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. 

January Thaw

As you may know, weather in Buffalo has been a little atypical of late. We had a green Christmas and now a weird warmish January peppered with lightish snow that melts pretty rapidly. I've always liked the January Thaw that we always get around this time of year but this year all of January has been a thaw. At this moment I seem two possibilities for our near future: 1) Hello, mega lake effect snow blizzard or 2) Hello, Al Gore's next slideshow presentation!

Either way, I decided to have a little fun and throw a little January Thaw dinner party. So I had my mom and aunt over for a dinner with a nice melty theme. Maddie and I made snowflakes to drip from the ceiling. (Don't worry I help the scissors. She just stuck every other snowflake on her play kitchen.) We also made pipecleaner snowflake napkin rings.

On the menu:

And of course, for dessert I tried out these melting snowman cookies that I found on Pinterest.



And this was also a little Pinterest discovery... and a science project that Maddie and I made in the "Super Fab Lab." I had meant these little snowflakes to be our napkin rings, but I forgot to do them with Maddie on Saturday and they take about 12 hours to do. You can find the directions at the link above, but you basically make pipecleaner snowflakes and crystalize them in Borax and water. Super easy, but only for the patient.

Magic Butterflies

When I took Chemistry as a junior in high school, I had an awful teacher who basically treated us like kindergarteners. This is the one thing I learned in Chemistry - magic butterflies. (I still remember Mr. Herman placing the emphasis on the magic part, hence I to this day have absolutely no idea why this was a chemistry lab.)



I decided to try this idea out with Maddie and my niece, Annie, as we're taking them to the Butterfly Conservatory this week.This is absolutely perfect for two-year-olds and they really loved doing it. As an added treat, they're both marker crazy right now and got markers for Christmas. Score.

Here's what you do: Take a conical coffee filter and cut along the two folds on the side. Open the filter, and you should have a perfect butterfly shape.

Let the kids draw all over the filters with washable markers. They can color as much or as little as they would like.



(My niece discovered a new species of butterfly -- the H fly.)


Once they've had enough with coloring, it's time for the magic to begin.


Dip the edges of the butterfly into a bowl of water, and all the colors will run together and spread throughout the coffee filter. (Maddie is paying close attention to this step with the binoculars we made). Because these little ones don't have too much of an attention span, I ended up dipping pretty much the whole filter in the water, but older kids might like to see the water actual spread into the filter (I think this is the chemistry part that we missed courtesy of Mr. Hogwarts School of Magic).

We added little pipecleaner antenae to our butterflies and my sister-in-law and I decided that the paper towels we set them on were just as pretty! Here's Maddie's butterfly: