Homeschool Field Trip: Children's Museum of Indianapolis

Just in case you were happy, be forewarned that I'm in kind of a bummer mood today. I miss Mac so deeply, all the time, that I get used to it, until I have something that I want to tell him, or something happens that he'd think was funny. Fugazi comes on my Spotify. Someone else shares a memory or a photograph on his Facebook. Or maybe nothing happens to instigate it; maybe I just miss him desperately all of a sudden.

Sometimes, then, I make a mental list of all the people whom I would rather have had a brain tumor instead of Mac. It starts off easy. Evil people, for sure. Donald Trump. That guy who shot Trayvon Martin. And then I add all the people whom I hate. My former next door neighbor. Most of my former bosses.

The trick is to distract myself and move away from the activity before I go much farther, because my best friend from seventh grade? Sure, I’d sacrifice her for Mac. That cousin whom I really like but also haven’t really seen in a few years? I could do without her, if I could have Mac instead. It’s a stupid game, because I love Mac more than almost anyone else, and it’s stupid that you can’t actually burn the world down to get back someone whom you love.

Of course, if one could do that, we’d all be dead a thousand times over from the people who would happily sacrifice us to save their own precious ones.

Okay, deep breath, because I have a lot to do today, and I really don't have time to grieve until I've gotten four people packed for two completely different vacations in two different climate zones, partly with clothing that we do not yet own. Also, we need to mow the lawn, clean out the chicken coop and yard, and I need to write something like six Crafting a Green World posts and adjust the shipping times on every one of my etsy items...

Argh, this is not better! Another deep breath...

How about I show you some photos from the day that we spent at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis this week? We spent half of it in training, as we are now official volunteers of the museum and will be working in the Paleo Lab starting next month, and I know all the secret stairways, and can help you if you've lost your adult, and can lead you to evacuation in an emergency. The other half of the day, though, we spent happily exploring all the happy museum exhibits both old and new:

This is new! The museum has a new exhibit on the International Space Station, and it's awesome.

AND they have Gus Grissom's Liberty Bell 7 on long-term loan! You know what a space nerd I am, and I'm especially super stoked about this guy because this is the craft that almost drowned Grissom in the ocean when the hatch blew off of it before the rescue helicopters had reached him. There was suspicion for a while that Grissom had blown the hatch himself in error, but he always denied it, and I *think* the controversy has since been resolved in his favor. If you can check out video footage of the rescue operation, however, I highly recommend that you do, because it's absolutely harrowing: you can see the helicopter hook the Liberty Bell 7 and attempt to lift it, but because it's full of water it's too heavy, and you can actually see it drag the helicopter down with it, until the helicopter has to let it go. At the edge of the screen, the entire time this is occurring, is Gus Grissom, actively drowning. He was rescued, the Liberty Bell 7 was lost, and it was only recovered from the ocean floor decades later.

The Liberty Bell 7 exhibit is located in the former planetarium, and they've used the screen to make a show centered on the craft.

David Wolf is the museum's Astronaut-in-Residence, and this is his logbook from one of his missions.

It's kind of weird.

This is the elevator to the Treasures of the Earth exhibit, and it's a ride and show all on its own. We've seen it a hundred times, but we still love it, especially Syd, who has a fangirl crush of her own on Josh, the docent who was filmed for this and is also one of the hosts of This Week's WOW.

Terra Cotta Warriors!

I want to use this same electrolytic process in small scale to remove the gunk from some of the treasures that we find with our metal detector.

Not treasures like this, of course, but still treasures!

The museum's Chihuly sculpture is its centerpiece.

Just so I can end on a sad note as well: now that our plans to be regular volunteers at the museum are firmed up, I've made the difficult decision to quit our weekly volunteer job at the food pantry. I'm going to miss it a lot, but to be fair, this new job is probably going to be much closer to following the children's passions than the food pantry was. The kids are hard workers, but it's clear that after several years of labor at the pantry that the work isn't necessarily inspiring to them. Of course being of service isn't about you, the servant, but about the good that you do, but there are so many ways to be of service in this world that you might as well do something that brings you joy, if you can. Working towards food stability is crucial, but working to increase our collective knowledge and to provide extraordinary learning opportunities to children and their families is also pretty great. 

And also, can I just say? Dinosaurs. We'll be working with dinosaurs. There are worse ways to spend two hours on a Friday, I can 100% absolutely guarantee.

Work Plans for the Week of February 23, 2015: Fashion Show, Field Trips, and Final Cookie Orders (Yay!)

I have GOT to finish the kids' Trashion/Refashion Show entries this week! I was thrown off my game by a full day last week when, no matter how many times I sewed it, Will's T-shirt biketard simply. Refused. To. Work. Now that I've got that nailed down finally, I keep telling myself that all the rest of the design and sewing will go much more quickly, but still... must get it done this week. That Thursday Free Day is going to be the final leg of the race, no matter what.

In addition to these lesson plans, the kids' daily work will include, as always, chores, typing practice, keyboard practice, Chinese practice, and a daily book or documentary of my choice, to be read/viewed and then discussed with me. Those selections include a picture book biography of Georgia O'Keeffe that I thought that Syd would enjoy, a photo/essay book on fossils that I thought that Will would enjoy, a couple of books and videos for more Chinese language practice, and some selections on ballet or Sleeping Beauty, the theme of Syd's Spring ballet recital.

MONDAY: This time last week we were in the middle of a blizzard, and all outside-the-house activities were happily cancelled, but today we'll be happy to be back at our regular volunteer gig now that everything is plowed and cleared and the snow is piled up where it ought to be--a foot deep on the grass, perfect for sledding and forts and snowpeople in our free time!

In Math Mammoth this week, Will is studying decimals and Syd is studying area, perimeter, and volume. On this day, I'll be showing Will how one can use our Base Ten blocks as decimal manipulatives (hint: the hundred flat equals ONE), and Syd will be helping me tape out a template for the capes that she designed in masking tape right onto the floor. I'm hoping that she and her sister can sew these capes themselves, or at least baste them by hand for me to sew...

Will has the outline for her essay on historically black colleges and universities written, so this week she'll be writing that essay, then editing it. And yes, I do make suggestions in colored ink all over her rough draft, just as I used to do with my freshman comp students. Syd also has a book report to write on this day, and both kids need to write some thank-you notes to some extra generous Girl Scout cookie customers.

I've set aside time for the kids to have a Hoffman Academy keyboard lesson today, but I think that I'll actually give them the choice to either take a new lesson or complete the worksheets from the last few lessons--I got lazy about printing the worksheets for them, because for a couple of weeks in a row they'd just seemed like busywork, but now that I look back at the pages that they missed, I think that they'll want them for the rhythm and note identification.

TUESDAY: We'll actually be gone for most of the day on this day; we'll be helping with seed sorting at the food pantry where we volunteer weekly, and we'll be sledding with friends, AND the kids have Science Club (and hopefully I have a date at a Mexican restaurant!) that night.

The kids, especially Will, love animals so much that I think they'll be excited to start this zoology unit on this day. We'll be using Zoology for Kids, and the first lesson is an introduction to animal biology at the cellular level, and it asks the kids to make an edible animal cell model--yum! We'll be doing it cookie cake-style, and I plan to require them to also make an edible plant cell model, so that they can see the similarities/differences.

WEDNESDAY: In addition to horseback riding class, the kids and I have a field trip to a local wild animal rescue center on this afternoon--they are going to be SO excited. We'll slog through one, two, or three First Language Lessons lessons, depending on how long each one is, and hopefully the Trashion/Refashion Show garments will be finished--at least *almost* finished--by the end of this day.

THURSDAY: If not, I'll be ignoring the kids all morning while I finish them on THIS day!

FRIDAY: It's early for Easter eggs, I know, but I have an experiment with dyeing brown eggs that I'm desperate to run, and I know that the kids won't care whether or not it's off-season.

The kids have a couple of larger orders of Girl Scout cookies to add notes and prizes to, wrap up for mailing, write addresses on, and calculate postage for. If it needs to be done anyway, might as well do it as part of school!

This Prima Princessa ballet DVD might be on the baby-ish side, I'm suspecting, but it's supposed to provide an excellent narration of the story as told in the Sleeping Beauty ballet (as opposed to the Disney movie), so I think that it'll be a worthwhile experience, and it's also supposed to include some little ballet moves for the kids to do along with the video, which will be nice for Will, who's never taken a ballet class in her life, to try out and get the feel of.

While Will takes her final ice skating class of the season, Syd can write thank-you notes to the relatives who generously mailed us their unwanted black or white T-shirts that will hopefully by then be part of our 100% completed Trashion/Refashion Show garments!

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Saturday, as usual, will have Matt spending part of the day taking Syd to ballet and both kids to Chinese and doing something fun with them in between. Sunday will hopefully be a day at home for everyone!

Because now that we've got our two favorite sledding runs nice and packed down, it would be a shame not to spend half the day, every single day, out on them!

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Bookshelves (and, Inadvertently, a Long Rant about Educational Equity)

a round-up of upcycled bookshelf projects

and our own decoupaged bookshelf that we made for our local food pantry

I don't have the photography skills to make the bookshelf look as cute as it does in real life, but the kids and I are really pleased with it, and it looks even better sitting in the children's area of the food pantry, chock-full of donated books, with kids sitting around it in their kid-sized chairs reading happily. There's so much for kids to do at the pantry now--books, crayons and paper, a construction set, some sidewalk chalk that we brought over on our latest work day, afternoon drop-in kids' gardening classes--and the Youth Outreach Coordinator has a ton more planned for after school hours and in the summer. I'm really excited about it!

We had asparagus in the pantry this week, and the week before we had arugula, and Will, both weeks, has seemed really struck by finally noticing that there are plenty of people in our community who can't identify these two vegetables, don't know how to prepare them, have never tasted them, and are nervous about doing so. I'd imagine this isn't super uncommon anywhere, and Will's seen this over and over again for years--one of my happiest memories is cutting open pomegranates for kids, encouraging them to try it by telling them that it tastes like candy, and then watching their little faces when they realize that I don't lie--but watching me answer questions, helping me photocopy preparation instructions, and tasting veggies in front of people to show them that they're good are experiences that she's brought up several times in the past couple of weeks. 

It's a lot of growing this kid must be doing, trying to figure out that other people's experiences are different from hers. The privilege of knowledge is something that we've been talking about for a while now, since the kids' global education unit study that they completed for their Girl Scout World Thinking Day badge. In a lot of circumstances, education is a luxury, I keep saying to her, over and over. You have to have time to spend. You often have to have money to spend. You have to have mental energy available to spend. If you have to work all day in a factory sewing cheap clothes for Americans to buy, you don't have time to learn to read. If you don't have extra money in your budget, you can't buy asparagus just to see if you happen to like it--you're going to buy apples every single time, because you already know you like them. If you're always worried about if you're going to earn enough money to pay your rent and electricity and water bills each month, you're not going to feel like sitting down at your table every night and studying for a college degree.

I remind her of the time that we spent $15 on a jackfruit just to see if we liked it--and we didn't like it! If we'd really, truly needed that $15 for food that week, then we would have had to eat that entire jackfruit anyway, and that wouldn't have been fun (seriously, it weighed something like eight pounds). If we'd really needed to eat using that $15, we would have been better off buying rice and beans and hamburger and spinach, even though we eat that all the time, because we know we like it and we know it will fill our tummies up nice and comfy.

That's why it's so important to make opportunities for people to educate themselves without risk. There have to be places where all kinds of new experiences are free, so that people don't have to spend their money to try or taste. There has to be enough money for every person to allow everyone to have some leisure time to explore, and there have to be courses of study--all kinds, in every possible field--that people can try at their leisure, also for free.

That's why public schools are worth improving, even if you don't have kids who go there. That's why open courseware is worth funding, even if you don't use it. And it's why your local food pantry is worth supporting, even if you don't shop there.

*steps off soapbox, turns off microphone, wanders off to eat a cup of noodles and read the next chapter in her book*

Work Plans for the Week of March 24, 2014: Play

Syd spent much of last week learning how to make and break codes and edit Zoo Tycoon with Will, so whatever we didn't get to last week, I just left in place for this week!

MONDAY: Latin is one of the subjects that Will always chooses to do with Syd--somehow, those workbook pages that were such agony when required don't merit a peep of protest when they're chosen. Syd's keyboard lesson is again from Hoffman Academy, who, I am thrilled to see, has added more video lessons. I'm pretty stoked that we can learn more at home before I have to make a decision about formal classes. Syd also ADORES Mr. Hoffman and his lessons, so she loves keyboard. Will, on the other hand, hasn't picked up the recorder since the day that I stopped giving her work plans; we need to have a conversation about this, to see where she wants to go with music, because I do want her to study some instrument.

We didn't get to the skip counting board last Friday (but Syd did spend a LONG time creating and translating "secret" codes on that day, so there's her math enrichment and logic skill building), so I put it down again for Monday. I also read another Pippi book to Syd, and then had her write a letter to Pippi Longstocking, care of the theater where we saw her play a couple of weeks ago. Syd LOVED this project, and it turned out super cute, too--she asked Pippi what her real name was, told her all the things that she liked to pretend to be, described in detail her favorite part of the play (a scene that didn't actually include Pippi--oops!), and wrote the names of our three cats in every possible order for her ("My cats' names are Ballantine and Gracie and Spots or Ballantine and Spots and Gracie or Gracie and Ballantine and Spots or...). I'm curious to see if the theater passes the letter on to the actress and if she writes back--hopefully she's not *too* overwhelmed with fan mail?

Both kids also seriously worked their butts off at our volunteer gig on Monday--I have NEVER seen them work so hard! They stocked cans and granola bars and frozen meat and milk and yogurt and produce, including a ton of really heavy stuff. They helped repackage pasta (some stuff comes in giant bulk bags, and we split it into smaller portions to serve more people). They organized their bookshelf and stocked more books (someone brought in even more books last week!). Syd read to a little boy. They normally do all that, but with plenty of time spent reading quietly or coloring or playing together, but yesterday they hardly even took a break. It was wonderful to watch them so dedicated and focused, and I felt really proud of them.

TUESDAY: The kids have a playdate for this entire morning (right now they're playing hide-and-seek downstairs, with a gentleman's agreement that no one will hide in the closet where we keep the litterbox), so nothing will get accomplished until afternoon, but then we've got First Language Lessons, which both kids LOVE, and math, which Syd is fine with and Will tolerates much better these days (even though she IS spending the week doing the long-threatened Kumon multiplication drill workbook), and that documentary on natural Indiana that's been on the work plans for weeks--surprising, since the kids usually adore documentaries, and I actually want to add more of them to our days, but they've been so involved in active play and their own busy plans recently that I just don't think they want to sit down long enough to watch this. It's also snowing right now, which means that we're not going to make casts of animal tracks today, either, but on a family hike this weekend--without the supplies to make casts, of COURSE--we saw some good animal tracks, so on the first nice day this week we'll head back there, plaster of Paris in our backpacks, and finally make that project happen.

One thing that I like about homeschooling is that I get to put what are essentially chores on the schoolwork plans, instead of rushing to try to do them after school and extracurriculars, so today I also want the kids to figure out their birthday presents for a buddy's birthday party this weekend. I have kind of strict rules for birthday party presents--You can either make your friend a gift, buy your friend a gift with your own money, or give your friend something of your own--so making/buying/figuring out what to sacrifice does take enough time and effort to justify being a "work" for the day.

WEDNESDAY: Horseback riding lessons begin again! The kids couldn't be more stoked. I also *may* put Will back in aerial silks class, because she says her thumb isn't sore anymore, but I'm terrified that she'll accidentally rip off a big scab or her entire thumbnail during class and cause an "incident," so we'll see...

THURSDAY: Oh, my goodness, this last Girl Scout Birthday Week project seems like it will never get done! I may have to wave the Birthday Week patches temptingly in front of the children on this day, because I know they want them deeply. To be fair, Will worked on other Girl Scout badges for I can't even tell you how many hours last week--she's simultaneously earning her Animal Tracks, Detective, Inside Government, and Geocaching badges--and Syd worked on her Potter badge, so Girl Scouts is still leading them into some really enriching, engaging learning experiences, but I know that regular sense of completion and accomplishment goes a long way towards making it as fun as they find it to be.

Since we just had a Bible chapter in The Story of the World, and since Easter and Passover are coming up, I thought we'd spend some time in the next few weeks exploring some myths from world religions. We're reading about Creation myths this week, and then we might focus in on Jewish and Christian myths related to the upcoming holidays. I'll tell you one thing about children's religious education: it includes a LOT of crafts! Fortunately, Syd enjoys crafting, so I think this will be a lot of fun for her. Will doesn't always enjoy crafting, so I think she'll appreciate the ability to choose her own level of participation.

FRIDAY: Last Friday was a beautiful day, so the kids just played and played and we didn't get much of our formal schoolwork accomplished. This Friday may end up being just as beautiful, especially after being so chilly earlier in the week, so we'll just see what ends up getting done. I'd like us to begin Indiana history, after spending some time studying natural Indiana, so we're starting A History of US, which I'm pretty excited about. I "think" I'm going to skip around to the chapters that relate directly to Indiana, but if we like the book as much as I hope we're going to, I may just add it wholemeal to our curriculum. Anyway, on this day we begin with the Bering Land Bridge, and we'll be using a cool ipad app that allows us to see historical geography to research what the Bering Land Bridge actually must have looked like.

For our regular history, we'll be doing the mapwork in The Story of the World Activity Book for chapter seven, but we've actually spent so much time exploring Mesopotamia in earlier chapters that I'm already researching for chapter eight. Perhaps this is how we'll eventually begin to move faster through the book--we'll just, at some point, have done all the cool projects that there are to do! Math class is back this week, and the couple of leftover assignments from last Friday should finish off our day... if I can get the kids to come inside long enough to do them, which I'm not counting on.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: It's going to be a busy Saturday, with an all-day nature class for the kids followed immediately by a birthday party for a buddy. So even though I'd like to plan hiking or rock climbing or some such family adventure on Sunday, we may just goof around and play at home, with a few breaks for enforced yardwork.

Work Plans for the Week of December 9, 2013

We're back at school, more or less. I'd been hoping that after two weeks' vacation for Thanksgiving and travel, our school routine would feel good to get back to for everyone... and in some ways, it did. We were all happy to be at our regular Monday volunteer gig again (We taste-tested pomegranates! Marveled over the many uses of powdered egg! And discovered that crates of celery are, for some reason, about the heaviest things I've ever had to lift!), and the girls readily accepted my insistence that an afternoon sledding at the park means an evening at school (yet another reason to LOVE homeschool!), but my Will, in particular, has needed many iterations of the "I can sit here with you, but I cannot learn this material for you, nor will I bully you into learning" lecture, sigh, and both times that we have needed to leave the house today, I have managed to work myself up into manic, frustrated tears--it should not take 40 minutes, constant reminders, raised voices, and manic, frustrated tears to get us out the door to go somewhere that a child enjoys going to! ARGH!!!

Anyway, tears dried, traffic battled, here we are at one child's aerial silks class, the other child working contentedly on her reading assignment while I get a little work done, myself.

MONDAY: I've mixed up our regular schedule a bit this week--I've ditched a couple of assignments each day and replaced them with a daily Christmas project and, for Will, daily exploration of a math/science online computer program that I've got a free two-week trial for. I've discovered through experience that the kids love these sorts of programs, but also that they tire of them quickly, so two weeks of activity is probably just about right. For the Christmas projects, I expect that some of them will be crafty in nature, but I've also discovered through experience that I can use the kids' general Christmas enthusiasm to get some real help with holiday chores. Today, for example, they're writing Christmas cards to our nearest and dearest, so I can check that job off my list!

Will's still happy with the recorder, but Syd, over Thanksgiving, was inspired to give piano a try. She has so many relatives on the West coast who play piano, and eagerly took a piano lesson from her grandma before we left. I'm willing to pay for piano lessons for her, but I know how challenging she can find formal lessons when she doesn't automatically take to the subject, and I know how her frustrated feelings manifest in acting uncooperative, so I'm going to make her take several weeks' worth of keyboard lessons from me, first, to see if she's ready for this.

TUESDAY: Peace Hill Press had a Cyber Monday sale, so I bought the digital files of First Language Lessons, volume 3, and I'm eager to start our first lesson! There are more word ladders for logic, and an extra lesson on acids and bases before the girls move on in their chemistry set. Will also has a math enrichment class that she'll be going to on Tuesdays now, which may give me and Syd just enough time to make that model volcano.

WEDNESDAY: In addition to math and memory work, which never cease, Will has a meeting of her online Magic Tree House Club, which also entails listening to the audiobook of Revolutionary War on Wednesday. She LOVES Magic Tree House Club, and is going to be stoked.

THURSDAY: I finally took my  own advice and moved one of our subjects away from our overbooked Thursdays, so what's left looks quite manageable. This Yorkshire pudding business is going to be a new one for Syd AND me (What, no raisin bread?!? We finally ran out of raisins, and I didn't want to make a special trip to the store), but she loves Harry Potter so much that I wanted her to learn how to make something British, and I hope that Will can figure out the Spacewar ROM that I downloaded for her, because I sure can't! It's the very first videogame, though, so we've got to give it a shot.

FRIDAY: I'd forgotten that Will's ice skating class is dismissed until January, or I would have put another school assignment there--lucky kids! Instead, we've got some geography to finish up that we didn't get to on that last hectic Friday before Thanksgiving vacation, and since we just saw real, live papyrus growing in a pot, I'm pulling out a papyrus papermaking kit that I bought this past summer. I really want us to make canopic jars, but I do NOT have the energy to source old baby food jars and clean the labels off right now. That sounds like a mid-January sort of project, don't you think?

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: On Saturday, I'm having the girls try out a once-a-month nature class that I'm hoping they like (nature skills = yay, of course, but so does one day a month just for me and my Matt!), and there are a couple of other activities that we can do that day--a puppet-making workshop at the library, a symphony concert at the hands-on-science museum--but other than that, we're free as birds! Just between you and me, though, I'm hoping that there's a really great football game on TV on Sunday. Matt watches football on the cable TVs on our university's campus, and he always takes the girls with him. A whole evening, just me?

That suits me JUST fine.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: A DIY Balance Bike, and a Vintage Embroidered Pillowcase Refashion

a tutorial for converting a pedal bike into a balance bike

and a tutorial for converting a pillowcase into a summer top

with much bonus chick footage, apparently

 

In other news, the fabulous food pantry where we volunteer has big, wonderful changes afoot: it's moving to another, much larger space! With that space, it will be able to be open more hours, so patrons will no longer have to stand in line outside waiting to shop; it will be able to stock more food of a wider variety, giving patrons more options and power to make their own food choices; it will be right on a bus line, making it less stressful for many patrons to get there; it will have a bigger parking lot, so patrons in vehicles won't have to waste gas circling the block or risk getting a ticket; and it will just be BETTER, with a teaching kitchen on-site, loading docks, a pallet jack (my back says hallelujah to that!), walk-in storage coolers and freezers, and a small demonstration garden.

The pantry isn't *quite* as close to us anymore, but it's still not that bad at just about a mile. I'm fixing to go make the girls sandwiches for lunch, and then we're going to head down the road that mile to an orientation in the new space.

And, and, AND...

We're all going to ride our bikes!

Cake Wrecks: Buzzard Edition

So once a week, the girls and I volunteer at a food pantry that's just a few blocks from our house. We walk over, help unload the donation truck, stock the pantry, and then help out during the shopping hours by restocking, getting people signed in, handing out shopping bags, carrying their groceries, helping them shop--basically whatever we're needed for. The girls can help out with all of this, or they can read or color at the children's table, or they can hold the door open for the shoppers with their arms full of bags (this is a fun job because, as you can imagine, it comes with lots of praise and positive reinforcement!), or--and this is their favorite thing to do--they can play on the sidewalk outside the pantry, often with gigantic cardboard boxes that they've snagged from one of the adult volunteers before it's broken down for recycling. It's a great, kid-friendly environment, a place where we like everyone and where we like to be, a place where the girls can interact with lots of different people, a place where I can get off my butt and use my muscles, a place where even kids can do meaningful work and see concrete, immediate results from it.

Anyway, the absolute only reason why I'm telling you all about this is so I can also tell you that on this donation truck that gets unloaded are, in particular, unsold items from store bakeries. It's not the pantry's favorite thing to stock, because this pantry tries to focus on real, whole, healthy foods, but the shoppers do love desserts, and anyway they keep coming on the truck, so there you go. But unsold bakery goods are some of MY personal favorite things to stock, because what, apparently, is the number one reason why a bakery good remains unsold?

Because it's horrifyingly butt-ugly, that's why! Think "brownie dippers" that looks like a giant poo pile of brownie pieces covered in icing. Think "butterfly cupcake cake" with a bunch of cupcakes arranged into a vague butterfly shape, covered in piles of orange icing, with a leering green icing smile on the north-most cupcake. Think sheet cake with Justin Bieber's face on it.

A few weeks ago, the mother of all ugly cakes came in:

It's a terrible cell phone shot, so I'll try to walk you through it. In the middle, you see a buzzard. A buzzard! On a cake! The buzzard is peeking out from behind a tombstone. A tombstone! On a cake! Written on the tombstone is "50th." Someone ordered a cake that equated her 50th birthday with being about to die and have a buzzard eat her! Only the buzzard won't be able to eat her because she's clearly been buried, because there's a tombstone. That's probably why the buzzard doesn't look exactly happy, rather smirkingly quizzical,  breaking the fourth wall in order to say to you, "Shall I instead eat YOUR flesh off of the bones?"

But the best part is the writing on the cake, in pink icing: "Happy Birthday Julie." ME! This cake has MY name on it! Sure, it's written kind of half-assed, with too much room above and to the side, the perfect amount of room to write the name bigger and cuter, but the decorator was all, "Nah, I'll just put it here real quick, nice and small, but with a little curlicue on the J to show that I'm making an effort."

And to think that it ended up at the food pantry instead of being purchased by the person who ordered it. I would LOVE to have been a fly on the wall during that particular conversation!