Fall Tree Craft: Bringing Nature Indoors

Oh hello there, readers of this blog.  You may have all thought that I disappeared into the abyss, but alas, here I am!  Actually, if you've been following this blog you will know that I take time off occasionally.  Either way, I took the latter part of the summer off and now....cue music....I'm back!  From outer space!

Anyway, it's Fall here in Northern Florida, and by Fall I mean that the leaves are falling down and it is still 90 flipping degrees outside every.single.day!  Do you think some of you could send some cooler weather this way?  My boots and sweaters are BEGGING to be worn!

We did get one nice cool day....one.  I quickly threw The Sophster into a pair of leggings, boots, and a {light weight} hoodie and she was actually able to stay in it for most of the day!  We spent the day outside picking flowers and playing in the yard at Granny's.  :)

We have also been to a couple of pumpkin patches this year.  The Sophster is seriously so so much fun right now with all of the Fall/Halloween festivities.  I'm saving most of the news on this for another post {that's right...I'm not doing one post and then disappearing again! You've got me for at least three...lolz}.  I do want to share a couple of my favorites from the first "Puntin' Patch" {<~~Sophster}

Family Pic {I'm in so much love with this!}:

The girl with her cousin.  Belly laughs are contagious!

But that's not what you're here for, is it???  You want to see what we did for our favorite fall craft, don't you?  Ok here we go, then.

Fall Tree Craft:Bringing Nature Inside

What you'll need:

• Leaves, twigs, acorns, whatever you want to bring in from outside.  I don't recommend squirrels. Those bastards are crazy.
• Washable paint {for the tree trunk/branches}
• Paper
• Glue
• A toddler looking for a good time

So we went for a walk one day.  We had to be on base for some reason or the other and The Sophster wanted to go play in the field full of old airplanes and helicopters.  She loves that stuff.  We played there for a bit and then she decided she wanted to go to the playground, which was just a short walk.  So we set off on foot.  The pathway to the playground is lined in several different types of trees and they had all started dropping their leaves, so of course we had to stop and investigate!  We found leaves of different sizes and colors.  Even found some baby acorns on twigs and an oak leaf with a little fuzzy thing on it!  Anyway, I had no idea what we would do with all of these leaves {I'm not crafty by nature}, but The Sophster insisted that we bring them home....and I hate to disappoint that girl, so bring them home we did.

They sat outside on a shelf in our garage for several days when I thought I remembered seeing something somewhere about using your kids arm/hand as a paint brush and making a tree!  Heck yes I did!  This is what we were going to do!  Oh man...The Sophster was so excited when I told her we get to paint her ARM!  WOAH!  

Here's what we did.  I sat her at her table in the middle of the room, painted her forearm and hand with brown washable paint, then pressed her arm/hand down onto the paper.  Then, I had her do a couple more handprints to make the branches of the tree.  I ended up going over the "trunk" more with a paintbrush because Sophi's arm is so tiny that it looked like some giant branches on a wimpy little tree.  No, my kid's arm is not really that fat. ;)

At this point, you kind of let your toddler take the reigns and get creative on where and how each piece of nature will be placed on their paper.  The Sophster loved picking on her own and telling me exactly where each thing would go.

We have used the glue stick many many times, but this is the first time that The Sophster has used a bottle of glue.  I have to say, I was pretty impressed with her ability to hold the giant bottle of Elmer's, glue a straight line onto a leaf, and hardly make a mess!  

This was a relatively quick craft to do, but we had so much fun!  

Once the glue dried, I made sure that all of the pieces were secured, The Sophster helped me pick out a nice spot on her playroom wall, and we hung it.  We actually did this craft a couple of weeks ago, and she still wants to show it to everyone who comes over! 

The final product, on the wall:

What do you think?  Does this seem like something you would do with your kids?  What kinds of fall crafting projects have you been up to?  

Independence Day 2013

This year for Independence Day, we didn't do anything crazy exciting.  Just spent the day crafting, playing, and spending time with some good friends of ours, but I'm going to write about it anyway....because for the life of me, I can't remember what we did last year and I don't want to forget again. :)  Last year, Mitch was deployed and The Sophster was barely 17 months old, so I don't think we did much....anyway....

This year, we decided that we would have some fun!  We started out by doing a little craft idea {that I may have hi-jacked from one of my super creative mommy friends} and made a flag!  This was a super easy craft.  All things I had on hand, only a couple of minutes to prep, and Sophi had a blast!  There's also that part about learning through play and such. ;)

All I did was cut a medium sized rectangle out of a piece of blue construction paper, and a bunch of small squares from red. Then, I wrangled the toddler {all it takes is telling her she gets to glue something and she is THERE}, gave her a white sheet of paper, put some glue down, told her where everything went, and put her little fingers to work! Meanwhile, we talked about the meaning of Independence Day, the flag, what it is to be free, etc. I'm pretty sure she had no idea what I was talking about, but whatevs. We had fun, anyway. She was very proud of her flag!

Once it warmed up a bit outside, we decided to go outside and help Daddy wash the vehicles. I put The Sophster in her bathing suit, we set up the baby pool and the wacky waving sprinkler thingy, and we headed outside. She pretty much ignored the sprinkler, but she had a great time helping Daddy wash the cars and transferring sponges from the wash bucket to her pool and back again.

After The Sophster woke up from her nap, we headed over to a friend's house for some swimming and fireworks! Being the bad mommy blogger that I am, I didn't take pictures of either of these things. Oops! We did have a nice time, though. Sophi got to spend some time with her friend Anslee, and Mitch and I got some good QT in with our friends {and a bottle of wine}. My girlfriend, Jessica, gave Soph a fishing lesson. She loved it and I'm sure it won't be the last time we sit on a dock and yell "Here fishy fishy! Come out Mister Fishies!" over the side. ;)

We hung out and waited for fireworks, but they didn't start until 9:45 and by then, Sophi was beat. She wanted nothing to do with those fireworks and was demanding to go home! Alas, maybe next year she will be ready for the fireworks. We did set some small ones off, but again, she was too tired to care much at all.

Anyway, that was our Independence Day! It's never too late to write a post about a holiday when it's loaded with cute toddler pictures, right??? Hope you had a great holiday, too!

Easter

It's only a week past Easter so it's not too late to blog about it, right? Even though I had full intention on writing this a week ago. Oops! What can I say? The weather has been SO awesome lately that I just haven't felt like sitting at the computer. SO! We had a really fun Easter! Mitch and I were really excited because, even though this was actually the Sophster's third Easter, it was the first one where we have felt that she could get involved with the fun of the holiday...and we went all out! We did several tot school activities throughout the week and FOUR egg hunts! I'll show you the tot school activities that we did this week, first.

Easter School Activities

My iPhoto program kind of crapped out on me last weekend and I, sadly, lost a lot of pics. Mitch was able to get most of them back {that man is a God sent!}, but needless to say, I was an emotional wreck the night that it happened. I am still finding more and more that have been lost. I'm saying this here because, a lot of the missing pics are pics that I took of the Sophster with her school activities. {sad face}

This week was either a complete hit or a complete miss for Soph, and that's ok. We're both still trying to feel different things out. This is only the beginning. :)

The first thing I did was {get really super excited about my new laminator, and} printed out this egg themed, shape matching game. I found the idea on Pinterest but for the life of me, I can't find it now! Anyway, the big sheet has one big shape on each egg, and the individual eggs have multiple small shapes on them. Sophi figured this out pretty quickly. I kind of knew that she would BUT what I especially love about this activity is that it got her saying names of two shapes that she hadn't named before, rectangle and oval. Cool! Oh, I ended up gluing some of that no skid shelf liner to the backs of the eggs because they weren't staying in place well and she was getting frustrated. That worked out perfect. Fun for days!




Another thing that I did was just gave her two bowls, put several of her Easter eggs in one bowl, and gave her a spoon. Then, I encouraged her to scoop the eggs up onto the spoon and transfer them to the other bowl. Yeah...she couldn't have cared less about this. She wanted to break all of the eggs open and then put them in the other bowl. After a few minutes, though, she DID start scooping the egg halves and moving them from bowl to bowl. Success! Her interest was not held for long on this activity, though.



The third thing I did was printed out a large b/w Easter egg, laminated it and let her color it with her dry-erase markers. She loved this! We are big fans of coloring around here! She also loved that mommy could just wash it off and she could start all over again. I presented this to her, along with the next thing, after her nap one day.


The other thing that got rolled out was a picture of the Easter Bunny that was printed 5 times, in progressive sizes. The goal here was to get her to sort them from largest - smallest or visa versa. She didn't get it at first. She was VERY excited when she saw it. She ran over and started pointing and yelling "Easter Bunny Easter Bunny Easter Bunny!!!", which eventually turned into, "One, two, three, four, five! Five Easter Bunnies, mommy!", which EVENTUALLY turned into her stacking them with largest bunny on the bottom up to the smallest bunny on top. So, even though it didn't work out as I had planned, she definitely got a few lessons from this and it wasn't an idea wasted. :)




The Fun Stuff!

As I mentioned before, this is the first year that we have involved Sophi in any kind of Easter egg hunt or Easter activities. The first thing we did was a glow in the dark egg hunt! I found the idea on Pinterest, originally posted by Play at Home Mom, and could not WAIT to do this!! So, I got on Amazon and ordered a bunch of these finger lights {wow, they're like $4 cheaper now!}, threw those babies in some eggs, waited for it to get semi-dark out so that the light wouldn't come in the blinds too bad, and hid them while Mitch distracted the nosy toddler with food. ;) I was nervous about how this would turn out, since she had never hunted eggs. As usual, I was nervous for no reason. Not only did she "get it", she LOVED IT! It was SUCH a huge hit! Then, the lights went to hang out with my little brother, who did a night time outside egg hunt for my nephew, who also begged to do it over and over again!




We colored eggs

Well, Sophi "painted" eggs. I got the cups all out and set up all nice and pretty, laid a towel down underneath, came prepared with dippers....c'mon lady, you're working with a two year old, here! LOL!! We showed her the "right way" and then she did it her way. She grabbed an egg, plopped it onto the towel in front of her, dunked her tiny little hands into the colored water, and painted those eggs! She was so proud of herself and asked to do it again for days after. We were pretty proud of her, too. :)



Yeah, we may have slammed one or two into the glasses and busted some shells. Oops!

Egg Hunt #2

Our first outdoor egg hunt was the Friday before Easter. There was an egg hunt over at Sophi's Oma's condo. So I got our little pretty all dolled up in one of her Easter dresses and we headed over. The weather could not have been more perfect. It was the first perfect day of the season, I think. Absolutely gorgeous! Sophi had a blast. She didn't get a whole lot of eggs because instead of grabbing the egg, throwing it in the basket, and moving on, she has to open every egg that she finds....right then. Oh well, she didn't care how many eggs she got so neither did we! Here are a few of my favorites from that day.



Easter Festival

Saturday, the day before Easter, my little brother and nephew drove out to join us for the Easter festival near our place. The kids had an egg hunt but it was kind of a joke. So many grown people were snatching up eggs and throwing them in their little's {3 and under} basket and Jaiden and Sophi only got a couple of eggs a piece. No biggie, though. Why? Because they had a train! And free popsicles! We stayed for a few hours and had a great time. Sophi is completely obsessed with her cousin. She is always wanting to hold his hand or hug and kiss him. She asks about him every day. I hope that when they grow up, that he will be like the protective big brother that she doesn't have. :)



Easter Morning :)

The Easter Bunny came Saturday night and left Sophi a trail of jelly beans leading from her room to her very first Easter basket on the coffee table! This was a HUGE hit! She woke up and we went in to get her, told her that the Easter bunny had come and had left some surprises for her. Once she woke up and got all of her snuggles out {oh how we love that part!}, she was off to explore! She stopped as soon as she saw the jelly beans and proclaimed "JELLY BEANS!!", then stooped down to eat one. We actually had to encourage her to follow the trail, and not sit and eat every one along the way. LOL! She had a blast going through her basket and discovering the goodies inside. After that excitement had calmed some, we gave her breakfast and I hid the eggs in our front yard while she ate. Then we headed out and let her hunt! She had a great time. We all did. It was an awesome Easter. She still asks to see the Easter Bunny {whom she refused to see while he was around} every night before bed. Silly girl, maybe you'll be ready for him next year. :)




Aaaand last but not least, our attempt at a family selfie on Easter morning. I looooove Sophi's bed head and how I look like I just rolled out of bed but I have that "I am one seriously proud mama!" look on my face. Because, well, I am.




How did you spend your Easter? Do anything special with the people you love? Whatever you did, I hope you all had a fantastic weekend!