etcetera. and so forth.

1. paper snowflakes are one of the simplest crafts, but they pretty up a house like little else. if you sew them straight through, you can tack up strings of flakes beside a window like so:




2. actual snow, however, i am not so good with. i find snowscapes gorgeous but wrought with peril, and if there were an award for The Worst Driver In the History of Inclement Weather, i'd have a case of trophies gracing my garage.

so when things go from this




to this



i take it as a cue to stay indoors. (however, in the hubby's absence i shall be ferrying the kiddos to book club and sports practices, so y'all may want to stay off the roads between the hours of 4-9 pm. this has been a public service announcement.)


3. if your pantry resembles mine, it holds a stash of leftover candy canes doomed to languish till march, at which point they shall be unceremoniously dumped in the trash.

however. may i present to you option b:

oreos + melted choc chips + crushed candy canes (just stick 'em in a zip loc bag and hammer them. for real.).


4. perhaps i have been residing in that beautiful land called Denial, but i am only now coming to terms with the fact that just because i graduated from mililani high (class of '94, holla!) sixteen years ago does not actually mean i am done with homework. in fact, i have a good dozen years of math facts and spelling words and science projects ahead of me, otherwise known as Responsible Parenting.

(and let me just say it is Tricky Stuff providing just the right amount of scaffolding to help your child learn to excel independently. it would be far more expedient to do most of the work myself...i would totally ace fourth grade.)


5. fun fact about nic #206: my weekly total of miles on the treadmill is a direct measurement of the quality of my reading material.
0-10 miles = sad waste of a perfectly good tree.
10-25 miles = liked the books enough to finish them, but i didn't lose any sleep.
25-40 miles = so help me rhonda, i am going to pilfer these guys from the library and escape across the border.




6. yesterday was my little brother's birthday. he's 29. i'm thinking that maybe at thirty i'll stop calling him 'little,' but yeah. probably not.

i found some really cute (by which i mean Completely Horrid) photos of my brothers and me as kids, but sadly Public Humiliation was not on today's agenda, so you don't actually get to see them.

(happy birthday, poley.)


7.


sometimes elle and i do talent shows, wherein mostly she twirls things and i recite shel silverstein circa 1985, thank you third grade speech assignment.


8. happiest monday to you.


ps last day to drop your name in for some custom stamped jewelry. don't miss out!