I like to save all the broken crayons to make new swirly ones and I have been wanting to make heart ones for the kids for Valentine’s Day (Ethan is going to give them out in his class too). Unfortunately the mold I just bought is meant for heart ice cubes and I don’t think [...]

I have nothing against characters being on Valentines but I don’t like the cheapo little character Valentines from the store and I also don’t like the stress of having my kids do an assembly line of homemade Valentines either. This year I am saving $ and sanity by making my own Valentine’s for our 3 [...]

John got this built so much faster than I thought and pretty much all that is left is for me to paint! The boys are thrilled and spent their first night up there last night after our little Super Bowl fun. I just wanted to get some pictures up but I had my 50 lens [...]

Jamie is at a nice age for painting and its fun to give her different things to use besides brushes. You can buy special painting tools for kids but its so easy to make them or just use things you have around the house. Here is what I gave Jamie on the day these pictures [...]

Here is another one of our advent calendar activities! There are so many hand and footprint craft ideas and I think they’re fun so we did our family wreath and then we tried out something I thought up on my own: a family tree made of footprints. I had thought of this last year but [...]

Well I thought we’d try to make some of the gifts we give this year. Its not going as well as I’d hoped, I think they are on the young side for some of the things I had in mind. At first they liked making these ornaments  but after making 1-2 they lost interest. I [...]

One of our advent calendar activities was to make snowmen for each person in the family. The boys and John were out until mid afternoon today so Jamie and I started without them. I used to do similar snowman paintings  when I was an art teacher but I decided to try something different and we [...]

Last week Ben told me he wanted to make a Star Wars movie using their toys, but he didn’t want to see his hands in the movie.  This  turned on a light bulb and I decided to teach the kids how to make stop animation movies. When I was a kid I made a couple [...]

For the past week I’ve been making hats while I am feeding Jillian. Its addictive once you get started! Here are my 2 favorites! The yarn is about 50 years old from when my grandparents owed a knitting/sewing store so it makes the hats more special to me. I haven’t done much crocheting before, just [...]

John took the boys to 6:45 AM hockey this morning, then to the bagel place, then to get chicken food and then to the SLEDDING HILL! I am so happy he took the camera so I could see how much fun they had. I can’t believe how much they did so early today and now [...]