October Crafts

We like to do projects/crafts at our house...no surprise. I LOVE the blog No Time for Flashcards. I also look at the blog Oopsey Daisy. Both of these women are former teachers for young children. They have some great stuff on their blogs that have helped me a ton. I get a lot of ideas from them, but they have also helped me to think of things on my own or variations of their projects. Sometimes I think back to my Elementary Teaching days or my days working at a Day Care and wonder how much more I would have enjoyed those days if I had these types of resources and ideas to pull from. Hmmm...

Anyway, we have been having a great time this month!! We made pumpkin shapes for the fridge and laminated a ton of different face shapes and put magnets on them. We love creating new faces for these fridge pumpkins. I even took them to Primary one week and everyone loved them while we practiced singing songs.




We used coffee filters and tried out some techniques. One set we colored with non-washable marker then sprinkled water on them and let them dry. Another set, we dropped yellow and red food coloring on them and then sprinkled them with water and let dry. They both had really neat results. The boys designed some faces for them and we taped them to our Halloween Wall. I added a construction paper fence/gate to make 5 Little Pumpkins.

We also made hand print bats and stuck them in the "sky" of our wall. Adorable!!

We used little halloween character erasers for sorting, counting, and making patterns. (A No Time For Flashcards idea) The boys really liked it.



We made witches for our wall. This one was completely my idea...no blog helps:) The boys loved her green face and the fact that she has tights...which they got to pick out. Damon loved drawing the face on his and decorating her broom.



For Family Home Evening treat, we decided to make pumpkins out of Rice Krispie Treats. Damon helped me mold them (he was in charge of treat) and was really helpful...those things are super sticky!




I thought our "sky" needed some owls flying around with those bats and witches. Our bats turned out WAY better than I had imagined!!



On No Time for Flashcards she has a lot of sensory bucket ideas. Damon was at preschool one morning, so I thought Tommy would enjoy playing with dried beans and Halloween erasers just scooping and dumping away...and he did! We got smart and put a plastic tray/lid underneath to catch the ones that dropped.



We painted Frankenstein faces with mini paper plates. I had them use a sponge to stencil the hair on...then they drew faces. (I didn't get a picture yet...)

We made spiders too! We painted old mason jar lids, then hot glued on googley eyes and rick rack legs...super cute!





We also made glue ghosts. We used Elmer's glue to draw an fill in a ghost shape onto a page protector sheet. It took almost 2 days to fully dry, but then they cling to the window...we added a piece of tape to help them stick.

We made lollipop ghosts to hang from the ceiling too:)

We're trying to decide what else we need for our Halloween scene. We'll see if we can get it all done before the big night:)

Stake Conference Weekend

Stake Conference was the weekend after General Conference. Our good friends from up north came over for the afternoon Sunday. We love them. Our kids play so well with their kids (we have boys...they have girls). It is always so nice to be with them. We were sad to think that they will soon be done with school and moving on to bigger and better things. We will miss them so much! By the end of the afternoon, the kids were getting pretty restless and started jumping off things...like the couch...and the window seat (after they did a little dancing). Such fun times!

General Conference Weekend

We love General Conference weekend. Love it! Saturday morning we woke up and headed out to clean the church. When we got home, we started making applesauce to can. Unfortunately we didn't quite finish before conference started, but at least all the really difficult stuff was already done.
For some reason, Tommy was insistent on having his lunch in a lunch box and eating it in front of the tv.

I printed out a pile of coloring pages for the boys. I had also seen on a blog somewhere this really great idea that we decided to try out. You put pictures of the first presidency and 12 apostles up on the wall. When one of them is speaking, your child draws a picture of what is being said, then you hang it next to the person's picture. Damon loves to draw and color, so this was awesome! We helped him listen for things that he could draw. We missed a few, but overall we did great! My absolute favorite was his drawing for Elder Anderson's talk about multiplying and replenishing the earth. What a wonderful talk! Anyway, Damon drew a stick figure mom with a giant belly (pregnant). Then a billion little kids around her with the dad playing soccer...of course. Isn't it the greatest?!

I can't believe how well this idea worked. We left the pictures up for a few days. At Family Home Evening Monday, we reviewed. I said a prophet/apostle and the boys had to run and find his picture. Then, I asked Damon what that particular person's talk was. He did amazing!! I mean he's not even 5 yet and he could tell us what was spoken at General Conference! Call him up and quiz him...I'm sure he'll do great! After a while, Barrett had the idea of reversing it and asking "who talked about your scriptures being your friend?" And Damon would answer without even thinking, "Elder Scott." I'm not sure this will work every time, but boy were we pleased with the results! It even helped US remember what our apostles talked about!


Part of the fun of conference weekend is eating good food. We of course had a little applesauce and made a delicious apple cake. We also made some adorable sugar cookies that looked like candy corn. You divide the dough up in 3 bowls and dye one orange and one yellow and layer it all in a bread pan, then slice it and cut them in triangles. We dipped them in sugar before cooking them...so cute! On Sunday we had waffles in the morning, white chili for dinner, and then made homemade raspberry ice cream with the raspberries we have been growing (they are in buckets in the front of our house and we only collect a few every few days...Barrett's been collecting them and putting them in the freezer until we had enough to make ice cream). We sure loved it!! It brought back memories of this summer making and eating raspberry ice cream with Grandpa Barry:)

So, I should mention that we have boys. 2 boys. Boys don't love sitting still for very long. Tommy was bouncing off the walls at times during conference. We had to pull out trains, legos, and make up other games to keep him occupied. Between sessions on Saturday I had to take them to the park to get out some energy while Barrett went on a 10+ mile run (I guess he needed to get out some energy too). Sunday we had to play basketball downstairs and do obstacle courses. Don't think all 4 of us were sitting reverently the whole time listening intently...those were the days before children:)

New Shoes

One day I realized Tommy's only pair of shoes (besides ghetto crocs) was getting way too small for him. I took him to Target and he picked out some shoes that he loves! I found a pair for Damon on clearance so picked them up. He thought they were so awesome...but he loves his other ones better and picks those first. These crazy boys loved their shoes the first few days and had to wear them all the time. In fact, Tommy had been sick at night with a bad cough and didn't sleep much, so neither did we. He had been up for a few hours when I was leaving for seminary at 5:30ish. There he was, sitting down watching Phineas and Ferb in his jammies with his new shoes on:)
Here they are modelling their new shoes. After I took the first picture and showed the boys, Damon said he couldn't see how cool they were, so they decided to do a few new poses:)

Apple Time

It's that fun time of year again...Apples!! I've tried to get motivated to do some crafts with the boys (I've been pretty lazy in the art project area).

We did apple printing...always fun. This year I made a border for a pretend bulletin board to showcase the boys' work out of the apple prints. I think it turned out pretty cute.



We made apple books. I found this great idea on some website but could not find it again...I looked everywhere possible (another reason I need to start using pinterest!) Anyway, the boys colored apples yellow, green, and red. The book went like this: I like yellow apples, I like green apples, I like red apples, I don't like worm apples!
Tommy loves this book and loves to read it to himself and wiggle that little worm around.

Another idea I've seen on various blogs is taking a paper bag and making it look like an apple. They put treats in them to give away...we just put newspaper inside and used it as a decoration. I thought they were adorable!


The boys painted toilet paper tubes one day for little apples. They were having such a great time that they decided to finger paint afterwards. Their creations looked pretty awesome after they dried.



The cute little apples made out of toilet paper tubes. We hooked them together and turned them into little apple trains.




We've also been to the apple orchard to pick bags of their seconds. We've eaten them with peanut butter, made apple crisp, apple crumb pie (from the Taste of Home magazine), apple cake, and applesauce. The boys keep asking if we can make apple cider. I have to remind them you need special equipment for that...they must remember how fun it was last fall at Grandma and Grandpa's house making apple cider.

I've been starting to turn on the classical station on the radio when we're doing artwork. The boys have really loved it (me too!).