Day 87: Egg Dying gone wrong...

We tried a new dye technique with eggs last night.  I am sorry I didn't post last night, but as I got ready to start, Penny woke up crying for a nightmare, and I went upstairs to quiet her down.  I took her out of her room, laid down with her in bed, and I fell asleep about 30 seconds later! haha.  Oh well, I know I needed the sleep!

I saw the "shaving cream egg dying" trick on Facebook, so I thought I would give it a try... honestly, it didn't work well at all.  But, I will get to that in a moment.

First, you need el cheapo shaving cream, you know that $1 beard buster stuff?  Yeah, that.  You need some neon food coloring, a tooth pick, cookie sheets, and some eggs.

Well, first, you spread shaving cream all over the cookie sheet, then drop drops of foo

d coloring around the tray.  Use the toothpick to "swirl" the food coloring into the shaving cream.  Once it has a marbley, swirly look, roll the eggs into the food coloring and let them sit overnight. When you wipe them off, they are supposed to be marbled.

Well, problem 1, I didn't use gloves, I was dyed from wrist to finger tip, and still am.  Now, I used brown eggs, I didn't expect them to get as dark as I would normally expect white eggs to turn, but, this morning, as i was wiping the eggs down, they started sweating as they got warm and sweat the marbling straight off.  that is to say the ones that got "marbled" in the first place.  Most of them just looked like brown eggs.  Overall, I would say craft flop.  Won't be trying this technique again!

The girls however, had a BLAST playing in a second tray of shaving cream.  I must be a mean mommy because I had never let them play with shaving cream before, they had it EVERYWHERE, but boy did they have fun :)  Penny tried helping with the eggs, but she lost interest quickly.  I think some of these may just be a hair out of their age range and I don't realize it when I plan things.

But, I look like a dye factory exploded on my hands :/

Days 85 and 86

Talk about the walking dead.  I can hardly keep my head up to write this blog.  But, I have been slacking lately, though I would like to think that everyone could understand why.  Penny is 110% from where she was when she went into surgery yesterday.  She woke up from getting her adenoids out and she was VERY upset for a few minutes (maybe 45) and she slept in my arms.  But even as she was upset, confused, and tired from the anesthesia  i could hear how different her breathing was from when she went in.  After she slept the last of the anesthesia off, we went home and by the time we were in the van, I could hear how different she sounded too!  She isn't congested anymore!!!! Last night, I kept checking on her because she wasn't snoring.  She is 3 years old (almost) and has snored almost every day of her life.  She is so much better, so happy, and her breathing is so much more relaxed.  In the words of the ENT she had some "Big honkin' adenoids."

If C didn't have to have the arm braces for the next 3 weeks, I think she would be feeling 95% better already.  It boggles my mind how fast kids bounce back.  She had a 3+ hour surgery (from the time they took her back until she came to recovery it was ALMOST 4 hours), and they made 3 incisions in her mouth.  Today, she is eating, smiling, and playing, but the braces are driving her nuts.  Thankfully, as long as we watch her like a hawk, she can have them off.  But nothing can go in her mouth, including her fingers, that isn't super soft foods.  She is sleeping well tonight, and it has already been 4 hours since she had her pain meds.  She is going about 5-6 hours between doses and the doing well.  Metro treated her like a little queen, she came home with an adorable hand-knit hat, a handmade quilt, and a super soft stuffed shark- which Mike has named Henry the Hospital Shark.

Now, all three kids are at home, sleeping in their own beds, my hubby is at his computer, and I feel like my life is complete again.  I am one blessed mama here!

But, as promised, kids are doing a craft a day, and with the help of their AWESOME Aunt Natalie, Iris had craft yesterday :)  Penny wasn't really feeling it, but Iris enjoyed helping Aunt Natalie make these adorable Peep Blue Birds in nests.  They were really simple, a bag of melted candy chips (in our case PB), 2 cups of rice krispies, and 1 cup of chinese noodles.  They mixed them all up and dropped them by big spoon fulls onto a sheet of wax paper.  Then they made an imprint in the center and stuck a Peep bird in it and decorated the nest with jelly bean eggs.  Iris really enjoyed them, and LOVED showing her daddy when he came home.

Today, I made the Peeps bunny/M&M cake.  I was going to let each girl make their own cake, so I bought a box of lemon cake mix and a box of strawberry, but wouldn't you know, the girls BOTH wanted lemon!  So, I made 2 9" round lemon cakes and stacked them up on top of each other with some icing, iced the outsides, and let the girls have at it!  I split the Peeps and the M&Ms in half and they went to town.  I REALLY wanted to find the multi colored Peeps Bunnies, but I could only find yellow, so I gave them a little something extra to break up the sea of yellow Peeps!

Day 81, 82, 83, AND 84

So, here are the pictures of the crafts for the last FOUR days.  I am so thankful to my mother in law for doing a craft today before she brought the girls back to me!!  It was really fortunate too, because I was a total airhead today!  I went the wrong way home and took me an extra half hour.  I was SOOO exhausted after being on the road for almost 6 hours!

This was Friday- Puzzle coloring in the car:

Saturday- bunny ears

Sunday- necklaces

Monday- Easter Egg Decorations

And on a side note- Only in Cambridge would someone see this!

Day 81, 82, and 83

I know it has been a long time since I posted, but the reason is quite simple.  The big girls have been with their Ama and Papa in Charleston, WV this weekend, so I haven't seen them since Friday afternoon.  I didn't even do a car craft with them on Friday before I dropped them off in Cambridge because we were more focused on eating our lunches than doing craft.  That being said, I dropped them off with my MIL with a craft to do in the car- they were coloring puzzles.  I thought that would be something different, and exciting.  Penny has become an amazing puzzle putter-togetherer lately!

Saturday, they went to the Clay Center for an Easter Eggstravaganza which apparently included NUMEROUS crafts.  I have also seen pictures of rabbit ear hats that they made yesterday as well as Easter necklaces that they made today.

I cannot begin to express how grateful I am to my family who has been so instrumental in keeping the girls doing crafts every day that they have been without me.  I am quite sure that they are absolutely annoyed at times hearing me beg them to remember to do craft while they have the girls, but it has become a mission of mine to make sure that they get to do a craft every day.  This week will test my new years resolution to the fullest, and I am going to need all the warm fuzzies I can get sent our way...

Tuesday, Coraline AND Penny have surgeries.  Penny will be a simple adenoidectomy which should help her breathing and her horrible snoring.  I guess I probably shouldn't say "simple" because it is still anesthesia, it is still a hospital visit, and it is still stressful, but it is simple compared to Coraline's surgery.  C is having her cleft palate repaired Tuesday as well.  It is a 2-3 hour surgery  in which they will make numerous incisions inside of her mouth and bring the uvula together into one piece.  She will be in elbow braces for 2 weeks so that she cannot put anything hard/sharp/etc in her mouth, and for 3 weeks she will be on restricted diet of mainly soft foods that do not require work to swallow.  I am not sure if it just hasn't fully processed that this is actually happening, or that I am totally at piece with it, or if it is just the fact that it has been pushed back FOUR times now and I am so ready to have this phase of our lives behind us that I am ready go for it.  I don't know.  But, as it stands, it is 12:30 and I have to be up in 6 hours, so I am going to bed now.

Day 80- Bathtub Craft

So, we've done it all now, crafts in the car, crafts at home, crafts at a museum, crafts while visiting family, and now, craft in the bathtub!  This was a craft born out of necessity, but it made sense, so we tried it and it was a smashing success!  (Smashing mainly because Coraline kept smashing her hands into the water and causing EVERYTHING, and everyone to get soaked :-p)  We were on the go all day today, and at 5:00, when we are normally sitting down for dinner, we were just leaving Target in Avon Lakes after getting pictures taken. On the way home, I started thinking about ways to streamline craft, and I thought "huh, I wonder what kind of crafts we could do in the bathtub???"  It turns out, most bathtub "crafts" are messy- paint, glitter gel, etc... I wanted something clean.  Then I came across Foam Murals.  BRILLIANT!

Honestly, I have so much foam in my foam drawer, I knew I could spare some sheets of foam.  With a few minutes of "prep" that mainly consisted of cutting out large flowers, some small eyes, and other various shapes, I was ready to go.  I handed over extra foam sheets and scissors to the girls after they were done being bathed and let them go.  Penny got really into it, asking for shirts, pants, shoes, and a face... she made flowers, and many other designs. She even got ahold of the scissors and foam for a little bit and cut her own shapes.

Iris was just exhausted.  She helped make a monster, made a few little things of her own, but wasn't really into the whole make it herself thing tonight.  So, i cut the shapes she wanted and she put them up.

I think they both had quite a bit of fun, and it was a nice change to do something away from our dining room table.

Days 78 & 79: dreaming of spring

Sorry for skipping blogging yesterday to all my loyal readers.... We did in fact do a craft, but Mike and I were dealing with some stuff last night that left me totally deflated and in absolutely no mindset to blog.  Which brings me back around to yesterday's craft.

I was in a serious time/no mess pinch.  We had a realtor coming over yesterday @ 5, fairly last minute notice, to take pictures of the house to get it on the market, and I couldn't make a mess and it had to be QUICK.  So, I started thinking, and I started Googling, and I came to this:  Popsicle sticks, white pipe cleaners, medium-large pink pom-poms, and a dot of glue.... that is it.  In the end, the house isn't on the market because Parma market is in the dumps.  So, we are here for awhile still.

Quite simply, you just wrap 3 pipe cleaners around the popsicle sticks, and glue a pink pom-pom to the top. Instant Bunny faces:


Iris made hers all by herself:

Penny asked for help :)

Today was a little more fun.  It is the first day of spring, technically, but it is snowing, 23 degrees and cold as all get out!  We are supposed to get 1-3 tonight... first day of spring... yippee.

I thought it would be cute to make plate flowers.  They didn't turn out as nicely as I had hopped, they don't really look like flowers.  But both girls REALLY enjoyed it.  We painted small paper plates different colors. then cut circles of construction paper.  We glued the construction paper to the rim of the painted plates, then took scissors and snipped around the edges to look like the petals of a flower.  Then, we glued a popsicle stick to the back of the "flower" to make it look like a stem... Unfortunately, they didn't turn out as cute as they looked like in my mind.

 Iris' flower, aside from cutting the circle of construction paper she did EVERYTHING by herself

 Penny's flower

My flower... it looks weird

Finally: Rock candy SUCCESS!  It took longer than i expected it to, it looks funny, but we got to eat it tonight, and it tasted very yummy :)

Oh, and PS: Fish is still alive and swimming and very happy.  :-)

Day 77: Foam Easter Bunny Faces

I don't think I have had a day get away from me like I had today!  I swear, I blinked, it was 12:30, and next thing I knew it was 5:10 and we hadn't done craft.  Holy crap, where did today go?????  I knew I wanted to make something Easter related, so I started to think quick... and on these days where I have to think quick, I am more and more and more thankful that I have been doing crafts for 77 days now, because crafts on the fly are getting easier!

I reorganized the craft room over the weekend, so by just opening a drawer, I was able to find all the foam I could need for this project.  To make it even better is that we had white SPARKLY foam!  I cut bunny face pieces out of the foam.  White faces, pink/purple ears and noses.  I got out googly eyes out, the glue, and a black marker.

It is hard for me to give up control at times, and just let the girls make their own creations.  I am so by the books, I don't think outside of the box, an ear should go where an ear goes, etc.  I have been working very hard on giving up that control and just letting the girls create.  So today, I handed over the glue, I handed over the pieces, and I said "go for it".  Iris did SOOO well!  She put the ears on the ears, all of the face parts went where they should, and when I gave her the marker to make the face, she said "what does it look like?" so I drew a smiley face on a scrap of foam, and she copied it by herself.  Proud mommy moment. :)

Then there was Penny!  Eyes on the ears, ears on the cheeks, face on the forehead, nose under on the cheek lol.  Oh, Penny, I love her ability to eschew the expected!

btw, rock candy hasn't done much yet :/