Saturday's Progress

If one of our lovely trees must get a strange disease, have it's leaves all turn brown and crispy, and then proceed to die, why, oh why, must it be one of the ones between nosy neighbor and us??

Although I vaguely remember saying that I wasn't going to replace any trees until right before we moved, Ryan couldn't stand the dead tree and stopped at the store and bought a new one.  He said he picked the tallest one there, but it is a little petite when  you stand it next to our four year old trees.  Let's hope it catches up a bit this year and doesn't decide to do like the last guy in that spot and die!

It was a beautiful day on Saturday.  Okay beautiful may be too strong of a word.  But it didn't rain, it didn't try to blow us away, and the mosquitoes were on vacation.  I managed to get all my flowers planted and pumpkin and sunflower seeds in the ground.

 

Let's hope they look a little more impressive soon.

Easter

This year I left it up to Clayton to organize the Easter egg hunt.  I wasn't really feeling like doing one at all when he asked when we were doing it.  So I told him that he could do it and I'd supply the cash for the chocolate. 

A quick trip downtown for chocolate and a late night adventure of stuffing eggs, making up clues and hiding eggs in obvious but not too obvious places equals three happy children Saturday morning. 

He came up with some pretty good clues all on his own!

We had a good little laugh over some of them, including "I'm getting 'queky Clean in here". 

It was late, that's all he's going to say about that. Hehe.

The kids with their loot:

Not too much that I wonder when the heck they will eat it all!

Thanks big brother!!

Yes, he's still in his blankey.  Yes it's bright outside.  It's probably about 11 AM in this picture! And yes he enjoyed that hug about as much as it looks like he did.

Ha!

Easiest Play-Doh Ever

One more day until Winter break is over!

The kids are not so excited, but Mom is!!

Today, we broke out the play-doh recipe and I had a solid two hour break from things that I just needed to be told about.

Here's the recipe for the easiest way to get a 2 hour break.

Kool-Aid Play-Doh

2 1/2 cup flour  

1/2 cup salt

2 tsp cream of tartar

2 pkg Kool-Aid

2 cups boiling water

2-3 tbsp oil

• Mix flour, salt, cream of tartar and kool-aid thoroughly in a medium sized bowl.
• Add the oil to the flour mixture. Stir.
• Add boiling water to mixture and stir until completely mixed
• Knead together with hands, adding more oil if it seems sticky.
• Let cool a bit in a plastic bag before using. Easily cut in half or doubled, we only made half batches today

This playdoh smells awesome, doesn't stick to anything, takes 5 minutes to make, is easy to mold and make shapes with and doesn't keep* 

Yes, that is a plus by the way.  That way you don't have it around so long that they want you to participate in making fabulous creations such as:

Happy kids

Hunter's "Shrek"

Storm's Cinnamon Buns

Blade's crab

*This actually keeps for 2-3 weeks in the fridge or a week or so on the counter, but let's not tell the kids okay.  You shoulda seen my carpet under the table! Oy!


Bonus Picture:

I don't have to tell you what I see when I look at this 'tank'..... LOL

Gift Tags

Today started out with me spotting some free gift tag printouts on the web. Which is better than how yesterday started, with the doorbell ringing, me stumbling out of bed bleary-eyed to face the by-law officer who would kindly like to remind me to move my van for street cleaning.  Awesome.

Anyways, we needed new gift tags this year for our re-usable cloth gift bags.  I usually use stickers or just cut out old cards and write on the back, but since I seen this free tag printout I thought I'd use those.  So I cut down some Christmas card stock so it would fit into my printer and then as I went to print them out I noticed all the little pictures Storm has drawn and saved to my computer lately.

The girl loves her some Paint. 

And I thought, hey I could print those out and make myself some tags!

Manny from Ice Age, Scooby Doo and a Christmas tree too!

So cute.

Then I spotted the picture file I have saved of Storm's name and words that describe her, that is waiting for me to paint for her room.  And I thought,  "hmm I should use Wordle and write out a bunch of words that describe all of the kids and print those out as tags too!"

Easily distracted and way-laid.  That's me.

And then I did this:

I mean, why not make them re-usable!  As I got started on this, I realized that I was down to my last two sheets of 8x11 laminating plastic.  But I had bought a mixture starter package on clearance at one point and it had a bunch of different sizes in it, including business card and luggage tag sizes.  So I just used up all the random sizes and then cut them down.  Plus I made sure to put one of each kid's names into a luggage tag so if they ever need one, they can just use these.

All the cutting.  Gah!

How cute are those?! 


Now, what was I really supposed to be doing today?!

Hmm.  A shower might be a good start.

Homemade Christmas Cards

I'm leaving it a bit late this year.

Wait.  That's not just this year.  That's normal for me!

With all the painting I've been doing lately, I guess this idea was inevitable.  I decided that the kids should paint the 'cards' that I'm going to mail out. 

I bought some small canvases at the dollar store and painted the backgrounds for them.

I didn't bother sticking to traditional Christmas colors for the backgrounds.  Plus, I was testing out the new paint colors I just bought for Storm's word art for her room!  Multitasking people, multitasking!

Even Clayton painted two.

They got quite creative.  The only thing that had to be on the small canvas was fingerprinted snowmen.  The rest was up to them.

 

They turned out awesome! 

Ryan even painted one. Guess which one!

 I can't wait to mail them all out, which I better do soon, or they'll be New Year's cards instead!