I don’t know whether to be excited or dread that yesterday was the last day of school for my boys. I have some summer camps lined up for them, but frankly our summer schedule is all over the place. So much so that I need help remembering where the kids are going and when.

I thought it would be a good idea to display the schedule so the boys could see what was coming up (to avoid the inevitable anxiety from different camps for different weeks.) To give them a little control over the schedule, we sat down and brainstormed our bucket list for the summer. Ice cream, swimming, and Carowinds are only a few of their bucket list items. I thought it was especially sweet that they wanted to spend time with our longtime sitter one or two days ;-).

While I was contemplating this displayable schedule, I received a box of goodies from Plaid. The boys were home when it arrived, so naturally they hovered like eager vultures as I opened it. And of course they immediately wanted to make something with the supplies. Sometimes timing is a serendipitous thing.

I set up the kitchen table with all the supplies and a plastic cover over the table. When I looked up, my oldest son had disappeared! I found him like this:

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June is almost here (although it felt like summer this weekend) and more people are spending time outside sprucing up their yards and improving their curb appeal. As you drive down my street you are greeted by beautiful lawns, flowers, and {screech!}my peeling mailbox.

{Insert sad frown here.} My mom and I painted this mailbox shortly after we moved into the house. We had a lot of fun painting it together and I took all the necessary precautions of priming it and sealing it with polyurethane. But sadly we made the mistake of painting a few cute bumblebees on the top. Within a week of installing the mailbox I went to retrieve my mail only to find the bees had been pecked off the box. “What the…?”

I’m fairly certain a bird had just perched on top of my mailbox and was ready to partake in a buffet of bumblebees. After the paint had been chipped, it allowed water to seep underneath and slowly over the course of a few years we have the sad looking mess of a mailbox show here:

I wanted a unique mailbox that looked like a mini-me of our house. Plus, I wanted it to be tall enough to accomodate a priority mail box. So, I set about building my own custom mailbox and now you can too!

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Welcome back to the Spring Olympic events. We are here in Handy Stadium which is home to numerous sporting events including: football, soccer, 25 yard dash, off-road cycling and you can’t forget father/son wrestling.

As you can see, we have yards and yards of pristinely manicured blades of grass.

Wait a cotton pickin’ minute, is that a….

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