When I did some research to get everything clear in my mind ~ where’s NoCo Ice Center? what’re their hours? then who runs the ice rink downtown? what’re its hours? ~ I found out several things. First, the ice rink downtown would be dismantled today until November. Second, I read their hours wrong so last night we got there with only 20 minutes to skate. Third, the NoCo center is not as “northern Colorado” as they make it sound. Many of us consider actual NoCo to be either really north Fort Collins or at least the last exit north on I-25 that’s still considered to be Wellington. Any more north and it’s Wyoming.

The NoCo center is off the highway east into Windsor. That’s a 20 minute drive south on I-25 from where we live, so I’m sorry, but I’m debating the accuracy of their calling themselves NoCo. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, really.

The Old Towne ice rink is “cute” and charming in its own way. While the rink is open, they convert a small building, which in the summers is the way to rent free or cheaply a bicycle to ride around town, into a skate rental building. Since there was less than half an hour to skate, they allowed hubby and two kids to skate for free for 10 minutes, which in their protracted kindness actually turned out to be around 30 minutes. Cool!

I don’t recall mentioning that last night was hubby’s first ~ uno, one, novice ~ flight around a rink on ice skates. You’ve all come to know how amazing this guy is; well, not to outdo himself, he would stop in front of me and spin circles, then tout the benefits of having been on roller blades within the last 6 months. Hubby thought it’s remarkable how similar inline skates and a stainless steel/carbon blade are, especially when translated to their respective sports. Ergo, for him, ice skating is a less-friction, colder way of rollerblading!

Today was the last day to use the voucher for the NoCo center, and right before we decided to go, the mom of son Bee’s BFF called because Sarah was asking for a playdate. She jumped at the chance to skate for free with us at NoCo. She and Bee are just two pees in a pod, I just love it. It was beyond sweet watching daughter Tee and daddy skating handINhand, and watching Sarah and Bee help each other stumble around the ice with their push cones. If societal norms would have approved at the time, back in the 70s when I was Bee’s age, I would have hung out much more often with boys than girls, who were so incredibly petty and immature that I still remember how illogical their behavior was.

Anyway, a great weekend all in all, and yet another reminder of how amazing my hubby is. I don’t say that lightly; being amazed at him is a daily occurrence, and I pinch myself every few days to know that I’m not in a dream ~ his dreaminess notwithstanding!!!

Anyway, more things to share that have entertained via the screensaver, and I think they’re most excellent and plenty cool enough to post! I don’t have too, too much more to type right now as it’s Saturday night and those are pretty special nights in particular for the hubby and me

We like making Irish whiskey balls as gifts for Christmas and the genius St. Patrick's Day...and this is sweet T and her daddy makin' a batch!

This is the family's Jack Skellington Sandy Claws hat with a beard that glows in the dark ~ this is B's scary Jack look

Excellent smiley Jack Skellington ~ he could make any hat look wonderful!

Well, for a couple members of the team who went out of their way to help me, and one who I had to bug soooo often {for various reasons, not all good ones where the help was actually helpful} that I just want to needle my way in to his good graces. I will share individual pictures tomorrow when I get them off my memory card, but here is all three of them together, and pretty much everything but the ribbon and googly eyes is Cogsmo Cricket ~ what better to use with engineers? The printed circuit board paper, the gears paper, the linear scaling paper, it’s delicious!!! All of the items used to make these things were in my stash, except I bought and used some Terrifically Tacky tape, which you can’t see.

It's not only the papers and journaling cards that are so fun ~~ the black chipboard is wonderful!!

Well, it happened again, so this time I have to blog about it. There I was, minding my own business, driving to work, and Jenny’s number is right there on the back of the Ben Franklin truck! She’s gone upscale from having her name and number on a bathroom stall!!!

Any time someone asks for my number, I start singing this song; sometimes it's only funny in my head!

Well tonight this picture stopped me in my tracks and I let out the biggest, loudest {yes, we’d put the kids to bed, couldn’t believe they didn’t wake up!!} AWWWWWWWWWW! This one-of-a-kind photo is son Bee back on Gma’s birthday in June 2004, and please take note of that gorgeous grass that could only be courtesy de Gpa. I can’t believe we captured such a gorgeous, in focus, surrounded-by-green motion shot with surprisingly great color. I’m in awe, and I have no idea if this was hubby or me, but I’m in awe.

My sweet, green, action man!

I should have mentioned eons ago something I find quite wonderful: all the crafts I’ve done this year and last fall have all come from stash I’ve had for a while, with the exception of buying the paper and embellishment pack from Great Wolf for the vacation layouts. The only thing I’ve had to buy recently is my super-duper strong tape. Go me!!

The cool backstory to this particular layout involves the papers I used. I packed up my scraproom last summer not only because I was unemployed, but also to give my son his own room and because we almost had to move out of here due to my unemployment. I had packed away these particular papers, and promptly forgot where I packed them, but I needed something out of this particular bin that was labeled “12X12 paper non-bling” and as fortune smiled upon me, I found this circular piece of green paper {it came that way, which was extra pleasing!!} and two others to match. I fortuitously looked down at this pagemap that I had printed, then looked at the papers I’d found and exlaimed Hoozah!! I think they go perfectly together.

I honestly have no idea why I haven’t been sharing a picture of the pagemap that I utilize for these vacation layouts, but I shall start now, with this one:

October 2011 PageMap - I flipped the thing around

Talk about shop your stash!! The only thing I had to buy for this layout was the water embellishment!

Bucket of water and Bucket List and standing under a huge bucket o' water - they just seemed to go together!

I love that the Great Wolf pack had this water bucket embellishment, which just doesn't fit anything if you don't have a bucket picture!!

I still can't believe I had everything here, except for the wave embellishment, in my stash!!

I've been using the holy heck out of these Making Memories journaling pages - three years in the waiting!!!

On to the photos!!!!! Let me preface this by saying that apparently a person can really take for granted that he/she grew up around cows and chickens and horses, and now my kids haven’t really been exposed to that experience. So back in the fall son Bee attended Farm Camp at The Farm in Fort Collins, and he got to milk a cow, feed the chickens and collect their eggs, weed in the gardens and take a vegetable home, just stuff like that…and he loved it! Well, on The Farm’s property, on which is also located a huge public park, is this wonderfully huge old tree that Bee absolutely loves, and he asked daddy to take them there on Martin Luther King, Jr., day. Here are some of the awesome pics he took:

Love this far away shot ~~ is that tree huge or what?

Hubby stood in the same spot and zoomed in...love it!

These two are too stinkin' cute for words!

And guess which cutie patootie also got in on the tree fun?

Well, I too have a young son who would love those Legos. His favorite color right now is pink, he loooves fairies and all things fairy, and he has the most wonderful female BFF ever. He talks about what fun it must be to be a girl, yet in the same sentence he will ponder what caliber of husband and father he will be.

As if it hadn’t already, the article really got my attention with this: “My daughter can dress up as a ferocious dragon for Halloween and no one bats an eye. But put my boy in a Minnie Mouse costume and people start getting nervous. Not for one second did I worry about the looks we would get for my daughter this year, but you bet I was ready to challenge anyone who questioned my son. Girls have so many choices, and that’s a great thing, but boys should get that same freedom.”

My son wanted to be a fairy for Halloween 2011, and at first I thought, “Ohhh man! He’ll be picked on for sure!” But we couldn’t find an appropriately “boy” fairy costume, so he thought he could be a “dark” fairy, not dark as in mean and cruel, but a dark fairy who ensures the safety of the other good ones. Then our saving grace came when he saw a black, sort of flowing costume with battery powered spectacles that, when worn underneath the accompanying mask, made him look like a phantom. We further lucked out when he saw black feather wings, so his “dark fairy phantom” was complete. Consider this: his classmates thought it was a very cool costume, especially the spectacles.

So each little Lego girlfriend include an “About Me” synopsis with her life preferences. We have Mia who likes animals and at least aspires to be a vet. Emma wants to be a designer or beautician, and her preferences echo the stereotypes therein. Andrea wants to be a singer…but of course!!! Stephanie is the socialite who really wants to organize parties. Is it just coincidence that her appearance and accessories are Paris-Hiltonized to the hilt? Sadly, yet another girl likes to sit by the hot tub, drinkin’ her lunch. But on a rather brief yet serious note, there’s Olivia, who aspires to be a scientist or engineer ~ a girl after my own heart! One difficult aspect to stomach, though, is that some of the girls “…are defined by gender roles that can be stereotypical, like beautician and singer.”

Almost more stunning than the stereotypes are some of the comments left for Kelly regarding her article. CNN noted that “Some commenters said letting a boy run around in frilly pink outfits would make him weak, a target for bullies and possibly even gay.” I’m sorry folks, cover your eyes if you’re overly sensitive, but: W T F?

Seriously? The fact that there’s a human {presumably} on this earth who could actually be sooo antiquated and esoteric to claim that inanimate objects will make a boy “possibly even gay” makes me briefly dream of forced birth control.

One alleged human by the name of David Huntwork had this equally hateful thing to say: “And where is this boys father who should be providing himself as a proper male role model? If he is in the picture he is doing a horrible job.” My hubby is a stay@home father, and the best one I’ve ever known. I have posted numerous times about what an amazing kid even other people think my son is and will become, including influential teachers who are around him most of the day, five days a week. Holy moses, that David is a real piece of work, thinks he has it all figured out, associates a boy wearing a tutu as not having a proper male role model. No, David, your father did a horrible job.

Well, here’s what I decided to write to Lego about how I felt:

“I would like to express my dismay in your girls’ Friends line of toys. I have a young daughter and a young son, and both happen to love Legos. My husband and I grew up with Legos and of course have been excited to share Legos with the kids. When my SON – YES, MY SON – saw an ad for Friends in all their pink and everything, he seemed to have glimpsed heaven. He LOVES pink, he LOVES frilly, yet still talks about passing along Legos to his children. Yet, you’re marketing Friends to JUST GIRLS. Why would you do this? Do you mean to insult every single young boy out there who is MALE but happens to love girly things? Are you trying to imply that there’s something wrong with my son IF he doesn’t prefer “regular” masculine Legos by marketing these only for girls? Why would you do that to kids?

As for the actual Friends characters themselves, luckily my son didn’t notice that for some reason you decided to give these creatures BREASTS, small or not, and stereotypical interests like shopping, hairdressing, lounging on the beach. Who on earth is the brainchild behind this ludicrous idea?

I think your test markets were in areas of very low stats on college graduates. I am a young mom who happens to be a technical writer and software developer. If you were to have presented this product to me and my 23 friends who are also female and engineers, you would have seen some extremely angry women. I think you knew that and avoided demographics that would take this into account. We would have asked some very serious questions about the purpose behind this product.

Don’t you have female designers there who have children? If so, how on earth could those women feel it appropriate to have a line of Legos that stereotypes women/girls {you’re telling my daughter, essentially, that hair dresser and beach comber should be what they strive for in life} so blatantly?

Please advise. I’m horrified at your company.”

Here’s their response:

“We listened very carefully to what girls around the world told us in four years of concept development for LEGO Friends; and we’ve used their input to create a theme that invites girls who appreciate these qualities to the LEGO building experience.

Many girls told us they had trouble identifying with the LEGO minifigure’s unrealistic appearance. As role play is central to the LEGO Friends experience we designed a figure with a more realistic appearance.”

There you have it, folks: Apparently girls don’t identify with the androgynous appearance of Legos, so we asked for “taller and curvier” Legos with obvious breasts and long, flowing hair. That’s the definition of realistic? Based on the Lego definition of “realistic” and “role play,” when will the boys be offered Lego physical endowments with selectable sizes, hmm?