Archive for the ‘Holidays’ Category

We’ve got one heck of a photographer-friend, Jenni. She’s also the mastermind behind the Oobleck cupcakes I posted yesterday. She was at our Dr Seuss shindig yesterday snapping photos like crazy. She posted all the best ones on her blog, but I thought I’d share my favorites with you here.

Getting into the spirit of the Cat in the Hat

Just how I envisioned it:

• Reading Dr Seuss
• Kids gathered around
• Parents close by
• Snacks not too far off, either.

It was the perfect party, in my opinion. Lots of friends came and brought Dr Seuss books and food. The house was decorated with pictures and books in honor Dr Seuss. We visited, shared and played for hours. Thanks everyone who participated!

What makes a perfect party, in your opinion?

We started our Valentine’s celebrations with these balloons my mom bought the girls at the mall on Saturday.

We placed the valentine’s cards we got from our valentine exchange on the map showing where each card came from. Some are pretty close to us and other very far away. It was fun to talk to the girls about all the different places where we sent cards and then where got cards.

Here’s our table set for dessert. Brent brought us home roses. He brought each of the girls their own flower. They loved to flowers and having their own, but they loved playing swards with the long plastic containers the roses came in more! I made a tres leches cake from a recipe I saw on the Food Network. I made everything pink to go with the Valentin’es theme. Unfortunately, the cake is much better looking that it was tasting The cake didn’t cook evenly since our oven is bizarre and didn’t soak up all the milk mixture. The whipped topping was perfect, though and I scraped it off and ate it plain! The present you see to the right of the cake was a Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! Halloween video that Brent found at a great price (go figure!) and got for the girls.

Brent had to go back to school and study for his very difficult test today (that was actually canceled because of a snowstorm) so the girls and I sat down to watch a few episodes of Wubbzy before bed. My mom and I both dozed off while the girls were enthralled with Wubbzy’s adventures.

That pretty much wraps up our Valentine’s Day celebrations.

How did you celebrate Valentine’s Day?

Happy Valentine’s Day. Hope it’s one filled with love and friendship for you and your little ones! Here’s a favorite song of ours. I shared it last year, as well as this awesome nesting heart project.

Nesting Hearts

Click on an image to read more about that project!

Christmas-Themed Projects

Jesus Spelling Activity

Materials:

• cookie cutter letters: J, E, S, U
• 1 sheet of cardstock, red or green for a Christmas theme
• scratch paper, decorative or plain, enough for the 5 letters
• glue stick and scissors

My part: I used the cookie cutter letters needed to spell Jesus. Then I pressed them in an ink pad and “stamped’ them in order on a piece of cardstock. Then I stamped the letters again on pieces of scratch decorative paper I had. I cut out the letters from the scrap papers.

Sammi’s part: She used a glue stick to put glue on the back of each letter. Then she glued the letters to the cardstock matching each letter to it’s shape. I let her choose the letters in whichever order she wanted; she, of course, started with “S” since it’s her favorite.

Penguin

This penguin is one of the crafts found in my new eBook: Laptime Songs for Mommies. Sammi had fun putting this cute guy together then adding her own touches.

Go ahead, make the purchase that will help you bond with your little one through music, books and snuggling. Purchasing today, at the limited-time, introductory offer of $10, you’ll get a full-color, interactive version of Laptime Songs for Mommies, a black-and-white printable version and the 6 songs in MP3 form that you can burn onto a CD. This purchase will benefit you and your little one for years to come. —Laptime Songs for Mommies

Treasure Pouches

I made these for Sammi’s friends for Christmas gifts. Each one has the initial of the child it belongs to. I filled each pouch with a bag or two of fruit snacks. The idea is they can hold any little “treasures” your little one may be attached to and want to take everywhere.

Materials:

• felt sheets in different colors
• scissors, fabric glue, sewing maching
• ribbon

I folded a sheet of felt in half longways then cut off a third. This makes the pouch. Before sewing the sides up on the pouch, attach your letter and shapes using fabric glue and stitches. Some I stitched by hand and some I used the sewing machine. then sew up the sides, fold over the top edge and sew to make a hem for the ribbon. Cut a slit in the front middle of the hem then thread the ribbon through the hem. Voila, an easy, personalized gift for the little ones in your life.

Visiting Santa

I had to share this picture of the girls’ first encounter with Santa this year. Sammi was excited to see him and visit with him. She asked for toys and didn’t get any more specific than that. Elli was not the least bit interested in Santa. Poor thing. But she has enjoyed wearing a Santa hat and a bell on a necklace. The girls saw Santa at the Tree Lighting Ceremony on campus at Lincoln Memorial University. They had a great program that I thought was the perfect blend of the religious significance of Christmas and the holly, jolly side of the holiday. Afterward we were treated to a stellar performance by the Knoxville Symphony Chamber Orchestra. We had to leave early because the girls were desperate for their beds, but what we experienced of the orchestra was energetic and full of holiday spirit.

I love this time of year! It’s so fun to decorate for Christmas: putting up the tree with lights and ornaments, setting out nativity scenes, strategically placing snowmen and Santas throughout the house. We are having a blast! So far, our tree is lit but without ornaments. It may stay this way… I have several nativity sets that I love, but trying to keep little figurines away from little hands has proved difficult!

One activity that I enjoy but we haven’t done regularly is the make gingerbread houses. I posted back in October some Monster Houses that we made from Make and Takes eBook and mentioned a recipe I found that I liked for turning frosting into the glue that holds the house and its decorations together. Since I was thinking about it again, I thought I’d share my version of the recipe.

Frosting for Gingerbread Houses

In a bowl, beat until stiff peaks form
-3 egg whites
-2 teaspoons of cream of tartar
Add 1 pound powdered sugar a little at a time until all is mixed in smoothly
Add 1 teaspoon vanilla

You may need to add more powdered sugar so that the frosting is stiff. It should be able to hold gingerbread houses together fairly easily. Plus it’s amazing for sticking heavy pieces of candy to the sides of your house.

Happy decorating!

Don’t forget to enter the giveaway for a VTech Ride and Learn Giraffe Bike.

Today is the last day to enter the Bari Koral Family Rock Band Giveaway!

Butterscotch Monkey Bread

Yesterday I talked about the importance of family traditions and asked you to weigh in on what traditions are part of your family. I’ve gathered your responses from Facebook and Twitter as well and have some fantastic ideas if you’re in search of a new family tradition for the holidays.

New Family Traditions

My mom and I have always loved traditions. Every time we sit down and try to think of our family traditions, though, we come up blank. It seems every year we do something new and think “This will be a tradition!” And every year we forget what we did last year! So, we decided our family tradition is to START family traditions!

In the spirit of starting family traditions, I’m showcasing the traditions friends and readers have shared with me. There are some great ones and I hope you find something that will make this holiday season a little more memorable.

Katie said: “After all the good stuff on Christmas Eve (church, dinner, stories, songs, pjs, etc) we take the boys out to sprinkle reindeer food (oats and a little glitter). To them it’s the perfect end to day and anticipation of what’s to come!”

Kim said: “We have bonitsa (Bulgarian) for breakfast, Boklava (bulgarian) Christmas day, Rice pudding (Danish) Christmas eve, Talk about nativity (Peru) Christmas eve, and Celebrate the birth of Christ ALL day on Christmas (Christian) We try and do things as you see from all diffrent cultures we love”

J said: “One of my favorite traditions is watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” on Christmas eve.”

New Christmas Pajamas

My sister-in-law, Sara, and Vanessa of I Never Grew Up both share our tradition of new pjs on Christmas Eve.

Greg said: “Maybe driving around looking at Christmas lights on Christmas Eve.”

Mrs P, who has a wonderful, interactive site where she reads books for children, said: “I like to make paper leaves & have everyone write what they are thankful for, and then read aloud along w/ The Gift of the Magi”

One tradition that I married into and we have adopted into our own family is butterscotch monkey bread for breakfast on Christmas morning. It’s delightfully sweet and gooey.

Christie shared her family’s daily traditions that shape their identity: “As a family, we have so many traditions – my daughter and her Dad share a story in bed every morning before he gets ready for work. We sit down together to eat our evening meal every night. We have a bedtime routine that involves all three of us and remains unchanged since she was six months old. I completely agree that family traditions and rituals shape the identity of the individual and the family unit.”

Hope the holiday season is a wonderful time of celebrating and family bonding for you and your little ones.

We swapped a book through I Never Grew Up last year and it was super fun! I’m really excited to participate again this year. Hopefully Sammi and Elli can help me pick out a book to swap. Originally I thought it was to swap any book during the holidays. But I think the purpose is to swap a holiday-themed book. I’ll be more with it this year

Last year we got the cute book A Firefly in a Fir Tree by Hilary Knight from a lady and her daughter in Massachusetts. Sammi just loved it and I’m excited to pull it back out for the holidays this year.

If you’re interested in participating in the book swap, check out Vanessa’s post about the holiday book swap for details.

I know it’s early, but what are your favorite holiday books?

Happy Halloween!

Here’s one last Halloween craft you can do with all that candy you’ll get Trick-or-Treating!

We have enjoyed Make and Takes Monster Mania eBook. It is full of fun ideas that inspire creativity and problem solving skills. I love the projects because most of them use things I have on hand anyway. It makes it easy to pick and project and do it right away. For the Spooky Monster House, though, I spent some time preparing. I thought the prepping was half the fun and definitely worth it. I used the frosting recipe I found here.

Sammi's Spooky Monster House

Mommy's Spooky Monster House

Daddy's Spooky Monster House

We had fun this week making ghost craft projects. We also worked on a big project inspired by this I saw on a blog I love. But we’ll share that next week, after the Halloween hype is over. Here are our ghosts!

Cotton Ball Ghost

How do you color a ghost white? With cotton balls, of course!

Sammi and Elli both had fun with this project. I downloaded this cute ghost here then printed it in two sizes. For Sammi I gave her the bigger ghost. I let her put the glue on her ghost picture and then put the cotton balls on the picture. Sammi finished hers off with googly eyes. She also dumped some glue on Elli’s ghost and then spread it around.

For Elli I handed her cotton balls one at a time and told her to put them on the ghost. I tapped my finger on different places on the ghost to help her spread them out. She giggled and smiled the whole time. It was a fun activity.

Ghost Trick-or-Treater

We finally made it to the preschool storytime program at the Middlesboro Library (where I do the laptime program) and were treated to this treasure of a craft. This was such a fun project and Sammi was able to do it all on her own, which makes it a success in her eyes

We used thin glue dots to attach the arms and legs to the back side of the ghost. Those glue dots also worked wonderfully to accessorize the legs with shoes, the ghost with eyes and add the word “BOO.” I loved the glue dots so much I ran out and bought some for our projects at home.

Happy Halloween tomorrow! What’s your little one going to be?

After making the Pumpkin Patch craft, we had lots of extra pumpkins so we continued the pumpkin theme in our crafts. In this post we’ll be showing you

• Five Little Pumpkins
• Make Your Own Pumpkins Faces
• Pumpkin Ring Toss Game
• Pick the Pumpkins Quiet Book

Five Little Pumpkins

This is my favorite Halloween finger play. I love the board book illustrated by Dan Yaccarino, who’s got to be one of my favorite children’s book illustrators. I finally bought the book this year since our library here doesn’t have it. We used the pumpkins while we read the book. The first time through we took away a pumpkin for each pumpkin in the book and then the next time we put one pumpkin back as we read about each one. Sammi loved this and we read the book several times with the pumpkins. The pumpkins are fun all on their own with out the book.

Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate
The first one says, “Oh my, it’s getting late.”
The second one says, “There are witches in the air.”
The third one says, “But we don’t care.”
The fourth one says, “Let’s run and run and run.”
The fifth one says, “I’m ready for some fun.”
Oooo went the wind and out went the light.
And five little pumpkins rolled out of sight.

Make Your Own Pumpkin Faces

Sammi's faces are on the left. My example faces are on the right.

With another set of pumpkins we added cut out shapes to make faces. I cut out triangles, squares, ovals and different mouth shapes. Then I arranged them on the pumpkins to show Sammi what a pumpkin face looked like. Then I took the shapes off and helped her build her own pumpkin faces. We’ve been working a lot on emotions: happy, sad, angry and afraid; so we made a face for each emotion (2 for happy, of course!) Then Sammi glued the pieces on all by herself. I really had to let go of the finished product and let her do it how she wanted. She did a good job, I thought.

Pumpkin Ring Toss Game

We did a Fall Festival Trick or Treat at Brent’s school this last weekend. We decided instead of just having candy, we wanted to have games for the little ones to play so that it was more fun for them. Admittedly, there aren’t an awful lot of medical students with children so we wanted the few who came to have a lot to do! And we wanted it to be interesting for the students themselves who came. So we made this ring toss game. I saw this idea on an old school Reading Rainbow episode. (I sure miss that show.)

We covered a box with orange construction paper. Then I printed off the face from here and colored it in with yellow and black. On the other side, my crafting buddy, Holly, painted vines and leaves. She also painted the craft sticks green, with a shade of green we mixed ourselves for the occasion. When the sticks were dry we taped them with purple duct tape inside the box. Then we cut out rings from sour cream lids. The kids, and even adults, had fun tossing the rings onto the sticks. They were then able to reach into the box and grab their candy.

Pick the Pumpkins Quiet Book

This last activity I’m really happy with. It turned out better than I imagined it would. It sort of developed as I started to put it together. The pumpkins are sitting in the pumpkin patch. You pull the pumpkin out of its pocket and place it on a hay bale on the opposite side to decorate them for fall.

• I used an old cereal box for the pages. I duct taped the two pieces together to form the book. I covered up the duct tape in the inside with brown construction paper.
• I used the smallest size pumpkins that we had.
• I first created the pumpkin patch on a piece of brown construction paper. I used a brown marker to draw the patch and the lines where the pumpkins would slide into their pockets.
• To create the pockets I painted glue on the back side leaving boxes with no glue under the lines that allow half the pumpkin to slide into the pocket.
• Then I put a piece of tape over the line and used an exacto-knife to cut just the construction paper along the line. This created the opening of the pocket.
• On the opposite page I wrote out the instructions then glued six rectangles of brown felt for the hay bales.
• I finished decorating the pages with stickers of leaves and other fall things.
• Then I glued smaller squares of felt onto the backs of the pumpkins so they would stick to the hay.

I was thrilled that Sammi enjoyed it. She loved pulling out the pumpkins and putting them on the hay. She even got that each hay bale got one pumpkin. She could even put the pumpkins back into their pumpkin patch pockets all by herself. Yippee! I was hesitant to let Elli touch it since I didn’t get any of it laminated and I was worried she’d do a number on those little pumpkins. But I decided to be brave and let her give it a go. She loved it too. And she was fairly gentle with the  pumpkins. A double success! And it made for a nice activity at church yesterday.

We had lots of fun with pumpkins this week. Now it’s on to bats and ghosts. I have some fun ideas we’ll show you all about once we’ve tried them out. Happy Halloween (uh, in about two weeks!)