Day 12

Every holiday or so, I get this idea to do something with the kids that seems like a simple craft but turns out to be much more complicated that I realized. Last Christmas it was our shrinky-dink window charms. For A's b-day, it was the papier mache dinosaur eggs.

And for Thanksgiving, it is this deceptively simple leaf banner:It says "Happy Thanksgiving," if that's not obvious. Each one of these leaves has been carefully cut out (by me), painted (by the boys), had a carefully cut out (by me) letter glued on (by A. until he got bored and then by me), had two holes punched in it and a maroon ribbon strung through (all by me).

Just getting the letters done was a pain in the neck. I had to choose a font, remember how to switch to mirrored type, change it to outline mode so it wouldn't use up so much ink, and remember to switch the page orientation to "landscape." I forgot to do each one of those things at least once for both pages I tried to print. And, of course realizing one of my mistakes, I fed the paper back into the printer so it could print on the other side - way to save paper, right? WRONG - if you are cutting the letters out and there's printing on both sides of the paper, you're going to have funky striped letters. Duh.

Damn thing's finally up now. Happy Goddamn Thanksgiving.

Speaking of Thanksgiving - no one has accepted our invitation to dinner. Did word of the Undercooked Turkey Fiasco of '01 get out? Or perhaps they heard how we spread the noro virus to one whole side of our extended family last year at Thanksgiving? We're thinking of scrapping cooking entirely (although our new stove should be here by then) and going out to eat.