Santa beard Christmas countdown

The girls are so excited for Christmas.  I had to make a way for them to countdown so they wouldn't have to ask me every 15 minutes how much longer til Christmas.  Best idea ever.  Now they only ask me 5 times a day.  And that's a number I can live with.

 

Cheyenne's is on the left and Harlee's is on the right.

I wish I could take credit for that awesome Santa but I can't, get yours here.

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Our thankful tree is growing

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trash to fabulous - plastic easter eggs

It's after Easter and we have six thousand plastic eggs laying all over the place.   Why, oh why, did we have to get this 144 piece set of eggs?  Oh ya, because it was a good deal.  We also got lots and lots of legos and put them in the eggs and hid them ALL.

Adam loves legos and it has provided hours of entertainment and allows me oodles of uninterrupted hours in the craft room.  Oh, and the girls like them too.  Seriously though, next year the Easter bunny is only going to hide the eggs that we dye ourselves.  No more of these plastic junk eggs that take over your house for at least a solid week.

Harlee and Adam made this snake by drilling holes though all of the eggs and threading a piece of yarn in the holes.  Harlee wanted to leave the yarn for a really long tongue so she can pull it around.

I also made Harlee a matching game.  She played it once and successfully matched up all the letters without any problem.  Good idea but a year too late.

Dying flowers

I love doing sciencey projects with the girls.  Way more fun than doing workbooks.  Harlee likes her science projects, but that girls LOVES workbooks.  It's crazy. She will do 20 pages a day.  She would rather do workbook than color half the time.

She also loves cleaning the toilets and washing windows...she is the girl of my dreams.

But I digress.

We decided to dye carnations.  They were half off after Valentine's Day so it seemed like a good time to do this.  Next time I will put more dye in the water so they will soak up faster, but these are beautiful!

Love bug puppets

You know when you see a picture of a kids craft and it looks immaculate?  Well, guess what?  No kid made that. Someone dreamed up some cute kid craft then chased down a professional artist and had them do it.  Then they took a picture of it and passed it off as their own.

I here do solemnly swear to never ever pass off a professional artist's work as mine or my child's.  I don't have time for that. I'm sure not going to pay someone to cut construction paper and glue on googly eyes either.

So we saw this in highlights magazine.  We seen a picture done by a professional artist, of course.  Here is what they look like in real life.

We cut out hearts and then glued them onto paint sticks and then colored and decorated them.  Harlee wanted me to do one with her.  Mine is the one on the left.  I still draw like I did in 5th grade.  Harlee wanted to make hers into an alien love bug puppet.

And here is my love bug with the love bug puppets.  She put on a cute puppet show for me too!

 

Bead ornament

Harlee made these whale ornaments as a Christmas present this year.  I seen the idea on pinterest but the instructions where in dutch and there was quite a bit that was lost in the translation so I made it up mostly by looking at the pictures.  First we picked out a couple of cookie cutters, set them on parchment paper and Harlee very meticulously added the beads.  Then I poured oil in the cookie cutters.  Then I baked it in the oven at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.  You could bake it for a less time to keep it looking more like beads or bake it longer to make it more smooth. As soon as they where cool enough to touch we popped em out.  I drilled a small hole in the big one for the tree hanger but the little one had a small hole in it from the beads not spreading out 100%.  This was a fun thing for Harlee to make and with millions of cookie cutters and bead colors out there I'm seeing a lot more melted bead ornaments in our future.