"Pie" Charts

If I show you how M and I plan a party where we're serving pizza, do you promise not to laugh at us?  At least to our face?

OK, here is a screenshot then:

 

Because happiness is optimizing the correct number of square inches of pizza to have on hand for your guests.  Do we know how to party, or what???

At the End of the Rainbow

Now that Claire's birthday THIS year has passed, I went to look for my post about LAST year and realized I never wrote about it.  So now I'm going to remedy that.

We were camping on Claire's birthday.  And that day may or may not also be a certain holiday that falls in mid-March.  I wanted to share a little game we did with the other kids who went camping with us last year.  As you may have noticed by now, I have a real love of Pass the Parcel type games.  For this one, I put glow sticks (to play with after dark at the campsite) in-between successive layers of wrapping paper.  In rainbow order:

And in the very middle, a pot of "gold" (AKA chocolate coins):

 

M and I played music and the kids passed the package around a circle until the music stopped.  The kid holding it when the music stopped got to open a layer and keep whatever prize was inside.  (In a fit of obsessive justice, M and I watched to make sure the music stopped on everyone at least once.)

The kids loved the "Pot of Gold at the End of a Rainbow" and we followed it up with cupcakes:

Bonk!

She walked around like this for awhile.  She thought she was SO funny.  Even when she kept running face first into walls and furniture.

Photography Challenge Day #16 - Long Exposure

 

My kids had their spring break and we went camping for a couple of days.  It had rained quite a bit just before, so everything was green and lovely and there was plenty of water to long exposure photos of.

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I want to force myself to practice taking photos a little more, so I'll be posting for this 30 Day Photography Challenge even though the "official" challenge is over.  Posts may or may not be daily.

My rules for my self are:
1 - Take everything in manual mode
2 - No post-processing, only SOOC

Worst Birthday Date

By means of a highly scientific study (namely: my own inexpert observation), I have determined the worst date to have your birthday on.  I know because one of my kids has it.  (But I'm not naming names.)

Now, I will concede that a leap year birthday could be rough in a lot of ways.  But at least it has cool factor and it'd be memorable.  Same goes for Christmas birthdays and the like.  Holiday ones can be hard for planning parties, I'm sure.  (I have another kid whose birthday is always over Spring Break.  Which means all his/her friends are out of town.  I imagine this problem would be much worse in the Christmas season.)  But for the purposes of this discussion, I'm talking about the worst day to have your birthday if you don't want everyone to forget it.  If you feel mortified by attention, then perhaps for you this would be the best possible date.  But for a little kid who doesn't understand why all his/her presents are always late, it's the worst.

It is...

Drum roll please...

...
...
...

March 1st

Probably doesn't sound that bad at first glance, huh?  Now I shall defend my reasoning against all you naysayers.

I think ANY 1st of a month would be rough.  People tend to associate birthdays with a certain month.  When a birthday is on the first day of a certain month, people don't get any advance warning.  Normally it goes something like this, "Oh, it's August now.  G's birthday is this month.  I'll have to remember to send her lots of chocolate sometime soon."  But if a birthday is on the first day of the month, then by the time their "birthday month" rolls around, you're already kinda running late.  Definitely already too late to mail anything.  And let's be honest, there are plenty of us who suddenly wake up one day and realize it's not just the beginning of a new month, but a few days in.  Normally this isn't a huge problem.  As in, "Whoa!  It's already August 3rd?  When did that happen???  Good thing I have plenty of time to get all that chocolate in the mail for G.  I better get to the post office."  But when the beginning of a month is temporarily overlooked, any birthday in the first 5 days or so of a month is in peril, and a birthday on the 1st is probably already long gone.

So for example, when your doctor's office sends out birthday cards for everyone whose birthday is in March, they often don't send them until March has actually already started.  Which means that by the time that card arrives, a birthday that was on the 1st already seems like ancient history.  And if your family happens to have, say for example, 2 kids with birthdays in March, it means one kid's card is always late and the other kid's is always early.  I don't care personally, but I can tell in the world of childhood injustices, this does register with my kids.

But as far as firsts of a month goes, March is the worst.  This is because February is a short month.  Normally one might say, "Oh, it's July 29th.  Month's almost over and next month is August.  Better starting thinking about what kind of dark chocolate to get G."  But with a March 1st birthday, it goes more like this, "Today is Febuary 26th.  I should start thinking about [Claire/Scott/Kate]'s birthday sometime in the near future, but I've got some time."  But no.  No you don't have "some time."  You have 3 days.  (Assuming it's not a leap year, of course.  When it is, the calendar grants you one grace day to try to save your sorry butt.  Not that >>I<< would ever forget that my own child's birthday present still had to be wrapped and be really grateful for leap day or anything...)

See how that March 1st birthday will just sneak up on you?  Like a ninja.  A stealthy ninja birthday.

On the upside, maybe some day my kid will enjoy dragging out their birthday surprises over a couple weeks.  I think I would.

Anyone else have a ninja birthday?  Hate it?  Love it?  Discuss.

Photography Challenge Day #15 - Silhouette

Not a perfect silhouette, but I kinda liked how the petals were translucent. 

Spring is here!

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I want to force myself to practice taking photos a little more, so I'll be posting for this 30 Day Photography Challenge even though the "official" challenge is over.  Posts may or may not be daily.

My rules for my self are:
1 - Take everything in manual mode
2 - No post-processing, only SOOC

Okay, I'm Done Now

So, my blog redesign is officially complete.  C'mon over and check it out if you want.

If you've been here in the last few days and seen the constantly changing chaos, I'm very sorry.

I had been thinking about and planning my redesign when I made a rookie mistake and accidentally lost my old header.  Because I am an idiot.

So then I had no choice but to take the plunge and do the redesign.  It was nothing a little lack of sleep couldn't fix.  But I still had some things to finish and kinks to work out and I've been doing that the last few days.  It turns out it can be kind of hard to program in a language you don't actually know.  And it's hard to get Google to give you free answers when you don't even know what language you're working in.  But now it seems like nothing is broken.  At least not anymore.  It might have taken a dozen twenty fifty a few tries, but what's a few invalid variables between friends?

Now I declare it finished.  Please let me know if anything isn't working correctly and I'll promptly lose some more sleep over that too!