Today is Monday, Monday string beans, all you hungry children come and eat it up! Julius and I have started practicing days of the week and I have that song in my head (from the Eric Carle book Today is Monday. I’ve spent the last 30 years thinking that the first page of the Eric Carle book was “Monday spaghetti”. I even shout MONDAY SPAGHETTI at Will whenever we have spaghetti. My world is shattered. On top of this travesty, it has become clear while rereading the book with Julius that the best thing in the entire book is Wednesday’s “ZOOOOP” page which depicts an elephant eating some strange rainbow soup. It’s okay though because zoooop is now my new favorite word. Julius and I even had zoooop for lunch (or breakfast as he calls it; maybe I should work on mealtime names next) in honor of Wednesday zoooop. Hmm. Perhaps eating zoooop on Monday was a bad decision. What if every time Julius eats soup he shouts at his partner “MONDAY ZOOOOP”.
On Friday (fresh fish) we had another Virtual Ladies’ Night! What a fun night. This one I’ve been thinking of for a while, but only got everything together over the past month. As you probably know I like to host a Galentine’s day event for some of my local lady friends in February. Obviously I couldn’t do that this year, so I went a different route. I wanted this to be a fun little surprise for everyone, so I mailed out spa day care packages to my friends without telling them. I got lots of happy texts when people opened their packages, so I would say mission accomplished.
Picture from my friend Danielle when her package arrived
Virtual Spa Day
Goodies
The packages were filled with nail polish, nail stickers, a nail file, a headband, face mask, a custom tea bag, a tiny lavender beeswax candle, and lavender foot soak. Making several of the things inside the package helped to keep costs down. I purchased the nail polish and nail files at Kiko Milano. The colors were really cute, and everything was very inexpensive. The nail stickers I made myself with my Cricut. The headband you saw in last week’s post. The face mask is the Que Bella brand that is sold at Target. I’ve used their peel off masks a bunch and I always enjoy them. They’re also a great price. The tea bag I made (post coming in the future) and filled with Indigo Punch from my absolute favorite purveyor, Harney and Sons. The lavender beeswax candle Julius and I made together, so that is coming in a future post. Finally the foot soak is just packaged lavender epsom salt that I put in their own bags.
Items prepped for my assembly line
Foot soak waiting to go into bags
Polishes packaged
Packaging
I wanted to make the entire package look cohesive, so I used my Cricut to make matching stickers and tags for everything. For the Epsom Salt that I repackaged into it’s own bag using my vacuum sealer, and the tea bags, I added instructions and ingredients to the back. I finished it all off by slipping in a little note with a QR code for the hangouts link, and a “spa menu” on the reverse. The whole Kaboodle was wrapped inside a piece of tissue paper with a matching “Treat yo self” sticker on the front; a favorite mantra from one of my favorite shows.
Bundle of fun
The contents of the spa package
Tea bag front and back
Close up of polish kit
Foot soak front and back
Shipping
All 22 of the packages (including shipping) cost me about the same (or less than) a Ladies’ night party with dinner. Crazily the shipping cost quite a bit more than the goods inside! Part of this was because I had to send the packages via ground transport only (USPS Parcel Select) since nail polish has a high flash point and is a flammable material! For this reason there are a couple rules you have to follow. When I wrote this post the criteria was that I had to package the nail polish inside another container with padding and material to absorb the nail polish if there was any breakage. I took care of this with bubble wrap, and more heat sealing bags. None of the nail polishes were reported damaged so I guess it worked! Each package also needed to have a “limited quantity” label to indicate it was hazmat. I was able to print these off onto sticker paper I had at home, I just had to be careful that the tags met all the requirements including color and size.
Each kit I put inside a recycled padded mailer. I have been saving padded mailers because I hate throwing them out. For this ladies’ night I went through nearly my entire stash! Will had told me I was never going to use all of them, so I felt vindicated! On top of all that I got another chance to use Pirate Ship, which is a cool program my friend Ka told me about. They find you the best shipping price for USPS and also make sending bulk packages very easy. As a bonus the program made tracking all 22 packages super easy – since I am crazy and frenetically tracked all the packages. I shipped the packages out 19 days before the party, and all of the packages arrived before the date! (Though one I had to submit an inquiry for!)
The Party
The actual Ladies’ Night was lots of fun. I think in total we had 15 people show up on Google Hangouts, which is an insane amount for an interactive call. I told everyone before the party that I just wanted to laugh and asked them to come with their best stories. This meant we took turns listening and telling crazy stories, which worked pretty well for the number of people. While we listened folks drank tea, put on face masks and did their nails. The headbands were worn in multiple styles. Many of us had robes on. Some dedicated souls took footbaths. Overall it was great fun, and so good to see everyone’s smiling face. <3
My spa setup
Tea
Candid shot of the “party”.
