I just want to say, before you start in on me, I know. You’re going to scroll down and see the crazy, janky thing I made, and I have no explanation for it other than it’s a weirdly shaped thing and it was hard to podge properly. I am not proud. But then again I am in some way.
So here goes. We have these empty canisters that used to house the peach-mango flavored puffs. The melting kind that babies eat to practice chewing and swallowing and lifting small things to their mouth, so as to improve their dexterity enough to feed themselves dog kibble as they amble around on all fours, unsupervised. The Hubs started reusing these canisters for Cheerios. He took the label off and we had blank, boring white canisters. Which to me, looked like a canvas. Which gave me an idea. Why not turn the canisters into something awesome, while still containing plain old Cheerios?
My idea was creating a label and a logo for Astronaut Snacks! That there is an exclamation point, on purpose. You can’t say it without shouting. Try it. “Astronaut Snacks!” It’s too awesome for your inside voice.
The above is a picture of my raw materials. The aforementioned lackadaisical puffs canister, some Rockets & Sprockets scrapbook paper from Michael’s, Mod Podge, a.k.a. the glue that now holds together the cracks of my heart, and a completely insane fake canister label of my own design, comprised of images and text from the NASA website and ad copy from the rustier regions of my brain pan.
I just want to apologize to Captain Mark Kelly, the astronaut whom I’m currently fixated on because I’m fascinated with the story of his marriage to Arizona Senator Gabrielle Giffords. I apologize because I made this crazy thing for my crazy kid, and the canister label in its current form does not do justice to the hunky astronaut. You’ll see in a minute.
Anyway, because the puffs canister is such a weird shape, I cut out all the pieces of the label separately, thinking that would prevent much of the puckering and wrinkling. It’s not unlike old school newspaper design. The kind they used to do until 1997. Yes, kids, we used to cut our copy with a knife and glue it onto sheets of paper. This is why old timey newspaper guys were mostly drunks.
Once I finished cutting, I arranged the scrapbook paper in a ridiculous patchwork fashion, the podged it on. After that dried, I podged over the scrapbook paper with the label pieces, then placed some random foam space stickers here and there to cover up the half-assery, until everything looked like an unholy papier-mache mess, like so:
I know. It’s terrible. It’s an abomination of the craft of crafting. Mark Kelly’s face got so smooshed it looks like he was attacked by vicious space monkeys aboard the International Space Station. A better crafter than I would chuck this away and start from scratch.
But you know what? I still like it. In fact it is so ugly, I think I kind of love it. And I also kind of think someone else will love it, too.
That special someone would be this ungrateful child: 
At least, he’d better like it. Lately he hasn’t liked much of anything I’ve been making for him or reading to him. It is possible that the terrible twos are coming a year early for Little Dude.
Still. I’m sure as time passes, he will look back on his childhood and realize that the dotty old battleaxe who calls him every Sunday was the same woman who decorated his Lego boxes, who hand knit a terrible sweater for him as an infant, who made homemade robot garlands for his bedroom and who lied to him about Cheerios and convinced him they were Astronaut Snacks! And he’s going to think long and hard before he decides which nursing home to put me in. And finally he’ll realize that the trauma he initially experienced as a child from beholding the Astronaut Snacks! box was far outweighed by the thought and the love and the paper cuts that went into making the ill-conceived thing. And he’ll pick the nursing home with a pool and a swim-up margarita bar.
Because if my generation has anything to say about it, the nursing homes of the future are going to have swim-up margarita bars.
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