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!

15 on the 15th: November

My friend Rhonda has been posting 15 everyday pictures from the 15th of each month on her blog for a while now. Every time I look through them, I think that I should start doing it, but then I forget....and another month goes by. This month I was determined to do it. I am not a photographer, but I would like to learn and am hoping that if I commit to at least practicing once a month, maybe I'll get a bit better at capturing our life in photos.

So, here is our Saturday on the 15th:

Halloween

Halloween was fun, but I was sure worn out by the end of the day! I had put off getting the kids costumes ready, so the morning was spent making their costumes, them doing their own facepaint, and making doughnuts for our homeschool group party. Hadley decided she was going to be a zombie cheerleader about a month ago and Brian decided to be a zombie too. Elijah wanted to be a mummy. Sam had lots of ideas of what he wanted to be, but in the end he chose to be a zombie. Nellie was a dragon....cause it was easy.

 

 

Brian and Hadley played their part well.....

After the party, John made some rootbeer with dry ice and we had supper and got ready for trick-or-treating.

It was a beautiful night. Warm, no wind, gorgeous! I took Sam and Nellie around the neighbourhood and the older kids went on their own.

A great Halloween - too bad the nice weather didn't stay.

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!

cleaning with dice

I'm all for making cleaning/tidying the house a little more fun. Growing up we would play snakes and ladders to get the house clean, and I often have to just set the timer to motivate myself to get housework done.

Being a family with 5 kids, our house has no shortage of messes. Add homeschooling to the mix, and keeping the house clean becomes a constant battle.

So this morning, when I was faced with a messy livingroom, I decided we needed a fun, educational (so I could justify putting off "school" work for a bit), and fast way to get the livingroom back to normal. Or at least to sanity-keeping level.

I grabbed 3 dice and made up a little game:
1. roll the dice
2. add up two of the dice (I used 2 red to help differentiate)
3. subtract the third dice (the white one)
4. put away that number of things

This worked great for Brian and Elijah who are in Grade 1.

For older kids:
1. roll the dice
2. multiply two of the dice (red)
3. divide the total by the third dice (white)
4. put away that number of things

This worked well with Hadley - although some end up being a little difficult to divide because they aren't fully divisible.

You could obviously make up any combination of things to do with the numbers instead to fit your child.

We all worked together at it and pretty soon the livingroom looked a lot better and the kids got a little math practice along the way. Double win.

my favourite authors

So I'm doing a little friendly post today to share with you some of my favourite authors. They are my favourite because they are family! That makes them pretty cool, I think.

1. First up is my oldest brother, Eric Freeze.

You can check out his website and read all about him and his books here. He is currently living in Nice, France (yup he's cool), and is a professor at Wabash College in Indiana. He has his PhD in Creative Writing and just had his second book published by University of Nebraska Press. Both books that he has published are collections of short stories. His most recent book is called "Hemingway on a Bike" and can be purchase here.

 

2. Second, is my sister-in-law, Nicole Hillyer. 

She decided to write a children's book and had my other sister-in-law, Heidi Carter illustrate it for her.

 The book is called "What Happens in the Barn", and is a fun little story about a cat's perception of what all the animals do in the barn. Heidi did an AMAZING job with the illustrations. You can buy their book on Amazon here. 

 

What a talented family I have!

upstairs bathroom reno

When we bought our house, there was only one bathroom. The bedrooms are all upstairs and there was no bathroom, just one on the main floor. We knew this was going to be a problem, but luckily there was a random room upstairs (directly above the main floor bathroom), that was probably intentionally there to become a bathroom, but for some reason the previous owners never put it in.

This is the one reno that we hired out because it involved plumbing and lots of fixing old plumbing, and John was gone to school for 3 months and we needed to get it done. John's cousin and uncle did a great job and we are so happy with the results.

This is the best "before" shot that I could find. They had started framing the wall and put the tub in and the plumbing. Before that it was just an empty room which had a weird alcove in the wall that we just covered up.

They put in the wall, tub, shower, tile, and moved the vanity and mirror from the main floor to this bathroom. I put in the flooring (go me!) and painted it the same colour as our main bathroom.

I also got a vinyl window covering to put on the window (since it is right in the shower...)

The mirror barely fit with the sloped ceiling. I got the tile on clearance at Rona for about a dollar each. I love it.

We still need to put in a toilet paper roll holder and towel bar, but we love having a bathroom upstairs! It is kind of a necessity with 5 small children.....and 1 pregnant woman.

And just cause I love a good before/after pic

 If only it always stayed that clean....