Advent Activity Calendar, pt. 2

It was fun, and also harder than I thought, to come up with activities for our advent calendar.  I started by looking at our calendar and filling in the events we already have on the schedule and I also filled in a few days with "read a Christmas book".  Here's the rest of the list:

• Set up manger scene
• Make a pom-pom pinecone tree, similar to these
• Have a "Jingle Bells" parade
• Make salt dough hand print ornaments
• Have lunch or a snack next to the Christmas tree
• Make gingerbread waffles or pancakes
• Go see Christmas lights on our road
• Make a Christmas tree hairbow, inspired by this one
• Go to kids' Christmas party with friends from Daddy's school
• Go to the big kids' Christmas performance
• Make time capsule ornaments, inspired by this one
• Call grandparents to sing a Christmas song
• Make white chocolate peppermint bark
• Watch the Charlie Brown Christmas show
• Make and decorate cookies
• Take cookies to women's shelter
• Make a Christmas song video (Cadence loves to star in her own videos)
• Do some of the Christmas activities from Confessions of a Homeschooler
• Do Christmas pattern block mats

I haven't included our family advent time, which will be on each Sunday and Christmas Eve.  We light the advent candles and have a short Bible reading, activity, and prayer time.  I think this year we'll focus on some of the players in the Christmas story - Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the angels, and Jesus.

Advent Activity Calendar

I just finished up an advent activity calendar for us!  It's important to me that the whole presents/Santa/stuff part of the holidays be very minimal in our house, so I try to put a lot of emphasis on the really important (for us, the story of Christ's birth and serving each other) and the fun (making cookies, decorating, etc.)  I thought it would be fun if we had an advent calendar with an activity for each day.  

I pretty much worked with what I had on hand.  My supplies were: a piece of scrap wood from the garage, white spray paint, cup hooks, and a cute paper tag pad from Target (I found these near the scrapbook paper - I was pleased that there were exactly 24 sheets in the pad).

cup hooks and tag pad

I screwed 24 cup hooks in the wood in a staggered pattern  - that got a lot easier when I started using Matt's drill to start the holes.   I screwed two more cup hooks in the top (I pinched the hook closed with pliers) so I could hang it on the wall.  Then I spray painted the whole deal. 

Conveniently, the tag pad has cute little cut-outs so I could just pop 'em up on the hooks.  I still have to write numbers on the front.  Our activities will be on the back on little post-it notes so I can move the activities around if I need to.  I got the post-it note idea from Simple Mom.

I hung it in our dining room so it will be convenient to check the activities everyday. Here's the list of our activities.

Linking up to: Sundae Scoop at I heart Naptime, Think Pink Sunday at Flamingo Toes, Made by You Monday at Skip to my lou, Take a Look Tuesday at Sugar Bee Crafts

Mama & Me Decorating: Tissue Paper Decoupaged Stool

We have this little white stool that has seen better days.  When Cadence was around 16 months maybe she started flipping it over and scooting it along our tile floors, so the top was pretty roughed up.  Since then, I wanted to decoupage it and when we started our sun themed activities last week, it was the perfect opportunity to snazz it up.

This was a zero cost decorating project too!  Our only supplies were tissue paper out of our gift wrapping supplies and some decoupage medium we had (you can make your own decoupage stuff with white glue and a little water too).  We decided to decorate the stool with a sky background, and clouds, and of course, the sun. We got started by tearing up the tissue paper. 

Cadence brushed on the decoupage medium and stuck on the tissue paper. 

I would say that this was a much more mama-directed art activity than we usually do, even though Cadence still did most of it.  I especially encouraged her not to make the clouds too big and I tore most of the pieces for the sun, then let her decide where to put them.

Once we finished, you can still see some of the stool, particularly the rough edges, through the paper, but I'm okay with that.  I coated it with polyurethane, which we had on hand.

 

 

Linking up to: A Glimpse Inside

Easy t-shirt headband

Piper can totally rock a headband. She got a set of cute clippy hairbows for Christmas, but she obviously doesn't have enough hair for them yet, so I made a little t-shirt headband to clip them to.  (I sort of mashed-up directions from here and here.)

It was easy and quick but still took me about a week to finish because it's hard to find a decent chunk of time (like oh, 5 minutes!) to work on something that's not essential to our household functioning. 
The steps:
*cut a 2 inch by 16 inch piece from an old white tee
*sew up the long side, turn inside out to make a tube
*insert one end inside the other and zig zag over to make headband
* cut a small rectangle and hold around headband, sew together then turn inside out to make the little loop to clip the bow on
*position that little loop over the seam on the headband so it looks nice and pretty!

Serious baby.

Turkey Hair Bow Tutorial

Cadence and I made this adorable turkey hair bow during Piper's afternoon nap on Tuesday.  It's really cute with a ponytail.  Want to make one?  Here's how:

We started with a small brown yo-yo.  Here's a great tutorial for yo-yos.  Normally a yo-yo would be more circular, I smushed two sides together and sewed up the middle to make more of an oval shape.

We added two googly eyes.  And from felt scraps I cut two feet, a triangle beak and a waddle.  I used plain old white school glue to attach these to the yo-yo turkey body.

I traced an oval a little smaller than our yo-yo on brown felt.  This is the backing and where you glue the ribbons.  To be able to put in a barrette (as shown) or alligator clip, fold the oval in half longways and make two little snips with your scissors.  That makes the slit for the barrette or clip to slide through.

Cadence dug through the ribbon box and picked out some ribbons I cut into 2.5 to 3 inch lengths. 

Then Cadence occupied herself elsewhere while I hot glued the ribbon ends together.  Then I just arranged the ribbons around the edge of the brown felt and glued them down.

Finally, I glued the yo-yo turkey body on top.  A cute turkey clip done in about half an hour!

I'm linking up with project with A Glimpse Inside's Catch a Glimpse Party, Tatertots and Jello's Weekend Wrap-Up Party, Ladybird Ln's Turkey Show Off Party and A Little Knick Knack's Everything but the Kitchen Sink Party.

Homemade Laundry Detergent

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to make my own laundry detergent.  I read a bunch of stuff on the internet about how to do it, and then I ended up making it not quite as directed.  It was easy to mix up and WAY cheaper than regular detergent.  With this detergent, you only have to use 2 tablespoons per load so this batch will last quite awhile. 

The ingredients are pictured above: washing soda (not baking soda), 3 bars Ivory soap, Borax, and Sun Oxygen cleaner (generic oxyclean).  I found everything in the laundry aisle at Wal-mart except the ivory soap, which was with the other soap in the Health and Beauty area.  I grated all 3 bars of the Ivory with my box grater and then dumped everything into my metal laundry detergent tub and mixed very well.  All these ingredients together cost less than $10.

I've waited to post about this so I could report on the results as far as cleanliness and it seems to work just as well as the name brand detergents I was previously using.  I still need to use a pretreater on some stains (Cadence has a propensity for getting tomato sauce and chocolate things on her shirts), but I was doing that before.  The loss is the nice smell of our old detergent - this one doesn't smell at all - but I use scented fabric softener sheets, so it's all good.