Birthday Signs Tradition

Hubby's family had a tradition growing up.  When you woke up on your birthday, there was a fun sign waiting for you announcing your birthday.

When we were first married, I thought it was silly and we didn't really do it.  Then we had kids, and I realized what an awesome idea it was...because it's a cheap and easy way to make the day feel extra special for your kids.

We've put in varied amounts of effort over the years.  Sometimes they're made out of scrap paper...

You're Invited...Outer Space Party Invitations Tutorial

I'll be sharing quite a few details from Firecracker's outer-space themed birthday party over the next few weeks.  I decided not to do it all at once since it would be too much for one post...and I'm sure not every reader out there is into outerspace, so they'll be mixed in here and there with other posts.  I thought the invitations would be a good place to start though.

I'm not much of a paper-crafter.  I've never really gotten into scrapbooking or card making, and I don't have a fancy paper cutting machine.  When Firecracker asked for an Outer Space party, I did some internet searching for some quick invitations.  I found this one that I liked, but it required particular stamps that I didn't have, and we needed the invitations the next day.  So here's my version...

Here's what I started with to make them:

Easy Felt and Twig Valentine's Tree Tutorial

Yesterday I shared my melted crayon LOVE tiles that I made for our mantel.  Once I finished them, though, there was still something missing.  We needed something with a little more height to it.  After looking around on Pinterest I had this and this for inspiration, I remembered an empty red vase hanging out in our kitchen begging to be used.

A few scraps of felt, thread, and a glue gun later...

Twig Books for Early Writers from Playful Learning (& a Giveaway)

Some of you may remember that at the beginning of the summer, I had aspirations to write at least a weekly post for a Summer Writer's Camp series to get young kids writing...but life got busy and it never really got off the ground.

So you can imagine how excited I was when a copy of Playful Learning: Develop Your Child's Sense of Joy and Wonder by Mariah Bruehl showed up in my mailbox.  The whole first chapter is titled "Nurturing Young Authors" and features 7 different projects with somewhere around 14 different children's books to go along with them for inspiration.  It also has chapters about reading, math, science art, social studies, and citizenship, each with lots of projects and books for inspiration.  As far as I'm concerned, the only thing better than a fun kids' craft/learning idea is one that also goes along with an excellent children's book.  I didn't even make it through the second chapter before my hold list at the library filled up (seriously...we need to be able to put more than 25 books on hold at a time!), so you can bet we'll be doing more of the activities from this book in the coming weeks.  There are seriously so many great ideas in here.  For more information about the Playful Learning, Mariah Bruehl, and an upcoming E-course she's having, you can see her website here.

Braided Wristbands

When Robin at The T-Shirt Dairies asked for Stashbusting Ideas, I knew exactly what I wanted to share.

My husband is a high school science teacher, and recently he was trying to come up with some new ways to motivate his students.  He'd been reading some articles about game theory and how it can be applied to motivate students (and others) to work as something as hard as kids will work at video games.  One of the things he wanted to try was having cool sounding "levels" that the kids needed to get to, and settled on giving the kids a "Black Belt" in chemistry if they could meet certain learning goals.  We brainstormed possiblity rewards...it had to be something cheap, but at least mildy appealing to teenagers.  We came up with these. 

I threw in some gold since the school colors are black and gold.

Monster Mess!

The house was a general disaster and needed to be cleaned up.  We pulled Monster Mess! by Margery Cuyler of the shelf which we'd checked out from the library.  It's about a weird looking, but friendly monster who cleans up his boy's room while he's sleeping. 

I told Little Brother and Sweet Pea we were going to be Monsters and clean up their rooms.   Inspired by the kindergarteners the day before when we took Firecracker's class their monster cupcakes, we slapped some google eyes on our foreheads and went to work. 

Single Layer No-Sew "Braided" Fleece Blankets Tutorial

If you're looking for a way to make fleece blankets without those bumpy knots and losing so much to the fringe, this is it!

I picked up a bunch of fleece at Jo-Anns Black Friday sale ($3 a yard...plus 20% off that with the coupon).  Since then we've been drowning in fleece blankets.  We've been making them to go with other gifts for kids on the Giving Tree at Firecracker's school.

I have to confess that I've never really made fleece blankets before.  Our kids have plenty of them, including some special ones given to them by their birth families, but I've never made them...because I'm more of a quilt person.  The need to mass produce them easily and the sale with $3 a yard, drove me to fleece...and it's actually been kinda fun.  I wanted to find an alternative to the knots though, because the knots can be a little uncomfortable to lay on.  I've tried out three different ways, but I thought I'd show you my favorite one first.  This is just a little different than any other ways I've seen...but I'm probably not the first person to think of it.

So I present...the faux braided edge.  This method is for a fleece blanket from a single layer.

Updated Nov. 2011 - If you're looking for a way to make a braided edge for a double layer fleece blanket, check out my new tutorial here.

Make Your Own Doilies

As I was getting ready for Firecracker's Cupcake Party, I realized what we really needed were some doilies to go under the cups and saucers...but we didn't have any.

I still had some coffee filters left-over from making our snowflakes, so I improved.  (We don't drink coffee ourselves, but the filters are cheep to buy and great for craft projects.)

You start by ironing the filter flat.

Then fold the filter in half 4 times, so you have a wedge that's 1/16 the size of your original filter.

Then cut out half of two hearts near the top.

Unfold once and cut two more heart-halves lower down.

Unfold one more time and cut two more heart-halves near the tip.

Completely unfold and iron.

And set your table.

These could look pretty against red as a Christmas decoration too.

Best Ever Paper Snowflakes

...or at least these are the best that I have ever made by a long shot.  Today I took our fall leaves down and put up a bunch of these.  Before when I've made paper snowflakes they always turned our square and weird looking.  Now I've learned some tricks to making beautiful round ones. 

Colorful Chameleons - Book & Activity

Today was one of those days when I wanted to skip "preschool."  I didn't have anything planned and was in a bit of a slump.  Little Brother kept bugging me though, "Mom, When are we going to do preschool?!?"  I guess I must be doing something right if he loves it so much, huh?

Anyway, I pulled A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni off the shelf, just to read it to the kids.  It's about how a chameleon is sad he doesn't have his own color like other animals.  He decides to hide on a leaf the rest of his life so he'll finally have a set color...but then fall comes and the leaf changes from green to yellow, and then to red before falling off the tree.  (Perfect story for this time of year!  I would have known that sooner if I'd actually picked up the book!)  Then he finds a friend chameleon and they decide to stay together so even if they don't have a set color, at least they'll match each other.

I'm ready to be "over" our color unit, so we can move onto other things, and I figured if I read this to the kids, we could take it back to the library.  It wasn't until I'd finished reading the book that an idea came for our activity, and it turned out awesome and was so easy!

I grabbed some wax paper from the drawer, and traced the chameleon on the cover for each of the kids with a permanent marker. 

I thought about cutting it out, but then realized the tail and legs would last about 30 seconds if they were cut out, so I just roughly cut around the main shape.  Then I handed the chameleons to them and we ran around the house helping the chameleons change color.  Little Brother LOVED it, and it now ranks among my favorite preschool activities to date. 

We had yellow.

And green (this dresser is a prime candidate for a re-paint).

And orange on our pumpkin jars (and see the fall paintings made it on the mantle eventually)

T-shirt scraps colored

And "woody" colored as Little Brother called it.

Perhaps my personal favorite "road" colored...black and yellow striped.

And of course because there's still so much Halloween candy around, we have candy colored.

"Outside colored"

And he even found his way onto one of our window leaves like in the story. 

And of course there were many more we didn't take pictures of.

Sweet Pea was a little disturbed that hers didn't have a color of his own, so she tried to color him with a marker...but I wasn't going to hand over the permanent markers so she could make it stick.

Now this brings me to the real point of this post if you've read this far...if you ever don't feel like doing activities with your kids or you think doing preschool types activities with your kids is too hard...just do it!  Even though I didn't have anything planned this turned a blah morning into a great one for me and the kids.  They love the activities and don't care if they're last minute or silly.  The more you start to do these kinds of activities with your kids, the more the ideas will come, and the better the relationship with your kids will be.  There are days when my kids drive me crazy (at moments today even), but it's pay-back in a small way when they beg for "preschool time" because it lets me know that they really appreciate the time and attention they get with it, and I've been amazed at how much they learn.

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