Today, readers, here in our bustling Heartlake City, it is an especially auspicious day! Today, we welcome the Snuggly Barker Shack to our Fair City!
The Snuggly Barker Shack is a non-profit organization that gives dogs who are deemed unadoptable based on medical conditions a sanctuary where they can live out their best years in a place where they are given appropriate medical treatment as well as all of the love and care that they can handle!
It’s bath time!All the sticks and bones a sick pup could chew!
Today is a very special day here at the Shack! Today is one of our pups rescue-vrsery! Only the finest snacks and treats will do and they have top of the line Pup Chef Camilla on the job!
Everyone is getting ready for Henry’s very special day!How about that drone footage, eh?! 😉
Our very own Shack was inspired by the Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary, place that provides a forever home sanctuary and fosters for old and sick dogs who would otherwise be euthanized. It’s only through the contributions of kind donors like you that Old Friends can cover the costs of every day expenses and veterinary care for so many senior pups!
Please consider donating or buying merch at their website https://ofsds.org/ or:
Checking out their upcoming DOGumentary
Reading their book, Homecoming Tails available here
Or play the mobile app game to support the shelter and devs! Play and set up your own senior sanctuary and care for the actual Old Friends pups to learn about their stories! Here
We here at the Heartlake Lego City Herald hope that you will help to support the Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary in any one (or more!) of the many ways we’ve listed above.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this second edition of the Heartlake City Herald! Please join us again next week to see what’s the brick deal in our Lego city here at home! Here to give you the big connect, this has been your hostess with the mostest, signing off!
Little Maxwell choosing her card of the day after seeing me do it. But she couldn’t pick just one! There were way too many pretty ones! So she picked a whole stack! The card decks featured are the Everyday Witch Oracle, the Everyday Witch Tarot, the Halloween Oracle (that’s the black cat card you can see next to her hand), and last but certainly not least, the Isis Oracle deck.
These are all personal favorites of mine that I certainly recommend, especially if you’re looking for a deck that really speaks to you. These all use imagery that’s fairly easy to understand and conceptualize and out of all of the decks that I’ve seen and used over the years, these have my favorite imagery of all, especially the Halloween Oracle and the Everyday Witch Oracle. 10 out of 10 definitely recommend! 🙂
Straight from our special correspondent in our very own Heartlake City in the Garage, here is our coverage of the matrimonial ceremony of the Lego year!
Special Correspondent Little Maxwell, reporting from this beautiful scene of wedding bliss! A guest’s official word from the experience: “Meow!” -Lavender Kitty‘Dearly beloved we are gathered here today to piece these two minifigures, Emma’s Mom and Emma’s Dad(official names according to LD) together in blocky matrimony.’What a beautiful bouquet!A beautiful ceremony for a beautiful couple! What a great turnout! All of the pets have lined the walkway to give their best to the newlyweds!
We hope you’ve enjoyed this first edition of the Heartlake City Herald! Please join us again next week to see what’s the brick deal in our Lego city here at home! Here to give you the big connect, this has been your hostess with the mostest, signing off!
Our learning never ends! Learning about babies when her new cousin was born! Braving a rock wall at Girl Scouts camp! This was an amazing opportunity that continues to make our days wonderful. We attended a Me and Mine camp for the younger kids that allows a mom or older sister to attend with their Scout. It was SO much fun for us both and we met so many new friends and had such wonderful experiences! Us both learning archery! Now we want to keep learning now that we’re home! 😉 There’s a tiny froglet in this picture! Can you see her? This is Junie, one of my beloved spring peeper froglets. She has three other sisters: BB, Hazel and Juniper!We went to our first amusement and water park! Holiday World in Santa Claus, Indiana. And yes, that is ACTUALLY the name of the town and the whole place is Christmas themed!So. SO. MANY. LEGOS. We set up a brand new Lego City using all Lego Friends sets that were given to us. Each day there’s some new happening going down in the City!Doing a copy work card that she wanted to make for her Pops who’s been quarantined while he undergoes radiation. She asked me to write down what she wanted to say and then copied it down onto the card in her own writing. Copy work, especially when in their own words, is an invaluable learning resources when it comes to reading and writing. We spotted this gorgeous lady on the wall by our front door and gave her a photoshoot that she rocked!Nana’s house has a whole flock of hummingbirds that constantly flit between the feeders and flowers. We had fun watching them, seeing their behaviors and noticing differences between the different hummingbirds!
I thought that this would be a good time to share with you all how to craft your own Witch’s Broom, known as a Besom.
Technically speaking, a broom is the flat ended sort of object that we generally use for physical cleaning; while a Besom is a round shaped bunch of straw (or other plant material) bundled around the center handle, and is used to cleanse an area of negative energy, usually in the preparation of ritual or magickal work.
While you can buy a besom, and there are many lovely ones to choose from -it’s also pretty easy to make one of your own. The bonus of making it yourself is the addition of your own energy tied to its creation. Although the items that follow are for the more traditional style of besom, you can use nearly any types of branches and plant materials available to you…
My dad is going through radiation treatment for Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma right now. He just started to lose his hair and it’s been a really hard road for him this year. We’re Tennessee natives and it would really mean a lot for our community to show up for the good for him right now. Our family is very close and so my parents don’t have many wants so instead of raising money for them directly, I’d like to do this fundraiser my birthday this year. If you would like to donate to them directly for his treatments or needs, however, Venmo to @CMcRey. Thank you to everyone for your consideration and please be your most well. ♥️
Omgomgomgomgomg-! It’s NaNo time again! how did this happen?!
Full stop.
For those of you who have no earthly idea what I am currently in the process of becoming a raving lunatic about, this is November.
November first. Does this mean elections? Christmas decorations out way too early? Football.
Hell no, son! It’s wording time!
NaNoWriMo is best summed up as Mad Max’s Fury Road meeting the over-caffeinated, under-slept creative madness that exists solely in the deadline of November. In their own words:
‘National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel in thirty days. Now, each year on November 1, hundreds of thousands of people around the world begin to write, determined to end the month with 50,000 words of a brand new novel.’
That’s right, fam. No previous writing experience needed. NaNoWriMo became an official non-profit in 2006 and now, they host live, in person writing events (Affectionately called ‘write-ins’) all over the world!
‘It’s hosted authors drafting novels like Water for Elephants, WOOL, and Fangirl. It’s a teaching tool and curriculum taught in 5,920 classrooms, and NaNoWriMo’s programs run year-round.’
How amazing is that?! Not much of a writer? It’s spurred creative minds to come up with alternatives like the Photograph a Day challenge. Me personally? I want to do a ‘Minecraft build a day for 30 days‘ challenge. 😉 Who knows? Maybe I’ll even be a NaNo rebel and do both of those this month!
That’s the beauty of NaNo though and the amazing community that has grown around it. Every day of the month, there are forums and chat rooms dedicated to those doing traditional NaNo projects or the rebels, who are doing alternatives or even finishing up an already existsing work. It can be whatever you need it to be.
NaNoWriMo is something that I have done for nine years now. Every November. There are so many familiar faces and friends that, no matter how insane the year has been and no matter the existential crisis you may be facing, every year, they are there to help see you through the month. There have been times where fellow Wrimos have even babysat unruly toddlers, just to help get their mom over that finish line.
How amazing is that?
Now let’s talk about that not-so-fine print.
50,000 words. 30 days. That sounds insane right? Well, let me educate you, friend!
It is. It is totally and completely insane and you’ll probably be insane by the time it’s over, just like the rest of us. But hey! At least you have good company!
It ends up equalling out to 1,667 words each day. When you break it down, take it day by day, it’s quite a bit more doable, yeah? And fear not, dear writer-to-be! There are all kinds of fun ways for you to make it over these hurdles! A good example are the word sprints and a wonderful thing called a Word War.
The wars aren’t competitive (though you can certainly race with a friend if you like!), despite their name. They are races to see how many words you can write in a set timeframe, usually fifteen minutes. There are also challenges that follow your favorite movie, book, etc. These can be found on the NaNo forums.
All in all, it’s a fun, creative experience meant to get your creativity flowing and get you to pump out that novel you’ve been meaning to write for years but never got around to. Well now you can! And the best part is that NaNoWriMo doesn’t have to be once a year! They also have two different Camp NaNo’s that are the summer editions of the November event!
And for those completionists and gamers out there, NaNoWriMo has their very own achievements for reaching certain milestones on your writing journey. I love these. I love breaking down larger tasks into smaller, more manageable ones, and then getting a special badge for it! Achievements are basically kindergarden for grown ups.
We love that sweet, sweet positively reinforced validation.
So what are you waiting for? 1,667 words isn’t so hard, right? Hell, just in this article, do you know how many I’ve written so far? 700 exactly! See? And you can do it too! So hop on board this crazy train because the words are flying and there’s no such thing as backspace!
With Peace and Passion and A Thirty Day Committment To The Gods Of Creativity!
So last night, Little Maxwell decided that instead of going to bed like I wanted her to, she wanted to know how airplanes could fly. The question came after she made a request, with all the seriousness that her 4-going-on-40 toddler self could muster, for me to food her a paper airplane. The discussion spiraled into how different ways of folding the paper could make the airplanes fly further or (in my case) not at all.
There were loop-de-loops and markers. There were frustrations and poorly read Google instructions! There was even a video of a paper airplane competition by the illustrious and off-the-cuff Dude Perfect!
But where is the educational value, you may ask? In math and science. That’s right. Paper airplanes equal math and science. Today I’m going to tell you how.
This was our learning agenda for the day. As many of you may know, I suffer from an acute case of Goldfish Memory. Yep. Totally scientific diagnosis. Either way, if I don’t write it down, it is not going in the memory bank.This was the little basket that we put all of our paper airplanes in. We looked up and tried several different types of airplane folds to see which one ultimately flew better. I did the folding and a Little Maxwell did the coloring. 🙂 We decided that on the road in front of our house was going to be the best place for measuring how far each plane went without running out of room.Little Maxwell throwing the last of our planes. She was pretty disappointed when the red one that she took such pride in didn’t win first place. But we looked at the planes that did do well and compared them to the ones that didn’t to see what was different about them that could cause their success or failure. We came to the conclusion that the planes that did the best were more compact and had more folds. They were denser so we refolded the red one until it was just like the first place plane.
So where is the math and science? As for math, This was a great opportunity to discuss place values or rankings like first, second, third, etc. Strangely, I hadn’t yet found the opportunity to teach that. Also if you’re a child is a little older than mine, pull out a tape measure and measure the distances that each plane flies. You could even discuss the metric versus standard system measurements for each distance.
The Magic School Bus show was a classic childhood staple. Who could forget the ginger-haired Ms. Frizzle and her cold-blooded bestie? Coolest teachers assistant ever, am I right?
Well our kids can laugh along with the class as they navigate everything from old iron mines to human immunology with the OG Frizz as well as the series follow up, The Magic School Bus Rides Again, on Netflix! Both are equally fantastic and humorously educational. The best part? There’s an episode that features airplanes and what makes them fly!
And there’s the science, bitches! Yes! You may now have a celebratory glass of wine while they fall down the cartoon rabbit hole, satisfied with the knowledge that you did that school thing today.
Hell, add some vocabulary from the show on there for English, an airplane craft for Art, and then set them loose outside to throw airplanes at each other for an hour. Boom. P.E. Nailed it.
We also love the kids science shows SciShowKids on YouTube and Emily’s Wonder Lab, a recent addition to the Netflix queue. Both give quality educational and entertaining content for those times when it’s the middle of a three o’clock slump, your coffee maker just took a flying leap and you have a Zoom meeting in five.
All of this came from a simple question about airplanes that would have been so easy to brush off with some simple platitude. Instead, it turned into a full day of fun and learning.
Little Journeys Everywhere 