Happy Halloween 2013!

Happy Halloween from my little Justice League:

Well our version anyways.  According to my daughter Twilight Sparkle is absolutely a superhero.

I'll do a post soon on how I made her costume.  Basically taking an amazing tutorial and putting the "P" in "Craft."  But it's Halloween.  And I want to see if I can find Ghostbusters on Netflix.  So how about I just post some pictures of my kids frolicking in the woods in their costumes?

Superman approves of this plan.

Let's go exploring!

Twilight Sparkle has MAGIC!

Batman scales a wall.

Defending Gotham from above.

 And the Glamor Shots:

I tried to get a shot of all three but I'm quickly learning that it is literally impossible to get a picture with THREE kids looking at the camera at the same time.



So we'll just crop it.

What. We're not missing anything from this picture.

 COME ON.

At one point we were walking along the edge of one of the hills in the Metroparks and the Dude kept putting his arms up:

 I was all... ?

MINE FLY WIND!  ME FLYING!!!

Awesome.  Even the little guy was getting into the breeze:

However someone else was decidedly NOT:

Portrait of Woe and Pony Ears.

 I think this is my fav pic of the day, though. Each one of them is so ... them in it.

And if you look closely the dude is jumping in the wind:

And I'm glad I got some pictures with the fall leaves because I think after tonight's monsoon everything will have blown down.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!!

The Legend of the Lake Erie Monster.

So some say a monster lurks in Lake Erie:

That somewhere in the deeps there's something unknown, snakelike, and terrifying:

My kids were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of it:

He's been hanging out in the North Coast Harbor by the Great Lakes Science Center:

We happened to be there the day that the Downtown Cleveland Alliance was bringing him out.  So the chick pushing the stroller in their facebook banner is me, and the other lady tweeting a pic of the monster is Ashley. 

Our collective pile of kids making monster noises at the monster.

This monster is going to be lurking about through Halloween and then he's headed indoors until spring.  He's definitely worth taking the kids to see if you have a chance!

Here's the thing, though.  I think there's some truth to the legend.  As the story goes "Bessie", a snakelike creature somewhere between 30-50 feet long, was first sighted in the 1800s.  There've been sightings throughout the last century up through the 1990's.

My dad has seen it.

He is a charter boat captain who used to run out of Edgewater until it was destroyed by Sandy.  Now he captains out of Vermillion.  He's been fishing Lake Erie for 40+ years and has spend countless hours on the lake.  If anyone would know for sure it would be him.

Waterspout on Lake Erie photograph by my dad.  He's seen alot of cool stuff on our lake.

I remember him telling the tale as a kid but wanted to get my details straight for this post. Here's his story.

It was in the early '90's sometime.  He was trolling off of Lorain about 12-13 miles out.  They saw 3 humps moving across the water.  The humps were about a half a mile from the boat.  Unfortunately because they were trolling and had lines out they couldn't pursue it.  He's never seen anything like it before or since.

What do you guys think?  Do you believe in the Legend of the Lake Erie Monster?

I blame pintrest.

So I blame pintrest for the following nonsense:

1.)  The t-shirt scarves.  You guys I made another one.  It was even easier than the last one:

BOOM.

I used a maternity shirt that was one of the very first maternity things I bought back when I was newly pregnant with my daughter:

yeah it was a long time ago.

There's tons of tutorials out there - I especially liked this one by simply bloom - but the bottom line is this:

I sewed the pieces together instead of gluing b/c I'm not quite down the pintrest rabbit hole far enough to bust out the glue gun.  I'm afraid once I do that I"ll black out and wake up 3 days later in a haze of chevrons and burlap muttering to myself about wasi tape.

AHEM.


2.)  Doing this to my nails:

Yeah.  In my defense the polish (A Grape Catch from Fingerpaints) was designed by a local blogger - Michelle from All Lacquered Up.  I think a blogger getting their own nail polish line is about the coolest thing ever so I had to do something really neat with it.  Although just to have them painted at all right now is a feat of time management insanity so this is probably the last time I do something that labor intensive.  But pretty!

3.)  My dining room table currently looks like this:

You guys.  I CAN'T EVEN.  Back in Sept. I promised the girl I would make her Twilight Sparkle for Halloween.  I found a great tutorial online, bought the fabric, and was all yay for homemade costumes!  This will be fun!  Whoo hoo!
 
Yeah.  Halloween is less than a week from today.  Bottom line is I'm in over my head.  WAY over my head. Because I am an idiot.  Did I somehow forget the Maleficent Debacle?  And the subsequent Wine?  Or the Tinkerbell replacement costume?  Seriously I should have learned my lesson:

Homemade costumes lead to drinking. 

Although...

The Maleficent costume has been getting alot of play in the dress up box lately.

So... maybe this will be worth it?  Twilight sparkle is skeptical.

As am I.

 Stay tuned.  It's going to get interesting.  Pass the wine.

Girl Problems.

So.  I don't know if it's the influx of testosterone in our household thanks to her new brother or maybe just her age but lately my daughter has turned into a GIRL.  Not the 2 year old version where she dresses up in princess dresses and tiaras and dances around with her stuffed animals.  Although that was fun, too.  I mean a real girl.  A grown up one.  With problems that are going to plague her for the rest of her life.  It's amazing and awesome and heartbreaking to watch because I get it.  I SO get it.

I first noticed it after she went back to school shopping with my mom.  She told me:

"there were some things that I wanted.  Like really cute clothes.  But they weren't on sale.  So I'll have to wait and maybe look for them another time."

BEEN THERE, KID.

Then one day last week I found her sitting in the middle of her room.  The contents of her shoe bin were spread all around her and she was obviously very distraught.  I asked her what was wrong and she said:

"I just can't decide what shoes to wear."

HAPPENS TO ME ALL THE TIME.

The clincher was when she was getting dressed this morning.  She came to me in distress once again and said:

"Mommy, I just don't have enough pairs of black pants."

OH HONEY NEITHER DO I.  None of us do.  And we all own at least several pairs.  This is coming from a child who can rock pants with flowers and polkadots and stripes and all sorts of nonsense.  But nothing beats a good pair of black pants.  I get it.  I SO get it.   We all do.

Girls night out.

And as an added bonus picture... my girl 4 years ago when she was only 6 months old.  Before she had all of these girl problems.

Terminal Tower: Coolest Tower Ever.

So did you know that the Terminal Tower has a twitter feed?

This tower has a twitter feed?  What?

YUP.

And even cooler that they take requests for what color lights they display via this feed?

Image from the Terminal Tower Twitter Page

Yeah Buddy!  Which means when you're out with your kids you can say "hey kids!  What color do you want that tower to be?"  AND THEN MAKE IT HAPPEN.

Amazing! Mommy can do anything!  And bit surprise my 4yo girl wanted it to be pink!

But I'm pretty fascinated by this as an adult, too.

Cleveland from the Edgewater Pier.  I stopped after a happy hour a few months ago just to watch the Terminal Tower Lights show.  I also got to see the moon rise over the city (it's the big circle of light just to the left of the tower).

Showing off the red, white, and blue for a serviceman who was hanging out downtown.

There is an official form to light up for events, organizations, etc. here.  But I"m fascinated by this whole take requests from the plebs via social media thing.  FASCINATED.  To the point where I'm pretty sure if I still lived downtown with a view of the tower I would be the most annoying Clevelander ever asking to change the lights every five minutes:

The view out of our first apartment circa 2005.

My kids are a bit obsessed with the color changing tower.  And so when we were out picking up our fresh fork a few weeks ago on a perfect, fall Sat. morning we decided to investigate it further:

Perfect Cleveland Fall Day.

Kids in Tower City.

And took everyone up to the Observation Deck.

I didn't realize the Observation Deck was open again until I started following the tower on Twitter.  It had been closed for many years - remember all of that scaffolding?  But it's open weekends now through December (more info on hours etc here).  They say that on a clear day you can see 30 miles from downtown Cleveland:

View west over the warehouse district all the way to Lakewood.

View east to CSU.

View South across Scranton Peninsula (that btw was my thesis site many years ago)

It's really a cool vantage point to see our city.

Public Square from Above.  Love the shadow of the tower!

Spider with a view.  The kids LOVED this guy.

Hands down the Terminal Tower is the coolest tower ever.

Happy in Cleveland.