Need a last minute Mother’s Day gift? I’ve got two magnet crafts for you at Alpha+Mom. This one is made out of a frappuccino lid which should be an excellent excuse for you to make a trip to Starbucks for their frappy happy hour. Unfortunately they are NOT a sponsor. I wish they would sponsor me.

While we were making fun magnets for mother’s day I spray painted some alphabet magnets as a photo prop (as seen above in a handy instagram photo). I think they turned out the best. So if you’re not afraid of can of spray paint, you might want to give mom some pretty pink glittery letter magnets!

I also have two bunny books out now! Time for Bed, Bunny! and

Time to Get Ready, Bunny!

Time to Get Ready, Bunny! has been out for a while. I’m working on Time to Eat, Bunny! but that one is still in my head.

And that’s all my news for now! Hopefully I’ll have more news soon. I’ve got lots of projects in the works and of course tails of catastrophes that go along with them.

I have some bad news. I can’t blog about the big photo shoot Bug and I were involved in for a couple of weeks. The good news is I have other things to share with you!

I have some mini piñatas over at Alpha+Mom for Cinco de Mayo. This was one of those projects that took me around and around the craftastrophe mountain before I nailed it down. Craft testing can be exhausting. I really wanted to make miniature paper-mache piñatas but everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

Ask me about the wind tunnel that is my carport where I do all my crafting photography sometime. I’ll regale you with stories of failure for hours. Good times, I tell you. It’s great for blowing little pieces of newspaper all around every which way. Maybe I could teach weather to fifth graders.

Balloons popped, masking tape was flung in exasperation, foam core backing toppled into flour paste, kittens got in the thick of it. And then it was cloudy and rainy for hours making my white balance either bluer than the arctic or hotter than the tropics because I don’t quite have the hang of setting it right. Anyway, it was exasperating.

Good thing the final product turned out super cute.

It’s funny, I was so tired of futzing with this silly craft that I expected it to be completely un-kid-friendly and a flop. It was the eleventh hour before my deadline and I was covered in tissue and glue and everything was stuck to everything. It was just a mess. But the crafts must go on so I can pay my bills so I set everything up again and made sure I had all my pieces and parts prepped properly. Then I let Bug take a stab at it. She’s my official quality-control beta-tester go-to girl. She also is a bit more zen about crafting than I am.

She had no trouble with it at all. I didn’t even have to explain anything or clean up anything. She just glued her tissue fringe to her paper hat lickety-split and it was done. So if you think this craft might be too fussy for you, think again. I already tackled all the fussiness. It’s handled. In my carport with little pieces of newspaper stuck all over me like a tarred and feathered idiot.

Even Pedro is suspicious.

We’ve been on a bit of a neon kick lately. Neon friendship bracelets, neon Easter eggs… I have a new banner with my logo dipped in neon pixels. I may have finally reached full-saturation on the out-of-gamut color spectrum. I might even say neon is the new pink or something like that. Well, at least for us anyway. I know the rest of you are probably ready for it to be over.

Anyway it’s been fun to play with and to photograph.

Even clean-up is pretty.

Some of it not so much…

But whatever you say, you can’t say it’s boring.

Creating and writing craft posts is a pretty sweet gig. I love crafting and I get paid for it. However, things don’t always go as smoothly as I like. There’s an experimental element to creating an original craft and sometimes it just doesn’t work out. This means hours of lost time and buying supplies over and over until I get it right. Sometimes I nail it on the first try and I make my paycheck easily. Other times I try, try and try again until I’m making about three cents an hour. You win some, you lose some.

Here is what I thought was going to be a BRILLIANT crown idea:

Not so much.

There were a lot of steps.

And then!!! At the moment of reveal:the eggs wouldn’t stay up straight! They wanted to fall over sideways. I rigged them with candy and shot a few photos of them looking sort of alright but I knew it wouldn’t fly. Either I had to start over with round egg-shaped holes instead of ovals or write some sort of complicated disclaimer saying something about results may vary. You know that’s not going to go over very well. Crafters hate it when something looks simple in the photos and then turns out to be a messy nightmare.

So we scrapped it and thankfully I was able to think up two other kinds of crowns that worked out super simple and pretty to look at.

I just thought you’d get a kick out of the behind-the-scenes flops. It’s a dirty job but somebody’s gotta do it.

It started because Bug wanted to learn how to sew. She had tied a ribbon onto a pick-up stick and was threading it through an old knitted beanie when it dawned on me that maybe I should teach her how to embroider. That is what they used to do for fun back in the House on the Prairie days before ipads and iphones and streaming episodes of Phineas and Ferb were invented after all. Sometimes it worries me how much we are plugged in and turned off to really fun old-fashioned things.

I used to LOVE embroidering. Sit me down with a hoop, some muslin and a rainbow of pretty floss and I was a happy camper. I wish I could find my old projects. I think I covered a pillow case in free-handed frogs for an ex-boyfriend even. I wish I could see that again. But of course it is long gone. I’m not saying I’m some kind of amazing artist embroidering fine tapestries or anything (I don’t even remember more than two or three kinds of stitches) but stitching is a fun medium that shouldn’t be left to Miss Moffet and her poffet or however that old nursery rhyme goes.

So off to the craft store we went to get another hoop (I only had one and I’m not about to sit back and let Bug have all the fun) and some new floss. I had enough in my collection but I thought it would be fun to get some fresh colors.

Who has a collection of embroidery floss? I do! I do! I know. I’m a weirdo who is going to have to start letting go of things if I think I’m going to move into a tiny postage stamp-sized studio apartment at the beach this summer but that’s another blog post. I just happen to have it on hand. These things come up from time to time and I have aunts and a mother who gift them to me.

Anyway, the craft store had NEON and GLOW IN THE DARK embroidery floss!!!! And it was only 35 cents or something. My mom tells me that’s an exorbitant amount of money but to me I’m thinking, all that pretty color for only 35 cents? Bring it on! Tubes of paint in those colors cost me eight to twelve bucks!!! This is CHEAP fun!

Of course I had to make some friendship bracelets with that neon floss. I know that was a fashion statement last summer but I never got around to making any so, in my book it’s STILL cool and will be cool for a long time even if I hated the eighties.

I tried to get Bug into making a bracelet with me but I kinda need to teach her how to tie her shoes before I try to get her to tie tiny knots in tangly thread. And I think my enthusiasm over the neon may have been a tad over the top and consequently bored her to death. I swear she’s a little mini Miley Cirus sometimes, rolling her eyes at me and making jokes about Bon Jovi calling and asking for his jeans back.

Anyway it was super fun for me. I even made a special rainbow one for Bug and convinced her to wear it to school. Sidenote: She’s been having another bout of anxiety lately (brought on by THREE kids puking in one day. THREE!!) and I told her the bracelet could be her lucky charm and whenever she looked at it she could know that I was praying for her etc etc. She wore it but she wasn’t that into it. I told her I would even make some for her friends if they wanted. And they did! She came home with two requests so I made them up and then put them on fun little cards:

Super simple. Just cardstock punched with two holes and then a squiggly little hand drawing. Then you thread the bracelet through the holes like the hand is wearing it and write some kinda cute friendly phrase.

Tape it with some Japanese masking tape on the back and voila! A fun little gift. I know I should have saved this for Friendship Day and posted it on Alpha+Mom but Friendship Day is all the way in AUGUST and as you can tell I want to relive my youth right now!

Like, totally, Dude.

It’s been a while since I’ve cobbled together a lumpy pillow that roughly looks like a stuffed animal. I used to do it all the time. In fact, when I was little, many of my daydreams centered around the day that I would finally own my own sewing machine and then I could make anything I wanted. I envisioned a whole world out of stuffed material. There would be trees made of green calico and brown felt bears with black pleather noses… I would make a whole forest of animals!

Then I grew up and realized that sewing is hard and it takes entirely too much time. However, I did buy a sewing machine when I got old enough and I’ve made the odd lumpy pillow over the years.

So when Bug came to me dressed in a brown-flowered skirt and the only brown t-shirt she could find (that happened to have pieces of cake on it) and explained that she was a forest girl and all she needed to complete her pretend world was a pet owl that she couldn’t find anywhere in her vast (and I mean vast) collection of stuffed animals, I hesitated. It was true. She has every animal under the sun I think but she does not have an owl. Octopus, check. Ferret, check. Owl: no dice.

At first I rolled my eyes at her and told her to just imagine one or to find some other forest animal to play with. I’m sure the Forest Girl would be friends with all the animals. As she ran off, slightly distressed, to look one more time inside her hedgehog for some sad sorry owl substitute, I gazed over at my new clean work table and my stack of folders representing all the jobs I’ve got going on right now and sighed heavily. Then I decided that I would much rather make a stuffed owl than attend to my many deadlines. Blast it. Life is short. I should make an owl, I thought.

I hauled out my banker’s box full of odd bits of fabric and called Bug over to help me pick something owlish. She was beside herself excited of course. The prospect of making an owl, from fabric with mommy’s sewing machine! She hadn’t even thought of that. This was probably a bit foolish on my part because now she’s going to be thinking I can make anything she sets her heart on at the drop of a hat.

I’m sure I’ll soon cure her of that.

Anyway, she picked some red velvet for the body, some orange raw silk for feet and a beak and we found some buttons for eyes. I was going to use that brown corduroy for wings but like all my sewing projects, it got simplified in the end. I’m not that amazing at sewing.

I did, however, have a fantastic idea for the feet. What if I sewed the raw silk around some pipe cleaners so they could bend like real talons?!! I didn’t sew tiny claw tubes and then turn them inside out or anything. That would be madness. No, I just sewed seams around the pipe cleaners, cut off the excess and let the raw edges fray. The owl would have floppy-feathered* feet like real owls do.

It actually worked really well.

With Bug hovering at my side, I sewed up the owl body, snipped the edges, turned him inside out and let Bug stuff him. I stuck the bendy feet inside the body where the stuffing hole was and sewed him closed with a kiss and prayer.

And that is how Owly (or Velvie, as Bug calls him) became the floppy-feathered owl that hangs upside down from branches. So his bendy feet aren’t strong enough to hold up his own stuffed-with-fluff weight. That’s okay. He’s still cute. (Maybe I should try that trick with a bat next time.)

And she loves him.

I’m not really sharing this story so you can say, Oh, wow you’re such a great seamstress! (snort.) or Oh, Brenda, you’re such a great mom. Because I’m not. I like to put pictures up that make me look like I’m doing a half-way decent job but really, I’m just like every other mom on the planet nagging and yelling and failing everyday at motherhood. I should share the humiliating jacket story that happened the other day. Ugh. It was terrible.

Okay I’ll just share a little bit: I thought I’d teach Bug a lesson about not getting ready fast enough in the morning by making her wear an ugly jacket to school. It wasn’t even an ugly jacket but she hates it with a white hot passion which drives me crazy because I think it’s a perfectly nice jacket and it’s cozy and warm. I can’t stand seeing her shivering in the cold on the playground when she has a perfectly good jacket to wear but she’s too vain to put it on. It’s big, I’ll give her that and I guess the kids don’t like wearing things baggy these days or something but sheesh! The battles we have over that stupid jacket some mornings make me want to wave a white flag and tear up my mom card.

So she made me mad one morning like she often does by not getting dressed and not getting her shoes on and just generally goofing off and being a normal six-year-old. I lost my temper and said, That’s IT! You’re wearing the ugly jacket and you are going to learn a lesson. You’re going to learn to get ready quickly because you never know what punishments might await you around the corner if you don’t take Mommy’s nagging seriously, rant, rant, rant.

As you probably predicted by knowing Bug from past posts I’ve written about her, she didn’t get over it. There were tears all the way to school. How could I make her look so hideous, she cried. All the kids weren’t going to like her. It was a tragedy. Weeping and gnashing of teeth…So sad, so terrible…

I was tough about this lesson all the way to school. I would not let her win. But when we got to school and I looked down at this little two-foot person standing next to me in the giant purple coat that she hates so much with tears streaming down her cheeks silently; I was a mess. How could I do this to her? She was going to be humiliated all day and what would she learn from it? That her mom is mean and has no taste in coats? At the same time how could I let her niggle out of this punishment without teaching her that crying and throwing fits works like magic? It’s the eternal parental predicament I find myself in. You just want to make them happy but you don’t want them to grow up like spoiled brats either.

So we sat on the wall outside of her school like we often do when we are a little bit early and soaked up the sun. She’d stopped crying and had finally accepted her fate. I was just tired and wanted to hold her close to me because I feel that way when I drop her off at school. I feel like I’m missing something when she’s gone from me and it makes me sad all day until I get to pick her up. I like to hug her and squeeze her and blow kisses and do all the mushy embarrassing things that moms do when they’re dropping off kindergarteners. I know she won’t let me do it much longer so I treasure it.

And as we sat there in the bright winter sun, I felt a little warm. It wasn’t that cold actually. It was warm enough to take our jackets off really. So I took her jacket off and stuffed it in her backpack just in time for her to run to the gate as the bell rang. Did she learn the lesson that I wanted to teach her? I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll ever know. All I know is that this parenthood gig kicks me in the butt on a regular basis.

That and pipe cleaners make pretty good beak bones.

*floppy-feathered is what Bug says when she can’t pull her tights all the way up and the loose feet where her feet should be flop around when she walks.

It’s a good thing you guys like to read about fairy parties because that’s all I’ve got on my brain these days. I’m loving this theme and wishing it could go on for months and months. Unlike the Pinkkkity First Birthday where I got sick of pink and the Royal Fifth Birthday Princess Party where I never wanted to see anything fuschia again, I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of woodland fairies and the color teal/peacock/turquoise. I’m loving Bug’s latest color of choice. She is so funny about color, that girl.

Anyway, here is the progress: I’ve made a sign. I painted it with some black acrylic and varnished it with some leftover floor sealant from my bathroom project. There was a reason I bought that great big can. It’s coming in handy! I also painted a “home sweet home” tiny stump for my neighbor Wendy who is moving away to a cabin in the woods. I attached a magnet to it and she stuck it to her fridge so she can remember me forever and ever! I’m going to miss her. But painting stumps is fun. I might have to do some more and put them in my shop.

Last night at our weekly dinner at Grandma’s we made chocolate sticks and frosting and my Aunt Keren made meringue mushrooms!

How awesome are they?!! I can’t believe how real they look but they are super light and airy. You just want to pop them in your mouth and fart fairy dust or something. I told you I’m loving this theme. I’m thinking I need to sprout some wings and move to the woods.

Yesterday I rearranged my entire living room. I put my art desk in storage and moved everything else up against the walls. I failed to take pictures but I’ll try to get some tomorrow. I’m not a fan of furniture that lines the walls but it did open up a great big space in my living room that will be perfect for dancing fairies. I can’t wait to show you the tulle and the fairy orbs strung from the ceiling. It really does look magical. Which is a good thing because now the weather is predicted to be 71 percent chance of rain.

I’m embracing it. Maybe I’ll even make hot chocolate

For fun I even sewed together two sheets and hung them from a rope in Bug’s room. It was the best after-school surprise ever. She played in it all afternoon and is currently sleeping there. We might have to leave it up permanently.

I also baked four layers of cake (from a mix, don’t get all impressed or anything) that I’m going to turn into a stump with my chocolate branches and about four thousand little strawberry mini cupcakes that I’m going to frost with red frosting and stick white M&M’s into to look like red spotted mushrooms.

AND!! As if that wasn’t enough, I made some fairy atriums.

They didn’t really turn out. My glass bubble bowls are too small and the moss takes up half of the space but they’re still woodsy and fun. I really wanted a big glass fish bowl but these are what I had on hand so I’m letting that go. It’s not like it’s a wedding and I’m decorating a banquet hall or anything. Ha ha.

It’s all just been so much fun. So much fun that I haven’t done any work all day today and now I have to stay up half the night to meet my deadlines. It’s worth it though.

I have to admit I’m solar-powered. You always wondered why I’m full of enthusiasm and great ideas. Well, that’s my secret. It’s the sun. When the sun goes down so do I. So I get plenty of sleep which is awesome. I’m like Wall-E when I wake up. I have to situate my face so that the sun can fill up my battery reserves and then BVrrroooong! I make that sound a mac makes when it starts up and you forget to turn off the volume before shut down last time (Don’t you hate it when that happens at the library?).

This also goes for my moods. Sunny = Happy. Cloudy = Sad.

It’s great that I live in Southern California where it is sunny 90 percent of the time but when it’s cloudy I suddenly become like the rest of you sad people on anti-depressants and I don’t know what to do with all this gloom! It’s so murky and, and…awful!!! How do you cope?!! How do you get anything done? Ugh. I feel like I’m wearing cement shoes and my arms are stuck to the ground with strings of chewing gum. I just want to go crawl into a hole and die.

This is all not very fantastic when you’re planning a birthday party for a little girl who is turning six and birthday parties are what you are good at. There is no failing at birthday-party-planning in this house. No sadness allowed! We eat obstacles for lunch. Bring on the challenges!!! Fifty people in a small mobile home with muddy feet?! I can do it!!!!

As you can see, my winter-wonderland of backyard fun with stumps for chairs and bedspreads for tents might not be happening. My visions of tulle strung from the trees and girls sipping lemonade is vanishing before my very eyes. All I can see are freezing cold fairies with muddy feet running in and out of my house and tracking mud all over my peach-colored carpet. Which I hate anyway so I guess it’s not that big of a deal but I’m still getting hives over it. Ugh! Mud! Kids! Hyperactivity! The bounce house people won’t deliver the bounce house if it’s going to rain!! What am I going to do?!!!!

There is a thirty-percent chance of rain predicted for Saturday. I know in Portland that would be a perfect day for an outdoor party. You might even throw a pool party on a day like that and wear a bikini but here? We are weeenies! We are freezing our butts off!!! We are seriously shivering and moaning. It’s sad and pathetic and majorly cramping my party-planning style.

Well, until the sun comes out. When the sun shines I can think of all kinds of crazy ideas. I can do this. We can have an indoor party. I am excellent at crafts! But when the sun goes back behind a cloud again I shrivel up. The obstacles! It’s too hard! I just want to cancel the whole thing.

Such crazy talk.

So here’s my plan: The bounce house people said I can decide on the day of the party whether or not to have a bounce house. If it’s raining we’ll just move on. If it’s not really raining we will move the bounce house to the front yard and put it on the driveway where there is no mud. I don’t know where people are going to park but that’s their problem.

Inside: I’m going to move all my furniture to the side and create a big open space in my living room/office. Maybe I’ll talk Toby into letting me borrow the giant heirloom Persian rug that he has rolled up in Bug’s room at his house that is not getting used. He won’t mind too terribly if it gets chocolate cake ground into it, right? Hmmm…that probably won’t fly.

Then I’ll use all that tulle that I was going to put in the trees outside, inside. It will be like prom night! I’ll just hang it from the ceiling from an old hula hoop or something.

I bet you wondered why I have a whole bolt of tulle. That’s a good question. I’m weird. I used to do flowers for weddings back in the 90′s and I had a much bigger budget back then. I guess I just bought a whole bolt of tulle and I still have it to this day. I have a whole shed full of floral supplies leftover from those days. It’s coming in very handy.

So with the tulle and these stars it could be magical, right? Bug and I made silver stars the other day with card stock and glitter. I was going to hang them from the trees outside with my fairy orbs but now I think I’ll just hang them inside. Maybe I’ll get crazy with some sheets and make fairy tents inside too. That will be super fun when the kids pull them down along with the sheetrock from my ceiling. Oh boy.

I wish I had a man around the house who liked to build things. That would be so awesome. I could probably install a giant branch in the middle of my living room and bolt it to the ceiling. The cats would go crazy. (Note to self: If ever dating again make sure to date someone handy.) But I have no man around the house and my dad is working until Saturday so I’ll probably have to scale back my visions. That’s okay. It’s gonna happen. We’ll make it work. It always does.

Ugh. How am I going to make this work? You see this kitchen? Charming you think? Shudder. The wallpaper offends me so badly that I think I’ve blocked it out. It’s like a weird vibration in my head that makes me only see white where the little flowers are. But then I got this idea that I would rip off a part of the wallpaper near the sink. It had some water-staining and was really driving me crazy. I thought I would do what I did in my bedroom and go with the whole I-live-in-a-run-down-Parisian-apartment look where the ripped wallpaper reminds me of an Anthropolgie ad.

It did not work. Now I have a big blank spot over the sink that is still water-stained and your eye is drawn to it because it is NOT wall-papered!!! I might as well install neon signs pointing at all the ugliness. This would not be a big deal if the weather was great. I would just route everybody straight to the backyard and they would avoid the kitchen but now all my guests are going to be filing through my kitchen and silently judging me. I just know it.

If I had a man around the house I would ask him to paint all the wallpaper red for me or maybe pistachio green to match the cupboards. (Boy, don’t I seem like a catch?) I would do it myself except all those shelves would have to be removed (and the screw holes are puddied) and there is this light fixture contraption near the sink that my Grandpa installed that is bent on electrocuting me. I already tried to de-install it once and it zapped and ker-powed at me like a comic book villain. I’ve decided to leave it alone. So I don’t think this kitchen eyesore is going to be magically beautiful before the party. Back to blocking it out.

Did I mention that we went to one of Bug’s friend’s party this last weekend and they had a huge perfect house where they regularly host weddings in their living room? Yeah. No pressure. None at all. How does one go about canceling a party at the last minute again? Can I just board up my house and pretend I don’t live here?

Let’s talk about what is working. The craft ideas for the party are going along swimmingly. I know it’s hard to tell when I’m being sarcastic and when I’m not but here I’m actually happy about something. I decided to use Momfluential’s idea for fairy house kits. All those floral supplies I have on hand totally saved me. I didn’t even have to buy one thing to make all these bags up. It’s kinda scary that I have that much crap on hand but hey, it works out. I get to get rid of a lot of stuff and the kids get make fun fairy house with odd bits and bobs. I hope they are into it. I know I will be. I am all over this kind of craft like a fly on…nevermind. You get the picture. It’s going to be fun.

I think I’ll give each kid a stump disc and maybe some putty to stick things into. I was going to be on glue-gun duty but I decided with thirty-some kids they’d probably all want me to glue something and one of them was bound to get burnt. Since I don’t know every kid as well as I usually do I think I’ll pass on all the possible lawsuits. I think they can manage with sticks and putty and chennile stems and string. It’ll be fun.

The next thing that is working are the fairy drinks. I bought a whole bunch of canning jars and covered the printing on the lid with some silk flowers.

Then I punched a hole through the metal lid with my trusty metal hole-puncher and my super human man-hand strength. Actually, I only did one. It was pretty tough but it can be done. I’m leaving the rest of the lids for Saturday and I’ll let my Dad do it. Or any other random strong person who comes around.

Then I filled the jar with ice, a lemon slice and some delicious homemade lemonade from my backyard. I screwed the lid back on, stuck a pretty striped straw through the hole and presto! A perfect fairy drink!

So I’m making it work. When the sun comes out I’m pretty positive.

You know, having a birthday in January is pretty awesome. I know back when I first discovered I was pregnant and calculated my due date, I was afraid. I thought it would be a terrible thing to have a birthday in such a dark winter month right after Christmas. I imagined that we’d be so over presents and festivities that her birthday would get overlooked.

Who was I kidding? Me over presents and festivities? That’s like asking me not to breathe. We might be a little strapped for cash in January but that never stopped anyone in my family from planning the perfect theme party.

January is the perfect month to have a birthday. If anything, it helps us get through the winter months with something fun to look forward to.

An aside about my child’s rat’s nest hairdo: We were on vacation and that is what her hair does if you just wake up and don’t comb it every fifteen minutes. We call it rockstar hair. I used to have a complex about her hair. It’s so fine and is messy more often than it’s brushed. I thought everyone would judge me and think I didn’t love my child because she always looks uncared for. But then one day I saw a magazine spread about some rockstar’s kids. There they were in their Gucci outfits with their Prada shoes playing with their organically hip toys with HORRID MESSY HAIR! Except they didn’t look like ragamuffins, they looked like happy kids. So I decided to get over Bug’s messy hair and call it rockstar hair.

As you can see, Bug is making a paper chain. It’s a count-down-to-her-birthday-party chain. I thought Bug would make one of these in school for Christmas but they didn’t. They probably don’t hype the holidays as much as I remember when I was a kid because of all the political correctness. So I figured, why count off days on the calendar every day when cutting up a bunch of strips of paper is just as easy? And it was a simple craft that she could do pretty much by herself while I busied myself in the kitchen with dishes or something.

As you can see it went perfectly with a cup of hot chocolate with THREE straws. Don’t ask. It’s because I keep the straws in an easily accessible spot and she helped herself. I probably should enforce some rules about that but I figured it wasn’t going to hurt. We rarely use straws so tripling up now and then is not the end of the world.

She made the chain pretty much all by herself. Backwards numbers and all…it was a good exercise in number-writing and following a pattern. Bug is a freak about color so she needed very little encouragement to make a color pattern. In fact, it was her idea and I had to calm her down when she skipped a number and we had to throw in a lone green loop to keep from having to start all over again mid-chain. The horror! A green loop in the middle of things! It’s a good thing Bug has me for a mom because I am the queen of not being a perfectionist and I can help balance out her type-A tendencies. Shrug it off, I say. Though I’m sure we’re doomed to a lifetime of not understanding each other.

Anyway, we’re on the countdown. You know what that means: Party-planning time! My favorite time! I couldn’t care less about the actual party. If I could be invisible at the party and just hover around watching everything and taking pictures, I’d be much happier. But of course that’s not the way things go. I have to actually socialize and eat. Such a burden. Ha ha. Just kidding, mostly.

Here are the beginnings of the process. We’re having a fairy party in the backyard. I’m going to let the grass grow and pretend it’s an overgrown wonderland. There’s a pine tree in my front yard that badly needs cutting down so my dad is going to take a chainsaw to it and save the stumps for chairs. I hope it doesn’t rain.

I’m calling the party “Six in the Sticks.” Why not!? We might as well capitalize on that happy coincidence.

I’ve made the invitations that included cutting out about thirty-seven hundred little Bug fairies. Yes, I am insane. But these little insane things make me happy. I’m a very happy insane person with sore hands.

It’s a Bug army! (thanks to an instagrammer for that line)

I attached tissue wings (glitterized with a few finger-swipes of glitter glue) to the Bug Fairy and then taped her to a brown paper invitation with a funny fairy poem and some stick graphics along the sides. It actually worked out pretty well.

I’m trying to play up a woodland version of fairies instead of all that bright synthetic Disney crap. I had enough of that last year. In my vision I would have girls romping in Victorian dresses with gossamer wings and brown paper fox-head masks. Maybe the fox-head mask is a little weird. I don’t know. I secretly want to grow up and be a photo stylist for Vogue but fairy parties is where I channel that frustration.

Then it’s all tied up with a half sheet of transparent vellum and tied with these really cool wire flowers that my mom bought for me last year from some half-off clearance sale at the local fabric store. I think they turned out pretty cute. Now I’m just worried they’re too fancy.

I have a little bit of a dilemma. I wanted Bug to invite two or three of her best friends from kindergarten but we couldn’t figure out which girls to invite. She likes one girl very much but I know when I drop her off that there are at least two or three others who are so sweet to her. They always make a special point of saying hi and shouting across the playground at her. Many of them comfort her when she’s crying and having anxiety attacks about school. I couldn’t figure out which girls they were so I caved and invited all of them. Thirteen girls!!! I can’t handle thirteen little girls!!! I really hope they don’t all show.

I’m worried that when the parents see this super fancy invitation they are going to think they can score some swag at some rich kid’s party. Big surprise they’re going to get when they roll up to my classy mobile home. But I’m hoping that since her school is way on the other side of town that most of the kids won’t come. Is that how things work? Most of the parents are much younger than me and I don’t think we have much in common. I don’t know. Toby promised to pay for a bounce house so I’m hoping that will handle all the kids.

But what if it rains?!!!

In other news:

1. I have a little giveaway going on my review blog for anybody with a new baby. It’s kinda fun.

2. I have not finished that heartfelt, big, meaningful post that I promised you. Every time I promise something it seems to be the kiss of death. Ugh. The thing is that it is not my story so I’m trying to sort out the details with a friend whom I’m writing it for. I did promise her I’d write it though so I do really really want to keep my word. You’ll see when I finally get it done.

3. I’m almost done with the SAJ poster. Super-sleuthing spy-sentence hunters: your prize is almost done! Stay tuned!

I was working on a craft for Alpha Mom and I had these plastic ornaments hanging around. They are the best invention ever. We used them for bubbles once in an under-the-sea themed baby shower. Well, now I can add one more use to their list! Fairy orbs!

It’s really simple. All you do is open them up, place a battery-operated tea light (another item of many uses) inside and close them back up again. Hang them from a black thread and you’ve got instant non-flamable magic!

We hung them from the trees outside.

And some in the windows inside…

They are so cheery and bright! Perfect night lights, really.

Perhaps we’ll make them at Bug’s upcoming fairy-themed sixth birthday party in January. We could add some spanish moss, a mushroom or two, some fairy dust…who knows!