Kids' Art Display Board

Today marks the midpoint of my 3rd week of my new journey as a full-time working mom. My schedule runs Sunday to Thursday so today, Tuesday, is my Wednesday. Lots of change in my life. It's been almost 17 years since I had a full-time job and it's been never since I did it as a mom. Even though I'm working from home I still find the whole balance thing to be tough. Makes me have mad respect for those of you who do it away from home. The time you spend commuting in the morning I spend doing laundry and sweeping my floors. And your evening commute is my time to start warming the stove up for dinner. Other benefits:

If I forget to turn off the iron I can just run into the other room instead of worrying about it all day. Of course, that would require that I actually ironed my clothes.

I can run in and stick homemade bread dough in the oven. I just have to prepare it the night before.

I get to talk to my husband in person because he's here, too.

I can wear my pjs; However, I don't. I've been making myself get dressed, although it be in holey jeans and hoodies, and put on my make up every morning before I start work.
And that's about all I've come up with so far. I know there are more.

There are not-so-good things, too.

I can no longer check in on Facebook at my leisure.

I haven't figured out how I'm going to do the whole gardening/canning thing this summer. Big problem. Mainly because it means I'm going to have to bribe my kids who both loathe gardening.

I really never leave the house anymore. I've always been a homebody but now I can't just leave when I want. And since we live so far out of town, it makes sense gas-wise and time-wise to just have Caelan do the grocery shopping after school.

I can't go back to KC to see my family as easily.

I have to schedule my time to complete my projects for Fiskars. No more 9 a.m. to 3 a.m. crafting days the night before. This one I should actually add to the good list. If I do that, my good list will be longer than my bad list. So we'll do that and end my list making right here. I'll stay true to my goal in my last entry of not making bad lists!

And I'll close out today by sharing a new project I have up on the Fiskars website.


I'll start with full disclosure. This is a cleaned up version of what my fridge normally looks like. On my blog I could frighten people by sharing a photo of what it really looked like. When you're taking photos for the website of a business you can't do the I-should-be-on-an-episode-of-Hoarders photos. Imagine this with about 50 more pieces of paper piled on. Drove me absolutely batty. Love my kid's artwork. Love the excitement on his face when he brings something new to me. Don't love the clutter on the fridge.


So I made this. Is it ironic that I hated all the random layering on the fridge so my solution was to make a board with a cover that has random layering on it? I read one a rant from someone one time on the internet that the word ironic is most often used incorrectly so I'm always timid about using it. And then there's the whole Alanis Morissette thing. I think she now owns the rights to the word ironic. I still start singing the song in my head when I hear the word. And that leads to thinking about when we lived in KC and my favorite DJ there, Kelly Urich, played it one time and said something about dancing around naked in our radios afterward so it leads to massive internal giggles when I hear the song now. I'm sure you're getting a better mental image of what my fridge really looked like. Much like the thoughts in my head, it was a cluttered mess of randomness.

More full disclosure, I made this awesome (most overused word but still my favorite happy adjective) board and I still haven't hung it. We're wall-hanging challenged. Shawn wants things to be hung one time forever and ever. In a stud with a screw or, if it meets a certain weight requirement, it can be hung in the drywall with a plastic anchor. I want to buy and move things around all the time. You know, lots of holes and buy a giant tub of wall putty. See the texture of the wall? It only looks this funky and overpowering when you bounce flash off your ceiling onto it. But it's still texture and I'd send him over the deep end if I was constantly making random smooth spots on it with wall putty, so I try to choose my hanging spots carefully, which I haven't done with this board yet.



But I can still start filling it. If you'd like to make an art display board for your kids (or your lists or whatever your choice of paper piles happens to be), you can find a tutorial for making one on the Fiskars website.