Praises of a Wife and Mommy

I prepped the flowers and leaves but my 2 year old had fun gluing it all together.  This is  a very simple craft for toddlers and it sure brightened up the room since our spring flowers are taking forever with our cold spring.  

My sweet daughter made me this Valentine at school.  I loved it! I love her little thumb prints and the lacing with the yarn added a nice touch too.   If your looking for an easy Valentines Day Craft put this in your file folder for next year!  :)  

Happy Valentines Day!!! Are you the type of person who loves to decorate for every holiday?  Then this is a great idea that will save you money!  This is a simple Do It Yourself idea to create great Valentines Decorations.   All you need: Cardboard  Yarn Yep only 2 things!  Simply cut the patter you want out of the cardboard and then wrap it with yarn.  I like to wrap the yarn in all different directions to make it more textured.  You may like a more clean crisp look and then you will have to wrap very carefully.  Either way it does not take too much of you time and is very affordable and looks great in the window, staircase, or any other place you keep decorations.  

I-Spy is a fun game for children of all ages.  Take the same concept from searching in a book to a bottle.   You can look around your house right now for things that you can put in a bottle to create this fun and entertaining game. The kids and I walked around the house and found: necklace glitter noodle beads of all sorts of sizes and shapes food coloring Candy Yarn There could have been many more items to place in our I-spy bottle such as rice, paper, paper clips, caps, and anything small enough to fit through the hole.  We wanted to keep our items in the Valentines theme.   One of our bottles has glitter and the other has food coloring.  Each bottle is fun and entertaining.   You can allow your child to shake them and play on their own or you can create a game of I-spy with the bottles.  :)  Hope you enjoy creating some Valentine I-Spy Bottles.  

Valentines Day is a week away!!!  Have you made some date plans with your spouse?  Get a babysitter lined up?  Made your Valentines with your children for their classmates?   We had a little sensory time with some shaving cream and glitter the other day.  I have a daycare boy who as you can see in the picture below does not like to make a mess and then my son who is all about messy play!   Grab the shaving cream and glitter and get creating some fun Valentine memories.  :) 

Who say's you can't do fun crafts in your robe?  :)  We were having a lazy Sunday morning and then decided to do a name craft. For this activity my daughter worked on: cutting gluing letters colors First step was cutting strips of colored paper.  I cut the long strips then had my daughter cut them smaller. I then wrote my daughters name big and in pencil.  Then I handed her a glue stick and she went to town gluing her colored pieces of paper to each letter. As my daughter was working my 17 month old was getting so cranky until I finally put him up on a chair where he could glue on his own pieces and created his own little masterpiece.  It was fun seeing how proud he was of his work.  :)

This was a fun craft that we did at kids camp a couple weeks ago.  I wanted to share it because my daughter still loves it and we have read and reread the sayings on it.   The sayings include: - I have to give it my all! - I must never give up praying! - I must follow His Instructions! - I shouldn't quit when times get tough! - I have to serve those around me! - I need to share what I know! - I should be humble! At camp you could pick how you wanted to decorate your puzzle piece.  My daughter and I both chose marble painting.  :)  We had fun!  Some chose to sponge paint and some did both.  We then had a wall of our puzzle pieces together and that looked neat!   So are you playing on God's Team? 

With the new house comes new decorating! :)  I wanted the kids to help create the art for their rooms so we created some neat name canvas prints.  :)  JoAnn's had the canvas on sale so that was a bonus.  The kids then picked out some paint.  Selah picked pink, purple, and yellow, and Titus picked yellow, blue, and green.   I used painters tape to write there names.  This tape is easy to pull off and I was happy with the results.  There were only a couple small spots where paint seeped through a little bit.   It was fun watching the two paint.  Titus used a brush for a little bit then had fun using his fingers.  Selah on the other hand did not want her color's to mix.  She used her fingers for most of her painting.   So what do you think?  I LOVE THEM!!!!!  :)  I think we might have to do this again!  :) 

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Over the weekend Selah and I had some fun dyeing beans and noodles.  There are several different ways to do this but the way we did this was: in a bowl add water, white vinegar and food coloring stir every 15 minutes for about 2 hours then spread on a pan and put in the oven on a lower temp for about 10-15 minutes take off the tray and spread out and keep out over night to continue to let them air dry.   That looks so pretty! Are you excited looking at all of this... imagine all the fun stuff we can do with this!  :)  They kinda looked like jelly beans... make sure if you do this you reinforce them that this is not something to eat!   Stay tuned for our projects!  :)