What is it with Spain and bulls?

You’ve got to give kudos to Michael’s, the art & craft supply store, for keeping kids busy and creative in the summer. Once again, they’re inviting them to come over and make things out of their own hands with the”passport to imagination”.

Michael’s passport to imagination 2012

Each week you can visit the store and create crafts representing various countries of the world. For example you can make a gecko lizard and a monarch butterfly for Mexico, the Chilean flag and an alpaca puppet for Chili, etc. 

And then there’s Spain. 

You can’t blame Michael’s for mentioning bullfighting as a “popular pastime” in Spain. After all, the passport tells me Spain’s national animal is the bull and bullfighting is still a legal activity over there. Still, someone should tell Spain it’s 2012.

Oh well, at least it makes for a cute craft activity, since you can create your own terra cotta bull, nose ring included. Toro, toro!

Michael’s passport to imagination – terra cotta bull

Foam cows and sticky cows, what a day!

Today started with my kids digging up some toy capsules out of their treasure box. All you have to do is dunk them in hot water for a while. When the capsules dissolve you’re left with foamy shapes, such as animals, dinosaurs, you name it. Until the shape appears, you have no idea what’s in the capsule. This is what one of the capsules contained this morning:

Foam cow in a capsule

 Later this morning I went to Michael’s arts & craft store to get some supplies for homemade Christmas gifts. One of them will be refrigerator magnets made with clothespins (cute, huh?) so I needed colorful scrapbook paper for them. I also looked for stencils or stamps to use for homemade Christmas cards and that’s when I walked into an aisle I’d never visited at Michael’s: the sticker aisle!

Oh boy, I only took a few photos but I think you’ll get the idea pretty quickly that if you want to see a lot of cows, this is a great place!

Cow stickers and farm animal stickers

 I like the pig on that picture, looks very cute. Here’s more for you:

Farm stickers with cow sticker

 Oh, you’ve got to love that smiling cow! Are you ready for one more?

Large cow sticker

 Did you see this cow has a real bell around her neck? Here’s one last picture for you:

Farm animal stickers with cow stickers

 Boy, that was a lot of cows for one day, don’t you think?

Today’s cow looks quite mischievous with its heterochromia iridium condition

Heterochromia iridium? Say what??? I’m sorry, let me take you back a few steps.

This afternoon I took my five-year old to Michael’s art & craft store (it’s still one of my very favorite stores!) to get him a small present as a reward for his great behavior at school this pas week. We’ve been using a reward chart along with a few changes at school to correct some behavior issues , and so far this has worked great. So this time my son decided he’d get a black widow in the plastic animal department. Well, this spider is about 50 times bigger than a real black widow and is absolutely disgusting for someone like me who suffers from arachnophobia. What a mother wouldn’t put up with for her child…

We also took our time going through the bins of $1 items to see if we could get some good finds. We didn’t purchase anything but I found these pretty realistic cow and pig figurines:

Realistic cow and pig at Michael's art & craft store

But right below these realistic farm animals, I find their funny twins:

Funny pig, cow and sheep at Michael's art & craft store

At first I couldn’t figure out why this cow looked so mischevious. It sure has a funny expression with its mouth half open and its deer-in-the-headlight stare. But then I got it. This cow has a special condition called heterochromia iridium. In more simple words, its eye irises are two different colors!

Cow with heterochromia iridium

In real life, I don’t even think cows ever have green or yellow eyes, which makes this cow even funnier than it’s supposed to be. But I think it makes it look cute and quite unique. Wouldn’t you say so?

French cows and American cows battle it out at Michael’s

Wow, I can’t believe I’m going to publish this post in a few minutes! I was actually done with it at 3:30 this afternoon when I suddenly lost power. Well, it’s 9:30pm and we won’t get our power back until “some time” tomorrow. Nice! My husband is now home and kindly offered me to tether with his phone so I could get an internet connection. Thank you!

Our family, along with 5 million other people in the US Southwest and Mexico are enjoying an evening by candlenight and thinking of our food in the fridge wasting away. Oh, and don’t even think about getting more food at the grocery stores, because they are closed too! Best thing about having no power? All San Diego County public schools will be closed tomorrow, so we can sleep in, which is great because we’ll have nowhere to go, nothing to eat. Argh, it’s going to be a loooooong day…

Today my youngest got his front tooth pulled out. He broke it a year and a half ago on the back of his brother’s head. At the time the dentist performed a root canal and installed a crown, trying to preserve the tooth. Now, here’s my advice to you if you have little kids. If you ever need to have this procedure done on your kid’s baby tooth, consider getting the tooth pulled out in the first place. You’ll save yourself a lot of time, money, anxiety and replacement crowns since they’re not as strong as regular teeth. Yes, we were on our third crown as of today.

As a pre-tooth-pulling reward, my son and I stopped at Michael’s, my favorite arts & craft store, to get him a toy. I also needed to get a pad of watercolor paper for my art class, so this worked out well. Michael’s has a great display of hard plastic animals for kids and we’ve got a pretty good collection of them at home already. My son chose a humpback whale to add to his marine mammals.

Humpback whale from Michael's

As he was browsing the toy section to make his selection, I took a look with him to make additional suggestions. That’s when I saw these two cows, the Charolais cow and the Texas Longhorn bull battling it out. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, as they were both standing very still on the shelf.

Charolais cow and Texas Longhorn bull

And on the aisle across from this toy display, I found… a new cow puppet, hanging out with its best friend Pig. Cute!

Cow puppet and pig puppet at Michael's

I found the cutiest cows ever today!

Tonight I left my husband to handle the kids during dinnertime so I could attend my first acupuncture session to treat my chronic back pain, then make an undisturbed (read, without kids) trip to Michael’s, my favorite arts & craft store. I had a “25% off” coupon on everything and anything that expired at the end of the day and wanted to find some cool activities for the kids to do in their spare time.

As I was browsing the aisles for some fun new supplies, I found a few really cute cows. The first one looked pretty naked, but that’s because the buyer gets to paint it:

Clay cow to paint at Michael's

The second one is called a “mini cow bank” and it was sitting right next to its best friend, the “mini pig bank”. The “mini” description is quite appropriate as it looks like you can’t fit more than a few quarters and pennies in it. But it’s awfully cute!

Mini pig bank and mini cow bank at Michael's

I wonder what these two talk about all day…