DIY bleach Mickey Mouse shirt

I know this cruise is a little over 7 months away, but if you know next to nothing about me, you know that I am a planner. Things can get super hectic over night and I like to have all my ducks in a row. 


My list of fun Disney crafts is practically a mile long, and there are just too many great ideas out there to try. The first thing I wanted to try was a personalized bleach shirt for the kiddos to wear on the day we board the ship. Enter Amber's DIY bleach Mickey Mouse shirt!

So if I could find my card reader, you would have had pictures of the whole process, but true to form, it is lost. You get to see the picture of the finished product taken with my cell phone. It's not the best quality, but you get the idea, right?!


This was simple!!! I mean, super easy. I went to Hobby Lobby because they were having a sale on their t-shirts and grabbed a blue shirt to try this totally easy technique. This blue shirt was a whopping $2 and I got it a size bigger than what he is wearing now to account for a growth spurt between now and then. 


If you want to make one of these, here is how you do it:


Lay your shirt on a flat surface, free of anything you don't want the bleach to discolor. Line the inside of it with plastic trash bags, aluminum foil, or just something that will stop the bleach from seeping to the back of the shirt. 


I googled an outline of Mickey Mouse, printed it, and transferred it to contact paper. It really needs to adhere to the shirt so the bleach doesn't bleed underneath the outline. Then I rummaged for some lettering in my craft cabinet, and found some cute adhesive letters that were just the right size. Then arrange them on the shirt whatever way you wish. I played with a couple of lettering positions and settled on placing the Mickey just under the collar, and then placing the letters slightly curving underneath that.


Then mix up a spray bottle of bleach and water. I started out with about 1/4 bleach and the rest water, and it didn't give me the dramatic color difference I was looking for so I added more bleach. It ended up being about half and half....but it is really up to you. 


Lightly mist over the letters and contact paper. This is where you get to be creative. You can make it very dramatic or very subtle....just spray away. Be careful not to spray yourself or anything other than the shirt you are making. Let the shirt dry and then peel away all the stickers. You are done!


This shirt cost me about $2.50 total and Jansen loves it. We might use this same technique to make some personalized pillowcases for the trip. If you take a pillowcase up to Guest Services at the beginning of your trip, they will return it on the final night, autographed by all of the characters. How fun is that???

Disney Cruise!!!

Yes, my friends. We have officially booked our Disney Cruise for Spring Break 2013!!!!!

The cruise line is going to be sailing out of Galveston on a limited engagement from September of 2012 to May 2013, and Galveston is a 45 minute drive from our house! It just doesn't get any better than that. Otherwise, we would have to fly over 1000 miles to Florida, get transportation to the port, and cruise from there.

We were able to find a cruise leaving the Saturday that our kids' Spring Break starts and comes back two days before school begins again. This is a 6 day cruise to Grand Cayman and Cozumel on the Disney Magic. We are super excited.

There are so many great ideas from past cruisers on how to make the trip more special, less expensive, more magical, more organized, etc. So in the next 8 months, we will be working hard to pay the trip off, and to make some really cool DIY projects to enhance the trip. I just want to do everything possible to help my kids have a totally awesome, memorable time.

Medical diagnosis....

This morning, I had my follow up appointment with my neurologist to find out what the MRI and spinal Xrays showed. I was so hoping that it could just be fixed with a shot. Not so much.

The doctor sat down, pulled out the radiologist's report and then told me that he agreed with the radiologist's findings. Good news and bad news....

Good news: There IS a problem. Actually, there ARE problems. Two of them. The first one is something called Arachnoiditis. Basically, the nerves around my spine and the covering around them are damaged, swollen, inflamed, and they are clustering and adhering together. This is something I had never heard of, but when he showed me on the spinal model and explained the issue, it totally makes sense. This explains the lower back pain, the pain in my hips, the backs of my legs, the prickly feeling I get in my legs, the numbness and tingling in my foot and toes. How can we help this? Well, I am not really sure right now, because we mainly addressed the other issue the doctor wanted to discuss.

He thinks I also have a condition called Tethered Spinal Cord. This is a congenital defect where, much like a stretched rubber band, my spinal cord is attached instead of being loose and being able to bend and move with my body. As a baby and child, it wasn't stretched, but as I grew, it tried to stretch with me. This explains why I started having pain in my teenage years. I had the hardware removed when I was 20 because of pain...and it helped....but I continued to have pain. Now it is progressively getting worse. It makes sense why it wasn't caught as a child...it wasn't an issue.

It also explains why I have so many urologic issues that my urologist has never been able to accurately identify. So many times I have gone into see him, with pain and pressure only for him to tell me that I do not have a UTI. All these nerves are responsible for my bladder as well. My doctor requested all the paperwork from my urologist to further study this.

So the doctor wants me to have a myelogram to confirm this, and see the severity of the Arachnoiditis and TCS. He explained that he can surgically go in, snip my spinal cord loose, and the issues shouldn't progress. They may even improve. But if nothing is done, it will only get worse. Um, this is bad enough. He told me this is a major quality of life issue.

I told him all the little details. I have always had pain, but in the last year it is getting worse. I can't sit for very long, stand for very long, lie down for very long. I can no longer sit on the floor with my kids. When I try to stand it takes me a while to be able to stretch back out to be fully upright. I have had to stop going to Body Pump and can no longer lift weights. I can still do zumba, but there are days when it hurts more than others. There are times when I cannot feel the ground under my feel. There are times when my entire leg tingles. There are times when I feel like jolts of electricity run down my back and legs. The top of my right foot and the first two toes are tingly and numb. Some days I wake up with pain, other days it begins later in the day, but by every evening, I am in pain. Some days are better than others.

I have a pretty high pain tolerance and don't like to complain, but this is no joke. Tuesday, after I did zumba, I was driving my boys for a playdate and my right hip felt like it was on fire for a good hour. It went away after I rested, but returned later that night. I can tolerate some moderate daily pain....I just make sure that I rest when we are out places. When we are shopping, I sit for a while, then get up again. When we were on vacation, I came back to our camper to lie down frequently. At Schlitterbahn, we swam for a while, and then I came back to lounge, then we swam, then I sat and so on and so forth.

I am going to continue to exercise as much as I can without doing the weight lifting and body pump. The walking and zumba are less impacting :) Let's hope next week we can get some more answers and ways to help take care of some of these issues.

Salt dough fossils...

It has been raining here for about 3 days now, and we are trying to keep busy while at home. We got out yesterday to find some school shoes and have a playdate with a friend, but today is an at home day. It's just too messy out. I tried to get my kids to go out and play in the rain, but they both said no. My kids must be the only kids in the world who do don't want to get dirty or play in the rain!

So as an extension of our trip to the museum over the weekend, we made some salt dough fossils.

These were a huge hit for my boys!

They went around the house looking for little toys that they could make impressions of. They made up the salt dough...which is incredible fine motor work for Jansen and great tactile/sensory work for Caleb, and got to work.

After a few hours baking in the oven, these fossils are ready to go!

Here is what you need to make your own:

Make the salt dough using a cup of salt, a cup of flour, and a little more than a half cup of water. Add all to a bowl and mix using your hands until the mixture is smooth like play-do.

It's ready to go.

Roll out sections as you wish and start pressing.

Bake at 200 degrees for about 3 hours until they are solid. Make sure you bake them on wax paper, or they will stick to the pan.

You now have salt dough fossils.

Houston Museum of Natural Science

Over the weekend, while my husband was off, we took a trip with the boys to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. I haven't been there since I was a kid on some sort of elementary school field trip. Not much has changed although the exhibits were much more expansive and expensive.

Upon arrival, we noted that the parking garage fee was $20 to park!!!!!!!!!! Holy cow! So when we went inside to purchase our tickets, we were a little shell shocked by those prices as well. It was $27 for adults and $20 for children for each special exhibit (Titanic and the Warrior's Exhibits). There were three 3D IMAX movies to choose from (Flying Monsters, The Last Reef, and Tornado Alley) for $11 per adult and $9 per child. There were several planetarium movies to choose from (Mayan Prophecies, Cosmic Collision, Experience the Aurora, Led Zepplin Concert, Secret of the Cardboard Rocket, We Choose Space, Black Holes, Dark Side of the Moon, Night of the Titanic, Passport to the Universe, Starry Night Express, and Earth's Wild Ride) for $8 per adult and $7 per child. PLUS tickets just to get in the museum to see the regular exhibits were $15 for adults and $10 for children.

We had hoped to take the kids to do something that was not too expensive but would still be fun and educational. This was not looking like something we could do here.

So when we got to the box office and talked to the employee, she encouraged us to buy a year-long Family Members Pass, which would get all of our family members into the museum for free each time we came in.

Here is the low down on how much it would cost this family of 4 to participate in their events:

• $50 just to walk in the door and see the regular exhibits
• $94 to see the Titanic Exhibit and $94 for the Chinese Warriors
• $40 to see one of the 3D IMAX movies
• $30 for one planetarium show
• $20 to park

This doesn't include extras like making your own geode, buying souveniers, or eating at their restaurant. 

The 4 of us becoming members cost us $95 for a one time, year-long, unlimited use pass for the Houston and Sugar Land locations. It gives you free entrance for the regular exhibits (saving us $50 each time), instead of $94 for the special exhibits we would pay $42 each time we came, $20 for each IMAX movie, roughly $15 for each planetarium show, and $5 for parking. It also gives us a 10% discount in the gift shop. 

We parked, saw all the regular exhibits, and saw one planetarium show this trip for a total of $130. This member pass will pay for itself with our next trip...for just the entrance being free! If we go twice in one year and don't even see any of the shows, it pays for itself. There are so many other shows we want to see so we can't wait to go back. 

The boys were the most excited about the Hall of Paleontology. The museum has such an extensive collection of fossils, skeletons, and recreations that my boys were going crazy! They were fascinated by all the names, the set ups, and the sheer size of everything. Two enthusiastic thumbs up for the Houston Museum of Natural Science. 

Adventures in baking with a 7 and 9 year-old....

Happy National Sugar Cookie Day!!!!!!

In recognition of this wonderful holiday, we added baking to our schedule today! It's only 11:15 and we have gotten so much done today...on a Summer Monday. We woke up, had breakfast, took a quick swim in the pool in the back yard, I did 2 loads of laundry, Caleb has finished two 100 piece puzzles, and the boys have baked cookies.

This is the first time that they have made cookies from start to finish, completely alone. All I did was put them in the oven and take them out. I found a kid friendly recipe and printed it out for the kiddos. I just told them how to preheat the oven , spray the pan, find the ingredients, measure everything, mix everything according to the directions, spoon out the batter, and decorate.

It is so difficult to let them learn by making mistakes and creating a mess in the kitchen! I wanted to scream as Jansen was cracking the eggs and scooping out the shells!!!! Caleb almost made me dry heave when she was pouring sugar and missed the measuring cup all together. Ugh. But they did it!

I tasted one, and they weren't very tasty...but the boys think they are tasty so that's all that matters!

Today in reading comprehension...

My oldest son struggles with reading comprehension. He taught himself to read at 3 years old, which prompted us to question him greatly, and was always a very fluent and expressive reader. The problem is, he has no idea what he is reading. That comprehension aspect is a major issue for him.

This past year, his reading teacher tried to teach so many strategies to help him, and I really don't think a single one took. He will still look at you with a completely blank expression, or go back and re-read and still not be able to pick out the answer when it is written in black and white.

My concern was, that in the whole year he was in school, he is no better at comprehension than when he started. This is certainly not the school's fault. He was in tutoring, CEI, and I read with him every single day. But if he can't answer very basic questions where the answers are explicitly stated in the passage, then how is he going to be able to infer??? Inference is a huge skill...

So we are experimenting with graphic organizers and other methods to help him improve his comprehension. Today's lesson involved pictures drawn on the whiteboard.

We did an overview of the board, read a book, reviewed the board, and then answered the questions. I wouldn't say he was great at it, but I am really encouraging to mentally ask himself questions as he reads. My hope is that instead of reading and entire passage and then answering questions, that he can read one paragraph at a time, then look at the questions to see if that one paragraph had the answer in it. He simply cannot handle a multi-paragraph passage followed by 10 questions.

It makes me nervous for next year, especially since everyone in his ARD committee is new. My positive thought on this is that because this will be their first year, they will be very motivated to utilize all of his modifications on a daily basis. The power of positive thinking! New principal, new counselor, new speech therapist, new special ed teacher, new special ed aide, and three new teachers. I have been praying all summer!