Instructagram project - repurposing a soda bottle!

The owners of cropchocolate.com are working to get a new website up and running, so they are running periodic contests to encourage people to submit step-by-step projects. The latest challenge was to repurpose something around the house, so I decided to repurpose an empty soda bottle and make some plastic beads... which I then used to make into a unique bookmark.

Here's a close-up of the plastic beads - I think they look pretty cool!

Here is the bookmark in use - it's flat grosgrain ribbon, so it's not bulky within the book. Want to learn how to make this? Check it out at Instructagram!

Just one (or two) of those days...

Marika decided to gussy herself up yesterday evening...

And as if that wasn't enough, check out what she did to her leg...

My neighbor came to borrow some cinnamon this morning, while I was unloading groceries between errands - so she watched the girls in the car while I ran into the house. When I returned 20 seconds later, she casually commented, "oh, I see she can spell her name..." I wonder how truly horrified she was... and I really wish Marika would use those washable markers I bought! Can you see that she even "painted" her toenails??? *sigh*

And this is how my morning began. It's the morning routine to wave bye to Daddy as he leaves for work every morning. You can hear the girls all the way down the street! Well, apparently there was some pushing going on while I was outside photographing a crane fly (see below) ... one is mad because she got pushed off the sofa and the other is mad because she knows she did something bad... so you can just imagine them screaming, "Bye, Daddy, bye!" while they're crying at the same time - probably pretty pathetic!

But how cool is this? This crane fly stood still as I snapped picture after picture of it. You can even see the halteres (the second pair of "wings" that help the fly "stabilize" its flight)! Gorgeous, don't you think?

And finally... a story from our recycling man (the girls and I recycled our cans and bottles today). He said his grandmother used to tell him the story of two men who were each granted a wish by a genie. One wished to be the richest man in the world while the other wished to be the smartest. Fast forward one year later - the richest man was now poor and the smartest man was now the richest man in the world! I thought it was a nice story, but the guy reassured me that it sounded much better in Spanish!