Happy National Popcorn Day!

They pretty much have a day for everything now, don't they?  But this one - for me, at least - was fun.  I read a blurb about it a few months ago in Paper Crafts magazine, and put it on my to do list.  Because all of my guys LOVE popcorn.

Matthew has a particular thing for it.  I did this page several years ago, but he hasn't changed since.  If given the opportunity, he can down a large bucket at the movie theater with no problem.

To "celebrate" this important national holiday, I made envelopes containing a bag of microwave popcorn to give to my 3 guys, the boys' teachers, and my in-laws.  The popcorn box was made using a Silhouette 3-D popcorn box template.  I modified it to only present one face of the box.  October Afternoon's Egg Basket paper from the Cherry Hill line made for perfect popcorn, don't you think?  (Unfortunately, though I scaled the font to be large enough to read on the background piece of paper, ever since Epson "upgraded" their printer interface, my wide-format printer, which is supposed to give edge-to-edge printing, won't do so.  It will no longer print pages larger than 8.5x11, which was the whole point of my getting that printer.  And so the font printed much smaller than I'd like it to be.)

Make sure you have a bit of popcorn today!

In the Spring, a Young Man's Fancy Turns To...

Climbing trees.

And then falling out of them.

And ending up with a broken arm and a fluorescent yellow cast.  He can't play baseball or football until it's off.  But he is allowed to continue in tae kwon do.

And hey, at least he can still play video games. :)

This last picture has nothing to do with broken bones, but it is the entrance to our back yard. We had a good spring with no late frosts, and so the the wisteria is in full bloom, lushly draped over the arbor.  I really need to trim it back so you can walk through without having to duck, but I won't touch it until it's done flowering.  Down on the right is a lovely spread of coreopsis.  Ignore the fact that I badly need to prune back all of the abelia. 

Halloween Fantasy Land

The boys love rich fantasy worlds.  Jeremy tends to prefer tales of magic, while Matthew prefers game-oriented shows, and their preferences are reflected in their choices of Halloween costumes:  Harry Potter for Jeremy and Dan (of the Bakugan series) for Matthew.

We had a great evening walking through the neighborhood with friends and neighbors.  It was a beautiful evening, no full moon this year but plenty of bats swooping around to give that nice, spooky feeling.

A few pix of the boys:

Toothless and a Freebie

Another one of my templates is up for grabs on the ScrapStreet blog today.  I used to to make this layout about Matthew losing his top teeth.  He's lost a good 8 teeth in total now, and has had a pretty much continual gap since these pictures were taken last summer.  Jeremy's not been so lucky.  He turned 6 a month ago and doesn't even have one wiggling yet.  It looks like he'll be the only kid in his class to leave kindergarten without having lost a tooth.

Toothless. Digital Supplies:  Template: Framework No. 2 by 4Two2 Frameworks, Paper: Hugs and Artfully Intense by Lynn Grievson, Work Hard Playhard by Anna Aspnes, Other: tooth cartoon downloaded from the internet, Fonts: Jefferson, Georgia.

Journaling: Matthew had already lost both bottom teeth, but he didn’t have a “gap” for more than a few days, as the new teeth were in a big hurry to fill the empty space.  Now, however, he’s lost a top tooth, and he’s got a nice gap.  He’s had an ear-to-ear smile since losing it.

Storybook Stew

Matthew's first grade school play was yesterday. The four classes put on Storybook Stew, and each did an adaptation of a different fairy tale. Matthew's class did The Sky Is Falling and he was one of the forest squirrels. They had two showings, one at 9:30am for the Kindergarten and pre-K classes, and one at 1pm for the parents.

Since I was way back in the theater, I bumped my ISO up really high (1600) and got some decent, if grainy, pictures of the kids on stage. Matthew's the one to the immediate left of the tree in the first picture, and directly in front of the tree in the second. He had a great time, and we could hear him from our seat. (Yes, he is the loudest human alive.) We were a little surprised, though, because he's always telling us he doesn't like to sing where people can hear him.

After the play they had a cast party. Here's a picture of all three of the play's squirrels.

Aren't they just the cutest?