Daffodil muffins and more Pinterest inspiration!

At Pinterest recently I saw a lovely idea - little chocolate cupcake "pots" with fondant green shoots poking through the "soil"! I didn't want to use fondant, but I pondered the idea for a while, and last week when the boys were marvelling at the daffodils coming out everywhere, I thought of what to do for our activity.

Yesterday we had time to make some daffodils out of yellow card shapes which I stapled to green drinking straws (bendy ones worked GREAT as daffodils have that sort of bendy neck). Then the boys twisted orange tissue paper around the tips of their index fingers to make a sort of cone shape, and then glued those rather delicate cones onto the staples in the centre of the petal cut-outs. That part was a bit fiddly for the 5-and-under crowd. We put them in a glass jar to dry until the afternoon:



After lunch was cleared away, we set up to bake a dozen chocolate-chip banana muffins! Here are the boys all lined up on the bench ready to make muffins! Samuel wasn't supposed to be up on the bench with them, but he moved like lightning and was so pleased to be there that I let him for a while :) This picture really makes me think, "Woooooaaaah, I have a lot of little boys!!!" because suddenly instead of 3 little boys, a toddler and a baby (like when I last checked!), I seem to have 5 little boys (at times) or 4 little boys and a toddler. Gulp! They're growing up so fast!



The muffins, out of the oven, cooled, and "iced" with Nutella! Mmmm....



Then all we had to do was press the daffodil straws into the muffins! Happy Spring!! :)



While I am here I will quickly post a couple of pictures of an activity inspired by various lacing pipe-cleaners activities at Pinterest. We have pipe-cleaners already, and I chose some fairly big-sized beads at an online crafty shop, which were bright coloured AND shaped like sea creatures (bonus, lol!)!! They have 4mm holes so were perfect for using with pipe-cleaners. Today I put them together as a fine motor skill activity for the little boys, and because they were new, EVERYONE wanted to try them out. They all loved it, even Arthur! Benjamin was already working on one of his workbox activities, which happened to be posting coloured wooden beads onto sticks that were stuck into balls of playdough, and he LOVES that, so he wasn't interested in trying the new beads. I think he might be a little young for the pipe-cleaners anyway.





I am lurking on eBay pretty much all the time these days. There are some great Montessori-style bargains to be had if you wait long enough. I don't bid much above the starting price for anything, so sometimes I am waiting months to purchase something I want, but it's worth it! LOVE me a bargain! ;) I have all of Benjamin's 3rd birthday presents sorted already (some wrapped already!!!) and his birthday is in July! I will post pics of my finds as I get chance, and as they turn up and start being added into our school days. Must go and make lunch now!

Special fish handprint craft

Another post where I want to blog RIGHT AWAY to make sure I actually do it, lol!

Neil's birthday was on January 25th - he was 38! And his brother turned 40 in November, so we are now really starting to feel like we're heading for our 40s - you know how if there's a group of siblings over a couple of families, and the eldest one of the lot sort of heralds the next decade as they enter it first?! Neil is next eldest at 38, and I will be 36 next month - Neil's sister is also turning 36 this year. My brother just turned 33. Neil's much younger sister is 25. So all of us 30-somethings are realising that the first of our bunch has left the 30s behind and begun the 40s! I can't believe how fast my 30s are passing by, seriously. They are the BEST decade by far, so far! :) Having babies, bringing up sweet little ones, starting to homeschool and see them grow and learn, having more babies. My 40s will bring and end to the child-bearing which makes me feel sad, but the parenting will intensify and the season will change and bring new challenges and joys. I should have plenty of littles still to keep me going, and a whole decade of homeschooling to fill my days! :) I will be homeschooling well into my 50s, and I'm so happy and excited about that thought!

Anyway! So Neil turned 38, and I had a project in mind to make him a special but not-expensive birthday present. Unfortunately it took ages longer than I thought to find the time and do each stage with the boys, and we couldn't work on it at all when Daddy was home. Finally it was ready today, and when Neil popped out to get some milk and bread, we wrapped it up and had it ready for him to open when he got home! The boys were sooooo excited, and I have to confess, I was equally so!

I saw some handprint fish pictures at Pinterest while searching for pre-school crafts, and it struck me how lovely it would be to have a picture with all 5 boys' handprints on it, maybe as a special thing for a card or present. Then I realised that, obviously, 5 handprints would be waaay too big for a card. The more I thought about it, the more excited I got about the idea! I didn't get to this point early enough before Neil's birthday, but I HAD to make it his present all the same!

So we went to our craft supplies chest, and chose a piece of A3 white card. The boys painted it blue with kind of watered-down blue paint. When it dried, it was a bit chalky (which I didn't expect!) so some of it brushed off and made it look uneven. But never mind. Then another day, I cleaned Samuel up after lunch and wiped the table while he was still in his booster seat at the table. I got out the finger paints and a brush, and painted his little hand in several different colours. He looked at me like he didn't know quite WHAT I was doing, but he didn't seem to mind, hehe!

I printed it in a corner of the piece of card, because I had already planned out where to put each boy's handprint. Then I called in Benjamin and did his handprint. He chose plain green for his, and wasn't overly thrilled about the process, but at least it was over quickly! Nathan had a screaming meltdown over having his hand painted and printed, and it was hugely traumatic. He's obviously one of those children who does NOT like messy play and stuff like that! I won't do handprints or finger painting with him again, if he really is so against it. Anyway, then Arthur and Matthew came and chose their colours and very happily did their handprints.

We let those dry over a weekend (couldn't do any more with Neil home!), and then I ordered a beech wood frame from a frame company I found through eBay. I wanted one with acetate instead of glass, because we have NO pictures hung around the house in frames, and I am pretty sure that someone will pull it down eventually (thus the need for something light-weight and non-breakable!). I chose one that was big enough for an A3 picture with a small mount around it.

This week we did the collage parts of the picture. We found green shimmery ribbon, and some patterned ribbon, in our craft supplies. I cut the green ribbon in a wavy shape, long ways. We glued it all on as seaweed. We used little buttons to make the air bubbles coming up from each fish, and googly eyes for the fishies! They loved doing the eyes for their own fish. I used a Sharpie marker to make the smiles, which ran out just as I was doing the last smile (Benjamin's) - thankfully it's acceptable because that was our last Sharpie marker!

We found some sparkly holographic star sequins which we glued on here and there, mostly in the seaweed, as tiny starfish - they particularly liked that part too! We had to use LOADS of glue for the collage parts, to keep them from falling off. It dries clear so that's fine.

Then we let it dry! The frame arrived, and I put it in there yesterday. Today we had chance to wrap it, and voila! I wrote on the back of the picture, "Happy Birthday Daddy! January 2012" and then underneath I wrote "Arthur - 7, Matthew - 5, Nathan - 4, Benjamin 2 1/2, Samuel 13 months" because I wanted to record their ages for when we have had it on the walls until they have their own children (I love the picture so much, I think we probably will!) and then wonder how old they were when we made that picture.

So here is a photo of our finished product! It has come out a bit darker than the wood and paint colours actually are. The top row of fish are (left to right) Nathan, Benjamin, and Samuel's handprints, and the bottom row are Arthur and Matthew's handprints. Neil LOVED that all the children had put their handprint on the picture. It's so pretty to look at, makes me smile every time I glance over at it, and is a wonderful keepsake. I am SO proud of it, and thus wanted to blog it right away before I lost track of stuff and didn't get around to it.



After I found the handprint picture at Pinterest and had my idea, I searched the web for images of crafts that people had already done like it, so that I could see some examples of what I wanted to create. I am SURE people must have done it already, but I didn't find anything. NOT to self-promote in any way (!!), please feel free to pin this picture if you want reference to something to make with your own littles, because it would have helped me to have a picture like this to work from, if I had found one on Pinterest at the time. There are so many great projects out there, and I'm finding myself inspired almost constantly in one crafty way or another these days! :) So much fun!!

Pinterest love!

These days, I am totally in love with Pinterest, as many people seem to be! ;) There are just SO many ideas out there, and if I find anything, anywhere on the internet, that I'm interested in, I can pin it in a second to a categorized virtual pinboard. This REALLY helps me with my foggy pregnancy brain, because I can't remember a thing I found or where I found it these days, lol! So it's great to go to my "ideas for the boys" or "school ideas for my 1-4 year olds" boards (I have LOTS of boards!), or even my "recipes" board, and see my options for new things to try that I already love the look of. Or a new recipe - never going to lose that once it's pinned! :)

Pinterest is really inspiring me to MAKE stuff for the little ones' school time. There is so much out there, so many crafty mamas have made some awesome stuff for their littles - particularly Montessori type stuff. I love the things I'm finding! I am itching to get crafting, but just don't really have much time for it. I just love the idea of making things that my little ones can use and really learn from, and which can be passed on to other toddlers as we have them. I especially like the frugal ideas, so as to make great stuff for them to learn from AND save money! :)

Last night I finally got chance to repurpose an old tray we've had for years, and don't use. It's a chrome-edged, wooden-based tray, and the wood was pretty stained and cracking a bit. We have other bright coloured trays and never use the old wood/chrome one. I saw this coloured car playmat that someone made for their little one to practise colour matching with, and LOVED it. I pinned it right away and forgot about it. Then a month later I saw this colour match car parking activity in exactly the same style, but this time placed inside a tray for a Montessori "tray" activity for a pre-schooler, and I pinned it immediately.

Finally I have made my own! I originally planned to make a card/paper coloured car park like the examples, and use it as a tray liner for this old tray, but when I got the tray out to measure it, I realised it would be really cool to paint it in there permanently with acrylic paint! I LOVE painting in any form, so I was thrilled to get the paints out last night and start mixing colours! :)

Here is the finished article. I am SO pleased with it! :) I matched it up with cars for an activity for Benjamin's workbox today, and ALL the boys were so excited when they saw what I'd made! Benjamin had no trouble matching the colours and naming them all, and loved playing with it for about 45 minutes after initially doing the matching!



I'm so pleased with it that I wanted to blog about it right away, and knew I needed to just DO IT rather than hope I found time later! I should always blog this way! Mind you, now lunch is running late, so I had better go and get that done! School is already finished for the day :)