The Start of Spring Break

Friday was our last day of school. At least for about 9 days. We started the weekend off making snow cones or slushies as we call them. I figured this could find it's way into the theme at unplug your kids which was WATER. Frozen water is still water, right?

This was pretty much a self conducted activity; one they enjoy most anytime.

If you don't have one of these ice shavers from pampered Chef, you should look into it. I don't think they are all that expensive and the kids enjoy it so much! I don't even use the the bowls to make the block of ice. I just dump in ice from my freezer and they get to it! Cranking and cranking until there is a nice little mound of edible snow.


Yum!
Now I am off to www.unplugyourkids.com for some water inspiration! See you there.

It's a Happy Day!

The Unplugged theme this week is HAPPY. This made me grin just thinking about the broad range of interpretation we are bound to see from everyone.

Cori had a friend over today; we have the day off from school. After eating homemade biscuit donuts (Yeah, I know, I'm great huh :) I told them about the theme. Some times they are really into it and others not so much. Today they looked at me and their eyes screamed "Yeah, so what!". Knowing Cali needed some attention from them I told them how HAPPY Cali would be if they would be willing to do a simple project with her.

I saw Rainbows made from marshmallows at No Time For Flashcards the other day and knew it would be a perfectly simple project for her. I was equally aware that the older ones would not appreciate it near as much as she would.

Regardless, I forged ahead, showed them what I had and set them loose. Cori did not enjoy it much. She made her rainbow from sharpies instead claiming she really dislikes marshmallows.

Cassi and Alli made do with it and made their own versions both of which were cute.


And Cali really loved it as much as I knew she would. The thing that made her the happiest however was EATING all the marshmallows.


It has been really sunny here today albeit windy enough to send us to OZ. Still, Cori needed to be outside to be HAPPY today.

I found her falling backwards, over and over, into the soft thick snow. She was thrilled with herself and having a grand time. She gets angry at me for taking pictures but I loved the ones I got.

Cassi's happiest moment today was likely to be the minute she realized she was going to LOVE the new flooring Daddy is installing in her room.

She wasn't real sure when I told her about it and was concerned she wouldn't like it as much as carpet. Now that she has seen it going in, HOT DOG, she is bouncing around everywhere.

So, all in all, a VERY HAPPY, unplugged day with the best yet to come. Night sledding with friends from school, tonight. Keep your fingers crossed we don't blow away!

Unplug Your Kids-Creating with Bottles

This weeks unplugged theme was BOTTLE. I had an idea right away; one we have done before but simple enough for Cali and fun for the older kids too!

We've saved these small green bottle since New Year's Eve. They were from individual servings of sparkling cider. The kids loved drinking them and we all thought the bottles were great too.

I gave the kids several shades of green tissue paper and had them Mod Podge torn strips of paper to the bottle.

I made one with them; here are the 4 after one round of paper and glue.

The next day we decided to finish them. Wren had spent the night so her finsihed mine to take home to the big city. We were all quite tired from our late night performance and it shows.




While we were spending time our down time in the green room that afternoon we made some tissue paper flowers for Laura, our director. I borrowed one to take a photo although we are on a mission to find a lovely orange bloom to put in each vase.

It's starting to look a wee bit like St. Patrick's Day around here.

We're Having a Ball

I completely 'scooped' this idea from This Girl Loves to Talk. She does a LOT of fun stuff with her girls and after she does, I do them with mine! :)

Last week's unplugged idea was ball for which she made these. I in turn showed them to Cori and told her what I was thinking. Here is what we ended up with. I had a very hard time taking a good picture and not including the mess of her room.

I had them all hung up when she got home from school yesterday. Now Cali wants red and yellow ones for her play cubby under the stairs. I think these would look great in the kitchen in red, pink, and white for Valentine's day.

We Did it! Unplugged-Color

We haven't been doing the unplugged projects for a while. :( Well actually we have done a lot of things that would probably have fit with in the scope of the theme but the holidays kicked my bum and I didn't do much posting throughout November and December.

I was looking at the newest theme or idea which was color and was desperate for an idea. Cali is still a little under the weather but needed something to do.

I had some old magazines lying around so I decided to let her make a color collage book. I took a pretty blue file folder and cut the tab off of it. I found construction paper in the colors of the rainbow and trimmed them down to fit.
We punched holes in both and tied them with a bright orange ribbon.

While we were getting our supplies together and assembled we talked about the colors in the rainbow, in preschool terms. Then I handed her a pair of scissors, a glue stick and some magazines. She cut out pictures from the magazines that had the colors of her book pages.

In case I haven't mentioned it, she's been sick so this project was touch and go. She really wanted a lot of help which really meant "Can't I just sit on your lap and do this project". I really thought it would turn into a "5 minutes for mom" thing but not today.

She did enjoy it and I suppose I am glad that just sitting on my lap can still make everything all better! She didn't fill her pages but told me she would be adding more to it later. I figure until those pages are full, I can always yank it out for a quick activity to pass the time. As long as she is feeling good!

It's been a HARD week but we got UNPLUGGED

:) It really has been a horribly hectic week however we did manage to get a HARD project in, if only for a few moments.

I didn't really know what in the heck to do. I had birthday parties to plan, mommy preschool to get ready for and on, and on, and on.

Anyway, while I was preparing a few things for the party I got Cali up to the bar and gave a baggie full of old hard keys.

I showed her how to make rubbings with a crayon. Some of them were thicker than others and didn't work out so well but others worked OK.

While she was working Grandpa came by to visit and decided to show her how to make Mr. Lincoln appear by rubbing a hard penny. Even though it was a stretch I am grateful we were doing the project when we were. I think Grandpa had just as much fun as she did. I hope she will remember doing projects with her Grandpa. I know I will.

Check out this craftiness (unplugged-soft)

OK, so I am totally cheating, well maybe. We did at least do a project but it wasn't really original or anything. That's OK, right? :-) I have been perusing blogs of late and going through old posts in search of new ideas for gifts the kids might make for Christmas for their friends.

In my search I ended up at this blog which I adore and loved the cute idea for the easily made pillow. I told my girls all about it and the next day we were off looking for a placemat. That is what it started out as, a $3.99 placemat! Don't you love it!

Again this week, I didn't get pictures of us in the process (stuffing away) but mostly because we were laying in bed around 11:00 at night and I didn't feel like heading downstairs to find my camera. I didn't know about this tip previously but we followed the advice in the post and stuffed it with small bits instead of large clumps. What a difference it made. Our first attempt came out so darn cute that we are saving it to give to one of the girls' teachers for Christmas. Our plan is to add some holiday tea and a book to go with it.

We don't have a lot of choices for places to locate placemats but but we are headed to the big city soon and we will spend some time looking there. If we can find some tweeny looking ones we will give these to friends too.

I also read about this cute little pom-pom letter book over at Teaching Tiny Tots at Mommy School.

It was actually the Pom-Pom Number Cards link that I followed but it basically lead me to this wonderful site. Cali has enjoyed her new book with the brightly colored soft pom-poms so much. I laminated each page, put a Velcro dot on each spot and the corresponding Velcro half on many pom poms. The only things she has asked of me is to STOP taking her picture and make her more pom-poms. She likes the letters to have all the same color pom-poms.

I am struggling, thinking about next week's sand theme; can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with.

Unplugged-Insects

We had a lot of fun with this weeks unplugged theme. Insects. We do our fair share of insecty things around here on a regular basis but it was fun thinking about sharing some of our world with others.

We have an aquarium-full of walking sticks at any given time.

We are often asked to take care of miscellaneous buggy things during school holidays. We have had a millipede(we are looking for a new one of these) and beetles(these seem to escape easily). And we just recently adopted 3 (4 actually-but one died) hermit crabs. Not exactly insects, but creepy crawly just the same.

By the time school ended for summer we were down to 2 adults. I knew we should have little guys by the end of summer if I took care of our soil well. I was a bit concerned after leaving for a soccer tournament and coming home to only one living adult. Around mid August, I had only 4 babies. I made Grandpa keep them for the next tournament and came back to 7 babies. Now we are up to about 25 or more.

I am for some reason especially fond of them. I love to study them. The big one comes up to the screen top when I spray them and I can watch him drinking the water. It is also very interesting to watch them eat. The kids really like them when they are small but are nervous of squishing them. Once they are as big as our oldest one, they will no longer hold them. I tried to photograph the girls holding the babies but I am not having much luck because they are tiny and thin, barely visible to my lens.

We feed them romaine lettuce when raspberry leaves aren't available or I can't get to Grandpa's to get them. Here they are a bit camouflaged but if you enlarge the photo they are much easier to see,

When they get raspberry leaves I can actually see their growth from one day to the next. I am not sure why but they flourish on raspberry leaves. If you want a very gentle insect pet, this is the way to go.

They are fairly easy to handle. Not jumpy or slimy. And you can walk around with them on your shirt. :)

Don't change your soil and continue to spray your soil even if your adults all die. Babies will arrive!
The dark spot is where I spilled water changing out the lettuce for the leaves. They are everywhere.

I am curious if anyone else raises these. I was thinking about trying to create a larger habitat and wondered if anything else can live amongst these with out eating them.

We also did a caterpillar egg carton this week and a stained glass butterfly. Cali really enjoyed the butterfly project and of course she will paint until their is none left. I don't have the photo of the caterpillar,yet. It was on a different card which I've currently misplaced but here is her butterfly. I gave her a black construction paper template and she glued her choice of tissue paper on it. Then we glued another butterfly on and tada, our own stain glass window art.

Unplugged-Cylinder

Well, this week's unplug your kids theme was cylinder. We spent a LOT of time unplugged this week but didn't work on a project in the truest traditional sense. We did however have a quickie idea to share.I didn't even have time to take a lot of photos but we have one of our finished product.

Wren's birthday party was Saturday, which I will post about sometime tomorrow. (It was really fun!) We picked out several presents for him and fortunately one fit in our handmade gift container.

We recycled a(cylinder) oatmeal container, wrapped it in some cool skull-and-flame fabric, gave it a rope handle and stuffed in the squishy bike seat.
After opening or emptying, the container will make for fun storage in his new room in the new house.


I started with a practice model for Cali, but the fabric was a little thin and I painted the glue on the outside too thinking it would dry clear. It did however it warped the appearance of the fabric.

She likes it just the same. For hers I used a small canister that once held Doritos. : ) and gave it a braided ribbon handle.

This was really fun to give and we could easily claim the most uniquely wrapped gift!

Calling All Feathered Friends

We actually managed to do a leisurely unplugged project this week. Often times I realize late into the weekend (or even early in the week) that we haven't done the great idea I had planned for our unplugged project. We even occasionally do them and don't manage to get them posted before the week is well on its way, so I forgo posting about them. Not so this week. We'd been thinking about it since the TREE theme was posted and for some reason this is what came to me right from the start. I'd told Cori and Cassi to try and think of something but they never mentioned anything.

This afternoon I asked them if they'd like to make bird feeders. Cali was really excited. Cori was on her way out the door to spend the night with Alli so she didn't care much and Cassi kind of went along because Cali really wanted her to.

Once we got started it was really fun. I gave Cali a really long piece of yarn and a bowl of cheerios and let her string to her hearts content.

I gave her a little plastic needle as it made it much easier. In the picture below you can see the trees where we hope to host our new friends.



Every now and then she'd pass the string to me or Cassi and we'd string many at one time.

In fact once Cali figured out how we were doing it, she started doing the same.



I envisioned hanging our homemade bird feeders ( I wasn't originally sure how many different kinds we'd do) out by the koi pond and since we can see it well from the window, we stuck to that plan. We have two trees there about 8 feet apart. Now, I am not certain if the birds can cling to the yarn but in an effort to make it easier I pulled it very taut between the trees.

Because our string was so long, it took a little while but Cali stuck with it fairly well as long as Cassi or I took turns with her occasionally.

We had so much fun making these we decided to also make some peanut butter and birdseed covered pine cones.

Cassi was gone this time so Cori worked with Cali.

It was a little gooey but that just made it more fun.

We smeared peanut butter all over the pine cones. Grandma sent a huge box of these several years ago and we have just a small handful left. Once they were thoroughly covered we rolled them in birdseed. Then we tied a ribbon around the tops and hung them through out the two trees.



Cali was adamant about helping me hang them but after seeing the photos I think she really just wanted her picture taken.



We are looking forward to seeing some feathered friends arrive. I may pull the screen out of the window for the next couple days in hopes we can catch one with the telephoto lens.



For the record, I wouldn't usually hang anything like this with bears still on the prowl however we haven't seen any around this year, nor have we noticed any tracks. Also these are hanging on the side of the yard, right near the neighbor which isn't really where we see the tracks. If they come, they show up on the other side, nearer to the woods. If I notice tracks I will take it down but hopefully that won't happen.
It's a wonderful (Alaska) life!