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Thursday Theater: The Art of Sharing a Lollipop

Burke and Maggie received lollipops for cleaning up the living room…and decided that they *might* share with Logan.

(1 minute 55 seconds)

And the pictures to match 🙂

"That looks good..."

"Is this how you do it..?"

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"mmmmm"

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"Finally!"

Way Back When-esday

Cheryl over at Twinfatuation hosts this one. Go on over to see who else is playing – and join in too!

In honor of Halloween, I’m posting the costumes of year’s past.

2005

Halloween 2005
(Maggie and Burke)

2006

2006
(Burke and Maggie)

2007

2007
(Maggie)

2007

2007
(Burke)

2007

2007
(Logan)

2008

2008
(Burke and Maggie)

2008

2008
(Logan)

Various Cute Kid Things

It’s been a while since I’ve done a cute kid post…so, it’s time 🙂

Logan
While we were at the twins club Halloween party, I was standing there talking with another mom and Logan did what every kid has done at least once in their life…run up to the wrong legs and give a hug. Logan looked up (while hugging these legs), said “Nope!” (pronounced “Nopeff” in Logan-speak) and calmly switched over to my legs. Silly kid 🙂

Maggie
Maggie has been working really hard in her speech class and can often be heard practicing things that she’s been learning. . . therefore, I should not have been taken by surprise when she asked if I wanted to hear her “F word” song. After a minor pause from me,  I heard all about Foot, Friends, French Fries…

Maggie has this cute thing where she gives people pretend gifts. You have to make a show of opening these pretend gifts and ask her what it is. While playing with Daddy, he asked what the gift was and she said, “It’s a hat!” He mimicked putting it on and asked if it was a fedora. To which she said “No, it’s for Daddy!” HAH! Let Dora get her own stinkin’ hat tee hee.

Burke
Burke’s drawing teacher drew an outline of him and had him color things in by looking in a mirror to see what he needed on his face and by using a ruler to measure his arms and things to make sure that his drawing was proportional. Note that he even drew in the grass stains on his knees…

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Makes My Monday: Growing Reminders

Burke likes to get his picture taken with the big red crayon at his speech class. Today’s photo reminded me of how big he’s gotten!

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And this one was taken last year:92408burkesredcrayon

Cheryl over at Twinfatuation hosts this one. Head on over to see what else makes people’s Mondays (there are always some really good ones!)

Halloween Preview

As you saw in yesterday’s post, we hit a Halloween party yesterday. And today was our town’s Horribles Parade. (Have I mentioned that I love our town? 🙂 ) Between the two, the kids have had so much fun – without any candy!!

Twins Club Halloween Party

Ridin' Around

Ridin' Around

"I'm an Elephant!"

"I'm an Elephant!"

In the Bouncy House

In the Bouncy House

Random Shot of Lots of People

Random Shot of Lots of People

Town Horribles Parade

Waiting for the Parade to Start

Waiting for the Parade to Start

Still an Elephant!

Still an Elephant!

"I'm a GOOD Knight"

"I'm a GOOD Knight"

Random Shot of Lots of People

Random Shot of Lots of People

After the Parade

When the parade was over, instead of waiting in line for the candy that the kids didn’t need, we stopped at the park to play in the leaves.

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Saturday Snapshot: Party Time!

On our way to the twins club Halloween party. LOTS of fun…more pictures later 🙂

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Cheryl over at Twinfatuation hosts this one too. Go over and have a look at what others are doing on this chilly Saturday.

Fx4: Waiting on the Bus

To get to the circus, the kids got to ride on one of the little shuttles that go from Mike’s work to North Station. Their first bus ride!

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Burke’s big question while on the bus? Where are the seat belts?? Good question, Burke.

Candid Carrie sponsors this one – head over to her blog and find LOTS of links for bloggers who’ve joined in! (You can join in too!)

Scaring the Crap Outta My Kids

So, Halloween isn’t really a kid-friendly holiday, huh? I mean…let’s dress up and scare the crap out of them…after hyping them up with so much candy you can’t actually tell if they’re shaking from the sugar or because they’re freaked out. Nice.

We have some decorations up … and the typical shows the kids watch have been doing the Halloween themed stuff lately (ghosts, monsters, bats, etc). I didn’t *really* think anything of it until a few nights ago when Logan woke up – twice…literally shaking in his crib. Poor kid.

Apparently, I accidentally moved his clock just right so that it was casting new shadows (HIS shadows) on the wall … and it was totally freaking him out. I went in and he was pointing to the wall and shaking and crying. I felt so bad for him! I asked if he was scared, and with big tears in his eyes he nodded and said “Scared!” So I asked if he wanted to use the Monster Spray. He nodded. I turned to head out the door to get it and he totally freaked again…I had to take him with me to get the Monster Spray! That calmed him down for about 15 minutes – tops. . . when I had to go in again and spray one more time.

We ended up moving his night light (it hadn’t occurred to me at that point that it was his clock), and he slept through the rest of the night…but geez. Poor kid.

Way Back When-esday

Cheryl over at Twinfatuation hosts this one. Go on over to see who else is playing – and join in too!

This was taken 2 years ago tomorrow: October 22, 2007. Burke and Maggie were a few months shy of 3 and Logan was about 1.5 months old.

Tickle Tickle

Tickle Tickle

The Blog Book Creation

A few of you have asked how I created my blog book. I first have to give credit to LauraC because I got this awesome idea from her.

I also have to apologize if it sounds a bit anal…I write documentation for a living, so that’s where it comes from 🙂

Oh, and I had wonderful hopes that something like blurb.com would work well – but it really doesn’t. . . which is why I ended up doing this manually. And I know I’m going to forget some step that I did since I’m doing this from memory…but I’ll do my best!

Download a Template

I used Lulu.com. They have Word templates to download so that your page size and all of your margins are correct.

  1. Go to this page and scroll down to the bottom.
  2. Choose the size you want,  and click Download Zip File.
    I just used one of the 8.5 x 11 ones.
    Take note of the number of pages allowed for the size you choose.

Grab Your Posts

Once you have your template file, you need to get all of your posts into it. This is the time-consuming part…Since blogs are presented in the opposite order you’d want your book to be in, you need to work each post separately.

  1. Start with your first post. Copy the post part of it and paste that into your Word file.
  2. Copy the comments part – if you want those to be a part of your book – and paste those below.
    Tip: This is for wordpress since the comments are presented separately from the post part. You may be able to copy the entire thing – including comments – in blogger or any other blogging site.
  3. Move on to your next post – over and over and over again.
    Take note of the number of pages you have and compare that to the number of pages allowed. Keep in mind that page numbering will change a bit depending on how much cleanup you do.

Tip: I actually copied and pasted my tweets from Twitter as a last page or two in the book as well. (Just mine – and only the ones that weren’t replies.)

Clean the File Up

Once you have all of the posts you want in your Word file, it’s time for cleaning up. You can do as much or as little clean up as you want. It’s your book! 🙂

The first thing I did was get rid of all of the links – it’s a book, you can’t click them, so I didn’t want them to be blue and underlined.

  1. Press Ctrl+A to select everything in the file.
  2. Press Ctrl+Shift+F9 to remove all links.

I then scrolled through the entire book to format it – looking for widows and orphans, looking for strange things around copied pictures, things that didn’t change from a link, etc. If entire posts didn’t fit on a page, but were *close* I’d mess with paragraph spacing, or remove extra paragraph markers or whatever…

I inserted MANY tables so that I could format things the way I wanted to. I used them to put captions beside pictures or to force two columns if I had long, skinny lists. Things like that.

Obviously, videos don’t translate well to paper books…when I ran across a post that had had a video in it, there was a huge empty space where it was supposed to go. I went back to the original post on my blog and used a screen capture tool to grab a picture of the still video and put that in the blank spot.

Publishing

Once you have your file all set, upload it!

Go to Lulu.com, click Start Book, and follow the instructions on the screen.

There is also a cover wizard part where you can upload a picture, choose the font for your title (and change the title if you want), and more.

I’m more than happy to answer any questions you might have – just let me know! 🙂