Happy birthday to Wendolonia!
Happy birthday to Wendolonia!
Happy birthday dear bento/craft/parenting blooooooog!
Happy birthday to you!

Hooray! Wendolonia is five today! Five years ago I started this blog with three readers (Hi Zach! Hi Mom! Hi Dad!), not much to say and nary a bento box or silicone baking cup in sight. Today, Wendolonia has 659 blog posts, over 1000 bento box photos, and thousands of readers and friends!

I am so happy to be a part of this fantastic community and so very thankful for all of you — my bloggy friends who make Wendolonia such a fun place to hang out every day. I appreciate every single person who comments on posts, joins in on our Facebook conversations, emails me thoughtful letters, or pins photos to Pinterest. And I love all of you lurkers out there too!

Today, I’d like to thank everyone by giving away a few bento goodies! As much as I’d like to send a little gift to everyone, that would be a financial and logistical nightmare so I’m going to have to limit myself to four giveaways.  Take a look at the goodies I have selected for you:

First up is Bento Starter Pack #1! This box will include:

• 1 orange stacking bento box
• a package with star and heart shaped rice molds
• an orange bear bento belt
• 3 small wedge-shaped silicone cups
• a package of animal bento pics
• two larger silicon cups

Next, I have Bento Starter Pack #2. This box will contain:

• a bird-themed stacking bento box (I have had my box like this for several years and I pack Augie’s lunch in this about every other day)
• a package of colorful dot themed decorative picks
• a spherical rice ball mold
• animal faces cutters
• two large silicone cups
• 3 silicon bento box belts

I also have two smaller giveaways. Two people will each get either a large yellow or large orange silicone cup. These are one of my favorite bento supplies and they’re probably the item that I’m asked about most frequently. Until a few weeks ago I’d only ever seen one of them once at a Daiso store but then when I was shopping for this giveaway I found a rack of them and stocked up. These are perfectly sized to divide the large compartment of the popular Easy Lunchbox or other large food storage containers. You can see my green and blue ones in action on the Easy Lunchbox page of the Bento Box Gallery.

How to Enter:

Entering this giveaway is easy as pie! Leave a comment below telling me something you’d like to see more of on Wendolonia in the next five years. If you can’t think of something just say anything you want.

There’s no need to follow me on Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or whatever, but I’d sure appreciate that if you wanted to. I’ll close comments Friday night (March 16, 2012) at 9:00 pm and select 4 random winners shortly thereafter. Sorry, but I’m only able to ship to U.S. addresses. Winners will have 48 hours after I notify them via email to respond with their mailing address. If I don’t hear from you an alternate winner will be selected, so be sure to leave your email address and check your email.

I hope YOU win! Thank you so much for reading Wendolonia and being a part of my life!

February has come to a close, the MapMyFitness Quaker Challenge is wrapping up and I’m happy to report that I easily met my goal of completing 15 workouts this month! Woooo!

I had a few set-backs, of course, because these sorts of things never seem to go smoothly. I got sick for a few days and I had a big work project too, so I slacked off with the exercise a bit during those periods, but I made up for it during the rest of the month.

As I expected, I mostly walked. More than 2/3′s of my work-outs were walks which is my favorite way to exercise. I pop in my headphones, start up a podcast and go, go, go. It can be hard for me to get a real walk in when the kids are with me because they can’t keep up a good pace with me (Augie) and they also get bored and start complaining after awhile (Wyatt) so I’ve begun to sacrifice some of my precious, precious school/preschool time to walking. The area right around our house is very flat, so in the interest of saving time and hitting some good butt-buster hills I’ve started taking my walks right after I drop Augie off at preschool. It’s nice to get going early in the day and I also like logging a good chunk of my daily exercise goal before I sit down to work.

When the kids are with me, I’ve got a couple of strategies. On Mondays when Augie is home from preschool, I like to get out of the house and do something with him so lately we’ve been going on a hikes down by the bay. It’s pretty and there are lots of interesting things to look at so this is a fun treat for both of us. Check out this view:

Nice, huh? We also are lucky to live in a walkable neighborhood so we’ll often run errands on foot. And finally, when I take the boys to the playground, I like to do laps around the play structure while they get their ya-yas out. It doesn’t seem like a lot of activity to me while I’m doing it, but I keep track of how far I walk using my Fitbit and I’ve learned I can walk as far as a mile and a half doing this! Much better than the sitting around I used to do when visiting the playground.

One of the activities I said I hoped to do in my original post about the challenge was go swimming at our new neighborhood pool. I did manage to do this once, but the pool opened later in the month than I’d originally thought, so I only went the one time. I’m hoping to make this at least a weekly activity going forward though.

Finally, last week I managed to get my bike fixed up and ready to ride. I took it out for the first time yesterday, but I only rode for 5 minutes before I got super cold, so I turned around and came home. I recognize that a 10 minute bike ride is pretty pathetic, but last year I rode my bike zero minutes, so I’ve decided this little smidge of a ride counts as one of my work-outs.

What are my big takeaways from all of this? Well, I’ll start by saying that I haven’t turned into any kind of exercise nut — not by a long shot. But I have found a few things I enjoy doing and a few ways to get them done even with my kids in tow. I also think that I’m at a point where I’ve formed a little bit of an exercise habit. I’ve noticed that if I don’t take my morning walk I start getting crabby in the afternoons so that’s a motivator to get out and get moving. I definitely think I’m going to keep this up!

February is National Heart Health month. Even if it’s only 5 more minutes a day, what extra step will you take to stay fit?

For your chance to win $750 complete these two steps:

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Quaker Oats Company. The opinions and text are all mine. Official Sweepstakes Rules.

I have a serious case of blogger’s butt.

In the last few years, I’ve spent too much time sitting in front of a computer typing, and not enough time moving. And now I have the big booty to show for it.

It’s not like my butt was small before, but at least it was smaller. The last time I wore a pedometer, I was chasing a toddler all the time and I was easily logging 12000 steps a day. But as my youngest has settled down I’m lucky if I get 5000 steps in a typical day.  I’ve become much more sedentary and I’ve decided it’s time for a change.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to join the Quaker Heart Health Challenge and I immediately accepted. As part of the challenge I’m pledging to exercise 15 times in the month of February. What am I planning to do for that exercise? Oh, I’m so glad you asked!

1. Walk. I’m going to walk, walk, and walk and then I’m going to walk some more. My husband gave me a Fitbit (a kind of fancy pedometer) at the beginning of January and now I’m obsessed with hitting 10,000 steps per day. I’m hoping to take daily walks and a big family hike every weekend this month, but I’m also planning to get more steps in by changing my habits too. I’ll take the long route when I pick Wyatt up from school. I’ll do laps around the play structure when I take Augie to the park. And I’m going to become one of those annoying people who rock back and forth when they’re waiting in line at the grocery store. Oh, yes I am!

2. Dance. I bought Just Dance 3 for our Wii at Christmas-time and I’m going to rock out at least once per week. I’m already up to 4 stars on “California Girls”. Woooo!

3. Bike. A friend of mine gave me one of her unused bikes a few months ago and I still haven’t used it. (Sorry, Heather — I really do appreciate it.) The problem is that the seat is too high and I can’t get the screw thingy loose to adjust it. I’m vowing to corner my husband and make him help me with it so I can ride it at least a few times this month.

4. Swim. Our neighborhood pool has been closed for three years while it was being torn down and rebuilt and I’m so excited that the beautiful new pool is re-opening later this month. Since it’s just four blocks away, I’m looking forward to heading over (on foot of course!) and swimming laps.

I’d love it if you would join the Quaker Heart Health Challenge with me. The more the merrier, right? If you join, be sure to friend me! My username is “wendycopley”.

Joining the Quaker Heart Health Challenge is my first step towards becoming a healthier me. Now I’m curious to know, what motivates you to stay healthy?

For your chance to win $750 complete these two steps:

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Quaker Oats Company. The opinions and text are all mine.

Official Sweepstakes Rules.

Time for the January update on my 40th year project. Woo hoo!

This month I started digging into the box of super-special-save-forever treasures that I packed up and sent to California when I helped my parents move out of my childhood home several years ago. Though my parents had made changes to my room in the 15 years since I moved out to attend college, the closet and my huge desk were still packed with my stuff. Toys, papers, notebooks, tchotchkes  – you name it, I saved it. I did my best to clear everything out because I didn’t want to saddle my parents or myself with all my junk so the stuff that went into the box is the creme de la creme. Going through this box is very intense for me because literally every piece of paper in it has some kind of significance in my life. So far I’ve only managed to excavate 2 inches into it! You’ll see a lot more of these historical documents as I add them into my album in the coming months.

Let’s take a look at what I put together:

This page shows:

• I little bit about my love for tea. I really like tea.
• A photo and a smidge about my life from my freshman year of college.
• I great quote from Ira Glass about mastering creative pursuits. These are words I revisit frequently. (Found on Pinterest.)
• Rob Lowe, my teenage crush. I totally forgot how much I loved Rob Lowe until I found the photo of my bedroom in the lower left corner of this page and saw all the posters of him on the walls. He does nothing for me now, though. Isn’t that weird?
• A sparkly photo of myself I took using Incredibooth.
• A photo of my room from when I was in 9th grade. It was definitely NOT this clean normally. I think I took the photo specifically because it was so tidy.

I also included a going away card that my co-workers made me when I left my first post-college job in an 8.5 x 11 page protector. Lots of funny messages with inside jokes inside there.

The back of that page protector has a layout I made after asking Wyatt and Augie a bunch of questions about me. Their answers cracked me up and I realized they think my job is laundress. Nice.

The second side of this layout has:

• A picture of me with much longer hair than I have now.
• A bracelet that I found in the basement when we moved last year.
• My typical morning routine.
• A couple things about my love of books.
• A bit about my childhood relationship with NyQuil (Blech!) and the lengths I went to to avoid taking it.
• A picture of my awesome Sharp boom box.
• And a photo of me on my 21st birthday.

This next spread incorporates both the divided page protectors and a full sized 12×12 page.

The right side has:

• A photo of my goofing around in my first real grown-up lady apartment.
• A card that was thrown out into the audience when I went to a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in high school.
• A print-out of the box from my all time most favorite LEGO set.
• A note on my chances of surviving a zombie apocalypse. (Slim.)
• Stickers from my trip to Disney World when I was 8 that I never stuck onto anything. There’s a Minnie Mouse one behind the Mickey you see there, too.
• A photo of my Grandma Ruby and all her kids.
• And a picture of the first gingerbread house I ever made.

The opposite page holds a report card from 6th grade and my 7th grade ITBS test results.

The back side of that page holds a Mills College admissions office brochure about student life. My roommates and I were interviewed and photographed for the brochure.

And finally, the last page includes these little tidbits:

• A photo and ticket stub from a trip to Minnesota I took with my friend Gretchen for an Iowa football game.
• A photo and quote from Amy Poehler that I like.
• All you’ve ever wanted to know about my feelings for orange pop.
• My 7th grade class schedule.
• More about zombies!

And finally, in honor of the Martin Luther King holiday, I’ll leave you with an insipid poem I wrote in sixth grade that was inspired by his famous and much more eloquent speech:

A Dream by Wendy Thorpe

I have a dream!
I have a dream for peace on earth,
No nuclear bombs, and jobs for all.
I have a dream that Mr. Chauvinist and Ms. Prejudice are dead,
Laying in their coffins.
I have a dream of flowering shrubs.
Trees in blossom, and grass swaying in the breeze.
What I dream is a beautiful picture,
No hospitals, just health,
No poverty, just wealth.
I have a dream.

Flowering shrubs, ladies and gentlemen! Flowering shrubs.

I’m still working on my big 40th year album and it’s time to give you update #4! I’ve been having a ton of fun doing this project. I know I say that every time I give an update, but it’s true! I find memories are triggered by tiny little things — conversations with my kids, photos I find in boxes, random links on the internet. And approaching it one story at a time makes it feel manageable.

Here’s what I’ve been working on the past few weeks:

This page tells these stories:

• A photo of me from a few months ago
• A print-out of a Miss Piggy poster that I had hanging on the wall of my bedroom through most of elementary school (triggered, of course, by the new Muppet movie)
• A bit about my fairly unusual name
• A photo of my friends and me when we were on the high school track team
• A photo of me with my lovely cousin, Jessica
• My mom and dad
• The story of my love for Amelia Peabody books

The other side of the layout was filled with this stuff:

• A photo of me in front of one of the Great Pyramids. I accidentally wrote the journaling card that explains this photo in a vertical format when the photo slot was horizontal, but it was no biggie — I just slipped it in sideways. No stress.
• Next to that there’s a photo of me in the only suit I’ve ever owned.
• A postcard of my all time favorite kind of candy, only available in England
• A picture of my with my aunt and uncle
• A photo of me in LA taken the year after Zach and I got married.

This spread is a little different because I made a special 6×12 inch layout and stuck it in the middle. The left side shows:

• A photo of me from the years where I died my hair red all the time.
• One of me with my prom date
• A truly fantastic photo of my brother, cousin and me sledding. I’m making a horrible face and our winter clothes are of a beautiful early 80′s vintage.
• A photo I took with Cookie Monster and Elmo at BlogHer this year.

I had a few 5×7′s portraits from my bigger roles in high school plays that wouldn’t fit in the slots in the page protectors I’m using so I made this simple layout to include them and talk about my time doing drama as an extra-curricular activity. You can see the front and the back in the image above.

The other side of this page includes:

• A photo of me with memorable college friend — this was a little tag I made for a mini album that I never finished a few years ago.
• A list of things I’m thankful for. On Thanksgiving day I posted a sentence or two about things I was thankful for on Facebook every few hours. Afterwards I copied them all into photoshop and added in a few more to include in this book.
• A photo of me with a couple of friends I hung out with the summer between high school and college.
• A cute 10 year old photo of me and Zach
• A little bit about how I’m nosy and enjoy watching my neighbors. Judge me if you must, but I find people interesting!

This last layout is another one where I inserted a bigger item in a page protector.

The left side holds:

• A valentine Zach made me a few years ago
• My student ID from college
• A photo I found of the bulletin board in my bedroom that I took some time during my junior year of high school.
• A picture of the cook book bookshelf in our living room. I have a bit of a problem.
• A story about how I slept on a waterbed for my entire childhood.
• An Incredibooth photo I took last month.

I made the bulletin board and cook book journaling cards using Project Life Cobalt collection digital journaling cards. I bought the cards from the Clementine collection too, and I like those so much that I think I’m going to buy the paper version of the collection to use in this album. I think I’m going to do a Project 365 album again next year after taking a break in 2011, so I’ll use them in that album too.

The insert is some paperwork from my pregnancy with Augie. Early on, a test result came back showing that he had a chromosomal trisomy. After many more tests, it was determined to be a false alarm — thank goodness — but it was a time of my life that was totally and completely horrible. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me to look at this, but I have to include some of these things in order to paint a full picture of what my life has been like. The back side of this shows more of the paperwork.

The final page has this stuff:

• A photo with my brother when I was 3 and he was 6
• My favorite way to eat mac and cheese — with tuna and peas
• Princess Leia as Rosie the Riveter which is awesome in so very many ways
• A bit about my love for Christmas socks
• A few scraps of paper I found in a box — ticket stubs for Weezer and Beck concerts and a poem my aunt included with a Christmas gift many years ago.
• And finally, the neon sign for the bar my friends and I went to pretty much every weekend when we were in our mid-20′s.

Interested in seeing more of this project? Check out these other posts:

• My 40th Year Project
• Update: 40th Year Project
• 40th Year Project: Part 3
• 40th Year Project: Part 4

I love decking out our living room with all sorts of holiday swag, but the decorations that bring me the most joy are our Christmas tree ornaments. I think themed trees are beautiful, but for me the best ornaments are sentimental. I’ve been collecting our ornaments little by little for years and I try to select each one for a specific reason. A wagon for Wyatt because he loved his Radio Flyer so much. A trike for Augie the year he learned to ride. That sort of thing.

It makes me so happy to unpack each ornament and remember a little something about our family as I hold it in my hand. I like to tell my kids the stories as we work on the tree and I think they enjoy hearing them too. Here are a few of my favorites:

Fimo Santa

Back when I was single and living by myself, I had lots and lots of time for crafting. In 1996 I made everyone in my family Santa ornaments out of Fimo. The face was cut from a carefully assembled millefiori face cane and then I added the hat and beard. I made something like 15 of these and it took me weeks!

Sparkly Pyramid

This is one of the ornaments I made for my very first Christmas tree. I bought a four foot tree from the drugstore near my house and dragged it home across a super busy street because I didn’t have a car to strap it to! This ornament is modeled after a similar one that my parents have on their Christmas tree that they made for their first Christmas together.

Paper Clay Hand-prints

I made these hand-print ornaments for the boys’ first Christmases. I made quarter inch thick rounds out of paper clay, inked each kid’s hand up with red ink and then pressed them into the clay. After they were set, I stamped their names and the dates with tiny little letter stamps. These make me feel all gushy inside.

Spock Ornament

Zach and I bought this Spock ornament at the Star Trek exhibit in Las Vegas shortly before we were married. We went with a big group of our friends and had an excellent fun time. To say that Zach likes Spock is an understatement, so the choice to get this one was a no-brainer.

Tin Toy Flying Saucer

This is one from our very first married Christmas! Again we chose this one because of Zach’s love of aliens. The legs retract when you pull on the string to hang it up.

Camel Ornament

I bought this one a few years after my trip to Egypt to remind me of…er…my trip to Egypt. Yeah, it would have probably had a little more sentimental value if I’d actually bought it in the market in Cairo, but not every ornament has to has to be purchased in the time associated with it. I’ve decided I can assign sentiment to objects after the fact too.

Now I’d love to know, how do you spread real cheer with your holiday decorating? Show me with your photos! Click “Add me” in the Cheer Tree below to upload your holiday decorating photos and share them with your Twitter followers and Facebook friends. Be sure to click on “Special Offers” to unwrap the hidden coupons and deals exclusively from Sears. Keep checking throughout the holidays–new deals are unlocked every day! For all your holiday decorating needs and solutions, don’t forget to visit Sears and discover real deals, real cheer!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Sears. The opinions and text are all mine.

At some point in junior high or high school, I became really interested in learning how to sew with my mom’s sewing machine. My mom took the time to walk me through the basics of how to use it, but she didn’t have much time to spare beyond that, so she set me loose to learn on my own. When I asked her for a place to start, she told me, “I learned to sew by making Barbie clothes. Why don’t you experiment by making some doll clothes?” So, armed with a bag of fancy scrap fabrics and a couple of glamorous 80′s Barbies, I set to work.

Most of the clothes I made at first were glorified tubes. Who am I kidding? Just about all of the clothes I made were tubes! But after awhile I got bored, so I started to jazz my tubes up with some interesting details. Let’s take a look at some of the fancier outfits:

This was my first foray into applique (though at the time I didn’t know that’s what it was called). I cut a rectangle of yellow taffeta along with a bunch of random geographic shapes. Then I meticulously turned the edges of shapes under using my fingers (No iron! Yikes!) and machine sewed them onto the rectangle. I finished the skirt off by sewing it into a tube and then made a little boat neck top to go along with it.

This next outfit seems to be the project I used to teach myself about ruffles and pleats. the skirt is a simple tube (see? I told you!) with a wide ruffle added to the bottom. I’m pretty sure I had a skirt like this at the time.  The top is a boxy v-neck with a quarter inch pleat all along the bottom. I finger-pleated this baby, too! No iron! Look at me with my crazy self.

This sequined mini skirt is a very special tube. Why is it so special? Because I hand-sewed every freaking one of those sequins on that skirt, that’s why! It took me forever. I worked on it for a few minutes every night after I finished my homework and I did a fabulous job, if I do say so myself. Granted, it hasn’t been handled very much in the mean time, but 25+ years later not a single sequin has fallen off. That, my friends, is quality craftsmanship! It is also the reason why I’ve never sewn a sequin on any garment since then.

And finally, I want to show you how I loosened garments that were too tight to fit over Barbie’s excessively wide hips. (Kidding!) Instead of measuring Barbie and the fabric as I was cutting dresses out, I always just eyeballed everything. So sometimes after I finished a dress it didn’t quite fit and I couldn’t get it on the doll. Usually I didn’t leave enough seam allowance to let anything out, so instead of discarding the dress,  I just attacked it with a seam ripper. This gold lame number  — so very pretty and reminiscent of Solo in the Spotlight from the front — needed it’s seam ripped in an unfortunate place.

Poor Barbie! How embarrassing!

How did you learn to sew? Did you make clothes for your dolls? Did you ever inadvertently make them look like sex workers like I did?

Remember last month how I told you I was going to make a special project for my 4oth year? Well, I’ve been busily working on it and I thought it was time to give you an update on my progress. I’ve been jotting down notes about stories I want to add to this book as I think of them, digging through boxes and adding bits and pieces here and there for the last month. I’m not really working on it every day like I’d hoped I would, but I’m still pretty happy with how much I’ve accomplished already.

Here are the pages I’ve completed:

This page has:

• a photo of me with my second cousin when I visited Europe in 1997 and a little story about a song I heard everywhere on that trip.
• an essay about my Starbucks problem
• a photo of me with braids in Hawaii a few years ago (I alway braid my hair on vacation when my hair is long enough)
• a picture of my feet from this summer
• a story about winning the book fair costume contest when I was Wyatt’s age (I’ve gotta find the picture that goes with it)
• a self portrait from earlier in the month.

UPDATE: After my dad saw this blog post, he dug out a picture of me in my Cat in the Hat costume and sent it to me, so I slipped that into the photo above the journaling card:

Man, I sure was cute! (And kind of surly looking.)

On this page:

• stuff about tomatoes
• a few recent Facebook status updates
• a note about one of my favorite end-of-the-day activities
• an insert from one of the series 5 Lego minifigs I bought recently
• a love letter to my mixer
• and a postcard from Iowa, my homeland.

One thing I’ve found as I’m working on this book: it’s way easier to find vertically-oriented things to stick in the pockets than it is to find horizontally oriented stuff. A lot of the printable cards and journaling prompts and most of the photos of myself that I’ve found are vertical so I’ve had to go out of my way to take horizontal photos and create journaling blocks in the landscape configuration.

Here are some more detailed photos of the pages above:

Here you can see:

• a photo of my messy desk.
• a bit about an album that was part of the soundtrack to my young adulthood and some of the memories that brings back
• the back of the Lego insert
• a photo of my new haircut
• a list of my favorite beverages
• some stuff about my besties who are far away.

And finally this page has:

• a bit about letterboxing and the stamp I carved last night
• a photo of me drinking a huge vodka and orange juice on my 19th birthday (shhhhh!) — this was one of a stack of tags I made a few years ago that was intended to be made into a sort of mini-version of this book. It was a little too small for the pocket, so I mounted it on a piece of coordinating paper and slipped that in the pocket. I’ll be adding the rest of these pages in too.
• a few little notes about my childhood nickname, my senior photo and my husband coming home from a trip
• a list of suggested pre-college reading that I tackled my pre-college summer. I highlighted all the books I read on the list as I completed them and kept at it all through college. Sad fact: I’ve only crossed two books off this list since I graduated in 1994!
• a photo of my best friends and me at our high school graduation.

So far I’m really happy with how this is coming together. I feel like I’m hitting a good balance of photos, memorabilia, stories from my past, trivia and stuff from my current life. I’d like to add a few of the bigger stories of my life still, but if I can keep this up, I’ll have a pretty good summary of who I am I think.

• My 40th Year Project
• Update: 40th Year Project
• 40th Year Project: Part 3
• 40th Year Project: Part 4

I wasn’t a particularly sporty kid, but like everyone else I loved recess. I liked swinging across the monkey bars, hanging out on the top of the jungle gym (the old-skool kind that was made out of those slippery metal pipes) and chasing and being chased by the boys in my class. But most of all, I loved playing hopscotch.

I think a big part of the reason I loved hopscotch was because I really wasn’t very physically adept. I could never swing as far on the bars, or spin around them like my gymnast best friend. And I wasn’t nearly fast enough to actually catch one of the boys when we played chase. But my balance was pretty good and I could hop on one foot so I was a decent hopscotch player.

At home I would carefully draw hopscotch courts on our driveway with a piece of chalk. I had to be careful to make the boxes big enough to comfortably land in, but not so big that it was hard to hop over them when the pebble was resting inside. It was a tricky balancing act. At school I used the courts that were painted on the blacktop. There were several different styles — some that were just squares and rectangles, some that had boxes dissected on the diagonal and the ones with curves which were the fanciest by far.

At recess time, my friends and I would run out to the blacktop as soon as the bell rang and hunt up a pebble each to use as our markers. If you could find a bottle cap or something else distinctive that was even better because it helped avoid confusion as to whose marker was whose. Then we would take turns tossing our rocks into the different boxes, 1 through 10, hopping over and around them, then turning around and stopping to pick up the rock on the way back. Aim, balance, hopping skill — I had it all, baby. And I rocked recess on the hopscotch court!

Did you know that in the past twenty years children have lost an average of 8 hours of recess per week? I had three recesses per day and my son only has two. I’ve read about some schools where children don’t get recess at all!

Danimals Rally for Recess is a national initiative designed to create healthy competition, pitting school against school. Go to Danimals Rally for Recess for a chance to win $20,000 for your Elementary school playground. Plus each day Danimals is giving recess-related prizes to keep kids healthy and active. Share your Recess memories below and go to Rally for Recess for more information on how your school can win!

I have partnered with Dannon/Danimals to help promote the “Rally for Recess” campaign. I have been compensated for my time commitment to the program, which includes writing about the promotion and product, and hosting a giveaway where the prize has been provided by Dannon/Danimals. However, my opinions are entirely my own and I have not been paid to publish positive comments. Contest Rules.

Today is my 39th birthday! Yay! Happy birthday to me!

I am a lover of birthdays and I have no absolutely no reluctance telling people that it’s my birthday. I invite people out to lunch with me, I drop it into conversation with abandon and I relish in the long list of birthday greetings I get on Facebook. (I don’t like it when people sing the Happy Birthday song to me in restaurants though, so please don’t ever do that to me!)

39 feels like a big birthday to me — not so much because of what has passed but because of what is coming. I’m about to embark on my fortieth year! Yowza. This seems like too big of a milestone to just let it go by with no reflection, so I’ve cooked up a project to work on this year. I call it:

Wendy’s 40th Year Scrapbook

I’ve been wanting to do a scrapbook about myself for quite a while now for a bunch of reasons. First off, if I’m going to scrapbook about anyone, I think it’s just as much my responsibility to scrapbook about myself as it is to scrapbook about my kids and the rest of my family. I really liked my self-portrait a day project that I did earlier this year and I’d like to extend that a bit. Also, when we moved I unearthed a lot of sentimental objects and papers that have been in storage for years — decades even! I want that stuff out in a book where I can enjoy it instead of packed up in boxes in the garage. My thinking is that if I do just a little bit every day — print a photo, jot down a story, pull something out of storage — it won’t be a terribly daunting task. And at the end of this year, I’ll have an awesome record of my life!

To start, I bought this fantastically gorgeous buttercup yellow photo album. It’s a basic 3-ring binder so I can put a bunch of different sizes of pages in it.

I’ve decided I’m going to primarily use these Becky Higgens Project Life page protectors. They have lots of different pockets in them — many of them 4 x 6 inches — so I can easily slip photos right into them. The other slots are 3 x 4 inches and I have a bunch of cards that size leftover from my Project 365 albums that I can use for those. She has more of these page protectors in different configurations coming out later this year, so I might get some of those too.

I put together a couple pages this morning to kick the project off. Some of the stuff I put in included a photo and part of the writing from my Strawberry Shortcake blog post, a print out of the poster hanging over my desk, a photo of myself looking awesome in guitar sunglasses, and a screenshot and some journaling about my addiction to Google Analytics. I filled in one of the gaps with some cute paper and a monogram.

The second side of the page had some Incredibooth photos I printed out all on one photo sheet, a picture of me in our family’s ridiculous birthday hat from this morning, a flower fairy card I found in a box, a sticker from Burning Man 2000 and a doily that was leftover from making valentines from either high school or college. I still have a couple slots left on this page that I’ll fill in later.

Other things I’m hoping to include:

• stories and photos from my childhood
• bigger pages with papers and stuff I’ve saved in boxes
• bits and pieces of my daily life (kind of like I did for Project 365)
• I’d like to dig into the story-telling prompts from two books I’ve had for a while but haven’t really used much — The Book of Me by Angie Pederson and The Journaler’s Handbook by Tracy White.

I’ll try to post some pages now and then as I get deeper into this project. Stay tuned!

Anyone want to join me?

Interested in seeing more of this project? Check out these other posts:

• My 40th Year Project
• Update: 40th Year Project
• 40th Year Project: Part 3
• 40th Year Project: Part 4