The American Nightmare

movie written by and starring Shiloh Burgess
directed by Mom

This movie is about Shiloh having a dream that he was an army man. Then he encountered a vampire and vaporized him! Best dream ever.

PS - this is what happens when Mom lets Shiloh take a mental health day and just play with her all day. I love this!

... you look like a monkey, and smell like one too!

The last week of October/first week of November is always a stressful one around these parts! It means that we have to do Halloween and Birthday within a span of 3 days, which is always tough on everyone.

So, Buddy decided (much later than usual, since he usually picks out his Halloween costumes by mid-summer) that he wanted to be a vampire. And it was really fun, since he was super excited about the accent and the fake teeth, and he kept fake biting everyone which was hilarious.

Also hilarious was the fact that there are apparently no fake vampire teeth that come in children's sizes. At all. So this was his face the whole time he wore the teeth! Also also hilarious, trying to spray paint a squirmy blonde kid's hair black. As you can see, it SORTA worked. Also also also hilarious, trying to put makeup on a squirmy kid. Anyway, the whole thing was just funny!

We went with his new "best friend" from school and the best friend's father. And oh man, that family is a whole 'nother blog post, because I'm having some serious issues with clinginess (theirs) and I don't know how to get out of it all! But again, that's for another day.

After Halloween (a measly 3 days after) comes Buddy's birthday, so he decided he wanted a costume party so he could wear his costume again. And I got all perfectionist-y and decided I had to have all sorts of fall themed treats, and fancy cupcakes, and cutesy organized activities for the kids...

None of which I needed to do. The kids showed up (sort of) in costume, then proceeded to run around the backyard playing "good guys vs. bad guys" and chaining each other to trees for the majority of the party. None of my preplanned activities happened at all! Basically, the kids ran around outside, the grown-ups sat inside drinking beer and gossiping, and great fun was had by all. Never again am I stressing that much about the perfect themed treats, since it obviously doesn't matter AT ALL!

The "vampire cupcakes" that Buddy begged for got finished literally 5 minutes AFTER the first guest arrived :)

Nice picture of the boys

Obligatory silly picture

Birthday presents! You have to wear the hat if you want to open the presents :)

Last Minute Crafting :)

What do you do when your kid (probably looking to stall bedtime) starts BEGGING to do art with you?

This:

I had no time to come up with anything good, so I just had him take white crayon and draw a pumpkin picture ("Push REALLY hard, Buddy! It's OK if you break the crayon this time!") and then we painted over it with watercolors.

Quick, easy, not very messy, and turned out cute! What more could a girl ask for :)

Drawing the 'secret picture'

Adding the first colors (I think it's hilarious that he was wearing his blanket on his head at this point!)

Starting to see the picture!

He takes after his mommy, and he's OBSESSED with his 'new' camera from Uncle Ryan!

Anyway, super easy, a great craft to do after a long week so we could unwind and have some fun without too much stress. I like it.

And I think he did too!

Shadows on the Wall

As usual, it was a lazy Sunday around these parts. And lazy days are always the days I can get Buddy interested in crafts, so we worked on a really cool one today!

This idea, as usual, was found online, though obviously the idea of paper silhouettes is a pretty common one. But to tie-dye the paper with markers and coffee filters was definitely a new spin!

Anyway, first I used a really bright lamp to help me trace the shadow of Buddy's profile. It took me a few tries to get right, so the paper got a little bit wrecked, but since I knew we'd be cutting it out eventually I didn't care.

Next we colored coffee filters with markers and then placed them on the profile, spraying them with water to transfer the colors. (Just a warning, I had to pre-select Buddy's colors for him. Otherwise he has a habit of using only black and brown and it wouldn't have been pretty.)

Once it seemed like the colors had successfully bled out of the coffee filters and onto the paper, we removed the coffee filters. It took about 10 minutes for the colors to bleed this well.

Finally I just cut out the profile, put it on some black paper for contrast, and wrote his name in the corner with some of the extra tie-dyed paper.

Oh, in case you didn't know, Buddy's real name is Shiloh. Guess the secret's out!

Hangman.

So, my friend Molly taught Buddy how to play hangman recently. Which was great! He loves playing it, and I think it's good for his writing, spelling, and reading. Except:

He's too unsure about how to spell words, so he only ever picks 'mom', 'dad', 'shiloh'... words like that. And it gets boring quick, and he gets frustrated.

So I, being awesome, made him cheat cards!

First I found a list of kindergarten spelling words, and wrote a bunch of them in highlighter on index cards.

Buddy's job was to write over the highlighter with pen, so he could practice writing and spelling himself. 

examples of the cards, and the difficulty of the words.

This is our awesome hangman set, we found it at Target and it's so much fun! Also, Buddy was in a silly mood. As you can tell by the face.

The cards worked great! He can now draw lines for the letters, and he can look back at the word card to figure out if the letters I guess are in the word or not. These are such a big help, it made this game way more fun!

Up, Up, and Away!

As I've mentioned, I looooove Pinterest! And so when I saw this super awesome jet pack, I obviously wanted to make it for Buddy immediately.

Of course, as with all spur of the moment crafts, I didn't have ANY of the right supplies, so we improvised!

We used:

1 cereal box

2 toilet paper tubes

red and yellow tissue paper

aluminum foil

shoelaces (not shown)

and bottle tops.

So first we covered the cereal box with aluminum foil, and punched holes in the box to string the shoelace "straps" through.

Next we "foiled" the toilet paper tubes, made tissue paper "flames", and taped them onto the bottom of the box.

You could just leave it like this, but Buddy wanted buttons on his jet pack, which is where the bottle caps came in. Luckily I save stuff like that all the time, so we had enough for his design!

Anyway, this probably took us 1/2 an hour, and has provided tons of fun since! Did you know that jet packs are excellent tools to break out of jail? Especially if the mean Mommy Sheriff is keeping you there for no good reason, just twist a knob and BLAST OFF!

Underwater Adventures

So, I looooooove Pinterest. It is my absolute favorite, and I get lots of good ideas for things to do with Buddy from it.

There was this one picture that I found where kids laid down in chalk drawings and then interacted with the pictures, and it was AMAZING!

Anyway, we decided to do the same sort of thing, but with our own twist! Buddy didn't want me to draw the scene and plan it for him, so he picked out what he wanted the scene to be, and helped draw it, and then kept adding and changing it as we went along. It was SOOO much more fun than I had anticipated, and he was so pumped about it, and I think it turned out pretty great!

(Especially since I didn't realize till too late that you kinda have to be up on a ladder to take a picture from this angle, so I had to just hold my camera above my head and shoot blind!)

 The first picture we took, Buddy wants me to point out "Gary the Snail" in the left bottom corner. He's pretty proud of his drawing skills here!

 It was almost as much fun to edit these pictures as it was to take them, since Buddy was really into trying out all sorts of effects and styles! Yay for Picasa making editing easy :)

This pic is included cuz Buddy wants you to know that those houses at the top are the cottages: Grandma Betty's is on the left, the other is on the right!

I love this one the most, since Buddy got so into it! Look, he's even holding his breath "underwater"!

We've been really crafty recently, so expect more craft posts in the next couple of weeks!

Look what I made!

My cousin Laura taught me how to do some basic things with wire and beads a few months ago, and since then I've been doing that kind of stuff as an art activity at the BGC every so often.

Usually, I end up making myself a bracelet, which shortly thereafter I get begged for: "But Amanda it's so pretty! I don't have the patience, it's just my size, those are my favorite colors, you made one for so-and-so..." Until I give the bracelet to one of my kids.

But today I kept my creation! I think it's pretty, though not too fancy or anything :)

Dr. Seuss Day!

Yesterday was Dr. Seuss Day at the library, although it's not his birthday until next weekend. But since Buddy will not be with me next weekend, we decided to celebrate it ourselves at home!

We've been reading Dr. Seuss books nonstop for the last few weeks anyway, so this made a good tie-in:

He didn't like getting his hand painted, but...

Thing 1 and Thing 2! You can see the pictures better if you click on them, but this was made with Buddy's hand and thumb prints! I think it turned out adorable :) We've been reading The Cat in The Hat all week, Buddy has recently realized that he can read most of it himself so that's making him really motivated!

 Tonight we're also watching the Cat in The Hat movie, and with it we're eating:

One fish, Two fish, Red fish, Blue fish! (I swear, I'm feeding him an orange and some veggies and dip too... the junk food part was just the cute part!)

And we might even have some Hop on Pop(corn) later on too!

Put 2 Introverts in a Room...

Ok, it was my birthday last weekend, and I'm totally going to write a post about going out with my awesome friends (spoiler, we went to a drag show! Hilarious.) but since I'm feeling sick today I'm just gonna give you a short post about being crafty again.

So, since Buddy was gone at his dad's all weekend, I basically spent the whole time with my favorite friend Molly! We went shopping on Saturday morning, and noticed a lot of jewelry that looked like this:

$8 from Forever 21

$14 from Maurices

So clearly, we decided we could make these ourselves! We went home and dug through our various crafting supplies, and came up with some beads and string. First attempt:

I made this one out of beads from a tacky old bracelet, interspersed with some turquoise beads Molly had laying around. It was fine, but we wanted to do more!

So we ran off to Michael's (craft store) and stocked up on some other beads, clasps, and charms (just for fun). Next bracelet made:

The darker green one. See how this time it has nice clasps at the ends? And I like the beads a lot more, but I still used some light turquoise ones so it could match the first bracelet if I wanted to wear them together :)

Finally:

This one was just for fun, since I had found these cute elephant charms on sale and had no clue what to do with them! So I just braided them into 2 bracelets, tied the bracelets together, and added clasps at the ends. I might re-do this one if I get inspired, but for right now it's fine.

Anyway, those 3 bracelets cost me about $6 (since we had some of the supplies at home) and gave us something to do for the better part of an afternoon! Love it.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

We put up our Christmas tree today! It took a lot of rearranging of my living room, since I don't actually have a lot of wall space in my living room, and I'm not exactly pleased with the way my couches/shelves/desk look right now.

However, the tree looks fantastic!

Shiloh just starting to get the decorations on!

Look how pretty! I don't like to have color schemes or themes in decorations on my tree, I want it to be fun and colorful and full of good memories. This is why I put on all the homemade felt ornaments I made at 12, even though now I think they look ridiculous! And there are disco balls, and lots of sparkly shiny tacky ornaments, and I love them :)

I like this picture lots, even though neither of us are making very normal faces. Also, you can see the stuffed felt angel I made when I was 12 (as previously mentioned)! I also made a camel, a snowman, a candycane, and a Christmas tree :)

Potayto, Potahto

This weekend was a "Mommy weekend", meaning I got to have Buddy all weekend and we didn't have a thousand things to do!
So we did whatever we wanted, and I'm really glad I got the chance to reconnect with my buddy.

we got to:

• go hardcore grocery shopping for all our favorite things (foodstamps finally came in!)
• have an entire afternoon devoted to board games
• take lots of walks
• watch the new Winnie the Pooh
• go to church
• cook together (we made "fun food" which I haven't done in forever!)
• finally get the house straightened up
• make art!

The last one has picture evidence, as usual :)
We made potato stamps, which is something I hadn't tried before but it went pretty well, other than my poor knife skills making his designs not turn out perfect!

First attempt, a "slightly wonky" star

Buddy wanted them to be two-toned

stars and moon stamps

painting takes lots of concentration

moon, lightning bolt, flower, and star (already cut off potato)

my son, the goober!

I never feel like I have time to do projects like this anymore, but when I can make the time it ends up being totally worth it!