Alphabet letters

We're back!

What a week it's been. We survived Thanksgiving and a birthday- my youngest girl turned 1! What a fun time we had with relatives and shopping and celebrating.

Our lives are back to normal now or until Christmas at least. With things calming down, my husband and I decided we needed to work more on teaching our two year old the alphabet. Today I cut out letters of the alphabet on red and green paper (for Christmas of course) and put them up in our dining room.

I didn't do a professional job by any means. I figure in about a week (or a day...) it will be covered in pen, crayon, or some other kid markings. We'll do another alphabet in a few weeks I'm sure. We had another alphabet up in our dining room a few months ago but took it down when the kids did their damage to it. With these alphabets, we ask my two year old several times a day what each letter is. A lot of times she goes through what she knows of the alphabet all on her own.


This wasn't too much of a project for kids, but my two year old liked pretending like she was gluing paper and really liked pointing out the letters. Depending on your child's age, they may want to help.

Holiday vacation from blogging

Hi Everyone!

If you haven't noticed, I'm taking a Thanksgiving holiday/I started a new job vacation from blogging. I will be back next week!

Jenn 

Edible paints

I've had my craft paints out for awhile while I'm working on some projects and my two year old has wanted to play with them so badly. So I thought a new painting activity would be fun for her today. I saw this idea for edible paints and I thought I'd give it a try!

I had originally planned on sitting my two year old up at the table and letting her paint different foods, but then I thought better of it. I could just see my carpet covered in colors in a matter of about 5 minutes. So if your kitchen table doesn't have carpet under it, this would be a great painting activity at your table. I decided for the sake of cleaning up, I'd try this one out in the bathtub.

Supplies:
Ice cube tray
Toothpicks to stir
Food coloring
Milk
Paintbrush
Food to paint on such as marshmallows (in our case, we just painted on the bathtub wall)

Put milk in each compartment of the ice cube tray.

Add food coloring to the milk.

Stir the colors into the milk with the toothpicks.

Now it's time to paint.

We turned these into finger paints and painted the bathroom walls. Ideally, however, these paints can be used to paint paper, foods, and whatever else you can come up with.

And if your child eats the paint, there's nothing to worry about.

Newspaper Hats

I was lying in bed last night and a thought came to me. When I was preschool age, I thought it was so fun to make newspaper hats. We could color them and add decorations. I wonder if my two year old would like to have a newspaper hat.


First, I had to remember how to fold them. I did a little research and here's what I came up with.

This is my 11 month old. My two year old refused to put the hat on at first, but she warmed up to the idea over time.

Here's how I folded the hat:

Take one piece of newspaper and have it lying flat.

Fold it in half.

Fold both top corners toward the center fold.

Fold the bottom edge up (only the top layer of newspaper) to hold the previous folds in place.

Flip the newspaper over to the other side.

Fold both bottom corners into the center. This can be adjusted to fit the size of your kid's head.

Fold the bottom edge up to hold the folds in place.

And there you go! One thing we learned is that you may want to tape the hat together. Our hats came apart pretty easily.

Here's my daughter coloring her hat. Other decorations can be added such as stickers, colored paper, etc.

A new job for me!

So... I just got a job!

It's going to be a huge change from the jobs I'm used to. But I'm excited.

Instead of cleaning up after monkeys, rats, and other science projects, I'll be cleaning up after kids. I consider it a step up in the world. :)

I'll be working at a child care center. The best part is I can bring my kids with me. I'm looking forward to a new adventure in life and hopefully have some new ideas to post.

And we could use the money. Did I mention that my husband's car broke down last week? It was almost $800 to fix. His car isn't even worth that much. There's nothing like buying your own car back. Twice, essentially.

And I know I said I would post more kid activities this week. My sister is sending me a bunch of things she has done with her students and is still compiling that list for me so I can try them on my kids. It's been a busy week for her so new activities are coming soon! Hang in there!

Happy Veterans Day!

As the country celebrates and recognizes those who have served our country proudly, we are celebrating with my husband's day off of work. Yay!

Today we are taking our kids to Kangaroo Zoo if they ever stop throwing tantrums. I'll try to post pictures if the batteries in my camera don't die like they did when we went to the aquarium a few days ago.

Happy Veterans Day! Make sure to thank those in our military today and their families for all they give for the rest of us.

Glow sticks in balloons

This was a really easy activity/toy for my kids. And yes, it's another glow stick thing. I think I mentioned this activity in a previous post but didn't have pictures or get around to actually doing this for my kids.

I bought a ton of glow sticks on sale after Halloween at Walmart. I got them for 23 cents a package. The balloons I've had around for awhile.

All I did was activate the glow sticks and put them in balloons. Then I blew up the balloons.

This activity is probably best when it's dark outside. I had a hard time finding a dark room in our house.

The kids still loved it. It's great for an indoor/rainy/snowy day.

I need a day out!

Today I had planned to have my kids do some bath tub painting with food coloring filled ice cubes. But the last adventure with shaving cream finger paints left such a mess that I decided to not deal with a new bathroom mess today.

I think instead we are going to go to the Living Planet Aquarium (I guess both painting AND Living Planet Aquarium are possible in one day but the latter requires less clean up).

I'm in desperate need of a get-out-of-the-house day.

Shameless self promotion

One of the things I didn't want when I started this blog was to do paid promotions for things. Well... I'm not getting paid for this so I guess I'm still okay!

I joined the masses and started an etsy shop. I don't have too much in there yet but it will just be filled with my own projects and things I make when I get a spare second (this is why there isn't much in my shop yet). You can see my shop here. I do have a few more projects that are about half way done so hopefully they will be up by sometime next week.

Right now I have a few burlap Christmas wreaths listed. If any friends or family or anyone who reads my blog (the anyone category probably just goes back to the friends and family category) would like a Christmas wreath, I am offering a pretty good discount to those of you who ask (the amount of the discount depends on which wreath and the cost of materials for any customizations- but the discount will put the total to just over cost). Contact me if you are interested.

I'm also trying to get some practice with my Silhouette Cameo. I bought a bunch of womens shirts that are sizes XS-XL in creme color from DownEast Basics (I LOVE DownEast basics shirts. If you've never tried them you are missing out!). If you want a custom shirt I can make one for just the cost of the shirt- $3, plus shipping (unless you live close and then there's no shipping). I would love the practice with my machine.

Anyway, enough shameless self promotion. We'll get back to kid stuff now. Thanks for reading through all this. :)

Jenn

Bath tub finger paints

I saw this on the internet somewhere and it looked like so much fun!

All you need is an old muffin tin, shaving cream, and food coloring.

We have well used muffin tins at our house :)

I just added a little bit of shaving cream to each muffin tin and then mixed it with a few drops of food coloring. A little shaving cream can go a long way so you don't need to use too much.

Let your kids paint away in the bath.

One downside to this activity I found was that because it's shaving cream, it doesn't last that long before you have to refill the muffin tins. Also, my kids managed to turn the bathroom into one of the biggest messes I've ever seen. And my 11 month old ate more shaving cream than I care to admit. Oops.

Potty training continues

Life has been so busy for us and so crazy lately. I have about 30 projects in my head I want to write about but I have had so much going on lately I haven't gotten to it. Do you ever get to the point where you have so much to do you just feel like you don't get anything done because it's all so overwhelming? Ugh... I'm there.

Anyway, we are having more success with potty training. A few tricks we've learned that might help any future potty training parents:

Don't let your child tell you they don't want to go to the bathroom. It's not an option. Even if they don't go, they need to sit there. Eventually one of the times they sit there, they will go.

Stick with it. I called my husband after the first four hours or so wanting to quit. It's so much effort (especially with a younger one around who still needs lots of my energy). But keep going and don't quit. You will make progress. I think this is where we have gone wrong in the past. I made zero progress the first day. None. Day two was a little better and today was a little better than that. Hopefully we're getting somewhere.

One of my students (yes, I was attempting potty training with this same child even back then...) told me one time to not bother buying pull-ups. We have agreed with this advice for a few reasons. First, they are so much like a diaper that my kid just used them like a diaper. Second, for cost reasons, they are expensive as far as diapers go. Third, I wanted her to learn what it felt like to be wet and to not want to be wet anymore. Pull-ups are just so much like diapers that the few times we tried them she just didn't have a problem using them as diapers and as a result, they were just a waste of money.

We resorted to rewarding with candy (I never wanted to be one of those parents who rewarded their kid with food. I'm just imagining all the eating issues my kids are going to have in the future). The star sticker chart just wasn't that effective so we had to do something. And well... the candy is working.

Just as a parenting tip- make sure you have LOTS of clean underwear for your child to change into. You're going to need them.

I have heard you can potty train a baby as young as 18 months. My 11 month old is going to start this process early (not now... at 18 months)- especially since she has been walking since she was 9 months old. I'm hoping she will be far enough along developmentally at 18 months to learn the process early!

As far as cloth diapers on my eleven month old goes, it's working out great so far. I didn't mind them too much when I used them the first time around but I think I forgot why I liked them and had used them for so long. We use BumGenius and Fuzzi Bunz brand cloth diapers so they are very parent friendly. Both my kids wear a size 4 disposable diaper and they cost between 15-25 cents a diaper on Amazon (I haven't calculated out the price for them in a store for awhile). I'm realizing how much money we are saving by going back to our old cloth diapers.  Usually between 4-8 diapers per kid per day times 20 cents per diaper results in a few dollars a day in savings. That's a lot of money for us right now. We didn't even have to buy special detergent since we still had the stuff around from cloth diapering earlier.

Anyway, sorry for the long potty training posts. I've read a ton about potty training and when I was teaching I had talked to several of my students about how they potty trained their kids (I had lots of parents in my classes). I got some great advice from people and hopefully some of this advice along with my own crazy experience will help others who are venturing out into the world of potty training.

I promise to have some fun activity posts coming this week! I have some fun ones I am getting prepared.

The dreaded potty training

We have been trying to potty train my two year old since before she was 2. It's been an off and on again effort on our part. But I decided today is the day!

A few things we're going to try are:

*Pink underwear. She LOVES pink. I let her pick out which pair she has on. We have tried Pull-ups but she just uses them like a diaper. They didn't do any good at all.
*A new potty chart. She had an old one and I think it got less exciting for her because it had a lot of star stickers on it. We started over with a new one today. A pink one, of course.
*I'm setting the timer for every 15 minutes. When the timer goes off, she WILL sit on the potty whether she has to go or not.
*Lots of praise, no getting angry. We generally do this anyway, but an extra effort on the praising might make a difference.
*I'm making sure she is always wearing pants so she can feel the wetness. And this is also to protect my carpets. We do have Woolite pet urine eliminator just in case.
*Watching a potty video. We used to have Potty Power but she took the DVD and drug it across our tile floor. Now the DVD player won't play the DVD. Luckily we have a free potty training DVD we got from Pull ups.

In other news at our house on a diapers related note, we are switching our 11 month old to cloth diapers. We used to cloth diaper our two year old until she got horrible rashes we couldn't get rid of for months. We are hoping to have better luck with the 11 month old.

Any tips that have worked at your house for potty training? I'm starting to wonder if it's at all possible for my kid to potty train.

Bread machine bread

One thing most people don't know about me is that I can't get bread to rise. It's terrible! I tried different flour, yeast, etc. I had such high hopes for myself.

Then my mom gave me a bread machine. Now we hardly ever buy bread at the store. Homemade bread is cheaper and healthier. It doesn't have any artificial additives or preservatives.

Last night I made a recipe that came in the manual for the bread machine. Usually I make whole wheat bread but I had just used all the butter in our house on another recipe so I gave this one a try. It turned out so good! It's called Kimmy's French Countryside Bread.

11-12 oz water
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 Tbsp oil
4 cups bread flour
1 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp. active dry yeast

Add all the ingredients to the bread machine in order from the list. Select the French setting and the crust setting to medium. Push start. The only downside is that the French bread setting, on my bread machine at least, takes 3 hours and 50 minutes.

This bread would work great for garlic toast. We just ate it plain.

Yum.

Coffee Filter Art

Once again, my sister has some great ideas for kids.

This is an activity she did with her students and they loved it. Well... my two year old loved it too.

What you need:

Markers
Coffee filters
Spray bottle of water (not included in picture)

I put down some plastic on our table because the ink bleeds through the coffee filters.

I let her draw in all the colors she wanted for as long as she wanted. My two year old had a great time doing this.

When she was done, we sprayed the coffee filters with water and watched the colors run.

If you want to make this an art lesson, you can talk about what happens when the colors mix or why the colors change when they mix.

When you are done, you can punch a hole in them and hang these up for display. We have enough stuff displayed at our house so we didn't do that but it would be fun for a play room or a kid's room.