We're Craftin' Crazy

Dear Laney,

Our dining room table has looked like Martha Stewart's Secret Crafting Sweatshop* this past week.

First, we're working on a few more projects for Will and Lindsay's wedding. Their wedding has an Old California/missions theme, and I'm designing their ceremony programs to have a floral paper collage trim, like so:

...which requires me to make a bunch of teeny-tiny flowers. What's really slowing my roll is that you want to be vice-president of the cutting committee, and it's hard to make a lot of progress when your chief assistant is an almost-two-year-old with a pair of safety scissors.

I let you cut to your heart's content, but when you started licking the glue stick and saying, "'at's good!," I had to let you go. Important lesson learned: In the workplace, any sniffing, huffing or licking of glue is generally frowned upon by employers.

We're also doing a few preparations for this weekend's Dora the Explorer-themed birthday party. See, Dora has these friends, the "explorer stars," with names like "Woo-Hoo" and "Twitchy**." They look like this:

Dora's always running around trying to catch them, so I thought it would be fun if we played a "Star Catcher" game at your party - basically like an Easter egg hunt - and everyone could try to find or "catch" some metallic stars that I'm going to hide in the yard.

So I bought some cardboard stars at the party store today, and thought I would class them up by putting some round stickers on them and making eyeballs. But once again, you wanted to be in charge of the project, so you grabbed your own sheet of eyeball stickers and an extra black marker. "Well, fine," I figured, "it's your party, and if you want to have wonky-eyed stars, that's fine with me." Besides, I think we all know this story is going to end with all the kids ignoring the stars and playing in the same patch of dirt for an hour until I shove some cake at them and send them home. Perfection in this case is not important (but don't tell Martha I said that, or she'll cut our rations).

Your dad named this explorer star, "Mescal***":

Thanks for all your "help" with the projects this week. You may not make them faster, but you certainly make them more fun.

Love,

Mom

* Come on, you know she has one.

** Don't worry, I am also appalled that I probably can't name all the members of the Cabinet, but can name most of the explorer stars.

***Your dad's on a roll with this kind of humor lately. We've watched 94 episodes of Dora, and this morning we finally saw our first white character. Your dad said, "She looks like an undergrad from Berkeley who fell in love with a migrant farm worker and ended up stuck in the barrio teaching la musica."