My Funny Valentine

I am not a big fan of what Valentine's Day has become. I don't deplore romance or flowers or even the occasional tacky gift and I think it's good for us to have a day reserved to remind us to show a little love. My issue with Valentine's Day is the lazy consumerism of it all. IMHO Valentines Day is a holiday for simple handmade expressions. Flowers and chocolates are fine but apply a little creativity and personalization to it in some way. Valentine's Day was made for crayons, scissors, and glue sticks.

One year I made a "Vouchers Of Love" coupon book to go with a few bottles of K8's favorite wine. Another year I bought 50 Spider-Man valentines, wrote a different little note on each one, and hid them all over in K8's stuff. This year most of my handmade efforts have gone to Q's valentines for preschool.

Thank God for ArtScraps and small class sizes!

The one plan for K8 this year I will disclose is two tickets to Romeo & Juliet at The Children's Theatre Company.

Modern Times

One might argue that my not having a super-high-tech phone like the awesome new G1 (seriously Google, you and Tmobile have my address. How shameless do I have to get here?) would disqualify me from the title of "modern dad". Well, one might be right, but I'm trying. For example;

Q is getting quite familiar with computers and has his own XO Laptop,

the boys have their own ipod that even Ozzi is learning to operate,

and this weekend we went to a party hosted by someone we only knew via the internet. Our internet real life friend Pumpkin Girl put on a great party for the kids and the adults as well. She generously sent everyone home with her highly sought after handmade baby clothes available on etsy.

Q scored a rockin' guitar shirt.

Ozzi got his dirty little hands on one of the famous tiesies. All we need now is a pair of red baby Cons and Ozzi could be Chuck for Halloween.

DIY Parenting or Raising MacGyver

I've done the occasional dabbling in DIY projects like the playgarden and Q's robot costume but lately I've really started to re-catch the "hardware hacking" bug that I had as a kid. Spurred on by the short distance our dollars seem to be going these days and Q getting to an age where building stuff and basic science is almost as cool as Word Girl, I've found some fantastic resources and communities online.

• The best DIY site I've found out there is Instructables.com. An open forum for everyone to post and use instructions on building most anything you can imagine.
• Curbly and the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories are two great DIY blogs that are either posting their own projects or pointing us all to the innovative ideas of others. Curbly is centered on design while EMSL registers a bit higher on the geek berometer.
  
• ReadyMade and MAKE are DIY magazines that also have great websites. A subscription to either one of them will definitely be on my xmas list this year.

And then there is Bre Pettis. Bre is the Jesus of the modern DIY movement. Formerly with MAKE, Bre is now creating videos for Etsy, blogging, and doing 700 billion other things to bring all us hipsters into the hardware hacker fold.
Coolest of all, his pilot tv show, History Hackers, just aired on The History Channel. (If you're like us and don't have cable you can find a torrent file online if you look hard enough.) The show is AWESOME! It even held Q's attention and he's 3... and its not a cartoon. History Hackers manages to perfectly blend Mr. Wizard, Nova, and Mythbusters together with a DO try this at home theme. The show is very well produced but still maintains a genuiness. I think the reason HH captures the attention of both adults and children is Bre's honest excitement for what he is presenting. Bre's ability to translate something like Nikola Tesla's ideas to something palpable like turning your bike into an AC generator with a few basic household items makes HH one program that I will make a point to sit down and watch with Q (and ozzi provided the show gets picked up for multiple seasons).

Nature Fort 08 August Edition

The fort then:

The fort now:

I'm callin' 'er done.... for now.

I dialed back my overly ambitious plans for gardening this spring. I'm relatively satisfied with what we managed to get done and am leaving all the plans for the front yard for next year. What we did get done turned out to be a pretty nice play garden. I'm also pretty proud of the amount of recycled/reused materials I was able to use.

The veggie fort turned out pretty sweet using the neighbors tree trimmings. It seems pretty sturdy and will really look cool once the sweet 100 tomatoes, yellow plum tomatoes, and scarlet runner beans start to grow over it all.

It looks like the poppies that we transfered and split from the neighbors yard will survive along with all the other flowers and veggies that we purchased... except one Himalayan Blue Poppy that didn't make it. Hopefully the huge volume of basil we planted will keep up with our steady use. We should have everything we need for a great ratatouille this fall. Mmm.

Pimp My Ride - Toddler Edition

We got a secondhand Fisher Price trike for free from someone a while back. The other day I was looking at it and thought to myself that what it really needed was some "chrome rims". After a lot of taping and two coats of the silver metallic spray paint that we have left over from Q's robot costume I thought to myself, "We need more spray paint!"

Before:

After:

Q at the wheel: 30 second craft project

30 seconds of cutting bought me enough time to make dinner and Q some "Pigeon at the wheel!" time.

Materials needed:

scissors
round pizza cardboard

Use scissors to cut cardboard to look like a steering wheel and let the good times roll.