Hey girl!

Well, we’ve had our “Back to School” front porch apple-shaped chalkboard welcome signs and oversized door ruler graphics up for like, what, a week already?! You know what that means: we’d better hustle over to Target tomorrow and check out the Halloween decorations. Although Megan told me they’re already pretty picked over since they’ve been on display since mid-August. I knew we shouldn’t have spent that extra weekend at the lake; you snooze on the pontoon, you lose, right?! Haha.

While we’re out, let’s run over to Starbucks and drop off our refillable commemorative “Happy Fall Y’all” cups. Pumpkin Spice Latte season is starting early this year – woot woot! Megan heard we can line our cups up at the counter and the baristas will just go down the row filling them at 12:01am on Wednesday. We can wear our leg warmers when we pick them up! Although it’s gonna be 95 degrees on Wednesday so maybe we’ll wear ‘em with shorts. Haha. We should also try out the sneak peek of their top-secret Gobble Gobble Grande that they’ll be launching in mid-September. They are going to put little chocolate turkeys sprinkles on it – for cute, right?!

Oh, that reminds me: both Martha Stewart and Joanna Gaines have declared this Christmas the Year of the Sweater, and suggest covering your Christmas tree ornaments, wrapped and unwrapped presents, ceramic Santas and reindeers, door and window wreaths, and welcome mats in Scandinavian-patterned wool sweaters. I’m so glad we anticipated this back in 2008 and started our Tuesday night Knit and Wine Club. Although once you get a couple of pints of Merlot into Megan it’s more like a WHINE Club, right?! Haha. But seriously, if we are going to buy those miniature flocked Christmas trees that we saw at the Dollar Store we should get on it so we can get their sweaters knitted in time.

Speaking of Knit and Wine, were you sitting next to Megan last week when Hobby Lobby texted her that it was only 587 days to Easter 2024? I’m thinking I’m gonna do wooden bunnies. I’m pretty sure they’ll still be bunnies in 2024. I don’t want another repeat of 2011, when I thought it’s be fun to do a whole theme of paper mache Western Black Rhinos for World Rhino Day and it turned out they had just gone extinct. Blarg. I found out right after I had stayed up all night writing funny jokes onto napkins for the kids’ lunchboxes – How do you keep a rhino from charging? Plug it in! – and then had to quickly pivot to something else because Jack’s so sensitive about that kind of thing, you know? The last time we went to the zoo, he came home and did a lemonade stand for the Spix’s macaw because he learned that they were endangered. I’m happy he was so concerned about their plight, but I had to take a half-day off of work in order to design and construct a lemonade hut, stamp pictures of smiling lemons onto paper cups, paint a sign (macaws have a lot of feathers, whew), and decorate a cash box. It was so much work that I forgot to make the lemonade and he was just selling empty cups for a bit. That’s what happens when I do things last-minute. People were nice and donated anyways.

What did I pivot to? National Love Notes Day! It was June, so naturally Walmart had all of their Valentine’s Day stuff. I got a package of strawberry Funfetti and a miniature heart cake maker, and piped Candy Heart messages on all of them. They were so cute and I (and the boys) loved them. And that’s the whole point, right?

Hey, speaking of Walmart, are we doing Ginuary or Dry January in 2025? Because I need to know if I should etch our last name into those cocktail glasses we got right after we graduated from high school. I think we stored them in your old bedroom; good thing your mom never redecorated. Okay, I gotta run the kids to hockey practice. Man, where does the time go?

By Amanda Silverman Kosior