“Hand”made Flowers

Want to know how to make these adorable flowers? :)

Click over to HowDoesShe to see my post about how to make them, and then what you can do with them! :)

Mug Flower Pot Gift

For Mother's Day, Ken had the idea to have our girls make personalized mugs for our moms, and fill them with paper flowers with notes on them. They turned out really cute, though I would do some things differently next time!



Tips

- we bought a kit from Michael's that was do-it-yourself, but the photo part peeled off and the markers rubbed off- not cool! Next time, I would get the mug printed somehow so that it would last!
- Ken used regular artificial flower squishy stuff that you stuff stems into (yes, that's the correct terminology) and that worked fine
- green straws are great if you can find them
- you can do paper hand flowers, trace & cut out hands for flowers, hearts as well
- we wrote notes on them from Talia, she drew pictures, and kissed them with lipstick
- spraying the flowers with perfume is a big hit with Talia :)

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Indoor Ice Skating!

Thank you Frugal Family Fun for Indoor Ice Skating!! We had so much fun together this morning! I even loved it! (Ok, so I'm getting a lot of joy out of our activities these days).

All you need is wax paper, tape, feet, and carpet!

Wrapping CDs

As mentioned in one of the wrapping paper posts, we are wrapping Christmas CDs this year, to open one each day as Christmas gets closer.

It's a great advent-ish thing to do, and lets your kids open something before Christmas.

I hope to be able to do this with Christmas books one year when we have enough of them! (We wrapped a few this time).

Homemade Advent Calendar

Today we made ourselves an advent calendar!!

I got the idea from Filth Wizardry, and posted about it in my Christmas Ideas post a few days ago.

Preparation:

-On Saturday, Talia & I went to a local restaurant supply store and picked up some plastic shot glasses.
-Over the last couple of days, we've been making paper snowflakes.

Process:

1. I cut a piece of tinfoil for Talia to wrap around a piece of cardboard.
2. Together, we taped it onto the back
3. I cut a piece of blue construction paper, Talia covered one side with glue, I stuck it to our shiny board.
4. We decorated with some of our previously made paper snowflakes (we took turns gluing- she was getting tired of it, but wanted to direct my placement ;).
5. I glue gunned the cups to the paper
6. We took some computer time and we decided who she wanted to make Christmas cards for this year. I told her how to spell their names, she typed them out. We printed the page, I cut the names out. She folded the names & put them in the cups.


7. We got a chocolate advent calendar and had fun opening all of the doors in one shot, to get the chocolates out and put them in our own calendar :)

8. While she napped, I stamped the tissue paper with numbers and glued it onto the tops of the cups, so that she could break the tissue paper with her finger and get out the candy and the name each day of December.

(The plan is to make one Christmas card each day, so that she doesn't get sick of making a bunch in a row.)

Alternatives:

I also thought of putting a paper in each cup listing the activity for the day, but I can guess that we'll end up switching things around, so for us, that wasn't the best choice :)

I have seen this idea used as a way to put left over Hallowe'en candy to use as well. You can use it for the month of November if you're doing that, or make a giant one that goes from Hallowe'en to Christmas!