Day 104: Birthday "Bonies"

Well, first and foremost, Happy 29th Birthday to my amazing husband!  We had an amazingly relaxing, laid back, fun day.  The first shower that took place in the house today was after 1 this afternoon.  We played outside some, the girls got to go to the park with Mike while I made dinner.  Now we are settling down for the night to play Xbox before bed :)

For Mike's birthday, the kids wanted to make him a cake, but at the last minute we decided to make him brownies.  We bought these amazing Ghiradeli (sp?) double fudge brownies with this amazing icing.  Iris asked if we could make those for craft today, so I was fine with that.  I have decided that "craft" in my mind is anything getting the kids doing something new/different and engaging them in something that is outside of their norm, and baking is something that I am always happy to embrace as the kids are interested.  

I love baking with boxed mixes with the girls.  Mainly because it is typically 3-4 ingredients, including the mix, it doesn't matter which way the are added, and I can easily pre-measure everything before we get started.  In today's case, i was able to let Penny add the mix and the egg and Iris got to add the messier stuff, water and oil, to the bowl.  They were each able to get a turn mixing, and were able to help me pour the batter, and possibly most importantly to them, lick the spoon in the end :)

Once the brownies came out of the oven, Penny was able to help me pour the icing on them, and Iris helped spread it out.  Then, they got to "decorate"  I guess they don't understand dispersing the toppings, because I gave them each 5 cups of "toppings" and they just took turns dumping all of the toppings into one spot on the brownies.  By the time they were done, we had a huge pile of sprinkles in the center of the brownies and and I had to spread out a bit before we could eat them.

But, they were so excited to make the brownies and Penny was absolutely ecstatic about getting to eat the "bonies"  She wanted them for dinner too :-p

Day 103: Homemade bubbles

So, this really isn't a "craft" but it is an engaging activity that both girls got a chance to do their own.  I really wanted to make sidewalk chalk, and i thought i had all the necessary "ingredients" but when it came time to make it, I realized that my recipe was for sidewalk paint, not chalk.  And since it was 43* and cloudy/rainy all day today, i didn't think that sidewalk paint would be fair to anyone.  So, I changed it at the last minute and we made our own bubbles.

It is a very easy process, 1/2 cup dawn, 2 cups water, 2 tsp sugar.  Now, i can't figure out what the sugar does, and I am wondering if i could have replaced it with corn starch to make the bubbles a little "stronger" like the Gymboree bubbles.  But, we did sugar in ours, and they worked well.  All you do is mix everything up, whisk it, and blow bubbles!

the kids had a BLAST.  We gave them straws to dip into the bubbles and blow bubbles with, they just stuck it into the mix and blew the biggest bubbles ever.  Our table was a soapy mess!  However, i think it is cleaner now than it has ever been :)

Mike took a few pictures, but he hasn't sent them to me, and I don't have the heart to ask him right now because he is fighting with his airplane.

Day 102: Finger Painting

Can you believe we are over 100 days into this craft thing, and I just now got brave enough to finger paint with the girls.  I mean, it is MESSY... and Penny..... and paint... and well, if you've read this blog in that past, that is enough said :-p  But today, apparently I was bitten by the Finger Paint Paper bug or something, and I broke down and bought finger paints!  I only bought 4 colors, but hey, that got us started.

So, we started with giving each of the girls 1 piece of paper, and 1 squirt of paint at a time.  At first it was kind of funny.  I squeezed the paint onto the paper and said "go ahead" and they both looked at me like I was crazy.  I could actually see the wheels turning in Penny's head: "do I dare touch this with my hands?!?!?" hehe.  But, once they got started, they both had a lot of fun, though they did insist on wiping their hands off each time we finished painting with a color.

The second paper we did was actually collaborative with the girls.  I set them across from each other, and we talked about colors.  I explained to them what primary colors were, and then I explained that when we mix primary colors, we get new colors.  So, we mixed red and blue first, and they were both so excited to see it turn purple.  Then we mixed yellow and red, then blue and yellow.  Then, they decided they wanted to paint the ENTIRE paper.  So this is what we ended up with... with no fighting!

Day 101: Poured Paint Pots

I was trying to figure out something to do with the 100th craft yesterday, and stumbled upon a blog that described this drip paint technique.  I thought it would be kind of cool and something the girls would be able to do.

The basic premise of this idea is to flip a clay pot upside down, cover the drainage hole with tape and literally pour paint on the top.  Just enough so that it starts to pour down the sides.  Then you just take the next color and pour it on top.  We tried to be sparing with the paint, but Iris' motto was apparently the more the merrier.... you can currently see 2.5 of the six layers of paint she poured on her pot because she went so heavy.

Penny really took to this craft technique though. I think that it was a good balance of paint bottles and her personal strength.  She can only squeeze so hard for so long, and it seemed like that amount of time was the perfect amount of paint to make it pour and drip over the sides properly.

We only had 2 clay pots, so I had no intentions of actually doing this craft, but then I thought that the kids may need an example, so I grabbed a Solo cup and showed this kids.  Solo cups don't have any porous surface to keep the paint on them, so the paint has, over the course of the evening, dripped down and is mainly pooled on the paper plate below it :-p

Day 100!!! 'Nough Said

There is part of me that just wants to post the picture of this and not even write anything, but this is Day 100!!! 100 crafts in 100 days!!!!  We are ALMOST 1/3 of the way through the year and we are still going strong!

It is hard to find crafts with the "100" theme.  I finally searched "100th day of school" on Pinterest, and I hit a jack pot!  I decided to do this 1-0-0 paper plate theme.  I used hot glue to stick the #s together, then i put dabs of glue everywhere to keep the pasta stuck to the plates.

If you are wondering- to keep with the 100 theme, each girl got 100 pieces of dyed pasta for their plates, and they used them all! Now if you sit here and count, I can't promise you that there are 100 pieces of pasta on each plate, because come on, we are talking about a 2 and 4 year old.  Who knows where they put the pasta.. I mean, Penny tried to eat a piece today! lol

On a side note: My hits to this blog have SKYROCKETED lately. I've gone from about 8-10 a day to almost 30 a day.  My +1s have gone from 1 or 2 to 3 or 4, and I can see I'm getting a lot of hits from overseas.  I'd love to know who everyone is if you are a regular.  I don't like feeling like i'm talking to myself all this time :)  Feel free to leave a note, let me know who you are and where you live, and most importantly, if you have any craft ideas, make sure to let me know!

Day 99: Garden Start-Up

Today's blog will be quick.  We didn't necessarily do a "Craft" today, but more of a learning activity to follow us through the next few weeks/months, if it succeeds :-p  We planted seeds in little cups outside.  While we were at Home Depot on Saturday, I let the girls pick out seed packets of things they want to grow over the spring/summer.  I was hoping that they would choose things like a pack of tomatoes, maybe a pepper plant, some herbs, maybe even some peas or green beans.  Basically, I wanted things that we could easily plant in a planter and not in a huge garden.  Well, leave it to Iris and Penny, they chose lettuce, broccoli, yellow squash, and corn... yes, corn.  We are attempting to grow corn, in a POT on the back porch.. yup this a recipe for disaster.

The girls got to dig shovels full of dirt from a bag and put the dirt in their cups, then they got to put seeds in each cup.  We planted a lot of lettuce, i hope that the lettuce takes off.  But other than that... who knows how this is experiment will turn out, it could be a total disaster, hopefully it will be worth our time in a few months.  Wish us luck! :-p 

Day 98: Flower cutouts

So, a few months ago, I saw this really cute paper punch craft done with paint samples from a hardware store.  I had been thinking about it and thinking about it, and thought it would be a super easy, fun craft to do with the girls.  On Friday, we went to Jo-Ann's and picked out a paper punch (daisy) that they liked, and then on Saturday, after making our bird houses, we went to the paint department and they picked out paint swatches that they liked.

That is where it went south.  I didn't quite know where to go with this craft.  The picture I had seen, they had used a brown paper back as a gift bag for someone, well I had no need for a paper bag, and I had no real direction to go.  Mike suggested just gluing them onto a piece of green construction paper, but we had a lot of green paint swatches, so I went with black.

I really wanted to make something as well, but I spent the entire time punching daisies out so that Iris could hoard them only to pile them all up on her paper at the last possible second and declare craft "done".  Penny did actually enjoy gluing her pieces on the construction paper.  I got a P glued on before the kids lost total interest and craft was effectively OVER.