Friday, February 16, 2018

7 Quick Takes about Unexpectedly Edible Things, Times It's Not Worth Going the Extra Mile, and What Dinosaurs Think about Fast Food

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

1


As Phillip likes to say, I've got good news and bad news. (For the record, I hate it when he says that because I hear 'bad news' and automatically think cancer, death, or dismemberment and then I'm just mad when the actual bad news is that he forgot to pick up cheese at the store on his way home from work.)

Anyway, in this case the good news is that there's an online shoe store called "Shoebacca."

Phillip ordered some basketball shoes from there and I laughed all day at the name on the box dropped off at our doorstep.

2


The bad news is that it's been a tough week around here, hence the radio silence on the blog.

Phillip has been so sick he's basically bedridden, and I'm exhausted. It's been a busy week to pull off solo, and to be honest I'm not good at having sick family members because it totally stresses me out (I think it's my way of worrying about them.)

On Saturday the kids needed to be in two different places at the same time, so I took my son to his basketball tournament leaving instructions for my daughter to wake Phillip up to drive her to a church thing at 3.

When I checked the list of Alexa commands to our Amazon Echo that night, I noticed one of them was "Remind me at 2:50 to raise Dad from the dead."

That was pretty accurate.

3


On Sunday I was in charge of a visiting teaching conference at church. Visiting teaching is a program where every woman in the congregation is assigned to visit a few other women at least once a month to share a spiritual thought, help them with something, drop something off, whatever they need, really.

Our theme for the conference was "Bee the Difference." (As you know, this is way too cute a theme for me to have come up with on my own, but I did the executing.)

I made these centerpieces:

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?  {posted @ Unremarkable Files}


It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?  {posted @ Unremarkable Files}

You'll notice the jars are filled with Honeycomb cereal, so when we got home after the conference my kids literally ate the centerpieces.

4


Speaking of eating things, the whole family went to see our cub scout compete in the Pinewood Derby (even Phillip roused himself from his deathbed, mostly because he was the one who knew how to run the computer program on the track.)

My kids enjoyed the race and also the activities that had been set up on the sidelines for siblings to do, like creating a race car out of wooden wheels, toothpicks, and marshmallows.

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?  {posted @ Unremarkable Files}
Halfway through the race my one-year-old got real quiet and disappeared. I found him in a corner methodically dismantling and devouring some poor innocent's car.

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?  {posted @ Unremarkable Files}
RIP, car.

5


My kids celebrated 100s Day at school (if you don't know what that is, it's the 100th day they've attended school that year and it falls around this time of year) and were asked to come wearing 100 of something.

I was prepared to do my signature "100 Cheerios strung on a necklace" thing and call it a day, but something inside me urged me to go the extra mile and do something to make my kindergartner feel extra-special.

So we searched the craft cabinet, found a bag of plastic jewels I'd forgotten about, and grabbed an old shirt to decorate.

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?  {posted @ Unremarkable Files}
If we miscounted and there aren't actually 100 of these, keep it  to yourself. I don't want to know.

Unfortunately, I burned the crap out of myself several times with the hot glue gun. Even my daughter somehow got burned, and even without the bodily injury it was a pretty tedious project.

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?  {posted @ Unremarkable Files}
If this is what a good mom looks like, it really isn't worth it.

She didn't seem as excited about making the shirt as I thought she'd be, but I figured she'd change her tune when she got to proudly wear it to school the next morning.

After she came home from 100s Day I asked how she liked having her own sparkly shirt that she'd made herself, to which she responded "I didn't really care," reminding me why I never do things like this in the first place.

6


Something our family does every Valentine's Day is write love letters to each other. That's right, each person writes a separate letter to each other person in the family. With our 8-person family, I think that works out to like 1,180,005 letters.

Since some of our kids are obviously too young to write, my 13-year-old asked the 3-year-old a bunch of questions about me and wrote down his answers.

The picture that emerged was that he's really glad I make dinner for him. When pressed for more details, he's also thankful that I make him lunch.

7


My kindergartner brought home this paper from school, with a picture of two dinosaurs having a conversation and she was asked to fill in their speech bubbles with whatever she thought they were talking about.

In hers, the first dinosaur says, "Have you ever gone to McDonald's?" and the second replies "No, I haven't."

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?  {posted @ Unremarkable Files}
Probably what the dinosaurs talked about millions of years ago.

I thought this was a pretty random subject and asked, "So why did the T-rex say he's never been to McDonald's?" She just looked at me like I was an idiot.

"Because he hasn't," came the obvious answer.

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9 comments:

me said...

Though I've never dug out the hot glue gun for 100 days, I did write my son's name 100 times on a tshirt. He loved that one! It was easier than the 100 cookies one daughter brought - or the 100 words she brought in on tiny skips of paper. (She complained when she could only find 99 of them. Maybe she should have used a bigger font?) Sometimes the big efforts we make on their parts are completely wasted.

Ann-Marie Ulczynski said...

These are awesome. Not the burn. I love when we go all out and it just doesn’t matter. I’m sorry your husband has been sick. That’s no fun. And the centerpieces are super cute. I’m kinda sad they are devoured.

AnneMarie said...

Haha! Those dinosaurs are hilarious. I love those centerpieces, too!

I hope your husband gets better. I was pretty sick this week, too-not as deathbed ill as him, but it was still super difficult to function, and the house kind of fell apart. At least my husband, in his enthusiasm to care for me, made a gigantic pot of chicken noodle soup which we'll probably be eating for days ;)

Erin @ Sky Blue Pink Roses said...

The race car out of toothpicks and marshmallows is cool--I don't remember ever seeing that in our years of Beaver Buggy/Kub Kar/Pinewood Derby racing (Canadian and American Scouting), but then again, I always managed to get out of going to the actual races. I think it's fitting that the centerpieces and the car were devoured--better to eat them then have them sitting around taking up space after they are no longer needed.

Jenny Evans (sister, not author) said...

Apparently the kids have a penchant for marshmallows, I remember when the kindergartner was following after her cousins playing with the marshmallow guns dad made to eat the ammo instead of actually participate.

Jenny Evans said...

That's actually why I'm not very crafty - maybe it's fun making the craft but then what do you DO with it afterward? I'm thinking about making all my crafts edible from now on...

Jenny Evans said...

Oh, so sorry you're sick. When you're pregnant it takes FOREVER to get over the littlest cold. Hang in there.

Rachel said...

I was majorly giggling over the T-Rex conversation. I make Valentine's cards for all my siblings every year but I'm the only one in the family who does. Classic firstborn, I tell ya.

Katherine said...

Yes, I, too, am "over" doing things like making individual sparkly shirts, as sweet as they are. I hope you got more kudos and appreciation for the delightful bee centerpieces you made!