Advent Wrap-up

 

This is a little overdue, but I wanted to share our traditional Advent countdown. Once again, I tried to keep my daughter crafting throughout the Christmas season. As I mentioned here, I whipped together a quick advent calendar of craft projects, including the elf ornaments above.

 

With 24 craft projects, I thought I had boredom under control and excitement in store. But this year, some were hits and some were misses! My daughter has moved on from my scheduled craft projects to doing her own thing. She's so quick to say, "Daddy, is that a coffee filter? I'm going to do a project with that!" (He's thrilled!) For the first few days, I was about 0 for 5. 

I started off our craftraganza, by making some decorations for Maddie's room. When we moved, Maddie got to pick out the paint color of her room and surprisingly, she chose Pepto Bismal Pink. It actually does look really cute and she seriously loves it. It looked a little jarring with any of our traditional red and green Christmas decorations, so I figured that she needed something new. I started off with the idea to keep her Christmas decorations whites, muted greens and pinks. The music box above is something that her Grandmother bought for her first Christmas in Germany, and it set our tone for Christmas with nightly rituals of listening and singing along. Surrounding her bed, I plotted out a Christmas tree forest, inspired mostly by the Charlie Brown Christmas tree lot. White trees that I drew on packing paper and we cut out together. Then I gave Maddie a pack of price tag stickers that I found at Target. She decorated in her very typical OCD way (I'm quite sure you can tell which ones I was allowed to do.) When she opened that pack of stickers, she was pretty thrilled with the first day of her Advent calendar. It deteriorated from there.

 

The stickers were a hit. Decorated the trees was awesome.   Hanging them up was apparently torturous. She did not want anything on her walls because then there would be no room for her valentines. I kid you not. I basically went all Grinch on her and hung them up anyway. She got teary eyed the second night they were up. She has since refused to take them down.

Our next two projects were to give Maddie a Christmas tree for her village. I was planning to make this Christmas tree to keep with the color scheme, but Maddie likes primary colors more. (By the way, that book leaning against the wall is the "bookstore". We also made a wreath out of a feather boa and a wire hanger. Easy peasy and also apparently torturous.

Then we started to fall in love with crafting all over again.

Most of our projects this year were some great Pinterest finds. These were Maddie's favorites -- the ones that she got very excited to do. From left to right, top to bottom:  Maddie coloring an ornament, snowflake ornaments, edible Christmas trees, snowflake window clings, pipecleaner garlands that apparently were better as a necklace, global warming snow globes (Maddie didn't want to put any snow in hers!), a gingerbread house that would last inspired by this large scale version (this is so typically Maddie. She loves decorating any box into a house!), the borax snowflakes up close, and a playmat of the North Pole (it's actually Elf-correct with a Candy Cane forest and a sea of swirly twirly gum drops).

This is one of my favorites: Borax snowflakes. So cool to watch crystalize over the course of the day. 

And fantastic for our mobile. We also made these candy trees (which I'm really hoping that I can somehow save until next year??)

As you can probably tell from the many links throughout this blog, this season I was not at my creative best. My lack of creativity may have been a product of a long hard fall. Or maybe it was the fact that I remembered the whole thing on November 29. But regardless of the amount of time I put into doing craft projects over the season, it just magically makes everything so much more Christmassy. Not just making decorations but the process of counting down, building in more quality time during a normally busy time, and handmaking something that will someday mean a lot more than the Popsicle sticks you made it with. 

A Leap Day Celebration

I'm a big fan of celebrating little things and it gives me a focus for some activities and crafts. So naturally celebrating a day that only happens once every four years seemed like a good idea. And hey, it's Maddie's first Leap Day! Things have been a big frog-centric around here ever since we saw Princess and The Frog, so that was a good jumping off point (hehe!)

These pictures are terrible, as per usual but hey, you get pictures. First we made some frogs.


Then we had a dinner: Those pancakes are supposed to be shaped like frogs and lilypads; kiwi (aka more lilypads); and flies on a log (obviously celery, pb and raisins).

We did an awesome science experience which I found here, that I renamed "Catching Flies."

You drop raisins into a glass of sparkling water and the raisins give off lots of bubbles and then gradually pop to the surface before dropping back down. Maddie liked trying to touch them and fish them out. She made me repeat the experiment over and over again, and probably would have stared at it all night if we didn't have a Leap-lympics to get to.

Ok, the quality of the photos above was bad, but this is worse -- and it all has to do with my badly lit apartment and a little girl who is constantly on the go.
I set up a little obstacle course that included jumping off a little stool, over a ruler, into a circle that I had taped onto the floor and hopping from lily pad to lily pad.

Every time I tried to take a picture, Maddie would walk up to me and stand in front of me, like this.

And lastly, we did a clothespin drop, but used clothespins that I had glued little froggies to. It's an easy enough game: You just stand next to a bucket, hold the clothespin to your nose and try to drop it into the bucket. Maddie loves to kneel on a chair and drop stuff into buckets, too.

It sounds like a lot, but they were all little activities with very little prep time at all. And there was even time for some cuddling with Aunt Dode:


Happy Leap Day!

Happy Ash Wednesday!

Hmmm, that doesn't sound right. I want to share a bit about our Mardi Gras even if it is a bit late.




Maddie, her grandma and I made Mardi Gras masks (just cardboard, construction paper and random craft supplies). I cut myself no less than twice. Nice!



Maddie's got her eye on you.



My mom, hard at work after two attempts at Fascht Nachts. (Turns out you should read directions when you only cook something once a year).



These things are delicious coated in cinnamon sugar or powdered sugar.


Maddie liked them so much she apparently took a bath in them.

And yes, Rob did eat his alligator Po-boy, though I did notice it was only a small one and he ate a big heap of my jambalaya.

Also, Wegmans has a pretty good king cake for those of you locals.

Laissez les bons temps roulez! Um, actually no... Time to repent.

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