The $3 Craft

Bird houses from Michael's provided 2 hours of painting fun!

Paper Snowflakes on this Snowy Day

Kindness Petals

Proverbs 16:24

"Kind words are like honey, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones."

We are focusing on kindness at school and at home right now, which is how kindness petals were born.

I recently read a book titled The Noticer. The main character talked about how you can tell what kind of friend you’ve made by the ‘leaves’ they drop, assuming our lives are like a tree. If they drop ‘leaves’ of kindness, patience, friendliness than you can gain insight into who they are just like when they drop ‘leaves’ of dissention, fighting, anger.

In an effort to make loving through kindness a life-long theme in our house, I’m going to compare their little lives to flowers (we are girly-girls after all!) and the petals that we drop make us either beautiful or “petal-less.” This will help John and I really define kindness for both Piper and Tallie. And rather than always having negative consequences for being unkind, we are really looking forward to adding positive reinforcement for kindness. When we see them being kind in deeds or words, we are going to help them fill out a petal; after they build a whole flower, 6 petals, they will get to choose from a handful of different rewards. They want to play at the park once they complete their flowers this time. Next time, Piper wants daddy to join her for lunch at school. As they begin to rock kindness, we'll grow to more complicated concepts like patience, gentleness, self-control, etc.

We'll keep ya posted on the results! Thanks to Beach Nana and Ms. Shannon for some great ideas while I was in brainstorming mode. I hope to see our garage wall covered in completed kindness flowers!

Happy V Day

Love, your gals

Valentine Heart Garlands

A sweet Valentine craft from one of my favorite bloggers (legit, unlike myself. She actually has followers): Yummy Mummy. We made a batch of salt dough and went to town. Fair warning: glitter will be everywhere. Everywhere! But it's well worth it.

 

Simple Salt Dough Recipe

 

2 cups all purpose white flour

1 cup salt

3/4 to 1 cup water

 

Preheat oven to 200 degrees F.

 

Stir flour and salt together in a medium bowl. Stir in water until mixture comes together, adding a little more water if it is still too crumbly. Knead until smooth.

Roll out and cut into shapes using cookie cutters and place on a cookie sheet. Use a small dowel (a small paintbrush works nicely) to poke holes where you would like to hang the shapes. I found 2 holes worked best for hearts so they would face forward rather than sideways. Bake 20 minutes, flipping once half-way through.

Allow shapes to cool and then paint and glitter them, draw on them with markers, etc.

For the garland:
Thread twine or ribbon through the holes in the ornaments and hang up!

Tallierina Ballerina

It's a Boy!

Baby número four is a boy! Tallie keeps saying, "I don't like boys." She'll get used to having him around, I'm sure.

Bye-bye Mullet

Maddie was so happy getting her mullet trimmed off. She sat so still and let Rach work her magic.