Cookie Overload

HoneyBooBoo Eats Girl Scout Cookies so you should too.

First let me say that if you are our troop leader, stop reading this now.  Your shit list is the last one I need to be on...again.  I want to preface this post by saying that I am in love with the Girl Scouts despite any catty viewpoint expressed herein.  I am proud that my daughter is one and I hope that she chooses to stay with GS as she grows.  There are so many wonderful opportunities to take advantage of and so many memories to make.  My following comments are made in jest of a GS tradition that we are acclimating ourselves into and of course, I must add in my two sarcastic cents during the process.

Having said that - it's that time of year again.  Time to offer up your kid for any available free moment to hock cookies to America.

This being our first year in Girl Scouts, it's our first do-si-do with selling cookies and the dreaded Cookie Booth.  Cookie Booths are the bane of existence for any girl scout parent from February to March each year.  "Can you cover this?"  "Can you be there?"  "People need their cookies!"

I thought with Bean being so young and all that she might be eased into the Cookie Booth process but I was totally, 100% wrong.  We were even offered a 7 hour shift since we can only do weekend booths.  Uh huh. That ain't happening.  I thought at the time that I would be lucky and pushing it getting Bean to stay engaged for two hours and I as right.

She fared well for the first hour in the chilly morning wind gale but as that second hour started ticking on, I could see the curtain of "I'm over this crap" come down.  I had to beg to get her to wave at passing motorists.  It would have helped to warm her up.  She wasn't buying it.  She probably would have benefitted from a cookie.

My boss shared that he read an article stating the majority of cookies are sold by moms of Girl Scouts instead of actual Girl Scouts.  I'm not sure if that is correct  or not but it was true that second hour of cookie booth for us.

I'd love to give props to the Girl Scout and/or her parental unit that came up with the idea of setting up a booth right outside a medical marijuana facility.  That girl deserves a special badge for that entrepreneurial foresight.  Wished I had come up with myself.

By the time the second shift of the day rolled around, Bean was just not feeling it.  We were setup to man a booth outside a farming specialty shop for three hours and I was so dreading it.  I knew Bean was already at her limit and these three hours would be like trying to get blood from a stone but we had given our word. Once we arrived though there was a mixup with the assigned times and another troop was there.  Now not only was the actual Girl Scout over cookies, cookie booths, badges, all that, but so was her mother.  I didn't care if I ever saw another Thin Mint again or heard the words Girl Scouts.  I just wanted to run back to the car and peel out of there on two wheels with our Daisy vest sailing off in the wind.

But you know what happened?

The power of community and comraderie within Girl Scouts came out and renewed our love and passion for all things scouting.  (Except for actually camping out.  She's on her own with that one.)

The other troop that was there were two older girls and their moms.  These two girls had been active in Girl Scouts since they were Bean's age and they welcomed her to their booth and set about teaching her the ropes.  They were probably two of the nicest young ladies I've met in a long time and proved my theory that all teenage girls are possessed to be completely false.  I will state right now that if Bean grows up to be as nice and kind as these two girls, I will be over the moon proud.

The moms welcomed me into the fold as well.  They told me all about their girls who are now best friends, about the awards they had won, the trips they had earned and the friends they had made.  They could not say a single negative thing about the organization and left the impression that they had gained so much by their daughters being part of it all.

This is what I had forgotten in the hullabaloo of cookie season.

This is what I want Bean to find out for herself.

So despite my grumblings and petty comments, cookie season has given us one thing.  That's the reminder that when you enter into the world of Girl Scouts, you are entering not just an activity for your child to spend some down time.  You are opening up doors to friendships and opportunities that far outweigh any badge earned.  Thank you to Vicki and Dee Dee and your beautiful daughters for reminding us of that and for the hour spent getting to know you all.  Bean told everyone about her time in the Cookie Box.

Contemplating Home DIY projects

Back in January, we had a pipe burst that caused our front room to flood.  We have been on the search for weeks and weeks to find new flooring for this room.  Usually when Hubz and I go out looking for ideas, it turns into something similar to this.

Talk to the hand cause I hate that floor!

A while back and I do mean AWHILE we bought some hardwood laminate that we were going to put down in our living room, entryway and hallway with plans to later on also put it in this front room.  The flooring is still in the boxes and now they have discontinued that color so we cannot buy more.  

Now we are looking at finding flooring for all of the rooms and the two of us cannot agree on much.  We had been given the idea of tiling the entryway and finding laminate for the front room and living room.  That's a great idea but we hate each other's choices on tile.  I want something like this

Very elegant.

and he wants something like this

which is nice and elegant AND $600.  

That ain't happenin'!

We currently have a real hardwood floor that is glued down directly to the slab in the entryway only but it is a color of wood that I don't like.  Another problem is that we do not have enough money to do laminate in all these rooms or a mix of tile and laminate from our insurance proceeds and we don't have the extra in the budget to come out of pocket right now.

I am trying to come up with ideas of what to do with the current hardwood in the entryway.  I really like the idea of sanding and painting it but am not sure if the Other Half will like it.  I need to do it before we install the laminate because if I wait until after and we don't like it, it could damage the laminate if we try and take up this section later on.  

I just have no experience painting a hardwood floor.  Most say it's horrible to paint over wood but if it's a wood you don't like, why not?  Here are some ideas I've found so far that I like.

Have you ever painted a hardwood floor?  Would you or do you think that's sacrilege?  

Kelly's Faves @Rhinestone Beagle's Doggone Dirty Craftin' Linky Party

I absolutely love linky parties.  Last week, I added our Sofia the First party post to the party at Rhinestone Beagle and Kelly picked us as one of her faves!

Happy dance!  Woot woot!

Please check out the Doggone Dirty Crafter linky party at Rhinestone Beagle to see us mentioned and thank you so much Kelly!

Welcome to pinkieBEAN!

Thank you all for making the jump here to my new nook on the web.  I'll start posting up some new tutorials here shortly.

I hope you all like the new design.  It was made by Jessa at Caked Designs.  I love it.  It's new and fresh.  I'll be adding buttons and bling here and there as I get settled here in my new home.

If you have come here from Pinkie and The Bean, please follow this new site.  I've updated my Facebook and Twitter but if you receive daily emails of my posts, you'll have to sign up again over there on the right under the email link.  If you follow me through a feed reader, you'll need to add this site there too.  I'd really appreciate it if you decided to stick around here.

I hope you find something here that will make you smile, laugh, or get the desire to create something of your own.

pinkieBEAN

Bean's Sofia the First Birthday Party

 Bean wanted to have a Sofia the First birthday party this year. We knew of a local bakery that does birthday parties but we could not arrange a date that would work so on a suggestion by a co-worker we decided to do our own bakery party. This is where my fellow bloggers come in. So many bloggers are so generous to share their own projects and ideas and this year it really helped us with our party. I stole copied borrowed many great ideas found on Pinterest and through the magic of Google!

Going with the Sofia the First theme, I started looking around for invitation ideas.  I found a  a ton of Sofia party ideas at 3 Little Greenwoods.  I wish I could say I was also able to keep my party costs at $75 like she did but I couldn't.  Using the wonderful free Sofia the First party printables shared by Peonies and and Poppy Seeds, I made similar invites using ribbon I already had on hand.  I only had to purchase the sparkly cardstock for the backing paper of our invites and more envelopes.  Using a great coupon at Michael's,  I was able to put together our invitations for $9.

 I also used the foldable place cards to label our drink station and activities.  You can see one I made to display the Amulets of Avalor that I made after finding this great tutorial from Handmade Happy Hour.  I actually won a Mod Podge contest awhile back and it contained some of these Mod Podge Podgeable Shapes and some Mod Podge with glitter.  I had to purchase the gems for $2.34 at Hobby Lobby but I was able to use ribbon I already had on hand.

 The Welcome sign came from this set of free printables by Seven Thirty Three.  I wanted to make the welcome sign a little prettier but ran out of time so it got slapped onto a blank canvas with some glue dots.

Bean's cake was made by a wonderful lady named Bonnie who runs Bonnie's Cakes.  I found her through a fellow mom friend and come to find out after the party that Bonnie is friends with our aunt.  It's a small world!

 

We served "pink tea" a/k/a strawberry lemonade and water.  No food though.  Just cake and ice cream.

I don't have a picture of them but I used my Silhouette and cut out pink and purple tiaras that went on the water bottles.  I stole borrowed this idea from Catch My Party.  I found an idea on Etsy of dressing up plastic goblets for the pink tea.  Bean put Sofia stickers on each one and I tied the little bows.


After my friend suggested we do our own bakery party, I started looking for ideas on how to do this without it becoming some big huge mess.  We bought two jumbo muffin pans at Target and made our mini cakes the morning of the party.  Word of advice to anyone considering your own bakery birthday party - go to your grocery store bakery and ask if they will sell you some un-iced cupcakes instead.  We were afraid we hadn't made enough so Hubz went to our local Publix and was able to buy six for $2.50.  If I had known that beforehand I could have saved a lot of time and effort.

I found these cute cupcake boxes marked down at Five Below - $4 for a pack of 3.  I bought the cake decorations at Kroger, Target and Jo-Ann's.  On Pinterest, I stumbled across the idea for using paint palettes to hold the cake and the decorations.  Each princess got their own so there was little mess and no fighting over decorations.

 As you can see Princess Bean really enjoyed decorating her cake.

 I loved these floral arrangements found on Pinterest so I made my own version.  I painted the inside of some of Hubz' mason jars and made rolled felt flowers.  I will have a tutorial on how I made these shortly.

The princesses made princess bookmarks and colored princess posters I found at ConsumerCrafts.com.  The princesses got to take home their cake creation, and the bookmarks and posters.  These all served as the "goody bag".

I used the "Now We Are Six" sign that I made earlier to decorate the gift table.

 This was a totally fun party!  I think all of the little princesses enjoyed it.  I need to thank the beautiful Princess Hannah for helping me keep all of the royal guests entertained that day, Princess Melanie for helping me find the location and set everything up the night before and with the dreaded clean-up after, and also a thanks to Princesses Kimberly, Ashley and Justina for chipping in, too.  And of course King Hubz for all his manual labor.  You all helped to make Bean's 6th Birthday the best!

I'm linking up to the following parties:

A Creative Princess
Rhinestone Beagle
Glued to My Crafts
Artsy Fartsy Mama
Sweet Haute
Craftionary
Make It and Love It