Homemade Valentines

Today the kids made homemade valentines to mail to their grandparents and their cousins that are out of town.

On top of using foam stickers and crayons, the kids decorated their cards by dipping a heart shaped cookie cutter in glue, pressing it onto the paper and sprinkling different colored glitter on.

The inside of the cards:

To go along with these valentines, we’ve been reading these 2 great Valentines Day books, both of which are about making homemade valentines: 

Both of my kids really like these books! We borrowed them from the library and my kids have wanted to read them repeatedly. And im happy to see that as i was looking for a picture of this book to put on this post, i discovered there are many "Mouse’s First” books! Which is great because my children really enjoyed this one. Yay for great new reading material!!

To see other great crafts that go with stories, check out A Mommy’s Adventures.

Brianna’s First Birthday

Lately i have been gathering ideas for Brianna’s 2nd birthday party. I love themed parties and am having a blast with it. And i wanted to share what we did for her first birthday, even though it was almost a year ago!

The theme was ducks:

To accommodate all 40 something people, we had two parties. One at my house and one at my moms. But i wont be posting in any sort of order. Some will be from my house, some from my moms, depending on what im trying to show pictures of.

For snacks we had:

Duck feed:

(3 different kinds of homemade chex mixes.)

Cheese and Quackers:

To drink:

We had blue punch with rubber ducks floating in it.

And liters of soda we kept on ice in a blow up ducky bathtub.

Craft:

I gave the kids sheets of blue paper and lots of misc. stickers that had to do with water. (fish, ducks, bubbles etc). After they decorated their paper, we taped bubble wrap over it. And they made their own homemade water placemats! They got to use them for dinner.

For dinner we ordered pizza and wings, yum!

Cake:

My amazingly talented friend Sarah is a Wilton cake decorator. So she made the cake!

Brianna gobbled it up so fast! I got a couple pics, turned my back, and it was gone!

For the party at my house we had ice cream cake.

NOT a good idea for a little girl who will be using her hands! It was cold!

Presents:

She received lots of great gifts!

I am so excited for her birthday in 6 weeks. I have some great ideas for her theme and can’t wait to see how it plays out!

Color Swirling Milk Experiment

I am so happy Naturally Curious Tots is back! I really enjoyed it, when we had time to do it that is :)

This weeks theme is colors.

I saw THIS idea over at The Shafer Family blog and knew it was exactly what i should do!

I poured a cup of milk into a bowl and let the kids choose what color food coloring i should put in. I squeezed in a few drops of each color.

I then added a few drops of dish soap and immediately the colors spread apart. It was really cool!

I then gave them a spoon to mix the colors and the result wasn't as pretty :/

So i added a couple more drops, of blue this time, and it was somewhat pretty again, but not for long.

I think it would've been neat if instead of mixing it with a spoon, we just added a drop more of a color and the soap and kept making it swirl around everytime we did so. Maybe next time :)

Sea Creatures

To finish off our 3 week animal themes (land, air and sea) we focused on sea creatures.

The kids made paper plate jellyfish.

Just like the weeks before, Connor picked out the animals that live in the water.

Using these materials,

Connor made a paper plate aquarium.

He worked on his Preschool book.

 

 Tot Trays/Misc:

We watched our growing snowman grow!

Connor made a snowman vase.

He worked on the number 8.

He worked on his new Target dollar spot puzzle.

Brianna loved feeding her cousin a bottle. This made my day! What a little mommy :)

We played with Connor’s Little People horse set.

Brianna attempted lacing the apple. She did pretty good!

Go here to see more Tot School posts from this week.

Paper Plate Jellyfish

Today the kids made paper plate jellyfish!

First i cut a paper plate in half. Since it was already colored, we didn't bother painting it or coloring it. But you of course can!

I then cut tissue paper into strips and they glued them onto the back of the plate.

(For Brianna’s jellyfish she was able to put everything together, i just needed to put the glue on the pieces for her)

Then we flipped the plate over and glued on googly eyes.

That’s it! Super easy yet super cute :)