advent calendar

Yikes! I know it has been a while - there are lots of pictures to post, stories to tell... but that will have to wait until after finals! I couldn't pass up the opportunity to break from my massive paper writing and post some PDFs for you that I made for H this year. It started in October when we did our annual shoebox trip to fill up a box for Operation Christmas Child. This year H got very excited about it! He wanted to pick out every item and for weeks afterward would continually ask about the 'little boy'. He wanted to know if he was awake or asleep, did he get his toys yet, does he go to school, how is his mommy, etc. We began praying for this box and our 'little boy' at night as well as praying for some friends of ours who are in the process of an international adoption and were just placed. I was really surprised how much he seemed to understand about these children on the other side of the world and what a joy it is to pray for them. That gave me an idea! I recently bought a sweet advent calendar on etsy and wanted to add something else to it to make it a little more 'reason for the season.' So, I went to the Operation Christmas Child website and looked up where they distributed the most boxes and then started searching for pictures and maps and prayer requests. I assembled this all into documents for one side to be the pictures and name of the country and the other side to be the prayer requests. I'm going to put these slips in his advent calendar everyday and we will take one out talk about the country, pray for the country, and then use little mini clothespins to pin them on our tree. I might buy him his own little tree for his room, we'll see. I'm excited to start the tradition though of celebrating Christmas through praying for the children of the world. Hope you can use this with your families this Christmas season!

back to school blackboards

I kind of accidentally made this chalkboard for H the other day and he liked it so much and it was such an easy project I decided to make a cute little back to school blackboard for all of the kids in H's class. All you need for this project is: construction paper, hole punch, yarn, chalkboard paint, and felt. These were all things I had on hand, so it was a super easy and FREE project. All I did was paint the construction paper with a few coats of chalkboard paint and after it dried (I did have to lay books on the edges to keep them from curling) I used the hole punch to make a border. Then I wove yarn around the border and left enough string to tie a bow with a long end from which I could tie a piece of felt that would become the eraser. I used a little snack size zip lock bag to put a few pieces of chalk in for the kids and stapled it to the top of the finished chalkboard. Here's the finished product. The kids were super excited about them and it was a really easy project that even H helped me with!

What we've been up to

I can't believe my vacation is ending already and I'm heading back to work next week. Boo hoo! We've had such a great time and have had a lot of fun things we've been able to do in spite of my being in summer school all summer. Thanks to pinterest and some other good mom blogs out there I found lots of activities for us to do and it has been really fun! Here's what we've been up to lately We hid the puzzle pieces of H's number puzzle in a tub of rice and beans and practiced putting our numbers in sequence. Once you have done it with them a few times, this is a great keep your kid busy while you need to make dinner activity. I also used the same rice and beans and gave H a bunch of cooking utensils to play with so he could make dinner while I was cooking dinner. I also found these Crayola window crayons at Target and decided to give them a try. They were a big hit and clean up really easily. I highly recommend them! We had a few rainy days so we built a fort under some bar stools and I gave H a flashlight and put all his cars under there with us. When the thunder started we moved this game to our bed and we played under the covers with the flashlight and cars for another 45 minutes! On July 4th we went to the picnic at our Church and H actually stayed up for the fireworks and when we got home we lit some of our wedding sparklers in the backyard. It was a fun day! Once it got really hot we started freezing ice cubes with food coloring everyday to play with outside. H and I went to the teacher supply store one day to look for some things for us to start doing some science projects with. We found some magnets and little magnetic circles. He loves playing with them in water. We found this activity on Pinterest. You dump some baking soda on a piece of paper and put food coloring in little cups of vinegar and use droppers to put it onto the paper and it bubbles up. H and Daddy thought it was pretty cool. We also did some painting with H's cars to see the different kinds of tracks they made. This quickly digressed into this... I'll leave you with this jewel... I've been teaching H to make faces. Being a mom is awesome. We've had some other adventures this summer but the pics are all on my phone. I'll post more after my next picture dump. Grateful for lots of fun with friends and family! It has been an awesome summer!

feely goup

I have Fridays off this summer so H and I are going to be doing some more art projects. Yesterday, we made feely goup. I found the recipe in a book a I got a month ago. The book is and it has some really great ideas!


Feely goup is cool because there are only 2 ingredients and it is super easy to clean up. Not to mention this provided my 1.5 year old with almost an hour of entertainment! For such a short attention span, this stuff is pretty cool! It starts off as a liquid and then hardens into a crumbly, clayish substance. H's favorite part of the liquid stage was putting food coloring in and then stirring it with spoons to watch it change colors. He didn't like to feel it with his hands when it was wet, but once it dried he thought it was pretty cool. I didn't get any pictures of the wet stage because my hands were covered... but here is the dried stuff.





To make your own feely goup all you need is:

2 Cups cornstarch
1 Cup water
optional: food coloring