I'm Blushing!

Another award?  For me?  Are you sure?

I want to thank Lynn from Upcountryolio for awarding me with The Kreativ Blogger Award.  It's very flattering (and somewhat ironic) that someone as creative as Lynn is giving me an award for being creative.  (We have SO got this backwards.)  But since she hasn't yet sent me an email saying that it's all a big mistake, I'm going to run with it.

As is typical with awards, there are some rules:

1) Give a big shout out & thank you to the blogger who passed on the award to you and link

to their homepage.

2) List seven interesting things about yourself that readers may enjoy learning about you.

3) Nominate seven other amazing bloggers by linking to their homepages & let them know that you have done so.

Now, as some of you may know, I'm not much of a rule-follower so I'm going to tweak things a bit.  Rather than designating seven new bloggers, I thought I would put the word out to all of my readers:  Would you like to participate?  Are there seven blogs you'd like to recognize?  Are there seven things that the world really needs to know about you?  If you answered yes to any of these questions, then take the award and run with it.  I bestow it upon you :)

Now here are my seven facts:

• My mom looks exactly like Sophia Loren--maybe even a little prettier.  Here is a picture of us from back in the day.  Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

• 

  Don't pin my mama!

• I can name my fingers in Italian.  I would do it here but I'd butcher the spelling.  The English translation is (starting with the pinkie): the littlest of them all, the one the ring goes on, the tallest of them all, the one that licks/wipes the plate & the one that kills the bugs.  To this day I don't know if this a a real Italian "thing" or if my Italian grandpa just made it up.  
• As a child I was the queen of stitches.  In a couple-year-period I had them on my forehead, chin and skull.  Thankfully our next door neighbor was a doctor.  
• I once had a dog named "Laundry."
• I can recite the first fourteen lines of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English.  
• The finger-naming and Canterbury-Tale-reciting are the extent of my "foreign language" skills.  (Have you ever heard Middle English?  It totally counts as a foreign language.)
• I was a vegetarian from age 12 to age 24.  My husband convinced me to add poultry and fish back into my diet but I still don't eat red meat.  

Okay, that was a whole bunch of random, wasn't it?  (And no, you can't get those three minutes back.)

But seriously--thanks for thinking of me Lynn!  I really appreciate the recognition.

Facilitating the Appreciation

Teacher Appreciation week is something I don't remember from my childhood. Heck, I don't even remember it from my teaching days.  Nowadays, though, it's a big deal.  If you log into Pinterest and type in "Teacher Appreciation Gifts," you'll get roughly a jillion hits.

I suspect my former math teachers would frown upon my liberal use of the number "jillion."

(And perhaps that frowniness is why I never gave them any teacher appreciation gifts...)

But moving on...

So, next week is Teacher Appreciation week and as a room mom I have to--how shall I say this?--facilitate the appreciating.  Yes, that's me: the facilitator of appreciation.

Usually it works a little something like this:  Room moms conduct a survey at the beginning of the school year to collect valuable nuggets of information from the teacher: "What's your favorite color?" "Where do you like to shop?" "What's your favorite restaurant?" etc.   We then use those answers to guide us during the holidays, the teacher's birthday, the end of the school year and, yes, Teacher Appreciation Week.

Typically during Teacher Appreciation Week we try and do a little something each day: Have your child wear blue on Monday!  Everyone brings in a piece of fruit (for a Stone-Soup style fruit basket) on Tuesday! etc., etc.  The problem is that some parents have three kids in three different grades.  This means that on any given day you might have one kid bringing in a banana, one kid wearing chartreuse and a third kid providing a daisy for a class bouquet.  That's fine for one day but five days gets a little old.  And confusing.

Not that I'm saying the teachers don't deserve the appreciation.  They totally do.  In fact I would prefer to give it to them in the form of a big fat raise but that's gonna have to wait until I'm queen of the world.  In the meantime, my co-room mom and I wanted to make the week simultaneously nice for the teacher and manageable for the parents.

This will involve some classroom funds (which thankfully we have), some shopping, some baking, and a touch of creativity.  The end result will be a week filled with small gifts, sweet gestures, a few lunches and one large(r) gift at the end.

I should note that many of our parents will be doing their own gifts, but those who don't want to-or can't-will be covered by us. Of the gifts that we're doing, there are two that I'm particularly proud of and wanted to share here today:

The first is the only thing we actually asked parents to do.  I have to give credit to my fellow room mom as this was entirely her idea, but I love it.  We asked that each child pick out a book from his or her personal collection to donate to the classroom library.  We provided them with homemade "book plates" to affix in the inside front cover.  On the book plate they explained why they liked the book they chose.

My daughter picked Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes.  Here's what she wrote in her book plate.  (The erasure on the word "purse" looks awful in this picture but not so bad in person):

(I blacked out her name which accounts for the box on the bottom.  And I know there are a million talented people out there who could do a waaayy cuter bookplate than that, but we kept it simple and I think her teacher will appreciate it despite its simplicity ;)

The other gift that I really enjoyed is Pinterest inspired.  (Except it kind of isn't.  Variations on this idea have been around forever.)  Apparently this teacher has a thing for chocolate chip cookies.  (I know because my handy survey tells me so.)  So I turned to one of my favorite cookie recipes.  (Found here.)  

Then I stacked the cookies in a cute spaghetti canister (which was my idea, though I wouldn't be surprised if others had done it before me):

  

Finally I attached this:

It says, "Thanks for making us into such smart cookies," except it doesn't show up too well in this picture.  

And here is the end result:

I'll be presenting her with these tomorrow to kick off the festivities.  

Do any of you have a great teacher appreciation gift to share?  (If it's on your blog leave me the URL and I'll pin it to my "Resources for Room Moms" board.)

Update:  you can buy a canister like the one above by clicking HERE.

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RAMSIGN Giveaway Winner

Congratulations to Zené S. She is the winner of my RAMSIGN house number giveaway. Her name was randomly selected by Rafflecopter. (You can see the official Rafflecopter results in my original giveaway post.)


Thank you to all who entered and a big thank you to Ramsign for giving me the opportunity to offer up one of their beautiful signs!

Ramsign Giveaway

Welcome to my very first blog giveaway!  

I am so excited to be offering a house number sign from RAMSIGN,  a small Danish company that manufactures classic enamel signs.

These signs are truly beautiful.  In fact, I'm going to let the pictures speak for themselves:

Now, I could spend a bunch of time telling you about the process.  I could tell you how the stencils are cut by hand.  Or I could tell you that two to four stencils are used in the production of each sign.  I could even tell you about the ceramic furnace where the signs are burned at 820 degrees Celsius.  

But I'm not going to do any of that.

Nope.  What I'm actually going to do is direct you to their website:

RAMSIGN.ORG

Seriously.  Go poke around in there.  The signs are beautiful.

Are you back?  Good.  Now that you've done that I'm sure you want to know how to win a sign of your own.  Here are the details:  

PRIZE:  

The winner can choose any one to five digit house number sign.  (That's up to a $99 value!)  (Sorry, name signs & address plaques not included.)

TO ENTER:

Click on the "ENTER TO WIN" tab in the Rafflecopter Giveaway box below.   (It might take a moment for the Rafflecopter box to load.)  Then follow the very simple prompts. Even if you already "like" my page on FB or follow me via GFC, you still need to indicate that within Rafflecopter as that is how the winner will be picked.  Thanks!

GIVEAWAY CLOSES:

Friday, May 4th at 12:01 (EST)

PRIZE SHIPS:  

Anywhere! Ramsign offers Worldwide FREE Shipping.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS:  

One lucky winner will be selected using rafflecopter.com and announced on Friday, May 4th.  The winner will also be contacted via email (so don't forget to have yours listed).

Snapguide: A Tutorial Tool

My brother just alerted me to this free iphone app.

I haven't played around with it yet but I feel like it has a lot of potential for bloggers who do tutorials.

It's called Snapguide.

Find it here: Snapguide.com

And if you use it, leave me a comment with a link to your tutorial.  I'd love to see it.

(P.S.  This is not a sponsored post.  I just thought I'd share the knowledge.)

I Suck...

...at gardening.

I really suck at gardening.

Well, I shouldn't say gardening, that's not broad enough.

What I actually suck at is anything plant-related.

I am a killer of plants.

Send me your beta fish, your dachshund, your four-year-old daughter.  No problem.  I can totally take care of those guys.  Ask me to watch your philodendron?  Yeah, you're going to regret that.

Except there seems to be one type of plant that is immune to my plant-killing super-powers: 

The mighty succulent.

I discovered this quite by accident.  You see, whenever my in-laws come to visit, we play this little game:  They buy pretty plants to put in the planter by my front door.  They take care of the plants during their stay.  They leave.  The plants die from my gross neglect.  They quietly replace them during their next visit.  

But on their last visit?  Well, something miraculous happened.  

They bought a succulent.  

And it lived.  

This was a revelation.  Positively inspiring.  So much so that when I recently saw this footed bowl in the Wisteria Catalog, I immediately envisioned it filled with succulents.  (Hmm...  now that I've pulled the link, I see that they have it pictured with succulents inside.  So much for "my" vision...)

Anyway, the bowl arrived last week and I was able to get to the garden store yesterday.  

First I picked out these: 

At the recommendation of the saleswoman I also picked up a bag of this:

Then I took my bowl (isn't she pretty?)...

...poured in a little soil...

...and started arranging the plants.

(Beyonce watched with interest through the pool fence.)

And here's the end result.  

(Much like my first daughter, my first plant is overly-photographed.  Plant #2 can attend therapy with daughter #2 after they look through the family photo albums in twenty years.) 

So, there you have it.  I'm hoping this will be my first successful attempt at plant ownership.

Second if you count my in-law's purchase.  

Well, third if you count this guy...

That's right.  While everyone else on earth has gotten rid of their Poinsettias (this being April and all), I can't seem to kill this one for the life of me.

Go figure.

(3/20/13 Update:  Come see my most recent succulent creation here.)

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The 2012 Ultimate Blog Party

Hello!  If you're linking up from the 2012 Ultimate Blog Party I'd like to welcome you to `A Casarella.

I'm kind of new here in the blogosphere, in fact I've been blogging for exactly three months today.

I call myself a mommy-blogger (because, well, I'm a mom who blogs) but ironically I don't write much about my kids.  If you'd like to learn what I do blog about allow me to direct you over here, the post in which I tell you how it all began (ninety looong days ago ;).  Or I perhaps you might stop over here, where you can learn more about my blog goals.

If you want to know more about me as a person, why not pop over here or here for a little history lesson. 

(And if you're still with me after that?  Well then I consider you a lifer ;)

Before I sign off to look through everyone else's blogs I thought you might be interested in reading some of my more popular posts, like this one.

That little project went viral on Pinterest.  And that made me a little big for my britches.  (For about two days.  I'm recovered now.)

This one was also popular.  And it's easy.  People seem to like easy.

Oh, and this one is tasty.  People also seem to like tasty.

And finally, this just happened today.  I'm still kind of giddy about it so I just had to share!

Thanks for stopping by and I look forward to getting to know a whole bunch of new (to me) bloggers!