I’ve been listening to the KidLitWomen podcast, and it reminded me of this video commercial I had seen. I tend to miss the viral videos, but I am SO grateful to have seen this one. I cry every time. And I LOVE that this notion of “like a girl” is being revisited, rethought, and embraced as something strong and powerful.
(When my friend and I separately asked our daughters to “run like a girl,” they both responded like the young girls in the video. Huzzah!)
I’ve never been a neat-freak, and I definitely don’t need my home to look “just so.” But recently, while staying somewhere else, I noticed the way the pillow cases were tucked in so neatly and crisply, instead of hanging out over the side, and I fell in love. It is crazy simple to do, assuming your pillowcase has enough extra fabric off the side. This is a very short video to demonstrate the technique, but basically the steps are:
-Lay the pillow flat with the pillowcase opening towards you.
-Grab the top part of the pillowcase and tuck it in and away from you, towards the back of the pillowcase.
-Adjust it to lay flat, and the rest takes care of itself.
That’s it! A very simple, fast fix that makes me smile.
I recently read about a site where you could change Mona Lisa’s smile with a click of the mouse. I thought this sounded interesting, but, alas, the page was no longer there. And even after some poking around, I couldn’t find anything like it. So, instead, in a very amateur fashion, I have taken out Mona’s smile for some good, old-fashioned pen and paper fun. (I love how her eyes are still “smiling” no matter what mouth you add.)
If you’re not interested in printing with so much color ink, I’ve also taken her smile out of a black and white coloring-style picture as well. Of course ,to conserve paper, you could slip this into a plastic protective sheet and use a whiteboard marker to change Mona’s facial expression however many times you’d like!
We might be in the minority here of people who have been completely aggravated by this issue, but this summer we had an absolutely frustrating time with the sliding doors on the Honda Odyssey. They continuously refused to open all the way, which made for many a maddening moment as we were trying to get our already-screaming toddler into his carseat. And then, magically, once in awhile, the sliding door did open all the way. And that was great, except sometimes it felt all the more frustrating because there seemed to be zero rhyme or reason to this absurdity.
After some failed Internet searches, my husband took to the manual and found this gem:
–If the back windows are rolled down more than a couple of inches (which ours apparently were most of the summer), then the sliding doors will not fully open!–
Something that seemed so incredibly maddening suddenly made sense. It’s a safety issue. And, hallelujah, we now know how to fix the problem!
And then, the opposite issue started popping up. The flipping automatic door on one side would close almost completely, ALMOST–just enough to tease us–then would loudly beep in alarm, and re-open. Obviously, if there was something in the way, then this very important feature makes sense. But, when the area is cleared and we had wiped down door tracks and door sensors and done a whole lot of crossing our fingers, the fact that the door only closed on its own about 40% of the time became really, really annoying, really quickly. (Can’t tell you how frustrating this little hiccup has been in our lives when it’s already such a struggle to get everyone settled in the first place.)
We have yet to find an “official” solution to this one, but what has worked almost flawlessly is to stand by the automatic sliding door as it’s closing, and right as it’s nearing the end of its little journey, we just sort of nudge/gently push the door into the closed position from the outside of the car. Nothing fancy, but has made our outings much, much better.
(Just had to share in case anyone else is dealing with this.)
I discovered this site a couple years ago, and I love it! I’m sure there are others like it out there, and perhaps I’m behind on the times to realize something like this exists, but, nevertheless, I had to share. On Calligraphr (no “e”), you can create your own font for free! The free account lets you do the basic upper and lower case letters, numbers, and basic punctuation (although, I find it doesn’t always pick up my quotation marks and apostrophes). It will also let you add one whole set of variants so that your font has a more natural look. The paid account will let you store/work with many fonts at once, contains more characters, more variant possibilities, and other features. (Once your font is saved and stored on your computer from the free account, it stays there; you just can’t store more than one font at a time on their site with the free one.)
I have yet to create anything super fancy or artistic on here, but I’ve done my own basic font, and I LOVE, love using it for our daughter. She enjoys writing stories, so this is a great way to type up her longer work, but have it “written” in her handwriting. Since her handwriting is still changing so much, it’s fun to update it as she grows. This would also be a fun way to personalize letters or cards to people, if your kid isn’t up to the stage of writing lengthy text.
It took me a little bit of a learning curve to figure out where to place my letters within their guidelines, but if you look through “Tutorial 1,” it’s quite clear how to do it.
Anyway, just thought I’d share for anyone else who didn’t know this was out there. It’s a fun way to personalize letters, cards, poetry, and stories, without much effort.