The best laid plans of mice and men...

they go awry.  I was planning to have a nice post today about how we had a lovely weekend and Garrett really enjoyed the family reunion on Sunday.  
Saturday morning Garrett woke up with other plans, he was wheezing.  We took him to the local ER (we were visiting with family) to find out he had a case of viral Croup.
Poor little guy is on some steroids for a few days but we left early Sunday to come home and skipped the family reunion.  Garrett is doing well and doesn't seem to be bothered by any of it.  In his eyes he came out on top because the ER doctor gave him a popsicle.

He's on the mend while I work on some stencils.  

Bowling Bunnies

Last year I bought a 2011 sewing calendar that has 2 projects per week.  I've been wanting to make the bowling bunnies (the ones pictured) but have been putting it off because of Garrett's stacking and lining up habits.

It may not seem like a big deal to some people but Garrett feels the need to almost obsessively line things up.  We know it's part of his autism and make sure that he doesn't do it for long periods anymore.  At one point we watched him line up empty soda bottles for 30 minutes.  If they got knocked down he would get annoyed and line them up again, that was the point when I shelved the bowling bunnies project.

At Garrett's last home visit I brought it up with his case worker who told me that it would be a good thing to make them because we could turn it in to a game.  It's ok for him to line things up if there is a purpose to it (like playing a game) and it would be good for him to make a game out of it.

Our hallway doubles as a great bowling alley

I decided to make them without faces, there is still a front and back, but the lack of faces makes him less likely to line things up exactly. 

 

Lining up the bunnies

Breast Cancer Awareness is so much more than a Facebook Status

This morning my husband's cousin sent me (and 67) of her closest female friends a message on Facebook stating that there was a new Breast Cancer awareness meme going around. 
I'm all for Breast Cancer awareness, as someone with the BRCA 2 mutation I have an 84% chance of developing Breast Cancer by the time I'm 70.  However the message I got made me want to burn my bra. Women are supposed to put the number of their shoe size, followed by the word inches and a frowny face.  Truthfully I was about to roll my eyes and ignore it until I saw the next part "don't tell the men", yeah, I have some big issues with this practice.


1: Saying you are raising awareness by NOT ACTUALLY saying anything about Breast Cancer isn't raising awareness. Especially when you leave out a key section of the population.  Despite what people think men can get Breast Cancer, they also have mothers, daughters, sisters and friends who are affected by breast cancer.  Men shouldn't be kept in the dark about breast cancer anymore than women should be kept in the dark about testicular cancer. Awareness leads to support.

2: Why does it have to be something sexual.  My shoe size is 7, so my post would be "7 inches :(" 
Even Ben said that comes off as a little insulting of your significant other. My bigger issue is how often we sexual breasts.  Don't get me wrong, Ben is a breast man, but it's still hard when thinking about the mastectomy I plan to have. They are part of our bodies and there are many women (my mother's birth mother) who would rather ignore the problem instead of lose their breasts.  Breast Cancer is NOT sexual and shouldn't be made in to something sexual.

3: what the hell does your shoe size have to do with cancer?  How does writing that help with awareness? I hate the false sense that people are helping when they could have easily done so much more.  Post information on where to get more information about Breast Cancer and where you can donate either money or even time helping people out.  When was their last breast exam? Wouldn't it be better to let people know the importance of getting checked early.

4: Early detection is key for treating any type of cancer. Support of friends and family is so important to those battling cancer.  So why would you make a post that excludes so many people from being able to properly get information?

Cancer awareness is of any type is important. I hope everyone will retweet, reblog and generally share this message with everyone they know and love.
If you want to raise Breast Cancer Awareness here are some sites to check out:
Susan G Komen for the Cure
Breast Cancer.org
National Breast Cancer Foundation
    
For more information on the BRCA 1 and 2 mutation check out:
Bright Pink
Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered (FORCE)

Something for me

Forgive the bad photo, a photographer my spouse is not.  Plus he was using my cell phone to take the picture. 

A couple weeks ago I decided I needed a few dresses for business purposes I didn't think this would be that hard.  I know I'm not a skinny girl, I also know I have some rather large...tracts of land. I did find a lovely dress from Lane Bryant.  
I figured "hey, I can make something like this" and that's just what I did.  I had already seen a tutorial for a tank dress with pockets and decided to make myself a dress. 
I got the belt on clearance so the entire dress only cost $20 (I splurged on some really high end fabric). 

I can wear this with or without the belt and unlike the dress I bought it has pocket for me to fidget with.  I plan on making another one which will probably be better because I know what mistakes not to make.    I don't normally craft clothing for myself and I'm loving this dress.  It will look great in the fall with a cardigan and even in the winter with dark pantyhose. 

Klout, social media and why they aren't going to make it work for them

For those of you who follow me on twitter you know I've been having issues with Klout for the last month.  Klout.com was a nifty page that allowed you to see your overall influence online.  Depending on what you tweeted, blogged about and put on Facebook they would give you influences.  You could then give 5 +Ks to people each day who you felt influenced you in certain areas.

I started using Klout a few months ago and realized just how many people I interacted with on a regular basis.  I also got to see how I influenced others.  After a week or so I ended up with an influence, parenting.  Now people could give me a +K on that topic while I worked on getting more influences.  It was at the point several people told me that they were surprised sewing and crafting weren't on my list of influences.

I started asking questions about new influences and finally got a canned response that told me they added new ones every week and to just keep tweeting and posting away. (amusingly I checked my page and this is what it said "You are currently influential about 0 topics:Last Klout topics refresh: Never", wait, didn't you just tell me the topics were refreshed every week?)
The next week my influence was gone. This was 3.5 weeks ago.

For the last 3.5 weeks I've been emailing them and tweeting them almost constantly with no answer.  Today I finally got a response in the form of 2 separate emails and a tweet.  They all said they same canned answer, which didn't answer my question.  I told them this and both emails gave me another canned response telling me that no one had given +Ks to my influence.  Again I told them this was untrue and wanted to know exactly how they decided influences but no one could tell me.


Again they stopped responding.  This is a company that pretty well depends on social media to work and yet they refuse to answer questions or work with their users.  They were generally rude and unhelpful.  Since people are going to them to try Spotify the service has gone downhill.

At this point what I'm wondering is why you would not only be so nasty to your user, but to the people who spread the word on the internet. I've seen all sort of people on Facebook and Twitter expressing that they are having the same problem and many who have left Klout because of it.

Well, I'm a blogging mom and I'm going to make my voice heard.

Fun without power

As I said in my last entry we had a black out on Friday.  It was in the evening so we had to figure out what we could do.
We are lucky enough to have a gas stove and dinner was mostly cooked when the power was out.  After dinner we had to figure out what to do.  Garrett has plenty of toys but the lack of light made it difficult to play with some of them.

We decided to go visit the upstairs neighbors and their kids.  Garrett had fun playing with them.

It got pretty hot up there so after a while we came back downstairs and got our few flashlights out since it was getting darker out.

  We lit a candle.  Just so we had some basic light just in case our batteries died. And grabbed our emergency radio and battery powered light bulb.

 Garrett was having fun listening to music and dancing.

While Ben double checks to make sure all power switches are in the "OFF" position.

 We went out on the front porch and chatted with neighbors while "the boys" played about and giggled.

We come inside and Ben checks his cell phone while Garrett snuggles and Aloysius looks a little confused.

The boys sat and watched us as we danced for them.

Garrett and I took a bath to help us cool down.


After about 4 hours our power came back on.  But by that point Garrett was tuckered out and asleep.  Our place managed to stay fairly cool until the power came back on.

Black Out

Friday our temperature was 108. It was really hot, so if course we had a black out that evening in my area.  We managed to blow an entire substation.  Power was out for 4 hours.
I managed to get a few pictures before the camera battery went dead (whoops, it's charging now) so I'll be posting that soon.


I was in the middle of sewing when we lost power so I'm a bit behind on projects.  Tomorrow will include pictures and the full story of our black out adventure.