Arts and Crafts

In the midst of all the craziness, I have tried to still do a few fun things with my kids. "Few" is the key word there. Oh well, at least I am trying. One afternoon I decided to let Gabe and Ethan help me make homemade play dough. We had a great time and, no joke, they preceded to play with that play dough for FOUR straight hours afterward!! You wouldn't believe how much I got done in that time! These are the instructions we used (click here). It is a great recipe and the picture tutorial was very helpful. We decided to not dye the play dough, but the boys enjoyed it all the same.

Later on that week I also decided to try recycling our old crayons into new chunky big crayons. I had been seeing a lot of "recipes" on other blogs so I thought we would give it a try. I had hoped it would keep the boys busy for hours again, but really the only one who was decent at it unwrapping crayons was Gabe and so the other boys quickly lost interest. I should have taken pictures of what the "finished" crayons looked like but oops...I forgot. If you do decide to make these, a couple of suggestions:

1. Fill your cupcake tins with foil before filling them with crayons. There are some pesky wax stains in my cupcake tin that simply will not budge.

2. Fill the tins pretty full. It may have been because I made them too thin but after we popped our crayons out the quickly broke in half. No big deal, but a little bit annoying.

Since Sam started at his new school he has had two "crafty" projects. In this project he had to research and right a report about an animal (he chose a rattlesnake) and then make a diorama about it. His teacher was VERY insistent that this project be done by Sam. Of course I was a little nervous about this....but silly me, Sam did an awesome job.

(I know diorama is spelled wrong here, oh well)

Didn't he do a great job? Couple of things about this picture...first, gotta love the "dead in the eyes" first grade smile. I recognize it well, I had the same look! Second, if you enlarge this picture you can see the scratches on his chin and face. Daddy had a great idea...twirl yourself up in the tree swing, then when you "untwirl" try to get off the swing and run...the above scratches are what ensued when Sam tried this and then proceeded to run smack into the tree. Poor guy.