UGLY RED WREATH OF LOVE

Now, I am no Mother-of-the-Year. Contain your shock, I know. But it got to the point where Ted suggested that perhaps I (and the children) might benefit from some scheduled periods of mutual interaction. Yeah, that's right. I had to set aside time on my daily calendar to make sure that I was spending enough bonding time with my own kids. I'm not proud, but there it is.

So I penciled in a half an hour of time every day when I get home from work, and I believe Ted made some snotty comment about "Oooooh, a whole half hour? Wow, don't over do it!" (insert sarcasm font here). This got twisted by the kids, so now our time together is called Mama's Whole Half. We do crafts. It's actually pretty awesome. We've been doing it for months, and it usually ends up being more like an hour (so there, Ted!) and it's almost always really fun. The best one so far has been Superhero Night, but that's another post.

As the holiday season approached, I thought we could start doing some Christmas-themed crafts. Inspired by Pinterest, I bought a few two dozen pool noodles. Now I know that sounds like a lot, but if you spend any time on Pinterest, you will understand. Pool noodles make a lot of appearances. So I figured I would cut some in half and use them to organize my boots, while others I would turn into light sabers with gaffer's tape for handles.  And one of them would be used to make a wreath for our front door.

(Needless to say, none of the other noodle-related projects have happened. Yet.)

I wanted the wreath to be red, because our front door is green and I wanted it to stand out. Hahahahahaha! No worries there, as you will see! Anyway, like a dumbass I cut up all the red noodles for my boots and then had to leave the last two for light sabers because God forbid Darth Vader has to wield a blue or green light saber, so we were left with an orange one for the wreath. But no problem, because I purchased lots of red, vaguely crafty-looking things from Amazon. So here's what we were starting out with:

I had the sense not to try this at the dining room table, and spread a tablecloth, face side down, on the living room floor. Then shit got real, with Elmer's glue, tissue paper, that crafts crap, and scotch tape. It got messy. Really messy. But at least I ended up with a nice wreath for my front door, right?

Not so much.

Here is a photo of the fruits of our labor:

I know what you're thinking. It wasn't ugly enough? I had to go and add on the gold pinecones? Look, things had spiraled way out of my control at that point. I'm lucky this thing doesn't have a portrait of General Grievious on it. And if you don't know who that is, just be happy and shut up.

Then, of course, I had to hang it on my front door. Because I said I would. And kids, though they can't  remember where they put the shoes they took off five seconds ago, or to say "please" and "thank you," remember shit like that.

And believe me, the wreath stands out! There's no missing it! Take a gander:

Ignore the crappy paint job on the door - it needs one more coat that I'm planning on getting to any day now...

My only consolation is that there are no lights on the wreath, so when it gets dark (which is at like fucking 3:30 these days) you can't really see its true garish hideousness. That and the fact that I have tangible evidence that I do, in fact, love my children. See? It's right there on my front door.

XOXOXO

ABC