What a Pineapple Under the Sea, Where's Spongebob!

Who lives in a pineapple, under the sea? Spongebob Squarepants! Spongebob is one of the hottest new characters out, and children and adults both love him and his show. A Spongebob Squarepants party would be a great theme for both kids and adults who love the yellow guy!

You can find Spongebob Squarepants party supplies in any party planning store. There are plates, napkins, cups, tablecloths and silverware that come in yellow with Spongebob?s face. There are also themes which have him and the rest of the characters on his show, including, Patrick, Squidward, Mr. Crab and Plankton.

One of the best piata?s around is Spongebob. He is large and square and easy to fill with all of your favorite candies. Other decorations include balloons, streamers, wall hangings and table pieces. They can be plain colors or bought to match your chosen motif.

Every party needs games! Pretend your guests are all crabby patty flippers. Use a spatula, cardboard or felt to resemble a crabby patty and an apron. Divide your group into teams. Each person at the front of the team wears the apron and carries the crabby patty on top of the spatula to a ?bun??on the other side of the room. Who ever can race the most patties to the other side wins!

Prizes to give away can include any number of trinkets like bouncy balls, paddle balls or Spongebob stickers and tattoos. Candy can also be found to look like Spongebob or even a gummy crabby patty. Party stores have rows of prizes to include in treat bags to send home with kids (or kids at heart).

A craft to make with the kids would be a take home Spongebob. Buy yellow sponges and let the kids color his brown pants on. Glue big googly eyes on and they have a work of art!

Foamcubesfor
Squareengraved
Tlatch
Suppliestn
Rollorcarrywithsofttop
Crissypoablog

Taking Advantage of Trends: Cocooning

One of the biggest established trends on the market front today, and still gathering momentum, is cocooning - the desire to perform the majority of social and cultural interactions (working, entertaining, relaxing, etc.) from home, rather than by going outside the home. This trend was strongly reinforced by the 9/11 tragedy, as many people began to review their lives and, sometimes for the first time, consciously decide how they wanted to live them rather than just letting life happen to them and going with the flow.

This poses an obstacle for many businesses who rely on brick and mortar style storefronts and foot traffic, as well as for those in the entertainment industries who rely on people "going out" for a large part of their income. The advent of home theaters, rec-room "bars" or "cafe corners" - sometimes better stocked and appointed than local business versions - and similar cocooning-based home improvements are becoming more and more popular as people are rediscovering the delights of having friends and family over for social time as opposed to meeting them outside the home in a third-party establishment. This trend is here to stay, according to all economic markers, so what are some of the ways in which your business can take advantage of this trend rather than being diminished by it? Here are some ideas:

1. Create a "house call" option for whatever you do. Now of course this doesn't work in all fields, but you'd be surprised how many it can be extended to, given a little creativity and thought. For example, a new car dealer might consider creating an exclusive "We bring it to you!" option for pre-qualified buyers, where interested parties can submit an application online, choose the model they're interested in from an on-screen "sales lot" and have a sales person drive it to their house for the test-drive and negotiations. Where can your business create a house-call option to encourage cocooners to purchase with you?

2. Reconfigure services and other offerings to allow for in-home variations of previously outside-only availability. For example, the recent boom of home-delivered DVD rentals does just this - you pay a consistent monthly fee and keep the movies as long as you want, sending them back when you're ready to trade them in for new titles. No longer do you need to leave the house to stay home for movie night - the ultimate expression of cocooning. How can you recreate your service or product to meet your customers' desires to stay in?

3. Consider adding "companion services" that make your service or product more attractive to cocooning customers. A pizza delivery service now offers free movie rentals with a qualified purchase as part of their "specials and sales" menu. These creative combinations save customers time and money, and offer strong incentives to remain loyal. How can you partner your offering to create this sort of option for your customers? Hint: what are your customers likely to be doing or needing during or near the time they are using your service/product?

The trend of cocooning offers many challenges to traditional businesses, especially those that rely heavily on showroom sales and foot traffic income. However, with a little creative thinking, you can turn this obstacle to your benefit and pull ahead of the pack where your competitors are concerned. My advice? Stay home one day and examine all the things you do that could be improved or eased by some version of your product or services. See where you hit snags or annoyances in your goal of living, working and having a good time at home. Imagine your ideal customer at home - then do your best to keep him there.

Woodendinnerflatware
Rfonlinewaepon
Rollorcarrywithsofttop
Razorstrop
Bravulockssets
Ideasusingbluejeans

The Ironman and Overtraining

This is a statement I read recently. "Remember that when you are not training, someone out there is and you will lose to that person when you meet on raceday."

This statement was directed towards highly competetive athletes, but just the same, by its very nature, this reasoning can lead to injury.

I really believe that regardless if you are a pro triathlete or first time Ironman hopeful, this is not the best thought process to follow.

To me it makes more sense to worry less about the other person and concentrate on the training regimen that's best for you. Being afraid to miss a training day because someone else might get a step ahead of you is a recipe for disaster. All athletes have different physical tolerance levels and must progress within their capabilities and not push themselves when they obviously need rest.

Often an olympic athlete -- like a swimmer for example -- will suffer an injury and be forced to take 4 or 5 weeks off from serious training. Then soon after being back from injury, they enter a competition and have some of the best results of their career. You see it with pro athletes as well. A hockey player misses a week or two of playing and when he returns to the ice he has a career night.

To me the reason for this is simple. They were forced into giving their body a long period of rest that it obviously needed. Chances are they were over-training before their forced lay-off. Their bodies welcomed the rest and responded with amazing results.

Over the years I've had times when I've pushed my body to the limit just to see what I could do and if it would improve my race results. I was capable of enormous training regimens, but ultimately found that training more didn't necessarily result in better race results. More often then not it resulted in injury.

For example: Ten years ago I wanted to see if run-training extreme distances would give me my best ever Marathon result. Over a 5 month period I kept increasing my weekly distance. I maxed out at 155 miles a week. Probably more than most olympic marathoners train on a weekly basis. To reach that distance I had to run around 24 hours a week. It also meant doing two-a-day training. In other words, it wasn't unusual to run 3 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening.

The last month of training before I had intended to taper was a monster. The weeks went 140 miles, 145 miles, 150 miles and 155 miles or almost 600 miles in a month plus working a full-time job. It was during the last week and a half that I started to feel soreness in my heels. Like many other odd aches and pains I developed over the years, I just trained right through it assuming it would go away. Well it didn't. It became so bad that I had to go to a doctor and was diagnosed with plantar fasciitis. It was an extremely serious case and cost me the marathon I was training for, and even an Ironman race 5 months later.

NOTE***I did mention to two different coaches that my heels hurt and it felt like they were bruised. They had no idea what it was. I told my doctor the same thing and he knew right away what the problem was. He diagnosed plantar fasciitis immediately. Ironically, when I looked it up on the internet later, it said that the first sign of plantar fasciitis is a feeling not unlike having bruised heels. To this day I don't know how both coaches failed to pick up on it, especially when they were documenting my weekly mileage. They could have saved my year. The lesson here: A coach is not a doctor. If you're injured go to a doctor.

Despite having my heel injected with an anti-inflammatory before the Ironman months later, I had to drop out 5 miles into the run. It was devastating injury and that was the last time I let myself over-train.

It really messed up an entire year.

My suggestion to anyone training for the Ironman is to listen to your body. Its true that often you will get numerous aches and pains and twinges that come and go as you put your body through the rigors of training for a distance event. If you quit training every time something ached, you would never train.

The best way I found to approach these nagging aches and pains was to monitor them "very closely." Say for example your heel begins to hurt like mine did. The first time you notice the pain do one more running workout. If its still there, STOP run training and concentrate on your swimming and biking. That's the beauty of the Ironman. Often an injury will allow you to do at least one of the other disciplines.

See a professional---a doctor or physiotherapist and tell them the problem. Had I done this it may have saved my entire year. Plantar fasciitis would have been diagnosed right away. A program of stretching 3 times a day and maybe some shoe inserts and I could have avoided the injury becoming chronic. At most I would have lost one or two weeks instead of the entire season.

So I believe this is the key to avoiding serious injury. If its a normal ache or pain it will disappear in a few days. If it persists through several training days, stop and get it diagnosed.

Pushing too hard in your training can have another serious consequense as well. You can just simply run out of energy and every work-out becomes difficult. Its times like this that training is just no fun. If you go out on a training run or bike and just know you have nothing in the tank--stop and go home. Take two or three days off completely and do things that have nothing to do with swim, bike, run. Avoid the mindset that you will lose all you've worked for if you take several days off. It just won't happen.

Give your body a break. When you return to training, you'll most likely feel re-vitalized and begin to enjoy training once again.

Strange as it may sound, my best competition year was when I decided to take extra days off whenever I felt drained. It was a complete about face from all the years that I just pushed through the fatigue. Training tired all the time often means you will eventually run out of gas somewhere on the Ironman course. Ultimately you will go into the race tired and thats the last thing you want in a major endurance event like the Ironman.

Remember:

-Listen to your body.

-Take a few days extra rest if you feel tired all the time.

-If a pain persists through a few training days, stop, see a doctor and concentrate on the events that don't aggravate the injured area.

-Don't worry about how everyone else is training. Do what works for you.

Razorstropparts
Withcopper27
Swordmaking
Fendicorodile
Finalfantasyonlineguide
Eq2trainer

Archiving Our Families

?We do not remember days. We remember moments.??Casare Pavese

A couple of weeks ago, a dear reader emailed me for help on documenting her family?s life and history. For several generations, we knew this as ?stuffing pictures in shoe boxes.??If we were super-organized, we used photo albums.??Today, we call this ?scrapbooking.??/p>

The fastest growing hobby in our country?with more than 25 million Americans, or 1 in every four households, participating?it didn?t even exist as an industry eighteen years ago, when I first contemplated how I would document and organize our own family photos?or ?memories??as they are now called. Less than ten years old as an industry, scrapbooking holds more than 52, 000 sites on the Internet; over 4,000 retail stores support this multi-billion dollar industry and even traditional stores such as office supply giants, pharmacies, groceries, and gift shops all carry a sampling of scrapbooking products. The maze is?to me anyway?completely overwhelming. To even partially navigate its many avenues both exhausts and bewilders me.

When you calculate the time and expense required to not only take quality photos (a high quality 35 mm camera, digital camera, and video camera are all practically required paraphernalia), it boggles one?s mind to add in the additional cost of documenting your pix once developed. The average ?scrapper??spends $50 per month on her hobby, or roughly $600 a year in supplies. Scrapbook papers generally cost anywhere from 10 cents a piece to upwards of 50 cents a piece (while browsing online sites I came across some fabulous specialty papers for my ?military enthusiast son,??so I purchased papers with a military theme; they cost 45 cents a pop plus shipping) Add to that the cost of stickers, brads, and trinkets?all totally adorable in their own rite?and your personal scrapbooking arsenal just escalated another couple hundred degrees.

And what about ink pads and rubber stamps? Gotta have those, too. At anywhere from a couple dollars to ten to twelve dollars for a decent stamp?as well as several dollars per each ink pad (gotta have all those wonderful colors, you know!)?you?re by now in this stuff too deep to escape fiscally unscathed.

And we haven?t even gotten to embossing yet.

Oh, geez.

So what?s a rocket mom to do? Practically speaking, at what point do you jump onto the scrapbooking craze while maintaining all of the other parenting strategies deemed so important in raising brilliant kids? I mean: can you really instill a musical heritage into your kids, immerse them into sports and exercise, and shape their character and help them to become more spiritually mature?and scrapbook all at the same time? Are there really enough hours in the day to get in a good workout at the gym, get dinner on the table?and scrapbook? Can you add community service to your calendar as well as add colorful borders to your family photos? And is it really possible to hammer in that decorative brad (which seriously requires a good whack on the kitchen cutting board) and keep the baby down for a nap all at the same time?!?

OK. Enough already. Here?s my advice on getting your arms around the whole scrapbooking/creative memories/documenting-your-family-history thing:

??Find an organizational scheme that you think you can stick with over the next dozen years or so. Trust me: motherhood, while certainly easier in some ways over the years, does not get any less demanding. You just shift areas in which you spend your time. Time, money, and energy are your three most valuable resources today?and they will continue to be until the day you ?go up.??So find a system to which you believe you can reasonably commit. If the whole idea of scrapbooking each and every page of your baby journals wears you out (as it would me), then switch to a system that is less creatively taxing. My personal choice: photo albums from Exposures. (www.exposures.com) They?ve been in business long enough that I trust they?ll be there as long as we all still need their stuff. The last thing you need to worry about while selecting a system is the possibility of changing it mid-stream. I researched their product line until I was nauseous. I wound up using over-sized, attractive three-ring binders (offered in three different colors) that work perfectly for our family. I buy a few at a time so I know I?ll never ?run out.??I also buy their archival scrapbook paper, and use old-fashioned photo corners for every picture. You might want to look for albums that are offered in a variety of colors, in case you?d like to color-code your family. (see http://www.selfhelpcenters.com/family.asp#1 for my recent article ?Color-Coding Your World??

??Decide if you want to be a ?documenter??or a ?scrapper.??There?s a world of difference here. ?Documenters??organize their pictures once retrieved from the store (pharmacy, Costco, etc.) and then put them into albums. Sure?you can add titles, captions, dates, and quick journal entries. You can even use color! But you don?t spend an inordinate amount of time on each page. ?Scrappers,??on the other hand, make each page of photos a veritable work of art. They use artsy background papers; crop each photo; add beautiful borders; make great use of sticker art, brads, and trinkets; and punch designs to coordinate with the page theme. You should decide which path you?re likely to travel down as soon as possible. Like it or not, you need to get your system?a system, any system?down before you take the plunge, as each system requires a hefty financial commitment. (The only inexpensive alternative is to buy cheap albums from a discount store (with those old-fashioned non-archival magnetic pages) and throw in your photos. You wouldn?t do that, I?m sure??

??Start collecting art and craft supplies. Regardless of which system you use, your children?s happy childhoods require that you spend time ?doing art.??Make regular art days part of your family?s weekly schedule. Those rubber stamps and ink pads that you?re picking up on sale now will become a wonderful collection down the road. Let?s face it: you need colored markers, pencils, pens, paints and papers anyway. They all add to your children?s artistic development. So perhaps documenting or scrapping your family?s memories will be part of your regular art day for the next few years. OK?so you?re not going to take up sculpting for awhile?or oil painting, rug hooking, or knitting. That?s alright. Just stay on track, keep picking up supplies, continue to browse art supply stores, and purchase fun stuff as you see fit. If you find yourself drawn to fancy papers and expensive stickers?go ahead and splurge. You?re going to need some of this stuff anyway, so try to make thoughtful and purposeful buying decisions rather than compulsive ones!

??Try to stay on top of things. But don?t beat yourself up if you fall behind. I always tried to use holidays and summers to catch up with my albums, but with major moves in four of the past six summers, those plans went to pieces. So I am terribly behind in organizing and documenting my family?s life. OK. So life goes on. I just commit that when I have time I?ll renew my photo journey. It?s a process. It?ll never be finished?so I don?t let myself get all whacky over it. If possible, though, you should come up with some system: perhaps you are on the ball enough that each and every time you pick up pix from the developer, you immediately put them into albums. You?d get an extra cherry in your sundae at my house. Perhaps after you pick up your pix you throw them all into a large drawer, with the hopes of organizing them one day. (That?s been me these last few years.) OK. So that?s a system, too. Just be sure that ?one day??isn?t too far into the future, promise?!?

??Figure out where this all fits into your family?s direction. You may be committed to too many things?professionally and personally. This may simply have too small a role in your family?s ?purpose.??The commitment of energy alone to the whole scrapping thing might wear you out, leaving you feeling totally unglued and unable to do the other things in which you are truly passionate about! That?s OK!!!!! Maybe this just isn?t your time!!! Stop beating yourself up. You may prefer to use your fingers teaching your child to finger-paint, your lap rocking your newborn, and your energy driving your kids to music lessons. You might rather use your discretionary funds supporting a missionary rather than spending it on pretty background papers for family photos. I can?t tell you what?s right for you. I can only help do the heavy lifting. So I?ve done the research, evaluated some of the options, and am presenting them to you for your ultimate decision. I can help to equip you?and encourage you?to propel you to excellence. But in the end, this is your archiving. Above all, don?t stress about this. Spend time your kids first and foremost?and these decisions will fall easily into place in due time.

Cardtechniques
Buntonsafetyswitch
Crissypoablog
Ottowamold
Withcandles
Outdoorfaucetextender