The Family Mario - 2023 GLOW edition! | This WONDERfilled Life

At our school's Fall Fest, 2022.  We won the trunk or treat contest!

It's been forever...again...I am so behind on life right now.  I know it "looks" like I have everything together and handled but I promise you that I am barely hanging on. 

I thought when both kids went to school (at the same school) this past fall things would get easier and I'd have oodles of time to work and do things like clean, organize and write...and...it's freaking April and I've written and published ONE blog post and my to do list is growing longer by the day.

So...let's catch up a bit on life and then I'll tell you all about the newest time suck over here.

I have like ten different blog posts rolling around in my head...I think I may have to go back to my 2018 plan and just force myself to write an hour a week and call it.  I find that when I get stressed (and getting behind REALLY stresses me out) my perfectionism starts to rear it's ugly head again and when it come to posting blogs I just won't finish them if they aren't perfect with the right pictures, etc...and then it goes back on the to do list and perpetuates this behind feeling and stresses me out even more. Today is the Monday after spring break.  I thought I'd get soooo much done over break...LOL...nope...still have taxes to do, cleaning, organizing, painting and staining in the back yard, and oh yah...practicing...I haven't slept more than two hours at a time in the last month due to kids waking up and not sleeping well.  We peaked this weekend when Bubba started crying about his ears hurting...so today rather than going back to school he's home with me with an ear infection.  Thank goodness I was able to get him in and I am sooo hopeful (please pray for me!) that he will feel better after his first dose of antibiotics and will take a good nap today.

So, onto filling you in on the next BIG project I've been focused on over here...

If you know us you know we don't do big birthday parties every year.  I was raised with a bday party for your fifth, tenth and sixteenth birthdays and I think it's the perfect balance quite honestly.  Parties are so out of hand these days and to host and pay for that yearly? No way...that said Bubba turned five LAST year but thanks to COVID we opted to postpone his big bday since kids five and under were not able to be vaccinated.  So this year for his sixth birthday we're going all out, exactly like we did for P's fifth birthday and her "blacklight COCO" party (if you've never seen the YouTube video I highly recommend checking it out!).

We've learned a few things since hosting that party and have known since Bubba was little that when the time came we'd likely do something similar...and by the age of three it was obvious that "something" would be a "Super Mario" theme.  

Fall of 2022 I created some of the largest standee's I'd ever done, all for the school's trunk or treat.  In addition to the standees we all went as characters from Super Mario (see header photo)... and thinking hopefully we'd be able to have his fifth bday in the spring I held onto everything to reuse it...so in planning his party I had plenty of finished standees as well as files ready to start with.  I thought I'd just use the standees I had already made and call it a day...but if you know me...it's gotten..how can I say this...LARGER! I'll talk more about the decorations and standees for the party coming up...but I redesigned many many more elements of Mario's super universe and am so excited to see everyone's faces when they walk through the warp tube to the land of Mario!

All that is for another post but I wanted to show you a simple project that I wanted to make for the occasion.  For P's Coco party we all wore costumes, which were awesome, but hot, and quite frankly we never wore them outside of the party and Halloween.  For Bubba's celebration I wanted to make something that we'd wear again, because I can't stand single use items! So I came up with matching character shirts for the family. You may remember last summer when I drafted up some cute Mario character silhouette graphics and used HTV to add them to drawstring back packs (jump to that blog post here).  

I was so excited that they turned out as cute as they did...but I found out later that instead of making them out of glow-in-the-dark HTV I screwed up and only Peach glowed...such a rookie move! 

Hahaha! THIS time I was very careful and checked the HTV before cutting and applying.  Bubba's grandparents are coming in for his party so I drafted a Toad character and we had exactly six iconic characters, one for each of us.  I bought solid colored shirts that paired with each character (Mario/red, Luigi/green, Peach/pink, Daisy/orange, Toad/purple & Rosalina/teal) and I just love how cohesive they look in daylight and also when they glow.  

As is, in regular daylight.

Under the blacklights!

With the blacklights on they get even brighter.  Check out how much light Toad was putting out when he was face down on my cutting mat!!

We took our shirts on a test drive last week when we went to the new Super Mario Movie on premier day!

No spoilers here, but if you're a fan of the old game or the current one, go see it...right now...

So that's where we're at! I have so many more little things to show you about Bubba's blacklight Mario Mash-Up...I just hope I can get it all done and documented at the same time! 

Now about those taxes...

Sunday, April 16th…UPDATE!!

First, taxes are filed! Woohoo!! Secondly, in looking through photos on my phone I realized that somehow I lost the bottom part of Peach in my t-shirt project!! I was sort of devastated about it so I spent a little time today working out a fix…and I am happy to report that it worked! I was able to add to the existing shirt the missing arms/sleeves and brooch…*long happy sigh*

Working out the additions…

I ended up putting the sleeves on separately just to line it all up correct.

The fix is barely visible up close…can’t tell a thing from a reasonable distance. So happy!