Tales of a Shoebox Princess

A bucket full of pictures for you today, for there is much I need to discuss with the blogging world. To keep my focus on what I would like to say, I'm making list (purely for my own benefit, so I don't get distracted and forget what I have planned to talk about and to remind me not to go yammering off on tangents, which I am likely to do. Half my blog posts end up being about something else entirely than what I had planned to say. Um, like this) or I suppose you could call it an agenda. 1. HDSF 2. Birthday wrap-up, if any 3. Update on the not-the-sewing-room-anymore 4. Katie The HDSF today will focus on FUTURE Halloween decorations (worry not--I haven't run out of actual decorations. I just thought I would focus on these today because I just got them out last night. They've sat in a basket for at least a year. Poor lonely decorations!). These are all waiting to be framed or made into pillows or, in one case, actually finished. I started the needlepunch witch hat...

Just a quick update. And as long as I'm updating with a picture of Matt's cake, I might as well do the Halloween Decoration Special Feature. This is a magnificent Tic-Tac-Toe Board made by seester Jen. She performs magic with a brush and paint. Check out the cute ghosties and candy corns made with egg-shaped wood pieces! The kids can't wait to get this out every Halloween and play the game. This is Matt and his cake. It is supposed to be a monster emerging from a pond. Notice the two lily pads (a requirement, according to Matt) He loved the cake. I got carpal tunnel from dotting the monster's head with pea rock sized dots of brown frosting that frankly looked like dry cat food pellets when I piped them on. The eyes are made out of halved marshmallows. Sidenote: since there are three halves of marshmallow on the cake, I had an extra half of a marshmallow leftover. What to do??? Make hot cocoa. I made a cuppa for myself just because I had a half a marshmall...

You can hardly see the little mite in the picture below, but I just wanted to remember Matt as a tiny tiny (at least compared to my other babies) bundle of future volume. And to remember Paul and Jimmy as little boys too. We had just moved into our house three weeks before and as I was unpacking a few more boxes, I had to lie down for a rest because I kept having contractions. The next morning, after one panic attack, one submission to an EKG, fighting one nurse over an IV (none for me thanks), after being told I was going to hemorrhage to death because this was my fifth baby by that nurse (she was mad at me), after a knotted umbilical cord, the little mite was born and I was done with birthin' babies. I can't believe I haven't had a baby in a decade. Here is Matt at about 18 months, sleeping off his lunch--as much lunch as he was able to make it through awake. And here he is after finding a pan of broccoli on the table (I hadn't cleaned up lunch yet) and helping him...

So there is something funky going on with the spacing of pictures. But I will forge ahead and brave the odd formatting. Today's decoration is a trio of cheerful potions that I bought in Kalama, Washington last October. Very cute! I like the frog on the bottle on the left. And I LURVE the skull stoppers. Recently, I had a conversation with Katie, who mentioned that I need to post pictures of the family here because she is starting to forget what we all look like. Someone has a short memory. Magic. Katie, Magic misses you! With you gone, he has only one person to hiss at. Paul looks up from his homework to see a camera lens targeting his forehead. Servo is still adorably cute. So is a sleeping Matt. Dad says hello. Your mother likes any opportunity to show off the excessive forehead acreage she possesses. Hayley was not happy to have her picture taken. Jimmy was.

So I was tagged by Bessie and I'm supposed to list 6 quirks. But how do I know if what I do is a quirk? Aren't quirks actions or behaviors that the quirkee thinks is normal but other people find different (maybe even annoying)? All's I'm sayin' is that my list of my own personal quirks might be quite different than what those around me would say are my quirks. OK, so keep in mind I don't find these things that I do weird at all, I just find that the majority of other people don't do them. 1. Ruffle the pages of books I'm reading. I am told that this is weird and irritating. And it wrecks the book. Sorry, but I can't help it. 2. Playing with my wedding ring and engagement ring. I take them off and put them on other fingers (this is why I can't have my rings be tight on my fingers). Sometimes I put the wedding band on the tip of my nose. I get bored easily and my rings are my toys. 3. Do rituals count? Rituals like eating M & Ms ...

Today's decoration is a cross stitch that I did. I made this one up--sort of. I combined three different patterns to make this. The ghost and the fence were originally three ghosts holding toast on the fence. I didn't want three ghosts holding toast, but I really liked the opaque look of the fence seen through the ghost's legs. I found a cat pattern and adjusted it so it was standing on two different levels and then found a pumpkin. It had a happy face but I just turned that smile upside down (and made the world a sadder place...). Every year, this framed piece sits on the thermostat. The stupid thermostat is in a very obvious and irritating place on the wall and makes it difficult to decorate the wall in a pleasing fashion, so I make it hold up the Halloween trio during October and another framed art piece during Christmas. This year, the autumn colors have been unbelievably bright. It seems like in past years, either the wind blew all the leaves off the trees imme...

Lego bricks. Yes, they have a kit to make these two pumpkins. Yes, I had to have it when I saw it in the Lego catalog. Yes, I buy Legos for myself. Yes, I am a sucker for anything that moderately resembles a pumpkin. Cubey, on the left, is a VERY DIFFICULT Lego construction. Even my master Lego builders (Paul and Matt) throw their hands up in frustration with Cubey. So I "have to" put him together "myself." It takes a while and some of the pieces tend to fall off until he's about halfway built. Flat Stanley, on the right, is pretty easy. Playing with Legos is a kind of zen activity for me (pretend I know what I mean when I say "zen"), it's calming and I can focus on just the one matter at hand without getting all ADD and doing ten things at once. So my cure for the inability to focus is simple: play with Legos (or Lego bricks if you are a stickler for the nonstandard, yet correct, usage) It's not weird that I have named my Halloween ...