Back to School

Today the younger two went back to school. I can't believe how quickly the summer flew by. I swear they only had a week or two off. We did get to do a lot of fun things. S spent a week at Girl Scout horse camp. We spent a week at Zion National Park. We spent several days at Yellowstone National Park. We camped at a lot of local places. We swam. We hiked. We star gazed. We watched a lot of movies.

Their school requires uniforms. In theory, I don't like uniforms because I like to see my kids express themselves creatively through clothes (like the time when Z was in kindergarten and wore gray pants and a gray shirt and told me he had tricked me with the "No Costumes at School" rule because he'd dressed up as a rock). In practice though, when I'm walking around their school, seeing all of the kids in the uniform is almost too adorable to bear.

I see the first day of school as a milestone. I haven't gotten too weepy over my own children going back to school in a while, but seeing all of these darling children in uniforms, the impossibly tiny kindergartners and their parents trying to hold the tears in will almost make me lose it.

Minecraft Lunch Box

My kids have gotten into Minecraft in a big way. It seems like all of the kids nowadays love it. We're getting ready to go back to school, and S announced she wanted a Minecraft lunchbox. All right, given the popularity, you'd think that'd be easy. Nope. Evidently she is the first kid in the United States who had this idea. Not one to be discouraged, I decided to create one for her, and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

I didn't want to deal with sewing something like this (I HATE sewing zippers), I went to the local Wal-Mart. In the sporting goods department, I found a soft side soda cooler. It says it has a four can capacity. $4.97. I bought a couple containers of acrylic paint- two shades of green (I have white and a black at home, so I could create slightly lighter or darker shades).

 Once home, I used a seam ripper to remove the rubber penguin logo off the front. Then I used a ruler and pencil to make lines on the box. I used painter's tape to block off the eyes and mouth of the Creeper.

Painting the Creeper- I mixed some white or black paint with the greens I bought to give more color variation, but still have overall tone family match.  Then, I painted each square a different shade of green. The nice thing about the pixelated Creeper is that there's no particular pattern or order. As long as I didn't have two squares exactly the same color next to each other, it looked about right.


Once everything dried, I coated everything with a couple layers of mod podge to give the paint a bit of protection. Kids can be rough on their lunchboxes and I didn't want the paint flaking off after a month or two.

I'm pleased with how it turned out, and my total cost was well under $10.