Jett had crayon envy.

He came home from school last week totally convinced that he was the only kid in his first grade class without a 96 pack of Crayons.  The pitiful story went on for TWO days.  Two days of me explaining how we'd already purchased school supplies, plus he'd received a 24 pack of crayons as a gift.  He still maintained he was the only child who didn't have a 96 pack.

This was the first time he had asked for something so he could "fit in" or feel included.  I laugh because it was a $5.00 pack of crayons that ceased his longing, but it also made me remember the first time I'd felt the need to feel included.

I was 7th grade and had just entered a middle school in a larger town.  I loved my new surroundings, new friends, and the new opportunities and drank them all in.  I clearly remember coming home from school one fall day and telling my mom and dad what I wanted for Christmas.

"All the popular girls wear these jeans with an upside-down triangle on the back right pocket.  They also have little short zippers on each ankle.  I really need a pair of those jeans.... i mean ALL the popular girls wear them!"

All of you 80's girls realize I'm was referring to Guess Jeans, but the name really meant nothing to me.  It was all about the upside-down triangle and short ankle zippers.  I was convinced just wearing those jeans would change my life!  Of course, I quickly realized the jeans were out of the question with their $58 price tag (and that was two decades ago, I'm afraid to admit).  But the need I felt to fit in through a choice in clothing was a strong one.

How about you... do you remember your first object of envy?

Maybe its just me but i'm sure encouraging kids to smell their marker pens is not a good message.
Silly Scents - Silly indeed

Apparently it's...

They say that you don't find out who you really are, what you're really made of, until you have kids. I think what they meant to say is that you don't find out how annoying you are until your kids can throw it back in your face. The more oblivious they are to this mirroring ability, the harder it is to take.

For instance, I have learned that I use the phrase, "In fact," a lot. I also start sentences with "You know what I think?," or "It was really ____ (neat, amazing, funny, disgusting, etc.)."

ONE:

"It was really gross that you got TWO's poopy on your nose, Mama. In fact, please don't come near me."

-or-

"You know what I think, Mama? I think you can color with these crayons. I don't want to anymore."

Having kids has forced me to accept that I am anal about things unworthy of neurosis. I had no idea how deep-seeded the problem was until I bought my daughter the 150 crayon caddy. I should have known it was a bad idea when I took pictures of it before I gave it to her. That picture at the top of the blog?  I didn't take it for this posting...

The first thing ONE did after being presented with this exquisite array of color was to pick out the glitter crayons. A friend of mine gave her the 16 pack of glitter crayons for her birthday and they are still the only ones that she cares about. I tried to talk her into experimenting with some of the other colors. I mean, C'MON, there are 134 other non-glittering colors that are just as important. She treated them like they were all Burnt Sienna or Yellow-Green or something. She looked at me and actually raised an eyebrow.

All was soon forgiven and she invited me to color with her. I'd barely gotten the bottom of Cinderella's gown done in the first shade of blue (I like to blend several colors) before she was ready to turn the page.

"But I'm not done, Pea."

"Yes, you are."

Seriously? I thought we were beyond this. She was no longer eating crayons, so wasn't she old enough to finish one picture before starting another? Whatever. I reminded myself that I was the adult and backed off.

But then she didn't put them away as she finished with them. This meant that she'd color a page, leave the crayons in the crease and then turn to the next image that interested her. So all of the used crayons were stuck in the book, absorbing the pressure as she pressed down to color something else.

It was more than I could take. What if they broke? Clearly she wasn't ready for the responsibility of the 150 caddy. Maybe she needed to see the episode of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood where they went through the crayon factory.

It was like she read my thoughts. She looked right at me and peeled the wrapper off of a perfectly good crayon for no reason. She hadn't even used it yet. It certainly didn't need to be sharpened.

It was time to put the crayons away. She accomplished this by shoving them into the plastic caddy. A crayon broke. I actually gasped.

"You know what I think, Pea? I don't think you're ready for these crayons yet."

"You know what I think, Mama? I think you can color with these crayons. I don't want to anymore."

I hate it when she's right.

I grabbed a coke and gave myself a time-out.

They were her Crayolas, not mine. I gave them to her as a gift and she needed to be able to enjoy them freely, in any way that moved her. If I wasn't careful, I'd turn her off to the beauty of brand new crayons.

Somehow it took having a kid to realize that I still need to work on my sharing techniques.

If your creative juices are currently running low, here are a few fun things you can do during the long, holiday weekend to help get the tank filled up again.

*Thanks to my friend Leo Bottary for pointing me to these.

• Jackson Pollock-A-Sketch – I LOVE this. It’ll look like a white, blank screen, but start moving your mouse around and click to change the color.

• Wordle – You can use Wordle to make a visual world cloud out of as many words as you like. Copy and paste your resume to see what themes pop up. Or your favorite blog. You can change the layout, colors, etc.

• Dumpr – You can create fun photos to share with friends. Check out the museum “painting” of Leo that he made using the site.

• Crayola – Remember when you channeled your youthful creativity by making cards and crafts. You know, before we had money to take the easy way out and go buy a card. Relive those early days when your creativity was unbridled.

Have fun!

*Image by Allie Caulfield.

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Also of interest is what seems to be Crayola's foray into the world of peripherals with its colourful keyboard for kiddies (now with Comic Sans MS!) and light-up mouse (complete with built-in water globe!). Going through the Crayola Store site (as you do on a Saturday night), I was reasonably surprised to also find that there is Crayola camcorder. The product description caught my eye, too:

Kids can enjoy endless hours of fun & learning with this Digital Camcorder. Camcorder features a preview screen, sound effect buttons and a built-in microphone.

Fun? Learning? With a camera? I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation. There must be.

Recently, I've been more active with social media than I was during last month - I've started using Delicious a lot, and I've started using FriendFeed a lot. What's the link? Both have had redesigns of late - del.icio.us got revamped to Delicious (finally) and there's the new FriendFeed beta that I would highly recommend to every FFer out there. When a site I use often gets a facelift, I tend to get excited about it again.

See, something happened last month that made me a bit sad and I started moping about. As a result, I started shifting away from active to passive in terms of intarwebs usage. Anyway, I became happy and stopped moping about - I eventually realised that there was the slightest chance, had I continued for long enough, that I may have turned into one of those little twerps who pretend to be all depressed and anti-establishment - and I have returned to active tube consumption.

Anyway, I was going somewhere with this before I got sidetracked with almost all of the last two paragraphs. I change my passwords regularly (mostly in order to avoid this scenario), but I forgot to update the details of the automated daily blog post of my Delicious bookmarks, hence the lack of bookmarks over the past few days.

If you're still interested in my Doctor Who reviews, then you may be interested to know that I'm working on those for The Reign of Terror, Father's Day and a couple of episodes from series 4.

How to Enter: Comment on the giveaway post at This Full House Reviews. Earn three extra entries by blogging about the contest.

Enter Before/By: 8/31/08.

How Often to Enter: Up to four entries.

Who Can Enter: Not specified.

What You Can Win: Back-to-school package including The Crayola 64, Pip-Sqeaks Mix 'Ems Markers, No Drip Paint Brush Pens and True to Life Markers, Colored Pencils and Twistable Crayons (ARV $30.00).

I'm blogging about this giveaway for an extra entry. Your comments here are always welcome, but please remember to visit the source -as described- for your own entry. Good Luck!

4. get another piece of clay and roll out the coil.
5. wrap coils around the base ( until you are satisfied with how the pot looks )
6. smooth out the inside of the pot not the outside.

7. let clay dry
8. after clay dries paint pot ( if you want to )
You have now made a coil pot

Gift bags and tissue paper are the new gift wrap and ribbon. Back in the day, gift wrap paper came in rolls or in flat packages lined up on racks like cards in a solitaire game with plaids, flowers, stripes and checks for suits. There was satin ribbon for tying and ribbed ribbon for curling. The spools sat stacked in neat rows, colorful as a 96-count box of Crayolas. For those with two thumbs and/or no time there were ready-made bows round and colorful as faerie pompoms.

Before gift bags and tissue paper became the new gift wrap and ribbon, wrapping presents was an art form. It allowed time to envision the recipient of our gift opening it with delight. There was the partnership between parent and child at that crucial moment when the ribbons had to be tied and Mom needed the nearest child’s index finger to “hold right there” until the knot that would hold the gorgeous present together could be tied.

Then there was the moment when the recipient marveled over the wrapped present, prolonging for a moment the anticipation of opening it. Gift openers fell into one of two camps: the tearer-intos (usually children) and the gently-slit-and-folders (mostly their elders). Beautiful, but ransacked, paper would be stuffed into the trash can along with the ribbons, their curls now a bit awry and spent. The carefully slitted paper would be folded back along its creases and saved for wrapping smaller presents, a book perhaps or the occasional gift of jewelry.

But now that gift bags and tissue are the new wrapping paper and ribbons all of that is disappearing. Little creative energy is spent opening a glossy bag, laying some preselected matching tissue in it, plopping in a gift and then filling the cavity with a few more sheets before fluffing the edges into some semblance of festivty.

And there goes the anticipation for the giftee. No easing tight ribbons off the corners of a gift box or cutting into them to release their hold. No more diversity between the puller-offers and the slit-and-folders, either. Were all just reacher-intos now, our gift bags reusable and politically correct. If we don’t reuse the tissue we crush it tennis ball size so as not to take up too much room in a landfill.

No, a simple delight is missing now that gift bags and tissue are the new gift wrap and ribbons. Good thing Rodgers and Hammerstein are not writing My Favorite Things today. “Mailing envelope and tape strips” just doesn’t have the same lilt as “brown paper packages tied up with string.”

I'd expect the usual...white, black, red, blue, green, yellow, orange, violet, brown & carnation pink.  They're all there.  It's the other colors that I found in the box that surprised & disappointed me...red violet, blue violet, red orange, yellow orange, blue green & yellow green.  It makes for a lovely rainbow; however, I really would have liked to see some greater variation in shades presented.  How about sky blue, apricot, goldenrod, midnight blue, jungle green & mahogany instead?  Still in the same color families, but definitely more different than the current batch of colors included.  There are plenty of others that would offer greater coloring variety that the current batch as well.

I could just as easily wish for colors that have been retired, such as maize, raw umber, teal blue & lemon yellow; however, I'm realistic & know that I should work within the current Crayola color palette.

So, kind people at Crayola who will probably never see this, consider the colors that you're putting in that box, eh?  Parents color with their children and we'd like to see something a bit more varied for our coloring pleasure while we're relegated to use of the washable box of 16 (oh, I remember the joy of that new box of 64 as a kid).

The color was an odd choice since the camouflaged mikes made the white pundits occasionally look as if they had strange facial features and were otherwise unflattering. A sleek black microphone would have been better aesthetically. Also, no improper subliminal (albeit unintentional) message would have been sent out.

FNC, what were you thinking?

Rather than just talk about being creative though, let's do it. To facilitate this exercise, I'll offer a link to the modern day way to create your own card/art project at home. When I was a little kid, we just grabbed a handful of Crayolas. It was the way we "competed" against Hallmark back in the day. Today, you can reach out to Crayola online.

Visit the Card Creator or Arts & Crafts . As opposed to stating: "Do not try this at home," I might suggest that's exactly where you should try it. We don't need anyone to get fired over playing Crayola in the office.

You're welcome to submit project entries. We'd be happy to assemble a set of judges and carefully evaluate all submissions. What does the winner receive? I guess we'll just have to get creative!

But the project needs to happen soon, according to Johann Scheidt of the Fotowatio Group, a Spanish energy company overseeing the project. Crayola hopes to receive the Solar Energy (Investment) Tax Credit, a federal program that would pay for 30 percent of the project. ''Without the tax credit, it's a no-go,'' Scheidt said.

According to the Allentown's Morning Call, the local Planning Commission decided to speed up the approval process for the plant after hearing a proposal that impressed both commissioners and residents.

The program expires at the end of 2008, meaning Fotowatio wants to get to work by the middle of September. It will take about two months to complete construction of the solar panels.

Just a couple of weeks ago we echoed a story about a sizable investment ($350 million) from two groups in Fotowatio, one of them being GE Financial Services. Fotowatio has built several large solar plants in Europe, including one in Spain that's among the largest in the world (20 MW). The one in Forks would be three megawatts.

''It's not going to break records, but for the Northeast, it's very significant,'' Scheidt said. As a matter of fact, Gov. Rendell is very supportive of renewable energy in the state of Pennsylvania. Last July he approved a $650 million fund to spur energy conservation and efficiency and RE development.

Partnership Encourages Creativity and Arts at Sandpiper Family Resort

(August 1, 2008—Miami) Club Med and Crayola recently added an artistic edge to family vacations with the new Club Med Crayola Creativity program.  Designed by Crayola for Club Med Sandpiper, Florida, the program features age-appropriate arts and crafts activities for virtually all kids, from toddlers to teens.  The Creativity program launches today with plans to develop additional programs in Club Med resorts throughout Mexico and the Caribbean in 2009.

Upon arriving at Club Med Sandpiper, youngsters will create picture frames and journals to illustrate their vacation memories, using the latest Crayola products. Mini Club guests can make their mark on a variety of “mommy and me” activities with Crayola TaDoodles, the first egg-shaped crayons, markers and paints designed to fit toddlers’ hands. The creative fun continues near the pool with opportunities to draw “floating” sidewalk murals, using Crayola 3-D Sidewalk Chalk.

In many projects, the Creativity program will highlight local culture, incorporating facts about manatees, the everglades and the Spanish language to tickle kids’ imaginations. Children will take a letter for their parents with each project, helping the parent extend the creative learning experience and encourage their child’s interest in artistic expression. The program will offer follow-up activities, fun regional facts and books relating to local culture to create a colorful cultural experience.

The Creativity program also helps adults perfect their artistic skills or discover new ones. Trained instructors, a box of pastels and the inspiration of the Florida mangroves may lead to many a vacation masterpiece. Families can also enjoy being creative together with games like “Draw, Draw and Name It!”

“Crayola, like Club Med, is an emotional brand. We both create enduring memories,” states Sabina Sicuso, Vice President of Marketing, Club Med North America.  “No matter our age, we all remember the excitement of getting a new box of crayons before the first day of school, and the anticipation of going on a family vacation when school finished.  Partnering with Crayola is a natural fit to enrich Club Med’s children’s programs with emotion and memories.”

“We are excited about launching the Creativity program at Club Med Sandpiper to make their guests’ vacation experience even more memorable,” said Jeffrey Rogers, Director, Portfolio Marketing, Crayola.  “What inspires us most about the partnership is Club Med’s unique focus on families traveling with toddlers, giving us the opportunity to design art experiences for the youngest set using Crayola Beginnings, our newest art tools created for children as young as 12 months.”

The Crayola Creativity program will color family vacations even before departure. Guests can log-on to www.clubmed.us  to download artistic activities that will keep kids entertained while traveling, including car, airport and airplane friendly activities. The site also details creative projects for rainy days and special occasions to stimulate children’s interest in hands-on art and Mexico.

Club Med Sandpiper offers programs for children four months to 17-years that encourage little ones to learn about local cultures, explore nature’s beauty, practice a variety of sports and discover activities designed for their age group. Children are divided into small groups according to their age and interests to participate in programs such as Club Med’s Circus School, Hip Hop Kidz and Lil’ Explorers Science Club. Additional activities include flying trapeze, tennis and golf lessons, soccer, sailing, rollerblading, archery and more.

Walang humpay ang pagsusumamo ni Manong Driver na magkaroon ng laruang bahay.
Walang araw na hindi niya ito sinasabi sa nanay at tatay niya.
Noong una, gumawa ang nanay niya ng maliit na bahay mula sa pira-pirasong kahon para maging bahay niya. Ngunit sawing palad sa kagandahan dahil noong natapos parang bahay ng aso sa sobrang liit at sa dami nng tagpi (parang asong si tagpi) pero masaya pa rin si Manong Driver sa munti niyang bahay-laruan.

Pagkalipas ng ilang buwan, pumasyal si Manong Driver sa bahay ng mga pinsan niya. Kung tutusin sila pa lang ang pinsan niyang buo. Ang makukulit ngunit mapagmahal na mga pinsan..(hello tita chezka, zane, zara and zack).

Pagdating ni Manong Driver doon, naku, bumulaga ang napakagandang munting bahay ng mga pinsan niya.
Ang kartong bahay na maganda ngunit medyo mahal para kay Manong Driver. Ang 700pesos na bahay na iyon ay hindi mabibili ni Nanay Andeng dahil sa panghihinayang sa perang pinagsisikapan ni Tatay Marc.

Kaya nitong isang araw lamang, tuwang-tuwa si Manong Driver at may dalawa siyang balikbayan box na wala nang laman (siyempre ang laman nito ay nakatago at kinakain na - salamat daw po tito ward at tita leah) ayun di na siya nagdalawang isip na ipagawa ito sa nanay niya.

Dahil creative naman ang nanay ni Manong Driver ay ginawa niya ito. Madali naman gawin ang kartong bahay basta't may kahon ka at maraming crayola ay ayos na. Matibay at malaki pa sa nabibili sa anumang tindahan. At ang kagandahan pa nito sariling likha mo ito at ang walang kapalit na bonding sa iyong anak ang pinakamasarap na kabayaran dito.

Kaya ano pa ang hinihintay ninyo mga nanay, inay, mommy, mom at mama diyan..bonding na kasama ang mga anak ninyo..db?

Si Manong Driver ang nagkulay ng mga likhang-guhit ni Nanay Andeng.

The bad news: They were $3.00 a box...3 bucks for 8 crayons?! Ugh, I just spent $9.00 on 24 crayons. You know those things are going to break the second the kids use them! I'd again like to recognize the good people at Staples for ripping me off!

I read your comments after I made my purchase. I never thought to look at the Dollar Store. Good thing I kept my receipt!

Not the best time for a crayon shortage..

Oh yeah - and they were out of dry erase markers too.

Please give me a shout out if you find some!

Here is a list of Crayola's acid free products:

Acrylic Paint
Gel Pens
Metallic FX Markers
Washable Glue Sticks
Washable Squeezables 3-D Paint
Certain varieties of Glitter Glue
Total Tools Glue Roller

Visit their website for an updated list of products.

 http://www.crayola.com/canwehelp/contact/faq_view.cfm?id=4

Two Crayons picked;
Violet and Crimson.
Aimlessly, ignorantly, they color
The white paper.
Flowing, curling across
Empty fields.
The parchment filled,
They want more.
They dip and dive
Into the red and purple picture.
Whimsically at first ...
Then violently.
A dark gaping maw
A void
Is all that remains.

~~ YeoungBraxx

Not quite as the photograph, this little boy was so cute It demanded to be drawn. Nothing like the real one. Which reminds me of my godson of 4 years going to his immunization shots. He made such a theatrical impression that most of the people were waiting outside to see who was crying with such intensity. I suppose those little ones waiting outside thought they were going to be sent to hell or something. Which is why, this should be done in a noise proof room with lots of earplugs at hand.