Where is my Easy Button?

I might have mentioned before, David got me an Easy Button to remind me to sometimes, or more often, simplify. If only it were as easy as pusing a button . . .

When I went to get favors for Gabe's party, I first tried Rebecca's, but the kids had to wait in the lobby while Paloma had to stay in the cart. When the employee showed me around, she told me Paloma had to be quiet. So of course, she was not. We didn't stay very long.

I wanted to figure out what I could buy in person before I ordered anything online, but the party date was drawing near, so next I Googled U.S. Toy Company. Mom had told me about it, but I'd never been. So I printed out the directions from Google maps. But once we got to Carollton, we discovered it was no longer there. I also had seen that there was a location in Plano, so I called David and he gave me directions to it. So we ended up being in the car an hour on the way there. I called my cousin Chrys to see if we could arrange lunch or something. It wasn't a good time for them, but it was fun catching up with her on the phone since we usually communicate via blogs.

The kids had fun looking at all of the novelties (junk), but Gabriel had spotted the Thomas train table at the front of the store, so he asked me repeatedly if he could go play there. They got to do that when I was checking out, so he was appeased. My favorite finds were traffic-cone shaped candles, Dr. Seuss stuff and a pretty real-looking and -feeling pair of child-sized handcuffs. Telling David about the trip later, I explained that there was part of an aisle of racing stuff, but it was pretty cleaned out. So David told me, this is race weekend... that explains a lot.

Anyway, since we were already so far north, I asked Chrys how to get to IKEA, and we went and picked up another mattress for the trundle bed (the first one was too thick to fit under the bunkbed). Carmen & Gabe were fine because they got to play at IKEA. I think Paloma slept on both legs of the trip to and from.

So back to the favors. There are so few things that aren't junk. I wanted to find some car-related things besides pencils, stickers and balloons. The Pixar Cars favors are the same ones that were available last year (we already used some of them) and not that great, but still expensive. So I decided to use my Photoshop skills to make a favor I think at least some of the kids will like: personalized license plates. I took a picture of a license plate, took out the numbers, and found a decent font that looks like the letters are raised.

Here's one: