Pinterest and Me

Pinterest is the devil!

I would claim to have a love/hate relationship with that site, but it's more like a despise/detest relationship. If you truly need ideas for something, it's a GREAT resource. If you just browse it, you will leave feeling terribly guilty and horribly inadequate as a mom/woman/teacher/wife/friend/housekeeper etc.

I have read many, many blog posts and facebook status updates about how guilty women feel because they are not able to produce Pinterest-worthy holiday celebrations and Bento lunchboxes.  I agree with these women who denounce Pinterest. I like and repost their stuff.

And then I went and tried some of it on my own.......

So with that in mind, I post the following pictures only to show you a realist-mom's Pinterest attempts. I do NOT want to make anyone feel guilty or inadequate. Of course, after you see the pictures and read the explanations, you may just laugh. Which is perfectly alright. :)

 My first crafty attempt this month was painting miniature pumpkins. Aren't they cute? Well, in the spirit of "good enough", take a look at them again. The two orange pumpkins were supposed to be painted by my daughters. They never got around to it. The two green ones and one black one were painted by me and my 3 year old son. Precariously. Have you ever handed a 3 year old a paintbrush in your kitchen? Yikes! So some of the orange shows through. Definitely not Pinterest-worthy. I was also going to "bling" all 5 of the pumpkins. You see I only made it happen for one.

 Next up we have the Halloween-sleepover breakfast! The original picture can be found here. So the bananas worked out just fine. The oranges....well, do you really want to peel all of them? Who has the time? So I made our guests do it. :) Yep. I'm the perfect hostess!

 This next example is creativity at its finest! I should "pin" this photo to Pinterest and title it "Candy Corn Pumpkins!" Which makes it sound like I really put a lot of thought into it when all I did was go to our local nursery and notice that they had yellow and white pumpkins. Aha, those look like candy corn! I thought. See? I don't think Martha Stewart is going to have me on her show any time soon....

Our first ever CARVED pumpkins! Mine is supposed to say "Boo" but the B was kind of difficult. So I think it says, "Doo." Or "200." I can't decide. Beta carved the one with the face and did a really good job! So was I bested by a 9 year old? I'll let you decide......

 Now these.....THESE are true Pinterest Masterpieces! The ubiquitous toilet paper tube filled with.......

 GLOW STICKS!!!!!!!

As I sat there during J4's naptime yesterday holding an exacto knife and carefully cutting eye holes out of the tubes, I thought, "wow, this is tedious." That's why I only did 6 instead of the 9 I had tubes for. (on a side note, you wouldn't believe how many rolls of toilet paper a family of 5 goes through in a week and a half.....)

 And if you look at this picture, it seems like they turned out pretty good! The thing was, you couldn't really see them from the street. You had to be right there nearly on top of them. Plus, Beta helped me get the glow sticks in by taping them. We didn't count on the unequal distribution of the weight of the glow stick so some of the eyes were looking towards the sky. But this one green one, and this one picture, make it look pretty cool.

My last Pinterest attempt was a total fail. But I don't have a picture of it. And I'm too lazy to go make one and upload it. It was the niblet ear of corn made out of a marshmallow and candy corn. I tried it. Really. The problem with it was that the candy corns kept sliding out of the marshmallow! I have no idea how they actually did it. I'm guessing they cut slits in the marshmallow and then "glued" the candy corns in with white almond bark. It certainly didn't work just by "sticking" them in. It was tasty, though!

So there you have it. A look at my guilt-free Pinterest-filled October! I've never tried this many Pinterest things at one time before, if ever in my life even. But I think in the spirit of "good enough" and "hey, at least the kids got fed and laundry got done," that everything turned out ok.

Now to start focusing on Christmas......Ugh.