School Holidays

School holidays are here, you know what that means! Two glorious weeks of sleep ins with not a school lunch to be made in sight. Imagine those lazy mornings you’ll have, sipping on your hot coffee, soaking up the sun in your garden, maybe reading a magazine or two.

Yeah, right.

You’ll be honing your skills as a short order cook to dissatisfied customers - one needs crusts cut off, one doesn’t like peanut butter anymore, but didn’t think to tell you until after you’d made it. 

When you’re out of the kitchen, you’ll be doing piles of laundry - washing clothes that were on the skin for 10 minutes tops, before getting covered in mud on the rope swing outside. You seriously contemplate putting them in school uniforms over the holidays just to save on the laundry. 

When you finally get the kids out of the house, your kids will ask why you’re going to the park or library again while so and so from their class has gone to Fiji. 

And on an on it goes.

I can’t promise you any miracles, but I can share with you, the fun experience I just had on this fine first morning of school holidays.

“Hey boys, come here, want to make your very own MUGS?!”

I sat my Boy 5 and Boy 9 down at the table with their $1 mugs from Kmart (oh how I love that place) and jar of Sharpies and some crappy colourful markers. 

Boy 5 decided right away that he’d go with the Star Wars theme. 

Here's how it went down:

Star Wars pals cheering him on... 

Star Wars guys abandoned by the boy, after being consumed with rage at not being able to get the letters right. To be fair, it's not easy writing on a curved surface. 

Maybe I should have thought this through.

Screw that, better curl up behind the sofa and lose my shit, thought the 5 year old.

Yup, so that took all of 4 minutes. 

Boy 9 loves pugs (news to me) - so here's how his went:

He wrote "PUGS" in block letters, coloured them in and even added a black stripe to the top of the mug. He's fancy like that.

Ooops, made a mistake. No worries, just need a bit of nail polish remover on a tissue. 
Some smearing happened there, but didn't seem to bother him. Oh well.

Some people recommend baking the mug to set the art. Tried this and the art didn't set 100%,  so we went with the miracle that is Mod Podge after baking. You can find this in the arts & crafts section of most stores. It is AWESOME for all sorts of projects. 

* To bake, put your mugs in the oven before turning the oven on. Bake at 100 degrees for 30 minutes.

Girl 14 had made hers last night, featuring some inside joke from a Vine (teenagers!)

So there you have it, custom made mugs using cheap mug, markers and Mod Podge. Do they look perfect? NO, this ain't Pinterest! This is real life. Pinterest has an endless collection of ideas to make perfect mugs, and they are amazing. Me, I'm keepin' it real. I'm showing you how your experience crafting with littlies will most likely go. 

You're welcome.

I need to start playing a drinking game where I take a swig every time someone in this house says "I'm hungry," "We're out of milk," "There's nothing to eat!" or "I'm bored." But then again, we'd be out of booze, like, immediately.

Change It Up

Next time you've had it up to here with your kids and you can feel the same script rise to your lips, stop.

Swallow those words.

They've heard it before.

They know how long the speech takes, how long they'll have to stop and pretend to listen, how long to be remorseful for before they revert to their usual shit behaviour.

What to do?

Time out.

Put yourself in time out.

They won't know what to do with that one, and their bewilderment may just buy you a few hours of good behaviour.