from his collection of "bits & fragments of the last 50 years" stashed in his garage, we were on the phone with a window well company and had it promptly installed.  Voila.

After

 The warranty says "lifetime" and the weight max is 250lb.  We'll see.