Where I've been...

We had several requests for showings on our house in December which kept me very busy and then a week before Christmas, we received and accepted an offer on our house.    The first weekend after the holidays we took a trip to Wisconsin for a wedding.  On the way back, we took the kids to Chicago for some museum fun.    A few days after we returned,  in the wee hours of the morning on January 13th, my family was faced with much sadness as our wonderful American Eskimo dog Cazzie died very suddenly.   He was a great dog, full of energy and love.   We were blessed to have him for  12 years but I wish it could have been even longer.   He was such a good boy and we all still miss him terribly.   

I spent the next few weeks packing and house hunting.   We ended up having a double move as we had to be out of our old house before our new house was finished.  We spent our transition staying at my moms house and my kids especially loved that.  In fact, they tried to convince us to just forget about buying our new house and live with nana permanently.  Nana does love to spoil them!    We finally moved into our new home just before Valentine's Day.   Moving was a ton of work and I'm so happy to finally be in our new home.  I still have a lot of unpacking to do but we are getting settled and have all of our essential things unpacked now.   

A couple of fun tips that I want to share with you:   My friend Kelly (who is an Army wife and experienced in moving) gave me a great idea to help keep the kids busy while I packed.  She suggested letting them decorate the moving boxes.  My kids had a blast with this and it kept them busy for a few hours.  Great idea Kelly!  It worked out much better than me trying to pack while they unpacked the things I had already packed :)

Another fun thing that I did with our boxes after we moved into our new house:  I let my kids make cars out of boxes.  I gave them paper plates, markers, crayons and tape and they had a ton of fun creating their own special car.  When they were done, we pretended to have a drive-through restaurant and they placed an order at "Mommas pancake house".  After dinner, we had a "drive-in movie" night.  My kids loved it and the next day, they wanted to do it all over again.   I think it made a fun new house memory for them.  I have to give my friend Sarah credit for the drive-in movie idea.   In a phone conversation, she told me that she did that for her son's birthday party and it was a huge hit.  I knew my kids would love doing that too.  So, if you are moving or just have some boxes around the house, have some fun and make some memories with them!

Preschool and Kindergarten Reading Fun

My girls have been reading books on their own for several months now. Listening to my children read brings me so much joy. During my teaching years and also as a mom I purchased a bunch of the "I Can Read" books. You can choose the level that is right for your child. A few years ago a friend gave me a complete set of Magic Castle Reader books. Her son outgrew them and she knew that we would enjoy them. They are fun and easy for young readers and my girls are currently enjoying reading them on their own. Unfortunately, I noticed that these books are now out of print but I did check and you can find them from Amazon.com or eBay. You may even be able to find them at your local library. Some other fun books that my girls have been enjoying are the Fancy Nancy books and my huge collection of Dr. Seuss books.


We've been joining the library reading club every summer since my kids were three years old. This year it will be even more fun as they do a combination of reading their books to me, to each other and reading quietly. Of course, I still read to them too. I'm sure we'll be doing that for many years to come. I don't think we ever outgrow the enjoyment of sitting back and listening to another person read aloud from a good book. Check your local library to see if they offer a summer reading club. The reading club is great for pre-readers too. It helps keep you & your kids motivated and accountable for reading books all summer long. Summer reading clubs usually begin sometime in June, once most schools are out for the summer.

Rainy Day Fun...Balloon Baseball

It's pouring buckets of rain today. It's finally feeling like Spring outside but we are stuck inside. Boredom was sneaking up on my kids and they were beginning to ask for the TV to be turned on. I said, "I have a better idea".

I happened to save a couple of cardboard paper towel tubes (for a rainy day activity) so that we could make telescopes. I gave my kids some markers and told them to decorate their telescopes. After spending awhile decorating, they were finished and ready for their next adventure. The telescopes were fun for a few minutes but quickly turned into swords and my couch pillows became shields. It was a creative use for the tubes but I wasn't sure that I really wanted to encourage that game for very long so I suggested an alternative that was an instant hit.

I blew up a balloon (I always seem to have a bag of balloons on hand) and showed my girls how to play balloon baseball in the living room. They loved it! I probably should mention that although they played very nicely and had a lot of fun, after awhile, they became weary of sharing one balloon (a natural and frequent occurrence with preschoolers ;-)) I blew up a second balloon so they could just hit it around with their "bat" on their own. I didn't have to worry about the "ball" breaking anything, knocking anything over or anyone getting hurt so that made me happy. It was an easy and fun way to pass about an hour of time.

The next time you finish off a roll of paper towel, save that tube. When you and/or your kids start feeling stir crazy or bored, give this easy project and game a try.

An Indoor Winter Picnic

If your weather is anything like mine, being outside is no picnic ;-) The arctic breeze is blowing through the mounds of snow. My kids love to have picnics and in the Summer, we eat outside all the time. About a week ago we packed up a picnic lunch, spread a blanket out on the living room floor and we enjoyed an indoor picnic. Part of the fun of a picnic is letting the kids help make and/or pack up the lunch. Having an indoor picnic is always a special treat for my kids because it's not something that we do very often. As we were having our picnic lunch, I had an idea, or as my kids would say, "a GREAT idea". For our next indoor picnic we are going to create Spring. We'll spend the day before making flowers and butterflies and other typical Spring crafts. We will decorate the room with our artwork, spread out our blanket and enjoy eating our picnic lunch inside our little Springtime retreat (as we watch the snow fall outside). It will be fun and something different and my kids can hardly wait. The great thing about our inside picnic is that the paper bugs won't try to eat our lunch! I love how preschoolers find such great joy in the simple things.

Weekly Challenge: Enjoy an indoor picnic with your children and make it extra fun by decorating the area with some fun artwork ahead of time.

Homemade Bathtub Paint

I've always thought about buying bathtub paint for my kids but have yet to do it. I happened to find a recipe for homemade bathtub paint and I'm going to give it a try soon. It's easy to make and the ingredients are very inexpensive. It's the weekend now and I find that I tend to let my kids linger and play longer in the tub on the weekends since daddy is home to help and we are less rushed. The weekend seems like a great time to give this bathtub paint a try. Art in the tub! Fun and easy to clean. Sounds like a winner to me!

The Recipe for this tub paint was found at FamilyFun.Com

Color-me-clean Tub Paints
½ cup liquid hand soap, clear or white
1 teaspoon cornstarch
Food coloring

Time needed: Under 1 Hour
1. Combine the soap and cornstarch in a small bowl. 2. Divide the mixture into separate containers, then add food coloring one drop at a time. Caution: Test the paints on a small area of your tub or wall first to make sure they won't leave a stain; darker hues may be more difficult to wash off. Tips: Apply to tub and body with fingers or paintbrushes. Use bathroom cleanser to clean the tub if any color remains. Keep any leftover paints in airtight containers in the refrigerator for up to three days.

If you try it with your kids too, I would love to know how they (and you) liked it.

Butterfly Fun

Today my kids and I went to a playgroup at our local library. The theme was bugs and butterflies. There was a sensory bin filled with water and pretend bugs and among the bugs was one butterfly. Both of my children were especially attracted to that one butterfly so I thought it would be fun if I could find some bugs and butterflies for our own sensory table at home. After playgroup, we needed to stop by the store so I decided to take a quick look in the toy section for some pretend butterflies. I found a tube filled with an assortment of 16 bugs and butterflies for $3.99 at Target. Perfect! I also bought a couple bags of rice for our sensory table. Back at home, I poured the rice and bugs inside our sensory bin and the kids had a wonderful time playing. They even arranged some of their painted rocks (we get a lot of mileage out of those rocks!) inside the bin and made a colorful rock garden for their pretend bugs.

We also had butterfly craft time at home this evening. One of the crafts was from playgroup but my kids chose not to do it there. I actually had all of the supplies at home because I was planning a similar project later in the week. We made two variations of coffee filter butterflies. I let the kids color coffee filters with markers. When they finished coloring, I bunched the coffee filter together down the middle and secured it with a pipe cleaner. The pipe cleaner became the body of the butterfly as well as the antennae. The second butterfly craft was similar only I used a clothes pin as the body of the butterfly. After fastening the clothes pin in place, the kids glued on tiny wiggly eyes, drew a face and colored the body.

After completing our butterfly craft, My kids enjoyed helping me read aloud one of our favorite Eric Carle books "The Very Hungry Caterpillar".

Do your kids enjoy butterflies too? When I was teaching preschool outside the home, every year I ordered a live butterfly garden from a company called Insect Lore. It was a wonderful learning experience for the children to have such a hands-on approach and to watch butterflies unfold before their eyes. Our local botanical gardens has a wonderful butterfly exhibit every year and my own children and I spent many days there this Spring watching the butterflies bloom.

Mother's Day Ideas

I've always enjoyed making hand print art with my students. These days, I do a lot of hand print art with my own children at home. I love saving their precious little hand prints to look back on later. Hand print art is very common but there is a good reason for it, mom's love getting hand print gifts. Hand print and fingerprint art makes for a fun art project, sensory experience and science project too.

For Mother's Day I like to do hand print flowers. Paint the child's hand with one color or use as many colors of washable tempera paint as you wish. Instruct child to keep fingers together. Press the child's hand onto a sheet of card stock paper. The child can then dip her finger into green paint and make a fingerprint stem for the hand print flower.

I like to make copies of a fingerprint poem to glue onto the hand print flower picture. One of my favorite poems to compliment Mother's Day hand print artwork is below. The author is unknown.

Sometimes you get discouraged
Because I am so small,
And always leave my fingerprints
On furniture and walls.
But everyday I am growing,
I'll be grown up someday,
And all these tiny hand prints
Will simply fade away.
So here's a final hand print
Just so you can recall,
Exactly how my fingers looked
When I was very small.

Love, (Child's name and date)

Sick Day

I need a sick day but it's not going to happen. I can't tell my two preschoolers that mommy is off duty for the day. My kids were sick last week and they were nice enough to share their germs with me. I knew that I needed to find some low effort projects to keep my high energy kids busy today.

• I put a few pipe cleaners out on the kitchen table along with a pile of Cheerios for each child. They strung the Cheerios onto the pipe cleaners to their hearts content and we made several bracelets and rings. When they finished their projects, I let them eat the Cheerios off their creations and then start over again.
• When they tired of that activity, I used Elmers glue to trace each child's name onto a piece of construction paper and then I let them stick Cheerios onto their name.

It was a simple low effort, low energy project for me that kept my kids busy, happy and quiet for awhile. I didn't even have to worry about making them a snack because they ate plenty of Cheerios while doing their projects. They also got to learn about ABC's and work on their fine motor skills.

Weekly Challenge: Have some fun with food. I'll post a few other ideas soon.