The happy angry update

Well, summer has been chugging along, filled with pools, splash pads, day trips, long trips, a mom and dad trip (sans kids!), and tons of time to play.  

And since most of you could relate to my meltdown last month, I thought I should give you an update....we had a success!

And we went a little Bird crazy.

We took your advice and bought Sculpey Clay and finally, finally built a proper Luke.  We (I mean, Casey.  I was still burnt out), threw Luke in the oven and he came out perfect and Angry Bird-ly.
Hooray!

And with the rest of the original modeling clay, Lucy and Owen spent days molding tons of characters.  Lucy made another Leia (above. I love it), Owen made Mace Windu, the original Luke (before he was a Jedi---big difference), K-3PO (a white droid similar to C3PO---we're getting into real nerd territory here), and on the far right a sculpture of Lucy. 

Clay has become the sophisticated Playdough.
And everybody's happy.

Owen was invited to a friend's birthday party last week so I got my Angry Bird on as well.
The theme of the party was Star Wars Angry Birds....and it was for a girl!
Love that combo.
So I made a Basic Pocket Tote to hold library books, toys, whatever a 5 year old needs:

I printed and ironed Leia to the pocket using THIS, which I read about on Cirque du bebe and Caila Made.  It's basically really high quality iron-on paper.  It doesn't replace Freezer Paper stenciling for me but has some really cool advantages.  And the jury's still out on it; I'm still experimenting.  So I'll post more details/ideas down the road. 

And...

Just when my kids were getting tired of clay, THESE cool blocks showed up in the mail from the ladies at Caravan Shoppe: 

They're so fun.  They're called Olliblock Mix Mates with tons of character combos.  The kids had fun mixing them around, making the blocks talk to each other, and then they got really excited when they discovered....baby fox and baby frog!  "Mom, just take out the middle block and you can make baby ones!"

Clevah, clevah.

I've you've never been to Carvan Shoppe it's really cool.  They sell tons of downloadable art and other creative items. I met the shoppe creators at Alt last year and they're really fun down-to-earth moms trying to spread their love of art with all of us.    

And right now they're trying to get their Mix Mate Olliblocks into larger-scale production so they can sell them as finished blocks (rather than download) and reach a wider audience.  They've got a Kickstarter campaign going for the next 8 days....and they're already 80% funded!  They're so close!

Check out the campaign HERE.  And check out the video too, it's pretty fun.  

And...if you're on instagram, you should check them out @almaloveland, @fifthandhazel, and @mikeloveland cause they're always sharing really cool illustrator patterns under the hashtag #365patterns.  Here's one of my favorites by Alma, which she turned into a card! Real women wearing swimsuits....

And that's a random wrapup.
If today's kid-mom life goes as planned I'll have another Shorts post for you tomorrow.
Have a great day!