The fourth week of the year has passed and, as I imagine they say in Hollywood, Project 365 week 4 is “in the can”. This week, I had a too-many-photos problem. Despite a pretty quiet week, I took a lot of pictures I wanted to include in my album and once I had them in the slots I wasn’t left very many spaces to include the stories that I wanted to tell about them. I ended up hiding quite a bit of by jouraling as you’ll see down below.

I started out by typing the date on the intro card using my typewriter. I don’t have my typewriter out where I see it all the time because Augie tends to bang on it and jam the keys which bums me out. I have to remember to get it out and play with it more often.

Sunday’s photo is just a shot of Zach making breakfast eggs. I had two photos for Monday — one of a rainy walk home from school, the other is one Zach took of the boys and me building a birdhouse. Tuesday I was struck by how much cheese we had in our fridge (14 kinds! No exaggeration!) so I took a picture of our cheese drawer. Wednesday Augie and I went to a local preschool play place while Wyatt was visiting a friend’s house.

I included an insert for the kids’ homework again this week. Augie brought home a duck watercolor (top photo) and Wyatt had a nice piece about his Chinese zodiac sign.

Thursday’s photo shows my FitBit after I hit my goal of 10,000 steps for the day. I had a whole raft of photos for Friday — Korean dinner, cozy kids, and Augie dressing himself. And Saturday I wrote about our family outing (more below).

This was the page where I struggled to get everything I wanted to include into the page protector. Here’s how I solved that problem:

We went out for dinner at a Korean restaurant which was a risky proposition with two kids who don’t really like to try new food very much. The food was lovely though and the kids tried a ton of new things so I made a collage of photos and wrote a bit about their adventurous spirit in Photoshop Elements. After I printed it, I taped on a business card for the restaurant because it was pretty. (Shown in the photo of the page up above.)

I also wanted to talk a bit about how Augie has started dressing himself. I loved the photo with his Perry the Platypus booty showing as he pulls his pants on, so I taped it to a folded journaling card and wrote the story out around it. I love how easy it is to capture these small milestones with this project that might otherwise be overlooked. Since Augie was born, I haven’t had much time to do the big scrapbook pages I used to do, but my 365 projects capture his day to day life pretty well.

I did another bigger card to talk about our Saturday hike and include an extra photo of Wyatt. I’d also like to note that despite living in the SF Bay Area for 20+ years, I still managed to misspell “San Francisco” the first time I wrote it. Yeah.

Questions about this project? Read my introductory post here. I am putting my album together using Becky Higgins Project Life divided page protectors, the Project Life Clementine Core Kit, and lots of products from my scrapbook stash.

Three weeks in and I’m still right on track with my photo a day project for this year! So far I’ve easily been taking photos ever day and often I’m taking several pictures that I want to include in my album.  I’m also managing to keep up with the album about which I am pleased as punch. Here’s what I put together for last week:

On Sunday, I photographed my grocery cart and then listed out everything in it that I could see or remember. Monday’s photo shows the supplies for a craft project that the boys and I put together from one our our Kiwi Crate kits. (Kiwi Crate ships out a monthly kit with all the supplies for two kids’ craft projects in it. I bought a 3 month membership for half off on Plum District last month and so far we really like it.) I had two items for Tuesday: a photo of my new laptop and a screen shot of some texts that I sent Zach when we ran out of Pull-ups at bedtime. Calamity! On Wednesday I photographed our pizza dinner and used the photo to symbolize how sick we all were.

I took a bunch of Instagram photos on Thursday, so I put together a little collage of some of my favorites. I also pulled one of Wyatt posing as Draco Malfoy out for a little bit of extra attention. Friday’s photo was of Augie at the grocery store with me. Saturday was a picture of our traditional pancake breakfast. I took a lot of pictures of food this week!

I did so much journaling right on my photos this week that I had several spare slots open in the middle section. I asked the boys to help me fill them and they were happy to pitch in. Augie drew me a picture of a rocket ship and Wyatt wrote a bit about a video game he’s been playing called Terraria. I also loved an idea that Cathy Zielske posted on Twitter to document the books our family is reading at the moment, so I included that too. I’m going to try to do that a few times this year, I think!

Questions about this project? Read my introductory post here. I am putting my album together using Becky Higgins Project Life divided page protectors, the Project Life Clementine Core Kit, and lots of products from my scrapbook stash.

Does it feel like it’s been all scrapbooking all the time around here? It feels that way to me — just a little bit — but I’ve been on a roll keeping up with my projects, so I’m just going to go with it!

I’ve finished up the second week of my 2012 project 365 album, so it’s time to share:

We started off our week on Sunday with an epic 4 mile hike up in the Berkeley hills. (Epic when you consider that the three year old member of our group walked the whole way.) Monday is Augie’s day off preschool so we went to IKEA for lunch. It is also garbage day, so I took a picture of Wyatt hauling in the recycling bin. Tuesday I took a photo of myself in a full-length mirror to document my daily uniform. The alphabet card was cut from this Jillibean Soup paper and it fits perfectly in the Project Life page protectors I’m using for this album.

I included another 8.5 x 11 insert this week. One side held a piece of art work that Augie made at school and the other side held the agenda from this month’s PTA meeting with my notes scribbled all over it. I maintain the website and send out the weekly email newsletter for the PTA so I do a little bit of volunteer work just about every week.

I also included a photo of Augie playing on the computer at the library for Tuesday. Wednesday’s photo was taken with my new Christmas toy: a  Fuji Instax Mini camera. The little Polaroid-type photos are sized just right for the 3 x 4 pockets in the page protectors and I think they’ll be a fun addition to this album. This particular photo was of Wyatt and his friend who came over for a play date. Thursday I got a haircut, so I snapped a picture of myself in the mirror with my phone before my hairdresser got to work. Friday’s photo documents our excellent dental hygiene practices. And Saturday poor little Augie was sick with a cold and a fever so I wrote out a list documenting what that is like right now. Finally, I had to include a photo of Saturday’s delicious leftover pizza breakfast!

What did you do last week?

Questions about this project? Read my introductory post here. I am putting my album together using Becky Higgins Project Life divided page protectors, the Project Life Clementine Core Kit, and lots of products from my scrapbook stash.

The big day has come and gone and the Copley family had a lovely holiday! Here are some glimpses of our celebrations:

We hosted my husband’s family for a very laid back Christmas eve celebration. We had a very simple menu of chicken noodle soup and snacks so I decided to make it a little more festive with a crudite Christmas tree.  (I was inspired by this single serving tree on Little Nummies.)

I made flannel pajama pants for the boys and my niece and they were all so excited to put them on. I made them without a pattern using this tutorial and it was very easy.

Before we went to bed, Zach and I put packing tape across the door to the living room with the message, “DO NOT ENTER! DO NOT CROSS! WAKE UP MOM & DAD! We want to open presents too!” I got the idea from a friend who did the same and posted it on Facebook and we laughed and laughed about it as we went to sleep.

When I woke up in the morning, the first thing I heard were tiny little wimpering cries and then Augie ran into our bedroom crying.  “There’s a sign that says we can’t go into our house, Mama! Santa says we can’t get our presents!”

Oops.

Our tree looked good though!

Augie was thrilled with his big gift from Santa. “I got a TANGERINE! For jumping!”

Stockings.

I got an awesome Lego set!

And finally, the aftermath of the gift opening frenzy!

I didn’t take any more pictures for the rest of the day, and it was nice to hang up the camera and just enjoy our kids and the rest of the family.

How has your Christmas or Hanukkah been?  I hope it has been full of happiness, peace, love and light!

We’ve been having a pretty great December so far. Somehow we’ve managed to pack a bunch of fun stuff in while also keeping it pretty low-key. I’m not sure how things are working out like that, but I’ll take it. A lot of the stuff we’ve been doing are activities from the advent calendar but it’s been spread out with just a little bit happening each day, which is nice.

I also bought a new Hipstapack (the Foodie SnapPak) for the Hipstamatic app on my phone and I finally took 5 minutes to get my Instagram account set up (my user name is wendolonia if you want to follow me). So now I’m in another grungy photo phase and have been taking tons of pictures with my phone instead of the good camera. Be forewarned.

So here are a few of the things we’ve been up to:

Snowman Pancakes! I saw this idea from A Little Loveliness on Pinterest a few weeks ago and couldn’t wait to make them for the kids. That jaunty bacon scarf! It kills me every time I look at it. So last Saturday I decided to surprise the kids with these pancakes. After I started making the pancakes, they turned into terrible little brats — bickering, hitting each other, screaming, getting into things they’re not supposed to touch, making enormous messes — and they did not deserve cute snowman pancakes, but I wanted to make them so I plowed ahead. When I served breakfast their response was underwhelming. One complained that his brother’s piece of bacon was bigger and whined because he doesn’t like chocolate chips. The other only ate his chocolate chips and bacon and threw his marshmallows on the floor. I found myself hissing, “Eat your snowman pancakes!” through clenched teeth.

Yay. Fun breakfast treat.

Our Christmas tree has been a much bigger success. We bought a too big tree from our local grocery store and had a bit of trouble getting it set up in the stand so it didn’t fall over. We also had to remove multiple pieces of furniture from our teeny, tiny living room to get it to fit.

But the kids were so excited about it and were super enthusiastic about decorating it. They even agreed to pose for a nice photo in front of the tree!

Last year Santa put these crazy glasses that make the lights look like cool shapesin our stockings and we have all been loving them. The boys and I spent over an hour trading glasses, doubling them up and running around the house looking at all our lights with them. I put the Santa pair over the lens of my camera and got a pretty good representation of what you see.

The fireworks pair was even more spectacular! We’ve decided we need to bring them along the next time we drive around looking at holiday light displays.

I’ve been drinking my tea out of our Santa mugs every morning, which just makes me happy.

Augie and I also spent an afternoon cutting snowflakes out of paper. He’s a talented three-year-old, don’t you think?

OK, OK — those are mine. Just curiously, would anyone be interested in a snowflake cutting tutorial? There are a lot out there already, so I’m not sure the world needs another.

On Monday, I took the boys to a favorite bakery after school for a surprise cookie and hot chocolate date. Augie was super cranky about the whole thing.

But Wyatt was into it and managed to turn Augie’s mood around. I love these occasional instances of fantastic-ness in their relationship. They’re relationship is a see-saw and it feels like it can go either way at any moment.

We made our favorite cream cheese spritz cookies. The boys helped at all stages which was great fun though the sprinkle stage got a little out of hand at one point. I’m still finding green sugar in various nooks and crannies of our kitchen days later.

And yesterday we took a little time to make some cards for our friends who moved away last summer. I just plopped some stickers, scissors and Christmas-themed paper on the table and let them go at it. The kids were unusually excited to craft and their cards were terrific and funny and creative.

And while they worked on their projects, I made this scrapbook page using the photos you see in this post!

What have you been doing this December?

One of the activities I put on our advent list this year was an idea that came from Family Fun magazine: create a snowscape with shaving cream. My kids had no idea what that meant when they pulled the little card out of the box but they were pretty excited once they figured it out.

I put out a cookie sheet for each kid, gave them each a selection of Imaginext guys, and made them take off their shirts. (That last one was a good move.) Then I sprayed a pretty good size layer of cheap shaving cream all over Augie’s tray. Once the kids saw what I was doing, they each wanted a turn with the can.

The idea with the toys was that they could make the guys ice skate, or sled or just generally play in the snow.

I’d even taken extra care to pull a Bat-snowmobile out of the toy box…

And penguins! But neither of the kids ended up using the shaving cream as snow.

It was interesting to watch them because I could tell they knew this was supposed to be fun, but they were also kind of baffled about what they should do.

And at first, they did not like getting the shaving cream on their hands. Wyatt probably got up to wash his hands three times in the first five minutes. Augie just wiped them on his tummy which he didn’t mind for some reason. I guess one’s feelings about shaving cream touching them aren’t always logical.

I gave them some rubber spatulas to play with and that’s what got the ball rolling. They swiped and wiped and squooshed the cream up into big mountains. They buried their toys and dug them out again.

And pretty soon they overcame their distaste for having shaving cream on their hands!

They were busy with this for about an hour or so but I’m not going to lie — clean-up was a total pain. Shaving cream sticks to everything and doesn’t easily rinse out of the tiny nooks and crannies on little toys. And despite the cookie sheets, quite a bit of the cream made it onto the table. There was a sizeable amount on tummies and jeans too. I let Augie wash the toys for a bit which he just thought of as a new variation on the game and Wyatt only complained a little about wiping the table off four times. So despite the hefty clean-up time we all thought this was a big, fun success!

Does your family play with shaving cream? Any tips to minimize the mess?

A few weeks ago, I attended an event at my local Safeway store centered on winter health and wellness. Along with a few other bloggers, I walked the aisles of Safeway with a pharmacist and a registered dietician who offered us tips on how to avoid catching winter colds and flu and how to recover more quickly when we did get sick. Some of the information they provided us with was common sense — wash your hands frequently, sneeze into you elbow so you’re less likely to spread germs, stay hydrated — but there were quite a few gems that I hadn’t heard before tucked into the presentations. Here are some of the things I learned:

• Vitamin D! We are big fans of vitamin D in this house. I’m not a supplement kind of gal, but this is the one exception I make. Since my husband and I started taking vitamin D regularly, we have barely been sick. In addition to supplements, most dairy products are fortified with it.
• Throw used tissues away immediately. OK, I know this one is probably a no-brainer to most of you, but this something I never thought about much. When I’m sick, I let used tissues pile up on the table next to me as I lay on the couch blowing my nose and then I throw them all away when I get up to get a drink or something. Even worse, when we’re out and about and I wipe one of my kids’ noses, I often stuff the tissue in my purse until I can find a trash can. I inevitably forget them there and then they roll around in my purse rubbing germs all over my wallet, my phone, my pens — everything! Gross! No more though — those babies are going right into the trash from now on!
• Stay hydrated when you’re sick. We all know we’re supposed to stay hydrated, but I never knew exactly why. Aside from the general health benefits of proper hydration, if you keep your liquids up it can help to thin mucus which in turn keeps you from getting too stuffed up and keeps coughing to a minimum.
• Ask your pharmacist questions! I’ve never hesitated to talk to my pharmacist when I’ve had questions about prescription medications, but it never occurred to me to ask her about over-the-counter products. I was truly shocked when Dr. Vatanka (the pharmacist giving us the tour) told us that more than half of her time with customers is spent answering questions about over-the-counter medications. Since so many products are designed to treat multiple symptoms — fever, cough and stuffiness, for example — she recommended that we check in with our pharmacists when taking multiple OTC medicines to make sure that there won’t be some sort of harmful drug interaction. I will absolutely be doing this from now on.

On to the giveaway!

Safeway has generously donated a $50 gift card to one Wendolonia reader! Woo hoo! This gift card can be used at: Safeway, Vons, Dominick’s, Genuardi’s, Randalls, Tom Thumb, Pavilions, and Carr’s stores.

To enter:

• Leave a comment on this post offering up your best tip for avoiding or dealing with winter cold and flu. I’ll close comments on Friday, December 2, 11:00 am PST and randomly select a winner shortly thereafter. If you win and you haven’t included your email address along with your comment another entry will be selected, so be sure to enter one on the form. The winner must contact me within 48 hours of being notified or another winner will be selected.
• Sorry, this giveaway is limited to winners with U.S. addresses only.
• I’m only counting comments as entries, but if you wanted to follow me on Twitter or Facebook I would think you were extra cool.
• I hope you win!

Disclosure: I received a Safeway gift card and a grocery gift bag from Safeway in exchange for hosting this giveaway. I donated all of the shelf stable groceries to a local food bank, but we ate the perishable items. Have you donated to a food bank this year? I hope you’ll consider it!

A couple of weeks ago, the Halloween decorations started to come out in our neighborhood. This is our first Halloween in this house, so I wasn’t sure what to expect but it became apparent pretty quickly that the bar is pretty high — at least in the little cluster of houses we live in. At our old place, most people on our block put a pumpkin on their porches, but that was about it. Now we live among some decorators! They’re not converting their front yards to full-on haunted houses or anything too over-the-top but they are definitely having a little fun. Our neighbors to the left, have a carefully selected assortment of fall foliage, pumpkins and a decorative flag, while the neighbors to the right are super spooky with skeletons, gravestones and a giant spider climbing up the side of their house.

I decided we’d better step it up!

Lucky for me, Augie has started bringing Halloween art projects home from preschool: a ghost windsock, a giant pumpkin and a smaller, freaky pumpkin man.

Wyatt decided that Augie’s art wasn’t scary enough, so he made a series of signs and hung them up. One of my favorites was this sign alerting visitors to the lava pit and the ghosts and zombies with blasters that are lurking behind our front door.

I also love this “Aliens!” sign. How cool is that cow getting sucked up into the flying saucer.

My contribution was a selection of pumpkins for the steps. This has provided me with endless amusement because the boys have very specific opinions about how they should be arranged.

Augie prefers a symmetrical arrangement with all the big pumpkins on one side and the little pumpkins on the other.

On the other hand, Wyatt likes them to be evenly mixed with the big and little pumpkins zig-zagging back and forth.

Every day when the kids come home from school (at different times) they look at the pumpkins, throw up their hands in exasperation and undo what the other brother did when they weren’t looking. Wyatt is always baffled, putting his hands on his hips, shaking his head and asking “How did these get messed up? I just fixed them yesterday!” While Augie is enraged, “No! No! No! Big punkins on dis side!” I finally explained to each of them what’s going on and now they are having good fun with it, switching them back and forth when the other has his back turned.

How are you decorating for Halloween? Do you go spooky, Martha Stewart-y, or do you focus on kids art like we do?

In the last fews months, our family has picked up two new hobbies: geocaching and letterboxing! Wyatt and I tried letterboxing once a few years ago and though we had fun we didn’t manage to make it a habit. I was determined to try it again this summer as part of our summer fun list. While I was getting my act together to go on a letterboxing excursion, some good friends of ours started geocaching and their enthusiasm inspired us to try that too. While these two activities are similar — hunting for boxes hidden around our community — there are a couple of small differences.

Geocaching

Geocaching seems to be the more common of the two hobbies. To get started, we joined an online geocaching community and Zach and I each bought geocaching apps for our phones. We were reluctant to pay for the apps at first because they were priced fairly high for phone apps, but when we realized that the cost for both of them was less than what we’d pay to take our whole family to the movies, we decided it was well worth the money. Fun, active, whole-family activity that we can do for years vs. one movie and junky food? Sold!

Geocaches range dramatically in size from micro-caches the size of a film canister, to huge caches that hold books and other large objects. Most of the ones we’ve found are about the size of a food storage container. To find a cache we log into the the geocaching website and look for caches in our neighborhood or an area we would like to explore. Or if we are already out and about, we look for something nearby using our phones. There are geocaches just about everywhere in the world and one thing we are really excited to try is looking for caches when we travel.

Usually the listing for the cache will get us pretty close to the cache site by specifying a park or an intersection or something along those lines. Once we arrive at the big landmark, we pull out our phones and start trying to pinpoint the location of the box using the GPS and compasses in the geocaching apps. So far I’m not particularly thrilled with the accuracy of the GPS on my phone. It will get me to the general vicinity of the cache but when we are within a few feet it goes all wonky and it’s pretty much useless. I’ve also had problems with the phone’s connectivity cutting out because of dense trees or bad signals. When that happens it’s almost impossible to find a cache without some pretty good clues. If we keep going with this I think we’re probably going to invest in a dedicated handheld GPS unit.

While you’re looking for the cache, you’re supposed to play it cool so that people who aren’t in on the secret don’t find the cache and remove it or damage it. I am really bad at this! I start off all sly, but after about five minutes of looking I get distracted and start shouting, “Did you find it? ANY LUCK?” to my companions. Even Wyatt and Augie are more subtle than I am!

When you find a cache, it has a log book for you to sign and it often has a few trinkets inside too. If you take something out of the cache it’s good form to put something in to replace it. This is probably the kids’ favorite part.

My favorite part is all of the cool places we visit when we’re geocaching. Since we’ve started we’ve found areas of our neighborhood we didn’t know about. For example there was a cache very close to this neat rope swing high up on a hill with amazing views of the San Francisco Bay and the hills of the east bay.

Letterboxing

Letterboxing is similar to geocaching in that you search for boxes, but the approach is pretty different. Again, you look up boxes to find on a website — the two main ones are atlasquest.com and letterboxing.org — but instead of using technology to find the boxes, you follow clues of the sort that you’d find on a treasure map or in an adventure comic. Stuff like: “Walk to the end of the fence and look in the hollow of the ivy covered tree.”

I like that adventuring quality, but the coolest thing about letterboxing is the rubber stamps! Each letterbox has its own stamp and each letterboxer or letterboxing team has a signature stamp as well. Once you find the box there is a little booklet inside along with the box’s stamp. You stamp the letterbox stamp in your notebook and write down any notes about your experience. Then you stamp your signature stamp in the booklet in the box. A lot of people use purchased rubber stamps, but a fun part of the hobby is that most of the stamps are hand-carved.

When my parents were visiting us this summer, my dad and I were talking about letterboxing and he has since taken it up with great enthusiasm.  A few weeks ago, he offered to carve a stamp for each member of our family since we hadn’t gotten around to making or purchasing stamps for ourselves. I was thrilled to take him up on the offer because as you can see by looking at our stamps (pictured above), my dad kicks butt at this sort of thing.  They are related to our trail names which are:

• Bentolonia (me) — the stamp is based on one of my all time favorite bento boxes
• Augie Bear (Augie) — our nickname for Augie
• MegaMegaCraft (Wyatt) — this is related to a game he likes to play called Minecraft
• Mr. Salad (Zach) — Zach really likes salad

I really like that my dad carved these for us, because we think of him every time we stamp them and it’s kind of like he’s right there letterboxing with us. As a crafty lady I feel a little bit dumb because I didn’t carve them myself, but I’m looking forward to carving some of my own when we get to the point where we start planting boxes.

Again, exploring cool spots is a big part of the fun. For example, we found this “fairy tunnel” (Wyatt’s description) while looking for a box. The branches across the path were low enough that Wyatt could jump up and swing on them. We’ve also been enjoying the boxes that some friends of ours have planted.

One downside of both letterboxing and geocaching is that we don’t always find what we’re looking for. We currently find about half of the boxes we set out to find. This is frustrating for all of us, but I do try to remind myself (and the kids) that most of the adventure is in the search.

What about you? Have you tried geocaching or letterboxing?

One of the “any time” activities on our summer fun list is writing letters. I added this one to the list for a few reasons. First off, I want Wyatt to keep his writing skills up over the school break. Also, one of my goals for the year is to send people letters through the post more frequently and when the kids sit down to write a letter, I’m more likely to do so too. And I’m always looking for more ways to help my kids connect to friends and family who are far away.

I’ll admit it — this one doesn’t always register as “fun” when I suggest it to the kids. They’re a shrewd pair and they see right through my clumsy machinations but I’ve slowly been making headway with the idea.

Unfortunately, the main thing that has inspired Wyatt to write is that his best buddy moved away. He has been writing notes and drawing pictures and stuffing them into envelopes every couple of days. Mostly, he has been writing his letters in secret which I think makes it more fun for him. Don’t you like having a secret with your best friend? I know I do.

When he does let me see what he’s writing, I keep my mouth shut about spelling (unless he asks, of course). Nothing like your mom marking up your letter with a red pen to kill all your fun.

When he sees Wyatt writing letters, Augie likes to join in too. His letter writing mostly consists of drawing on a piece of paper, adding stickers and scribbling “letters” and “numbers” on the page. When the letters are complete I help fold them and address the envelopes. Then the kids decorate the envelopes with more stickers and drawings.

Sometimes we write a lot of letters.

The real fun will come when people write back!

How about you? Do your kids write letters? Do you ever send snail mail to your friends and family?