Days 119/120

The days are getting longer and nicer, I can see that blogging is quickly taking a backseat to everything else we are doing... like repairing/replacing our lawn mower.  (know anyone with a good lawn mower for under $100, let us know!!)

Day 119:

Yesterday, I finished up the fish crafts with the girls.  Each time I give them free reign to design as they see fit, it makes me wonder more and more when they will "get" where pieces belong... like a mouth, fin, and tail fin should not all be in the center of a fish... but hey, they enjoy it, so really, in the end, that is all that counts.

The Fish:

Day 120:

Remember a few weeks ago, when we decided to plant some seeds and see if they grew?  Well, have they ever grown!  Today, I finally decided that the time had come to transplant two of our squash seedlings into their permanent homes... very large planters next to the deck..

Mike helped the girls pour the dirt, and he allowed them to break the clumps of dirt up, and then helped them plant the squash seedlings.  After they were planted, the girls and I watered them and with a hope and a prayer, they will be just as happy in their new, larger, homes and grow just as well, if not better, than they did before!  Hopefully in about 2.5 months, we will have some summer squash... now lets hope it doesn't decide to freeze one night, because those pots are not coming in the house!

(sorry for the low picture quality.. cell phone camera + night= bad pictures)

Day 119: Coffee Filter Fish part 1

Well, we are revisiting the coffee filters.  I found a ton of crafts I wanted to try with them yesterday, so here we are, making coffee filter fish!

I gave the girls coffee filters and markers and told them to have fun.  The colored quite a bit, lots of scribbles, lots of colored hands :-p  I made spirals and stripes, just to see what happened when I spritzed it with water. .. Water, that is where part 1 of 2 comes in.

It was such a beautiful evening today, that we took the girls to the park to fly their planes, and for Mike to fly his RC plane.  But, that brought us home late, so Mike bathed Coraline while I did craft with Iris and Penny. At the very end, I filled the water bottle up and spritzed mine with water, I failed to account for the fact that my water bottle is an industrial sized thing that sprays about an oz of water per squeeze (ok, maybe i'm exaggerating a bit, but it definitely doesn't "mist" it downpours on things :-p) Well, when it was already 8 p.m. and I doused my filter in water, and the girls both wanted theirs sprayed too, I knew then that I would not be able to put the fish together with them tonight.  It was just going to have to wait, because our coffee filters could have been rung out!

Once bath was over, I finished making one of my fish just to have a pattern for the girls to see tomorrow, so here is what you will see tomorrow, hopefully x 2 or 3 hehe.

Days 117/118

Well, I slacked again, but only because I was out of town for Penny's birthday and didn't bring my laptop with me.  However, thanks to a savvy aunt, we didn't miss craft yesterday!

Day 117:
My aunt works for a pediatrician's office and is in charge of ordering the stickers.  The girls really luck out in this department, because she has a wealth of stickers for them every time we visit!  However, yesterday, she came up with the idea of giving the kids these "build it yourself" stickers.  They are a really cool idea that I had never seen until a few months ago, at her office, and they come in tons of different themes with one main focal point, and then a bunch of little extra pieces to add to the pictures.  Some that she had at her house were birthday cupcakes, shopping carts, princess carriages, cranes, people, teddy bears, fish tanks, and I am sure quite a few more even.  She even had a great idea to put them on wax paper so the kids could move them around as they saw fit... I will need to remember that trick for the next stickering session we have at our house!

Day 118:
Well, I came *this* close to forgetting completely about craft today!  You would think after 118 days, it would be totally ingrained in my head, but it is not apparently :/  So, we stopped at a BP station to fill up on the way back home and I ran in with the express purpose of trying to find something in a convenient store to do craft with.  I had crayons in the car, so i was hopping beyond hope that they would have paper plates... they didn't.  They had styrofoam and plastic, no paper :(  But, they had white, circular coffee filters.  I figured that these would make very cute flowers if colored nicely, so I grabbed them and headed back to the van.
I handed both girls back coffee filters, gathered up as many crayons as i could find that had been strewn through he van, and cut them loose.  After almost 2 hours, this is what we ended up with... 1 usable, very pretty, flower! lol

P.S.- here are the finished Doc McStuffin's Big Books of Boo-Boos

Day 91: Coffee Filter Drawings

So, this craft was supposed to be a Coffee Filter Flower project.  Basically, take a coffee filter, color it with a marker, cut out a flower shape and spritz it with water so all the colors blend nicely.  But as they say, "The Best Laid Plans" We did color coffee filters.  But Iris was sooo meticulous with her drawings that I felt bad cutting it.  So, we just colored them, and then spritzed them with water to let them blend and bleed a little.  Here are some of the drawings we did: