I'm having a bad, bad day...

I'm having a bad bad day.  It's about time that I get my way. Steam rolling whatever I see, uh -  Despicable me.

This morning I hung out with my daughter and a few of her classmates as they waited to walk into school. I greeted two of her friends and one looked completely miserable. I thought I'd take a moment to help her change her mood. She began to vent. But she didn't seem to feel better. As I tried to think of what to say to her next, the other child started going into what was wrong about her morning. Wow! It became clear to me they weren't interested in a grown-up trying to smooth it over, patch them up or fix it. They wanted to commiserate and unload - and just have their moment of grumpiness. And hey, we adults need that too, don't we? I was glad to be reminded of this lesson by a couple of 6 year olds this morning!

My kids know, sing and dance to the "Despicable Me" song. I like it as a diversion when we hit a rough patch. But for when that doesn't work, I want to hold onto this reminder that kids sometimes need to stay in their miserable moments too.

Bronco Fever!! Homemade Custom Shirts!!

 

Being a proud Broncos fan for years, I'm always keeping my eye out for a shirt at the thrift store or on clearance. Sadly, they don't ever seem to become cheap after the season finishes. And now, with the Super Bowl coming up, I was determined to get my own shirts. Here's what we did:

 

I searched the internet for free clip art, broncos logos, and followed all kinds of links to find what I wanted. I saved a folder of images. Then I found shirts we already had in the house for myself and my girls (plus one last-minute trip to thrift store). We had a package of "iron-on transfer" paper for our printer. It is a bit pricey, but the package of 6 sheets is much cheaper than buying new shirts!

 

I printed up all our pics, put them on our "upcycle" shirts, and now this family of Broncos fans have new gear to sport on February 2! Gooooo Broncos!!  :0)

 

Princess Belle Birthday Cake

Finished Princess Belle Birthday Cake

Here is the Princess Belle Birthday cake I made for my daughters' 6th birthday.

Thanks to a cake decorating class, I had the skills to make a few of the pretty extras. You could always buy the flowers in the cake decorating aisle of a craft store and stick them on with icing, so don't be intimidating by this if you don't have any formal cake decorating skills.

I started by making my boxed cake mix and pouring into one round pan and baking part of it in a pyrex mixing bowl. I am still a novice, so you can see I had some trouble getting my bowl piece just right.

(L) my pink flowers, which needed to dry out overnight first; (c) bowl cake piece; (r) round cake

While my two cake pieces were not perfect, the best way to fix cake mistakes is icing, icing, and more icing! Fill in all your holes, smooth out the rough sides, whatever you can.

Next, adding your doll. I was lucky that I had a Belle doll that had clothes painted on. I was able to saran wrap her body and simply put her down into the middle of the cake. If your doll needs clothing added, you may need to dress her and then wrap in saran wrap. Experiment to see what works best.

I added extra flowers in the end to cover this up. I also squeezed extra icing around her legs to hold her steady in the cake. As you can see, my Belle ended up being taller than I had predicted for my cake. In the end I added extra flowers to resolve this.

After icing the cake, I "glued" all my flowers on with icing and added more flourish to pretty up her dress. My little princesses were happy with the cake and I was pretty proud.

Family Thankful Tree

When Thanksgiving rolls around, it is traditional for a lot of people to spend extra time thinking of all the things they're thankful for. This year I decided to make a Thankful Tree.

I have saved a good stash of the brown paper used in packaging. It worked well for making a tree trunk. I then ripped it into stripped and let my kids twist it and tape it on the wall for branches.

Our family's Thankful Tree

close up of our bag of leaves

I collected some of my kids paintings and traced their hands all over it. Together we all cut out the hands. We gathered them all into a bag I taped at the bottom of the tree. Whenever someone wanted to recognize something they were thankful for, we'd grab a hand from the bag, write on it and tape it onto a tree branch.

 

I'm sorry I forgot to take a picture of the tree full of our thankful branches.

Upcycling Cereal Boxes

When my imaginative daughter asks me to do a craft project, I often hesitate and think of all the chores I need to finish. But this year during our Christmas break I was full of creative energy. She clearly hit me during one of my more creative moments, when she asked me to make her a laptop. And how wonderful that my daughter thought so highly of my skills, to even ask, right? So here we go...

laptops, closed

A small priority mail box and a cereal box are perfect size for a laptop. The priority mail box even has a perfect closure already. With a cereal box, I just use an exacto knife to slice one cover leaving one edge in tact. I wrapped duct tape around all the cut edges. I also used it to tape white paper inside the cover as the screen. My children enjoyed drawing their "desktop icons" on the screen.

laptops, opened

I keep miscellaneous pieces of cardboard around, and this was one of those days when I had a use. You'll need to tape something across the open cereal box, to lay the keyboard on top of.

Now, to add the keyboard. You can find numerous templates on the internet to print. The one I used was  http://typingforchildren.com/printable-keyboard.html. Printing about 70% gives about the right size for the boxes I used.

If you look closely below the keyboard, you'll see my mousepad created from a square of duct tape. But if your child wants a traditional mouse and you can find a spare one in your house, you can easily create a USB hole on the side of your laptop to "plug in" the mouse.

The funnest part was after these were finished and my girls sat across the room from each other typing and sending emails to each other. Adorable!

Homemade Rapunzel Hat/Hair

Close up of hat made for Kelcie. Bling includes an applique "K."

Full view of Kelcie's hat.

These hats were super easy to make. I purchased basic kid winter hats. Then I searched the sewing section and found a handful of cute applique "bling" that I hand sewn onto the hat. Since I was making these for my twin daughters, I used an applique "H" and "K" to denote their names. Finally, I purchased a skein of bright yellow yard for the braids.

 After hand sewing the appliques to the hat, I started working on the braids. I started with about a 3-4  foot length (if you make it long enough to touch the ground for your child, it can serve as a scarf wrapped around their neck) and wound it back and forth until I had a very thick section to work with, that I thought would give me 3 fat braid sections. I used a small piece of the yellow yard to tie one end altogether. Then I cut the loops at the other end and separated into my 3 braid pieces and got braiding. I simply tacked down the braids to the inside of the hat to attach them. Viola!



younger sister loves the extra long hair!

My girls demonstrating how the long braids can be used as scarves!

 

 

Kelcie showing how fun the braids are for twirling!

 

Frozen

Frozen. Since before we saw the movie, it was already a craze in our house. Once our December weekends were freed up after Hannah's play, we could see it. The girls kept counting down the days until Frozen. Christmas Day. I must say, it held up to it's anticipation, too! I wish I would have taken a photo of the girls at the theater - they wore their new Christmas Frozen PJs and Frozen lockets.We all really enjoyed it.

But the excitement hasn't dwindled yet! Last weekend we acquired the soundtrack! The girls quickly changed into their PJs and acted/danced out the songs as we listened to the music at least 5 times over! Hannah later explained this was their rehearsal for the big performance the next day - when cousins would be here! The final chapter of our "Christmas."

Saturday was the big performance - what fun!

We're still roaming in our home and out in the world, with "Do you want to build a snowman" and "let it go" playing on repeat in our heads, in all that we do.