THANKSGIVING ACORN KID CRAFT!

Posted by Lori~

Do you ever hit the end-caps of Target?  If not, you should!  That's where Target always features items that are marked town.  Unfortunately, in my little city ND town--we do not have a Target.  BOO!  So, when I am in big city ND, I always pull out the Red Card and go shopping.  Also, I always make a point to hit the end-caps.

Recently, I came across a thanksgiving kid-craft. Perfect for the thanksgiving table.   

Marked down to ONLY $2.50!

We are not hosting this year, but will bring them with us! 
 

Mur-man did great putting them together.

Cute-huh?

LOVE the up-side down eyes!  I let Mur-man decide where to place the eyes!

Are you gearing up for the holiday?  Ethne is hosting, and we are hitting the road. 

Happy {belated} Birthday America!

Posted by Ethne~

Hello Friends!

I’m sure you missed us terribly yesterday.  That was totally my fault.  I was supposed to post but I slacked completely.  In part because we had family over and I was busy hosting for the 4^th and in part because I had hemorrhoid surgery on Monday and my butt hurts.  This is all true.  Everyone thinks the latter is HILARIOUS except me, though I take it in my usual good humor and just swear a whole bunch.

We did have a nice 4^th of July.  The girls sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to America, which I found precious.  We hung out outside almost all day (I on my butt donut), took lots of pictures, had a three-way fight over the control of music selection on the Sonos and watched our big city suburb’s pretty-darn-good fireworks display.

I hope you all had a nice Independence Day too.  I, for one, always remind myself of what a spectacular thing it is that our country won its independence.  For all the things each one of us disagrees with and gripes about, think of the things we enjoy and even take for granted.  Personally, I talk about just about whatever I want to on this blog, wear what I want and, as a girl, got to go to college.  (Of course, these are just 4 of a kazillion.) 

The Good Lord willing, my girls and their children after them will also be equally thankful and able to gripe.

If you get a chance, thank our servicemen and women and any law enforcement and firefighters you know for keeping us free and safe.  They rock.  And don’t drink and drive, k?

Here are a few pictures of our day:

Loving the parade!

A perfect day for water guns and the swimming pool

The neighbors love the shrieks I'm sure

Isn't that sweet?

 

 

Sport mode on the Rebel captured some cool hopscotch photos.

Easy Mac catching some air.

I even look infirm in this photo.  I assure you I am sitting on my donut.

Catching bubbles

The girls don't know that you can get REAL fireworks in other states (some neighbors do, which is cool).  For now, they think fountains are pretty cool.  And our suburb did a great job with the show, which we watched from our neighbor's yard.  LAZY. SLICK.

MAY YOUR DAY BE FILLED WITH PLAY!

Posted by Lori~

It's May day!  Do you guys celebrate?  I woke up (thank you!) at 7:00 a.m. this morning to a ring at my door and May Baskets for Steve, Mur-Man, and me!  (To the person that did this...I have my guesses, but THANK YOU!).  

As a child, I have a vivid May Day memory of leaving May Baskets outside the neighborhood children's doors.  We would then ring the doorbell and RUN!  Of course my brother would hold me down, let the neighborhood boys catch me, and KISS ME!  GREAT memories and FUN!

And so, last night Mur-Man and I decided to whip up May Baskets for May Day.  We hit the local Dollar Store and spent $15.00 total!  We ended up making 12 May Baskets!
 

$1.00 FOR THREE!  Perfect for May Baskets!

My $15.00 receipt!

The STASH!

I came up with the cheesy poem!  Mur-Man and I are on a rhyming kick lately!

KID ACTIVITY: Christmas Card Re-purpose

Posted by Ethne~

I still send out Christmas cards.  Well, we send out a Christmas card picture (from Costco, tho there are super cute ones online) and a letter.  I know I could send out a mass email with the letter contents and pictures, but somehow it’s just not the same as snail mail.

Sending out actual Christmas cards (I sent out 100!) means I get quite a few in return.  I love it.  Each day when I get home from work I can’t wait to sort through the mail and see what Christmas cards we received.  Each card is like a little present in the mail. 

I hang them above my sliding glass doors

It’s not as THRIFTY as the email version, but it sure brings me (and hopefully my recipients) a lot of holiday CHEER!  I suppose I should share the breakdown:  at Costco, the picture cards (I was able to use 4 pics) are $15.99 for the first 50 and $5.99 for each additional 25.  Not too bad.  Thrifty Nana picked up the cards for me and had a discount coupon, so I ended up paying $23.99 for them.  Shaun printed up the letter from the home computer so that was free to us.  100 stamps cost $44.00, but the Jesus and Mary stamps are FOREVER stamps now (you can use them forever without the $.01 stamps when postage rates go up later this month) so if I had any leftover, I could use the rest for bills…  So yeah, it’s not super cheap, but for the JOY I get out of it, Shaun agrees it’s worth it.  I hang them up on a string with mini clothespins over my sliding glass doors in the living room and can look at them frequently.

Someday there will be no vertical blinds - hate those things.

NOTE: a lot of multi-picture cards out come out with your pictures being teeny-tiny.  Re-think using these, please.  If I can’t make out the faces in your pictures, is there really a point in you sending out pictures at all?  I used the multi-photo picture from Costco because the pictures were each a nice size.

So the point of this is that I end up with a lot of beautiful cards at the end of the holidays.  I find it a shame to just toss them – either they have my dear friends' and family’s pictures on them or they are beautiful cards (which are artwork in an of themselves).  But it isn’t reasonable to keep them forever either.

I am always on the lookout for projects for the girls.  Like I say, if you could harness their amazing energy, we wouldn’t need off-shore drilling.  I have to be creative with it too, because buying art supplies constantly isn’t cheap, and they’d get bored doing the same project over and over again.  If I can use materials from around the house, all the better, and if I can use up craft or paper scraps that are otherwise cluttering my house up, bonus.

This brainstorm was a re-purpose of those Christmas cards we received.  The girls received art supplies, including scissors, for Christmas.  I’m really cautious with them using scissors a) since they don’t have a 100% grasp on being careful with sharp things, no matter how many times I say it and b) since KD cut her hair off into a mullet on Christmas Eve 2010.  But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t learn how to use scissors with safe, parental supervision.

The project: give the girls their scissors, construction paper, glue, crayons and the Christmas cards and let them Edward Scissorhands some artwork.  I didn’t set up any rules (like ‘don’t be messy’ since that would negate the point of cutting up paper) except that they had to be careful, couldn’t fight over materials and they had to clean up after themselves when we were done.

 

They made lovely new cards that will go up on the fridge and then I’ll let them pick their best and we’ll put them into their tubs of artwork.

NOTE: as to the tubs of artwork, I found that I had so much of their art that it was piling up all over the island and the dining room table.  Only so much can be shown off on the fridge at a time.  I want to get one of those wire hangers from IKEA that we can string up on the wall and clip their art to, but I haven’t made it down to IKEA yet.  And I don’t have the heart to throw all of their art away either.  Solution: a small clear storage tub that will fit their artwork once we take it down from the fridge.  I’m sure I’ll have to sort through those tubs to pare it down at some point, but not yet.

What creative projects have you invented for your kids?  We WOMS need to share these ideas to keep our kiddos busy.

Christmas Wrap-up #1

Posted by Ethne~

 

I couldn’t end the Christmas season yet without summing up a few fun things from Christmas. 

 

There were many wonderful things, and I wish that you enjoyed the people and traditions that are special to you as much as we did.  One of my favorite parts is watching people open their gifts from us (though I won’t lie, I’m excited to open my gifts too – at the top: the black diamond earrings and necklace pendant I received from Shaun and the girls.  I chuckle as I write this because that’s kinda like receiving coal, which, technically my black diamonds are, right?  Just 3 billion-year-old coal).

 

A new tradition for me was discussed in my post last week about the Bowdabra.  I think making the presents so gorgeous is awesome.  And remember how I mentioned that my sister-in-law Mel was hedging her bets that she’d beat me again this year with bow awesomeness?

 

 

True dat.

 

She was right.  I did a pretty good job wrapping for several of our family members, but I finished Rich and Mel’s gifts toward the end of the season (these were our DIY gifts that I’ll tell you about in Part 2 of my Christmas wrap-up).

 

So Christmas Eve I had everything finished and needed to do that last push of wrapping.  I had the girls’ stuff to wrap, too, and of course I put that off.  What I envisioned in my mind was the wrapping taking 30 minutes.  As usual when it comes to creative projects, I missed the mark entirely in my time estimate.  (Rich has labeled this phenomenon ‘Hedren Standard Time’ but that’s a convo for a different day.)  It took more like an hour+ and the girls were fussing and pounding on the door because they wanted to help with whatever they suspected I might be doing. 

 

Long story short, the ribbon beauty in my mind turned into tying on some curling ribbon and calling it good.  I knew Mel would have me beaten for sure.  And I was too right.  These are what my gifts looked like:

 

 

Mel’s wrapping was BEAUTIFUL!  Each gift was a masterpiece.  Here are a few photos of her gifts – don’t they make the Christmas tree look GORGEOUS??

 

 

 

And the funniest part is that Mel is such a nerd that she told me that she already thought of how she’d be wrapping our gifts next Christmas.  Whatever! 

 

I made sure to save all of the ribbons so I can re-gift them next year.  Mel makes fun of me for this (as in super-dramatically rolling her eyes), but I told her that I’d always do something new for her, so she can’t complain.

 

Tomorrow, the DIY challenge results.  I think everyone won this contest because all of our gifts were totally cool.  You can be totally THRIFTY and have great gifts, my friends.

DIY (kinda) ADVENT CALENDAR!

Posted by Ethne~

When I was pregnant with the girls and on bed rest that last month, I made a SugarPlum Fairy Christmas stocking for KD.  Whit made an identical one for Easy Mac.

My Rudolph made by my Grandma H;
Shaun's Frosty made by me; Theodore's, made in China

Its details are intricate and it is amazing.  It also will be the last stocking I ever embroider.  It took an inordinate amount of work.  Anymore family members will have to have character stockings more akin to my Rudolph (made by my Grandma H) and Shaun’s Frosty (made by me, and modeled after the Frosty stocking his mom made for him when he was a kid).

KD's - I am in awe of every stitch

Stockings aside, I’d been wanting an Advent calendar for a long time when I ran across this embroidery kit for one.  Super cute, right?

Le Felt Marathon

Yeah.  It sat for two years untouched in my basement.

This year I pulled it out, determined that I would have it for this year’s Christmas countdown.  But instead of all the stitching I used puffy paint and a whole lot of craft glue.

First, I stitched the green strips of felt onto the mail felt backing fabric – by machine, not hand.  I glued the red numbered squares and puffy-painted the days on.

Ah, the magic of puffy paint; I don't
think it gets 'puffy' anymore, but I'll always
call it that a la '80's.

Next, I glued the felt lightbulbs onto the bottom and glued sequins on.  Instead of the candy cane, I used black puffy paint and wrote Merry Christmas!!  The rest was covered with glued-on white sequins.

Use Fabri-Tac glue.  Nothing else will hold as well.  TRUST ME.

For the top I decided I wasn’t super fond of the snowmen.  Fortunately I found these cute felt reindeer and Santa characters at Target for $2.  Best part – they were a glue-together activity the girls could help me with.

I used the silver ribbon to make reins for Santa to hold;
I sewed those buttons on (discussed below)

Santa and his reindeer were glued onto the ‘roof’ and I used silver thread to make reins.  White sequins filled in all the gaps on top too.

I didn’t want to make all the white felt ornaments for each daily pocket, so I found 12-packs of mini ornaments to use instead – 50% off at Joann, so $6 total.  One set are Christmas figures and one set are the Nativity.  I was missing a 25^th ornament but found a mini Rudolph in my decorations that will be perfect.

Easy Mac and the felt ornaments

KD and the mini ornaments

One slightly tedious step was sewing a button above each pocket to hang the little ornament on, rather than sewing the ornaments into the pockets themselves (which in my estimation would’ve been more tedious).

Last, I needed a way to hang it.  I used my stash of craft keyrings and sewed three to the top back of the calendar – each 6” apart from the other.  This made it easy to line up the rings onto 3M removable hooks.

Done!

I won’t say it wasn’t a bit time consuming, but it was light years faster than the fully-embroidered version would’ve been.  I’m thrilled with how it turned out.

CHRISTMAS SANDWICH!

Posted by Ethne~

It has become tradition in our family to make Christmas sandwiches with holiday leftovers.  My Brit brother-in-law Rich clued us into this when he first came to the States.

Uncle Rich and the Monsters

At first, I was skeptical.  Can you blame me?  Look at the ingredients:

Sandwich bread

Turkey

Dressing

Cranberries

Gravy

[You can add whatever leftovers you want.  I put cheesy potatoes on mine.]

Turkey – that’s standard sandwich fare.  But dressing?  And cranberries for Heaven’s sake?

Yes.

All of it.

This whole meal turned into a sandwich

Trust me, cranberries are ESSENTIAL

Pile it on

Basically, it’s the full Thanksgiving/Christmas meal in one bite.  GENIUS!  KD and Easy Mac’s response was, “This is delicious!”  So get ready, Friends.  You’ll love it.

Ballet fingers

Jazz hands