If You're Going to San Francisco

Be sure to wear flowers in your hair...

or pitcher plants

and butterflies

and maybe you have a fat lip too, but on you, it looks good

and maybe flowers are happier on the ground

where you can run (or crawl) through them

That was our trip to the Conservatory in Golden Gate Park, without even including any shots of the awesome playground, the carousel or the trip to Haight Ashbury, where we saw "Jack Sparrow" according to Austin. There were a lot of "pirates" in the park that day, and the ones in earshot were pretty good sports too.

Witch Craft!

Halloween is coming up so Mom gathered the necessary ingredients for a spooky craft! We're making Witch Balls (which makes Dad giggle). Witch Balls are actually a real thing. Victorians used to hang colorful glass globes around their homes and gardens for good luck, though some say the tradition is much older. The gazing balls sold for gardens seem to be modern cousins. We're going to make it a little more Austin friendly with plastic Christmas ornaments, to be filled with magical moss, feathers, glow in the dark snakes and other witchy things. Somewhat inspired by this post on the Play at Home Mom blog, one of my favorite places to find things to do with the kids :)


How to Make Witch Balls:
Clear plastic ornaments
Moss
Glitter
Feathers
Flower Petals
Small Halloween Trinkets

Glitter balls in the back were done with baby oil and very fine glitter, courtesy  of changingmydestiny.

I also painted the top of the ornaments with some Halloweeny nail polish and threaded a ribbon through the loop instead of a hook.

This one was made by glueing googly eyes facing out of the ornament with ModgePodge.

One More Thing About the Birthday Boy

I had started a tradition on Austin's first birthday, of posting a video highlighting the year. I used the song, "September" by Earth Wind and Fire because his birthday is actually the 21st, just like the song. And I didn't manage to continue this on his second birthday... there was just a lot going on at that time last year. We didn't even do a proper party. But I had taken a lot of pictures and videos, and I had started working on the video. This year, I actually finished it. So this is last year's video, many months in the making...




And here's this year's. So amazing to see how much he's grown, even though I was there for every day of it.

Gratuitous Sophie Picture!

Austin's Deep Sea Pirate Party

Was awesome. If I do say so myself. Thanks to Pinterest and First Mate Mommy, I think Captain Austin had a pretty spectacular time...

We wrapped the windows in the sun room with blue cellophane and hung up jellyfish and crepe seaweed for an undersea feeling

We got some silver trays and plates from Goodwill, added paper boats and raided the Halloween decorations

Digging for treasure in the yard was a huge hit. We used about 200 lbs of sand to fill up the kiddie pool enough for digging.

I spray painted that X with two pieces of cardboard as guides. Just lay your cardboard on the sand parallel to each other to make one line, then turn 90 degrees to make the other.

We dug for Mardi Gras doubloons, necklaces and gold nuggets! Spray painting rocks gold for party favors was a brilliant idea from Notable Nest.

Some of the treasure was delicious.

This was just a piece of wood from Home Depot with two stepping stones underneath

The plank also made an excellent buffet table. We got some costume stuff from Goodwill for Dread Pirate Daddy.

Use paper plates and scissors to make a set of shark jaws! Excellent toddler party craft from Dollar Store Crafts.

Sophie just enjoyed the paper plates :)

The biggest hit was these Cannonball Cascarones. Just follow the instructions for blowing and cleaning the eggs, paint 'em black (I used some acrylic paint I had lying around) and stuff them with red tinsel or crinkled paper.

Fire!

Eggs contributed by our completely authentic Pirate Chickens

Jellyfish balloons made with glue, tissue paper, tinsel and curling ribbon

Hang a creepy cloth and some skeletons from your yardarm, with a crochet hoop. If you do it on a chandelier like I did, make sure you're using CFLS so you don't burn your Pirate Party down with your cheap ass dollar store cloth ;)

I also refused to shell out for themed party dishes and instead gave out stickers so my guests could ID their drinks.

They also made a fun way for toddlers to help with Austin's big birthday card :)

Labor Day!

Well, you wouldn't know it from the photos, but we had some kind of bug this weekend. Little dude was hot and fevery on Friday and Saturday, had a cough Saturday but only at night today. So he was not his usual boisterous self and we spent a lot of time watching Octonauts and whining. Octonauts is kind of our new thing, and we spent about two days watching it, which averages to three viewings of all the episodes on the DVR. But averages don't matter here, because we watched our favorites about 8 times each. Go ahead, ask me about The Great Penguin Race.

Anyway, Labor Day was actually great, even though the Sophieloaf is still awake.

And crawling!

No, wait, she's standing!

And we got a shot of Sophie with her first rainbow!

It's sort of an ongoing project of Mom's to recreate photos we took of Austin with Sophie. It's not something I do a ton of, but it is fun, kind of like a treasure hunt. Here's Austin's "first rainbow picture" from February 2011.







Anyway, we had a great Labor Day. Although neither Mom nor Dad got much of a day off...

And we did get one raised bed built and filled and planted with a little bit of a practice garden, since it's really late in the season. Austin had fun watering!

 And we enjoyed having a little time outside after being cooped up so long.