Bee @ MindSay 
I really do. I think it is such a fun holiday. This year, for the first time, my mom has my nephew and she and I are taking him trick-or-treating. Therefore, we needed a costume.
When my siblings and I were growing up, my mom made us costumes. To me, that became part of the fun of Halloween. You figure out what you want to be and then you figure out how to make that. Most years mom helped/did most of the work, but as I got older (say jr high and high school) I would make my own costumes.
This has become tradition to me and I think it is appalling that people just buy costumes. And they are junk! They are so cheaply made it is a wonder they last the whole night--much less year after year. (My mother made matching clown costumes for Nick and I when we were tiny and then the next year I think Zack and I wore them and then I am pretty sure Zack and Emily wore them. They lasted several years and four kids!) But, this is me and evidently it is not for everyone.
When we knew we had Simon, my mom and I went shopping. She wanted to buy him a costume and it took me only a few minutes to talk her out of it. After seeing the crap that passes for costumes these days (for $35 a pop and more!) she was more than willing to tackle the build-a-costume project of days gone by. Mind you, it has been years and YEARS since she last made a costume.
Simon finally decided (and by decided I mean he said it once and we took it as a decision) that he wanted to be a bee. Mom and I went around and purchased all the items needed to make the costume. We had a plan of how we would do it, but somehow things didn't go as planned. It ended up being that I, the fabulous auntie extraordinaire, made the entire costume. My mom kept offering her help, but I was sure I had it under control.
Let's just be clear: check the title of the blog.
Martha Stewart, I am not. This means I have never been convicted of a white collar crime, nor do I have the skills and ability to sew a bee costume by hand.
Lucky for me, I am smart and I am creative, I managed to figure it out. My mother was smart enough to buy materials that are flexible enough to be beaten on and used in a variety of ways and I was able to pull it altogether. And it only took me about 6.5 hours.
Yeesh.
Honestly, the hardest part was making the wings, but once I had one wing done, the second was considerably easier. Then there were the problems. Busted thread, pulling the antennae off the hat AFTER it was finished and then having to figure out how to reattach it, glue that wouldn't hold, gluing the wrong side of the wing so it was backwards, et cetera.
Still, after all that time and all those tribulations, I had an absolute blast. I loved making this little costume that he will wear for Halloween. I am so excited to get him inside of it and take pictures of him. So excited was I that after all was said and done, I dug out and old oversized doll from childhood and dressed Jasper up in Simon's costume. Now I know what the whole thing looks like all put together.
Jasper looks pretty cute, but I am betting Simon wins, hands-down. Plus, the costume will actually FIT Simon.
So stay tuned for the official Halloween pictures and make certain that all the comments are about how cute the COSTUME is...not the wearer.
(Ok, I'm kidding--my nephew is adorable, all comments welcome).
And look out Martha, a bit more practice and I'll be taking over! (Hopefully not the prison part, but the multi-millionaire part...be happy to!)
Happy All Hallows Eve Eve!
Monday, March 24, 2008
It's been 16 months since Dave Hackenberg of Dade City became the first beekeeper in the country to say publicly that something was terribly wrong with his insects.
In the intervening time following the identification of the malady now known as Colony Collapse Disorder, things haven't gotten any better for the nation's bees, which pollinate about one-third of U.S. crops — some $15 billion worth.
In fact, things have gotten much worse. Their numbers are continuing to dwindle from the disorder.
A survey of 22 apiarists from 10 states who took their bees to California to help get out the almond crop estimates about 37 percent of the 230,500 colonies managed by those beekeepers have been lost, said Jeff Pettis, a research entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's bee research lab in Beltsville, Md.
A year ago, a similar survey put bee losses at just 30 percent.
"There is a significant crisis going on here," Dave Mendes, a beekeeper based in Fort Myers and Dartmouth, Mass., said last week from California.
Hackenberg — who also keeps bees in Lewisburg, Pa., and was one of 30 Florida beekeepers to cart their critters to California — said Colony Collapse Disorder hit some of his compatriots hard.
"It was like a train wreck," he said. "There were a lot of beekeepers who had severe losses, people that had never seen this happen before."
Just to report: getting stung 3 times within 20 seconds is NOT fun. At all.
In the strangest way possible, I am very glad that I was the one who got stung multiple times, as much as I'm still in some pain, and that only one of my kids of the 12 that were laying there with us, got stung at all. And thankfully, it wasn't the boy who if he gets stung, needs an epi-pen because otherwise he'll swell up like a balloon and stop breathing and some other fun stuff I DON'T want to think about.
but yeah...Darren is NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVER being the first Sardine EVER again.
Mike and I were able to go to the movies tonight - thanks to josiejunk for watching Alex the Energizer Bunny!
So what do we pick with our precious movie night? Beerfest. Mike had already seen Invincible, and the movie I wanted to see, The Illusionist, wasn't playing at the right time. Who knew that someone could make a 110 minute movie about drinking beer?
While it did drag on at some points, it did have its moments of hilarity. I just can't believe that there are no movies out that I want to see. That must mean that summer is over, and I'll have to wait until Thanksgiving before any good movies are released.
I did see an excellent movie on the airplane - Akeelah and the Bee. It is about a young girl who has a gift for memorizing words and goes on to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Showing 1 - 5. [ Next ]
