Nellie's 2nd Birthday

Nellie turned 2 about a month ago. Two-year-olds sure are easy to please.....as far as birthday celebrations go.

I made a doll for Nellie using this tutorial from Make It & Love It using fabric and supplies that I had on hand. I think it turned out pretty cute, but the yarn hair hasn't held up very well.

Nellie loves it.

Sam wrapped up a truck for Nellie too.

At supper time, I felt bad for not making Nellie a cake, so John made an ice cream "cake" for her. He just put ice cream into a tupperware container to make it a square. Best idea ever! 

We sure love you Nellie!

Sam's Dinosaur Birthday Party

Sam turned 4 a couple weeks ago and wanted to have a dinosaur birthday party. Luckily pinterest has loads of ideas, so we found lots of fun and simple things to make his birthday special.

I found these cute invitations and pretty much copied them. I guess I didn't take a picture of them though. Sam loved them. We put angry eyebrows on ours though, cause "dinosaurs are mean."

 He invited 4 little boys, and they were sure easy to entertain. We started off with these dino colouring pages while we waited for everyone to arrive and then played a dinosaur matching game (Sam's only request for party games). I found this one from Itsy Bitsy Fun and printed off a set for each of the kids to take home.

Next we made dinosaurs with foam shapes - also a pinterest find from Little Family Fun. The kids loved this and I sent a set home with each of the kids in their goody bags.

I made these bath bomb dino eggs the night before. They were really hard for me to get to stick together, but they worked out in the end. The kids were mesmerized with them.

Sam wanted to have a pinata. I was not excited about making a dino shaped pinata after remembering Hadley's lovely pony pinata, but luckily I have a smart husband who gave me the brilliant idea of just making a dino egg. Duh. Hadley painted it and I think it turned out pretty cute.

 I am not much of a baker, but managed to pull off this cute dino cake for Sam. Thank goodness for pinterest!

It was a great low-key birthday party. Sam was happy with it and that's really all that matters!

Pinterest Success - printable monster drawing prompts

My kids had lots of fun this morning with these printable monster drawing prompts from Picklebums.

They came up with lots of scary, fun monsters and Hadley decided to add some pom-poms and hairy yarn too.

Another great Pinterest find!

Hadley's room part 1

I'm still working on Hadley's room (at a very slow pace), but I thought I'd start sharing what I've done so far.

Here is her room a few months ago (the "before" pics). We are renting and this is what the house came with. Lovely.

I found this room on pinterest and decided with Hadley that we were going to do her room pretty much the same. I'm good at copying.

I patched up holes and painted the ceiling, then painted 3 walls a very pale blue. It almost looks white. I like it, but would have been happy with it being a little more blue. I painted the accent wall white.

We decided to do a chevron striped wall instead of the grid one on our inspiration blog, and it took me about 27 hours to figure out how to do it. I was using all my trigonometry skills and finally figured out that it was very simple. Each up and down of the stripe forms an imaginary equilateral triangle because I wanted the angle of the stripes to be 90 degrees. Anyway, I drew it out to scale and decided to have the base of my "triangle to be 20 inches and the height to be 10 inches  I don't know if that makes sense, but here is the picture I drew. I wanted the stripes to be big, but not too big and I wanted an odd number. This worked out good enough and I liked the easy numbers.

I drew a grid of 10" x 10" squares on the wall using a large level and a pencil. A chalk line thing would be easier, but I was worried about washing the lines off after, so I stuck with a pencil (which ended up being hard to get off too)

Then I taped the diagonal lines, making sure that the thickness of the tape was in the white stripe section. I put pieces of tape on the white line, so that I wouldn't accidentally paint it.

Then, time to paint!

Then time to take off the tape!

After getting the edges all painted too, and fixing a couple spots, I attempted to wash off the pencil. It wouldn't come off with soap and water, so I used Mr. Clean magic erasers. It worked but left streaks because it took off some of the shine. You can't really tell unless the light hits it right, so it doesn't bug me too much.

I am so please with how this wall turned out! It took a long time to do, but it looks just how I wanted and was relatively simple to do.

Stay tuned for more of Hadley's room!

our valentine evolution

2011
I found cute ideas on the internet for Valentines and let the kids pick what they wanted to make. Hadley picked these robots:

Brian picked these airplanes:

And Elijah picked these guitars:

And after hours of cutting, gluing and stapling, I vowed I would never do that again.



2012
I toned it down quite a bit and just found some simple printables that could have a small toy attached.

I picked 3 different ones and the kids chose which ones to use. Easy peasy, right?

No.



2013
Boxed Valentines. John was so proud.