How could I not leave money?

How could I not leave money?

No Fat Girl Flea for me!

Unfortunately, the little girl came down with a cold so we're staying in today. So my fellow fatshionistas if you're in the city, check it out, shop, get your bargains, and pray for me in hopes I don't get puked on today.

Sidewalk Chalk Art

One of the bonuses of being a parent is that I get to re-experience some of the joys of childhood. I know many of us can remember playing hopscotch in front of our apartment buildings or houses. The setup was almost as important as the actual game. If you weren't lucky enough to have an actual stick of chalk, you'd look for that perfect rock or piece of concrete for drawing your beautiful hopscotch grid. A clean flat stretch of sidewalk would do but it was better when you could draw on that sweet black pavement of the street or a driveway.

As the only girl in my generation in my family, it wasn't often I could get my brother or cousins to play hopscotch with me. It was more likely I would play skully or one of a million games of freeze tag, hide 'n' seek, or hot peas and butter with them. So I spent most of my moments with that hopscotch piece of chalk drawing masterpieces on black pavement. It was WAY better than drawing on my small chalkboard at home. Outside, my pictures could stretch forever and be admired by anyone who happened to walk by.

Now I share that with my little artist daughter every summer. We take our bucket of sidewalk chalk and draw hearts and flowers in front of our house. Sometimes my nephews (even the 12 year old one) will join us as we do out part to beautify the world.

More art in the city:

Evaporation T-shirt by Ikyoto

City-Bowery by Art by Iris

Decorative Swirl Tee by Kimmchi

P.S. You can learn more about sidewalk games at Streetplay.com.

A Day at AMNH with my six year old --- well sort of

My daughter just completed kindergarten and scored very high on her standardized test (97% Reading, 85% Language, 96% Math to be exact) So as a treat I decided to take her to a day at the American Museum of Natural History. "Night at the Museum" with Ben Stiller is one of her favorite movies so I figured it was a great way to expose her to a great museum. Right?

Wrong!!!

A half hour into the tour she wanted to go home and after seeing the pelts of mice and scary owls it was a done deal. Well at least I got some pictures of her with the dinosaurs.