Day 124: Sea Life Paper Plates

We had a lot of fun making these sea creature paper plates today.  My MIL managed to find these adorable paper plate crafts somewhere (as you have probably noticed, she has found a lot, and we love them all!) and they are ideal for the girls.  We started out making the octopi, it was a little complicated, just because of the number of pieces, 8 strands of tentacles, eyes (three pieces total), then all the "spots" on the faces, the mouths, then the crown ,and the 3 jewels, there was just a lot to put on, but they both did great!  I especially loved Iris', it was so incredibly detailed, and she was so thoughtful about how she put it together. :)

After that, Iris wanted to make a Crab like I had made which was MUCH easier.  A little glue, 6 legs, 2 eyes, and the 2 black dots for the eyes and the mouth were sticky backed.  (i love that her crab has its arms raised, such a cute little touch :) )

Mike made the shark, quite possibly the CUTEST, happiest shark ever!

As promised, we are home now, so here are the pictures of the crafts from the weekend, starting with our twig ribbons and ending with the Planter Pots.

(something is up with the coloring on these pictures because they are REALLY green)

Day 123: Potted Plant Holders

Today's craft is brought to you by The Home Depot.  I am telling you what, I LOVE this kids project thing they do on the first Saturday of the month!  Last Month's was a little more complicated than the girls were able to do on their own, but today's craft was literally a dab of glue and a screw, YAY!

They made these really cute little potted plant holders.  They are just simply a piece of wood for the back, and a piece of some sort of fiber board with 2 large holes cut out for the potted plants to go into.  All the kids had to do was put a dab of wood glue on the fiber board and screw the back piece onto it, then they got to paint them.

Iris is really surprising me lately, at least these last two Home Depot crafts, because she has gone for the really dark colored paints.  Penny on the other hand has chosen very light, very girly colors (especially today).  I was really proud of both of them for how well they painted and how nice their plant holders turned out.  Can't wait to get home to put plants in them :)

I will post pictures tomorrow (I hope.) It took 5 hours for the pictures to get from Mike's phone to my e-mail last night... I'm a little afraid to try to upload those pictures and try to upload new pictures tonight, so I will have to wait until tomorrow.

Day 122: Breast Cancer Ribbons

What a fun day we had.  The girls had their very first ever manicures/pedicures at a nail salon that had children's chairs.  And our day got busier from there!  By the time we were finally able to get to craft, it was almost 8 o'clock, but I thought about it and decided that, since we are walking in the breast cancer walk tomorrow, we could make our very own breast cancer ribbons.  I wanted to do something different than just making a loop with a ribbon, or coloring a ribbon on a paper, so I asked Mike to go out back and cut some new growth off of a tree so we could use the twigs to make ribbons.

Once Mike got the twigs cut, we found some pink ribbon and worked on rolling the ribbon around the branches.  It was really a great craft for little hands, because once the ribbon was started, all that had to be done was to twist the twig around in circles until it was wrapped, tip to tip in pink ribbon.  Once they were wrapped, I secured Iris' with glue, Mike tied Penny's ribbon off, and we wrapped them into the ribbon shape.  To keep them closed, we tied a small pink ribbon in the center of the twist, and here is what we were left with.  Two perfect breast cancer ribbons!

Ok.. just kidding... no pictures. I have been waiting for 10 minutes for them to come to my inbox and they just aren't going to come and my computer is running SOOOO slow.  I guess pictures will come later :(

Day 121: Extreme Crafting... After Bedtime!

So, we were crazy this morning, we got up late, because the kids didn't go to bed until late, then we spent the morning cleaning the house and packing to go to Charleston for the weekend.  I had a dentists appointment at 11:00 so was out of the house from 10:30-12:30 and we still managed to get on the road at 1:15.  But, we had three stops, and didn't get here until 5:45.  We had dinner, then the girls went straight up to bed.  We finally came downstairs about 7:30 and I looked at my MIL/FIL/Mike and went "omg! CRAFT!!!!!"

Well, thanks to am amazing MIL, we were able to pull a craft from the basement, I substituted the necessary glue with Scotch Tape, because i had no intentions of them leaving their room and was not about to bring glue to a carpeted room with a 3 and 4 year old.  I mean, I know I may look crazy, but i am not that crazy!

Iris really did an awesome job with her snail.  I love the placement of everything, it looks almost exactly like the picture of it did, and she didn't get any help, and I don't know that she even saw the picture first.

Penny's frog however... well, nostrils on the feet says it all :-p

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