Roses Are Blue...

Pysanky!

Gesundheit!  Ok, ok, so I know this post is long overdue seeing as Easter was almost last month..but here we go.  Every year around Easter my aunt Jill and uncle Dan host a pysanky party.  And every year around Easter I miss it.  What is pysanky, you ask?  Alana did a great job describing it on her blog a couple of years ago so I will let you read that before we start (and save myself some serious typing).  Let me know when you are ready.

Ready?  Ok, so finally this year I just so happened to be in town for the pysanky party!  My aunt and uncle had everything ready to go when we arrived.  I took my place at the huge newspaper-covered table, picked a nicely shaped egg and then tried desperately not to be intimidated by the professional artists across the table who were doing, among other things, portraits of presidents on their eggs.  In the end, I opted for a simple bunny design.  Which was plenty confusing for me.  But I was so excited by the whole process that I wanted to try it at home with the boys. 

When I got home I showed the boys my egg and told them we probably wouldn't be able to get the supplies in time for Easter but I would order them anyway so we could try it.  Riley and I got online and lo and behold there is an online pysanky retailer here in NC!  What luck!  The folks at All Things Ukrainian were incredibly charming and helpful and we got our supplies in ONE day.  Lucky for us too because we spent the better half of Friday just setting up the table...this is not Paas & crayons, y'all.  The photo below shows a couple of Riley's eggs in the early stages of dying and waxing.

I do have to say that this year was one of the most pleasant Easter mornings that I can recall.  No egg hunts, no bickering, just pysanky until brunch and then again until bedtime.  The boys ended up decorating eggs for three days in a row.  Now there are eggs in the candle holders on the mantle, in dishes on the tables, and apothecary jars on the shelves...three dozen in all.  They are too pretty to put away (that and I still haven't figured out where to put them...)

Happy April Fool's Day!

This day is one of the favorites here in the Garrett household.  We spend a lot of time coming up with tricks to play on one another.  And, it is also special because it's my birthday (yeah, yeah, I know, the joke was on my parents, ha ha ha...)  Now we do have a few basic pranking rules: no water (outside of the bathroom), no baby powder (enacted after the 2008 baby powder fiasco), nothing permanent (eg. sharpie moustaches), and nothing mean.  Most years I have a big prank lined up, like last year when I sealed the boys into their rooms with transparent window plastic.  All I have to do still is picture them running into an invisible force field and I start laughing.  Riley was so confused he ran into it twice. 

Anyway, this year I have no big prank.  Which turns out is really a good prank in itself.  It was funny this morning watching my family cautiously opening cabinets, peering around corners, and looking up before crossing a threshold or moving a door.  I do have several little pranks set up...however, most of them were unwittingly foiled by my husband (one of the drawbacks of birthday sleeping in).  For example, I switched out the inner bag of frosted mini wheats on a new box for a bag of UNfrosted mini wheats (I know it's silly but the confused faces get me every time!)  Unfortunately, Kevin decided to make the boys eggs this morning.  I mean, seriously?  They eat cereal for breakfast EVERY day.  Then I rigged the boys bathroom so that the shower would turn on instead of the faucet and spray my oldest in the head when he went to shower.  But he woke up a little late so my husband told him he could skip it.  Argh!  I did get them with the wadded up socks in their shoes and the koolaid in the sink faucet though.  Mmmmm, grape-mint toothpaste...

The most elaborate prank I have this year was one that Alana actually came up with for her son's Wacky Wednesday day at his preschool: sandwich cupcakes.  It is actually a very simple prank but for my kids it required a pretty elaborate ruse.  They are veterans of April Fool's Day jokes (and they are not in preschool anymore), food gags in particular.  We've done meatloaf cupcakes with mashed potato frosting, toasted pound cake grilled cheese sandwiches, banana pudding & marshmallow fluff fried eggs...now they can spot a food gag a mile away.   I knew it wasn't going to be easy to get them.  So yesterday I bought cake mix and butter and told them I was baking cupcakes for my birthday blog entry.  I even let them lick the beaters from the buttercream frosting just so they would know that the cupcakes were the real deal.  Once the cupcakes were baked, frosted and sprinkled I sent the boys to bed and told them I would pack one in their lunches.  I know that baking and decorating 24 cupcakes might seem like a lot of work for a simple prank but the set up is just as important as the trick itself (plus, as you can see, I didn't go all out on the decorating...)  This is a real cupcake:

After the boys were safely tucked away in bed I made the fakies.  Turkey, bread and lots of pink cream cheese.  Only the sprinkles are real.  I do think this prank challenges the nothing mean rule but I am calling it fair since there are 24 real cupcakes waiting for them after school.  Mmm, turkey, cream cheese and whole wheat bread.  Just what they were looking forward to...

Happy Easter! What?

I SAID, "HAPPY EASTER!" 

Ok, just one more interruption before we get back to the simple fixes.  It's spring!  Well, tomorrow will be anyway.  And that means Easter is just around the corner.  If you were with me last year then these perpetual chocolate bunnies will look familiar.  But since last year the boys were, um, less than impressed with my clever faux chocolate, this year I have made them for y'all instead!  Now they are available for you to have your very own!  That is unless you'd rather have a roa-err, palmetto bug for your easter basket? 

Shameless, I know, but if I don't plug myself then who will?

Oh no! I forgot to cover the sugar bowl last night...

Ug.  And now the gnomes are everywhere!  That is just not a good way to start the morning.  Once they find a food source, these guys are impossible to get rid of!

Grrr.  Now I'm going to have to dump all of that sugar and I just filled the bowl!

Looks like it's time to put on my exterminator cap and get busy.  Someone's gotta do it.  May as well be me...

Do you know what happens when you live too close to the South Carolina border?

Wait, I should back up a bit.  Rewind to New Years 1999.  The new millenium.  We were hosting a party (because there was no way we were getting a sitter that night!)  Kevin, my husband, had decided that we needed to have our very own east-coast-west New York-style ball drop.  He bought a large, but reasonable, paper lantern from Cost Plus (World Market), covered it in spray adhesive and tinfoil and spent the greater part of the day fanatically poking tiny white christmas lights through the layers (he was a little Jack Nicolson-esque in his dirty white T-shirt...I won't pretend I wasn't scared of him that day...)  He and my BIL took a double-length pool skimmmer pole and stuck it into a cement patio umbrella stand to serve as the ball stand.  They rigged the ball and cords up through the giant oak tree in the front yard and at midnight we all counted down while they lowered the ball in the front yard.  It was the apex of an already awesome party.  Little did any of us know, though, that this was the beginning of an obsession...since that night the balls have gotten bigger, the heights higher and with our move to The South about 6 years ago, have involved fireworks.

Ok, back to 2008. 

About 3 days before our 8th annual New Year's Eve party (we have skipped a year or two) I woke up to this scene in the backyard...do you see Mario-the-tree-climber up there?  40 feet up into a tall pine?  Well, we've had a few err, premature ball drops in the past so this year Kevin decided on permanent rigging. 

We tried to explain to Mario what the rigging was all about but he didn't really understand.  Until he saw the ball hanging in the garage.  Then he just laughed and said, "Ahhhh, piñata."

Kevin had been planning the 8th annual ball for several weeks before the party and took over the garage with the boys.  The 2008 ball was the biggest yet.  6 feet in diameter, made of paper mache and wrapped in hundreds of tiny white lights.  And, after a quick trip to South Carolina, it was also wrapped in more explosives then would ever be considered...smart.  This is what happens, by the way, when you live too close to the border.  They strapped a coil of 1000 firecrackers, bandolero-style, around the ball and added a four foot long tail of Picolo Petes... and yes, that's a lighter in his hand...

Finally, the 8th Annual Garretts Drop-the-Ball (again) New Years Eve party, a house and yard full of people and several lighters at the ready...it was a spectacular sight for sure.  Once the 3-and-a-half minute explosion was over, we had all digits intact and no fires!  Bonus!  And then Kevin asked me with a big proud smile, "So, did I make your blog yet?"  

Happy New Year to you all!

Have I mentioned my niece's initials?

No?  Well.  Here they are.  For real.  I decided this year I should start having a little fun with this.  I mean, the little old ladies won't even get it so who am I really going to offend?  I might catch a few people off guard...but that's funny!  Right?

I also made this hat for her.  Could you die?  I came *this* close to asking Alana to open it early because I just couldn't wait to see it on...unfortunately Willa has the GIANT Reynolds noggin and the hat didn't even come close to fitting.  Soooo, I guess I'll be making another one...

Shhhh..be very, very quiet..

...we're hunting Christmas trees...  Of course, here on the coast of North Carolina, tree hunting is a little anti-climactic.  It consists of driving to the Little League Charity Tree-Lot-in-the-Park to pick one from their (lovely) collection of pre-hunted and pre-chopped trees.  But they have a very cool system where they stick the trees into short lengths of PVC stuck into the ground all over the park just like a real forest.  So it's kind of like donning our boots and winter gear and driving to the mountains and trudging through the cold and snow in search of the perfect tree to saw down by hand and triumphantly carry back to the car and tie to the roof for the long ride home in the warmth with thermoses of hot cocoa...except for the boots, gear, hiking, sawing, cold, snow, hills, cocoa and mountains part.  We do tie the tree to the roof of the car though... Well, we will make up for the lack of hills and snow and hot cocoa and character-building with the forecast for tomorrow: a lovely 70 degrees.  We'll have to pop on our flip flops and take a walk on the beach instead. 

These are three of my favorite ornaments and again I did not make them (some craft blog this is, right?!)  They were a gift from a friend and I love them.  I keep them out year round hanging on my peg board.  Maybe this year I will attempt to make a few as gifts.  Every year I think I will and every year Christmas comes faster than the year before...

The Pearl is in the River...

Ok, before you get too excited I have to admit that I did not make these ornaments.  But aren't they adorable?  The duck is my favorite (today).  They are from an awesome shop in NYC called Pearl River Trading Company.  I was thinking they would be really easy to reproduce and they would look really cute in felt with a little embroidery.  Maybe as gift toppers?  Personalized teacher gifts?  Christmas diorama?  An adorable reindeer garland to rival the easter eggs?  I'll keep y'all posted...

sweat.er, n. a garment worn by a child when the mother is chilly.

“The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.” - Rajneesh

...to all of the wonderful, beautiful mothers that I am lucky to have in my life, especially Mom, Sue, Alana and Sophie (and Mama but don't tell her I included her) the happiest of Mother's Days!  I love you all.

And the Easter, err, Spring fun continues...

Ok, so I know Easter is over but it's still spring, right?  I have a few more photos to share of the fun!  One is my egg garland that I love so much.  It is an old project I made from Martha Stewart Living (circa 2000?) that gives me the inspiration to decorate every year.  It is simply blown-eggs-on-a-string (*shakes head*  that Martha... *hearty chuckle*  ...what will she think of next?)  One tip though, dye the eggs BEFORE you blow them.  Otherwise they float.  And it's really annoying to dye floating eggs.

And here, the perpetual Chocolate bunnies!  I love how these turned out.  My boys are getting a little old for stuffed animals (and egg hunts when you really think about it...) but I can't stand a Bunny-less Easter basket!  So this was my solution.  The boys don't think they are as cute as I think they are  (Did you like the bunnies?!  See?!  Milk chocolate and dark chocolate!  Look at the eyes!  They're like the candy ones!  Don't they look like real chocolate bunnies?!) but they did a good job humoring me, "Yeah, Mom, these are great!  Did you make them?  Wow!"  *toss aside for real chocolate bunny*

My weebles got a little playful Easter morning during the egg hunt.  Apparently they'd rather run around and chase each other than hide quietly like good eggs should.

Can you see the egg hiding in the camelias?  Oooo, you're good!  The boys have walked past it about 10 times now...

These delicious looking creations were an idea from Angry Chicken.  I actually gasped when I saw them on her blog and ran straight to the store (I mean, I sent my wonderful husband straight to the store...) for Shredded Wheat and Robin's Eggs.  As I was rifling through the ahem, "baking" cabinet looking for the chocolate chips I bumped into a bag of mini-marshmallows and had a mini-brilliant idea to try marshmallow nests as well.  I think they are even yummier than the chocolate ones but I would be voted off the island for that opinion (does anyone see a pattern here?)

We took the nests to the Grandparents house for Easter dinner and set them alongside each place setting on "Grandmother's China".  It was lovely.  Of course, Grandmother's China could make a pile of poo look lovely...which, come to think of it...