The days absolutely fly by when you are far from finished on your crafting Christmas list I am afraid! BUT last night remedied a large portion of the time crunch problem – we had a Wrap-o-palooza at Kristen and Fydo’s to get a lovely chunk of my finished gifts out of the way! I am so happy we got what I had of the kids’ gifts and a few random others wrapped and set aside. I am so thankful for Kristen’s help AND that she let me take advantage of her massive roll of wrapping paper! I am still going to have to buy a roll myself for the rest of my presesnts but a much smaller amount than I originally needed and it will take a lot less time to get them done and out of the way! On top of that, Ken and Fydo got some gaming time and Echo got to be the center of attention at a friend’s house. We had He Chris to babysit and the big kids were asleep by the time we got home!
Echo "helping"
The two days before that we kept busy at home! One afternoon I cleared the blue table… washed everyone down, tied back Trinity’s hair and gave the kids sugar cookie dough, some flour and cookie cutters. A double batch of dough and I didn’t cut out a single cookie! They did brilliant and only a small amount of dough ended up on the floor (crumbs) and an equally small amount of flour ended up on the kids!
Making cookies!
The next afternoon we painted our Model Magic ornaments. I have some of the Crayola glitter stuff you add to paint and gave each kid a brush, some paint and walked away! We didn’t do too badly. ALL the ornaments got painted, one shirt tossed (it had a hole in it already so the red paint just put the final nail in the coffin) and all 4 kids were rightfully proud of themselves. We had to leave them overnight to be sure the paint dried and add the final touch – a ribbon to hang them on a tree with.
Painting
More sparkly than they look here
The twins and I battled it out BUT we finished our snowflake lapbooks… AND Gavin sat through (without crying) a re-write on a story he had misplaced. We printed off one of those sheets where there is a beginning part and then you wrote the rest. We got ours HERE.
Lots of snowflake knowledge here!
I have been working on a duct tape present for a family member and made errors with a couple of my strips. I was able to salvage one for the project and the other got cut down and set aside. Emanuel claimed that one for a bracelet and I had to make Trinity her own out of the purple duct tape I have in the house. They are so proud of their new finery! All I did was fold the strip in half (lengthwise) to make it one inch and then put on velcro circles. Result – happy children for pennies!
I have posted TWO owls to my Etsy store. Both Christmas themed and hopefully adorable to someone OTHER than me! I did a mini photo shoot in our Christmas tree for fun, of course, of both.
Christmas Owl
We have totally gotten into our Christmas themed stuff. There is a fun printouton Education.com to make little cards and envelopes. We went onto EnchantedLearning and printed off some Christmas themed early reader books and plan on hunting around for some Christmas themed math sheets. Gavin has excelled at moving up to adding two two digit numbers and dealing with results over 100. We have not broached subtracting with 100 yet but I don’t see that as being too far off. I have been told Education.com will have more Christmas themed sheets up presently but with Thanksgiving in the states being yesterday (a belated Happy Thanksgiving to you all) their focus was firmly on themed sheets for that event.
Emanuel and some of his completed projects
Coloured cars
The focus of the boys is firmly on their remote control cars sadly. They each (the twins) sacrificed an extra week of allowance to get batteries for their cars. So now all they want to do is play with them. Not the quietest or CALMEST indoor entertainment AND they tend to sneak off when I am busy with one thinking I wouldn’t notice the inevitable car driving sounds…
Remote control cars
I have some lovely craft supplies send from a friend who was downsizing her crafting area this week! I am so blessed that other people have extras of what we need more of lately!
Thank You!
Zander also spent some time making a hand pupped to entertain Echo with! I had to help with the antlers but it was all his idea!
Rudolf
My kitchen table is officially a danger zone at this point. So much crafting supplies out and no chance to them going away any time soon. I am certain there is more I could share from the past few days but the combination of late night crafting, strong willed children and Christmas plans have completely turned my brain to mush!!! So off I go back to the crafting and hope that Trinity winds down and goes to sleep BEFORE midnight!
Tree fairie