What took you so long!?

For the past almost four years since we moved into this house, I have had this sign:

Taped up over our doorbell on the front porch.

Well, actually, this is probably the third or fourth version of the sign. The others were either torn or the tape got unsticky so I had to remake the sign a few times.

But still. You get the point.

Yes, the doorbell chimes just feet from our nursery where once toddler Finny, then baby Goose and now baby Girly Pie have slept. And yes, when it has been rung during nap times, they all inevitably woke up in a horrendous mood. So yes, the sign was necessary.

But seriously. Could you get more tacky than that? Notice the cracked masking tape that held it up? See the faded lettering that you have to strain to make out? Punky pointed out to me yesterday, as he tore the thing down, that I must have had it up backwards. The ink was actually darker on the backside than on the front.

At first it was just temporary. I took it down in between naps. But as you can imagine, I would forget to put it up some days, and those were of course the days that the UPS gal would come and ring the bell smack in the middle of a much needed nap. So I just started leaving my temporary sign up all the time.

I lived in denial, thinking it wouldn’t be needed that long.

But as the weeks turned into months, and then years… well, I finally admitted that it was to be a permanent fixture to our front porch.

So for the past couple of years I’ve been meaning to make a pretty little sign to replace the tacky taped paper one. But really, I never walk up to my door and knock or ring the bell. I always enter through the garage. Out of sight, out of mind, after all.

But, after years of excuses, better things to do, forgotten ugly signs, teasing remarks from my dad who would never have stood for such a tasteless little (not so) welcome sign on his own front porch…

I am proud to announce that today it took me all of an hour (maybe less... though broken up for drying time between the paint and the varnish coat…) to do up this cute little sign:


I guess all it took was the guilt of seeing my son pull my handy little sign off the porch helpfully, seeing it as nothing more than a piece of trash on the wall.

So this afternoon while Girly Pie napped and the boys played out back, I whipped out my acrylic paints and a little wooden plate I’d intended for a name sign on Girly Pie’s door (never got around to that either…) and set down to work. Then when Hubby got home he was kind enough to drill out two small holes in the circle areas I’d painted for just such a purpose. He was also sweet enough to drill a little hook into the siding above the doorbell so I could hang the thing up. Then I stuck some yarn through the holes, tied a knot in the back, and VOILA!!! A cute, happy little sign on the front porch.

Let’s just hope it still gets the point across to Mrs. UPS. ;o)

This will be the day that I dye...

OK, so I know it’s already Thursday night and that Easter is only three days away… so it is technically a little late to be posting about a really great Easter craft with any hope of anyone actually having time to accomplish it before Easter.

But I found a really cool Easter craft. And I just have to post about it!

So we dye Easter eggs every year – and though I think there might be some pagan roots somewhere in the egg dying tradition, it is one of those childhood memories that just make me feel a little too warm and fuzzy to drop. We most definitely put the focus on Jesus and His death and resurrection at Easter time (well, all year really…), and our kids don’t really even know who the Easter Bunny is. I think if you asked them who the Easter Bunny was, they’d likely tell you that it’s Mary Grace’s kids’ rabbits – on Easter. But we do give little gift baskets, we do a little egg hunt, and we do dye Easter eggs. So there you go.

Usually I just buy the little box kit of egg dyes and we go at it sometime the week before Easter. Sometimes I forget to have eggs on hand, so we do it late. One time I forgot to hard boil the eggs before we dyed them. (Just FYI, boiling eggs AFTER you dye them just washes the dye right off. And then you can’t re-dye them. In case you were wondering…) But in general, that’s what we do.

This year though I was inspired by a little book I got at a library sale a few years back. The book is called The Mudpies Activity Book: Recipes for Invention by Nancy Blakey. It is a great book, and there are ton of activities I plan to do over the years. But the one I’m talking about is the natural Easter egg dyes.

It just looked like fun, and I’m all for crafty stuff like that. I know for sure that I would have LOVED for someone to sit down with me and chop up fruits and vegetables to boil down into a real dye. I haven’t a clue what’s in those fancy dye tablets you get in egg dye kits. Honestly, I’ve barely ever even wondered. So how cool would it be to actually make your own dye?

Well, being the big kid that I am, I figured that even if my kids didn’t enjoy the whole project, at least I would. So I set myself a few reminders on my little email program to make sure I had the right ingredients at the right times (I found the recipe months ago, and knew I’d forget to do it if I didn’t set myself an electronic reminder. How lame is that!?). And, lo and behold, I was set and ready to go come this week!

So after a busy start to the week, today was The Day… and my kids were so excited. To make matters even more exciting, we had done a craft earlier in the week with some friends and had made little clay birds’ nests – so the big boys were so excited to fill their little nests with naturally dyed eggs.

So here is a little step-by-step of our very, very, VERY fun project – pictures and all…

The ingredients you’ll need to make the three colors we made are water, vinegar, 2 cups each of blueberries, chopped beet root and yellow onion skins. Oh, and eggs for dying, of course. ;o)

So we first chopped up the beet root and got the onion skins peeled.

We used frozen blueberries that we had on hand for the blueberry dye. I had everything measured out and ready to go.

We only had two of the right sized pots, so we had to piggy back the different colors, but the basic process was to pour 2 ½ cups of water (4 cups for the onion skins) and two cups of the chosen material for dying into a pan.

Then you bring the pot to a boil. Once it’s boiling, cover it and reduce the heat to let it simmer for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, we poured the dye and the ingredients through a sieve into a heat proof container where we left it to cool. I just threw away the mushy beets, blueberries and onion skins, but I suppose if you’re really crafty in the kitchen you could think of something better to do with them.

Once the liquid was cooled to room temperature, we added two tablespoons of vinegar to each color.

Then we poured the dye into some tall glass mason jars that seemed a good fit for dipping the eggs into. I probably could have poured the boiling liquid straight into the jars but it seemed easier at the time to use a dish that had a wide enough opening to insure a spill-free pour, what with boiling liquids and small helpers and all. ;o)

And that was it for making the dye.

Then we just had a blast dipping our eggs and experimenting with how the colors of the eggs changed with varying lengths of time in their color baths. We had so much fun that when we ran out of eggs we ended up dipping strips of paper just so we could keep going! The colors that came out of the blueberries, beets and onions were so rich and lovely. I really was surprised at how bright the dyes turned out. I kind of wondered if the colors might be a little dull and watered down looking. But they turned out beautifully!

The boys had a great time setting the eggs up in their little clay nests. We have two little animatronic pet birds in our family, named Chirpy and Sunny (they are fairly realistic replicas of an eastern bluebird and a goldfinch, with lifelike chirps and all) and the boys had so much fun setting the little birds on “their” eggs in the nests. They were so cute!

So the process of making the dyes was really fun. I know it would have been faster, cheaper and easier to just buy the little kit with the colorful dissolving tablets. But I cannot describe to you the joy I felt today as we methodically planned out each step of the process. The vast majority of today was spent in making those beautiful eggs. Each step was very simple, and the kids were able to do anything not requiring sharp knives or direct contact with boiling water. But there were so many steps - and a lot of lag time between steps - that it did take all day.

There were eggs to boil, beets to chop, onions to peel, water to measure, pots to boil, liquids to cool, vinegar to pour, jars to fill and work areas to set up… not to mention a ton of clean up.

But nothing was complicated or difficult, and all of it was very soothing, really. It was such a peaceful day. And as each step simmered or cooled without supervision, we went about with our other business of the day. The dye making process was just in the background all day long.

This will most definitely be the most memorable egg dying experience of my life so far, and I’m sure it is one that we will be doing again. I wish I could describe the satisfaction we all felt through the process. But I’m not the best with written words. So you’ll just have to trust me on that one.

So there you go.

A very fun, very unique project that brought fun to a whole house for a whole day. And now we even have some beautifully colored paper bits to make into cards and notes for loved ones!

So if you happen to have a spare day and some beets and blueberries lying around this weekend, maybe you can try to make up a batch or two of dye. I think you’d really enjoy it…

Oh, and don’t forget to get those eggs hardboiled BEFORE you dye them!

Fun... and tasty, too!

I just saw the pictures from our last time doing this little project, and thought it might be a nice thing for anyone to do some rainy or snowy day as true spring approaches, but hasn't quite landed yet...

Here's how you do it: hand the kids a bag or two of marshmallows and a box of toothpicks... and let them go at it.

I usually get a bag each of small and large marshmallows. And I always tell my boys that they can eat a few of them right away. Then I just make sure they know that the main goal is to make things, and not to eat them. They of course do eat a good number of them, but the real fun is in watching them build with the materials.

We've made robots, cars, people... and lots of many legged marshmallow spiders. It's just good, tasty, sticky fun.

Girly Pie isn't sure what she thinks of all this sticky nonsense...

... But Finny sure likes it!

Adventing, Benny-style

Last year I decided it would be fun to just skip “school” for the whole Advent season and just do Advent activities instead. I’d never celebrated Advent before myself, but was very excited to start this new tradition with our family and try and really bring the meaning of Christmas back to Jesus and the gift of His birth (and life and death).

So I put in a few hours at the computer Googling Christmas crafts, baking and activities. I put holds on a bunch of Christmas classics on video from our library’s great hold system (after all, what Christmas is complete without watching the stop animation version of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer a few dozen times?). I ordered a Jesse Tree book and cut out the ornament circles for the season. I also found a whole Bible reading calendar for Advent online.

And then – and this is the key thing here – I used a small three ring binder and some plastic dividers with pockets in them labeled one for each week of Advent and printed out some weekly schedules from Donna Young. Then I just sat down and plugged the stuff into the weekly schedules. I left a column for each activity and filled something in for each day. We had movies planned in, a Christmas song to learn each week, baking days, ornaments to make, gifts to make, outings to go on, and days like St. Nicholas Day marked with an appropriate book ready from the library and the right items set aside to celebrate the day in a fun way.

And all this I had done long before Thanksgiving rolled around.

And do you know what? It was GREAT!!! The boys were thrilled with the crafts and the baking. We had so much fun! I loved having everything all laid out ahead of time so I wasn’t trying to think of something in a pinch. The recipes, craft directions, coloring pages and advent and Jesse tree readings were all right there in my little book, even down the which movie was up for the day and what song we were learning for the week. (By the way, there is nothing cuter than three little boys banging on upside down jars and singing The Little Drummer Boy. I’ll always remember the endless rounds of, “Puh-rum-pum-pum-pum… rum-pum-pum-pum… rum-pum-pum-puuuuhhhmmmm.” It was pretty stinking cute.)

We made our annual salt dough Christmas tree ornaments. We made caramel corn (yum!) and home made gum drops (not so yum...) for the first time. We cut out gingerbread people and decorated them and made a garland of them to hang in our dining room. We made handprint Jesse trees and the boys colored the Jesse Tree ornaments and glued them up their each morning after our Bible reading. We made Fruit Loop garlands to hang on the tree. And the cutest little craft ever was this little wreath shaped frame made from puzzle pieces painted green with little red holly berries dotted on them, and then used as picture frames for my kids and hung on the Christmas tree. So cute! We learned at least three Christmas carols that we had not yet memorized before.

The list goes on and on. I have so many fun memories from last year’s Advent season. Yes, our house was a wreck for most of the month. Sure, I was just barely finished cleaning up one project before the boys were digging into the next one. Yeah, we had so much paper lying around it was undoubtedly a fire hazard. And of course we did not do every single activity I had planned out on my handy-dandy weekly schedules. But we did most of them, and we had a blast doing it all. This year my boys started asking about Advent and when we would start it up again around, oh, late September.

This year things are a little different. This year I have a six month old (almost seven months… Ack!) Girly Pie in tow and I am much less organized. This year Thanksgiving just came later than it seems like it should, so it snuck up on me that Advent was starting YESTERDAY!!! This year, I still have a handy little notebook, but I did steal much of what’s in the new one from what I had planned out last year. But I guess that’s kind of the point. I took the stuff we really enjoyed, I dropped the stuff that was less fun or just not worth doing every single year, and I added in a few new ideas that were better for my kids being a year older (or just easier for a Mommy with one more little one to juggle in the mix) or that just looked like fun.

So we’ll see how it goes this year. Today was Day One of the full crafting schedule. And it was a little hectic, I admit. We made the handprint trees and some popsicle stick angels, and did our Bible readings. But Goose didn’t nap, Punky has been sliding into disrespect lately so we had some teachable moments that interrupted the flow of the day, and Finny is in need of some sensory activated every 2-3 hours so I need to keep on top of our schedule more than I did last year (I’ll write more on the sensory stuff another time…).

And, much to my great dismay, sweet Girly Pie is starting to look like she’s got an ear infection. I know an ear infection does not sound like the end of the world to most people… but to a mom who has watched one baby boy go through years of chronic ear infections and fluid and has fought off ear tubes for four years with her darling Sunshine Boy only to be told by a new Ear, Nose, Throat doc that he needs to have tubes NOW, oh, and a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy, too… just weeks after his fourth birthday and that he might have suffered some slight permanent hearing loss due to all those years of yuck… well, let me just say that I am not looking forward to going down that road again. It’s a little off topic, I know… but prayers are appreciated for anyone with room left on their prayer list that my Girly Pie does not share the same faulty genetics that her big brother Finny and her Daddy (and her paternal Grandma… the list goes on…) have with a really bad ear history. I just don’t know if I can take walking down that scary, pain-filled road again with another of my babies. But God’s will be done.. not mine.

Ok. Moving on. It might not even be an infection, after all. ;o)

So back to the point. The point is… Advent. It’s fun. It surely has brought us closer together as a family and made for some really great memories for us all. We made more time to study God’s word and really got a lot out of that part of the season… but we also just enjoyed the family tradition side of Christmas, too. And as much as I want my children to know the true meaning of Christmas, I do want them to really have a lot of memories of family time and fun, too. So we may not be the biggest shoppers this time of year, and we may also not be completely focused on Jesus’ birth in every activity that we do, either… but on the whole, it has been a really wonderful thing for our family.

And if you haven’t done something like this before, maybe you can give it a try this year. I don’t have time tonight to hyperlink all the resources I have used, but I’ll gladly pass along links that anyone requests in the comments area.

So Merry Christmas to all… and Happy Adventing, too.