harbertson mothership

i'm gearing up for a new week of challenges.  i am supposed to get my car back from the shop on wednesday and with this freedom will come a whole new set of temptations.  holed up on house arrest, the chances to deviate from the budget have been pretty slim.  i also have cleo's 5th birthday party on saturday to prepare for, which if you recall, was the one sin against the budget i was going to allow this month.   i am trying to keep the expenses for the party minimal but it still will feel strange (dirty?!)  to go out and shop for something after my nearly 2 week break from retail therapy.  

cleo and i spent a good portion of the day on friday hand making her "alien" invitations and the results are cute and definitely, ahem, hand crafted.  it was fun to turn something that i normally either would have done myself, or just bought, into a craft project we could do together.  when i slow down and open up to this i can see what a huge difference it makes to cleo. she loves being involved and seems to love that she's doing "grown up" work. she took such care decorating each card and envelope and i just had to resist my urges to reach in and stop her from drawing a rainbow or a heart on the space themed card.  she's a girl and she's 4, she can't seem to draw a picture without including one of these motifs!

i'm going to embrace some fun craft projects for the kids this week. i'm super excited to make use of the million broken crayons we have in our art box to make these cool chunky crayons.  again, very macgyver of me, and i know the kids will love the alchemy of it. http://crafts.kaboose.com/fall_crayons.html 

i am also going to set up a drawing binder for cleo. we have literally 50 drawings of hers lying around in various piles and i always hate to throw them away but i hate the clutter factor even more.  i thought if i put them in a 3 ring binder she would have fun going through them, we'd have a place to easily add new drawings, and a definite bonus from my standpoint is that i will have a makeshift chronicle of her art.  i'm amazed at the way certain themes come and go in her drawings.  last week was all about mermaids and houses with chimneys and the week before starred big hairy monsters.  on each drawing she usually writes flynn and cleo somewhere which i find perfectly adorable.  won't it be interesting to watch when she finally figures out that the n's in flynn's name are backwards?

and as a little bonus for myself this week, i am going to once and for all clean out our back room of all its crap and turn it into our official craft room. a table for me, a table for jaren, and a table for the kids.  i just might even set up my sewing machine.