Party Preparations

We've been preparing for O's 3rd birthday party all week, and she has been working right along with us :)

She and Guh-guh made her cake and cupcakes a few days ago. We froze the cake and cupcakes and thawed them on Friday to decorate.

O and Guh-guh made #3 sugar cookies. The cookies ended up looking like blobs after they were cooked, but they still taste good and that's what is important!

Then O decorated her own cake! Guh-guh spread on the white icing, and then we set O loose with all of the decorations :) She had a great time, and she was SO proud!

Here is her cake before I added "Happy Birthday, O" to it. I hope that it will become a tradition for her to decorate her own cake each year :) It will be interesting to watch the progression of her decorating skills as she gets older.

Chocolate Covered Frozen Bananas

Guh-guh and the girls had a delicious treat on Wednesday! They froze bananas and then dipped them into melted dark chocolate. Yummy! They discussed how the frozen bananas made the chocolate freeze and harden when they dipped the bananas in the chocolate. This was a great activity for O since she has been asking "what makes hot? and what makes cold?" lately. The girl likes details, and we ended up calling her daddy at work so he could explain how the hot water heater worked (in detail!). My girl is full of questions!

"I might be an artist one day!"

O has enjoyed painting unfinished wooden picture frames to give as birthday gifts. While she was painting she said "Mama, I might be an artist one day!" I love to watch her paint, especially when she is really into it :)

Excavating Treasures in Ice

O and her cousin, M, had a GREAT time excavating treasures from ice yesterday morning! This activity started about 2 weeks ago when I gave each of the girls a plastic container and sent them off on a treasure hunt around my mom's house for them to find small objects suitable for freezing. We filled the containers with water and put them in the freezer...and forgot about them for 2 weeks :) Guh-guh and Grandpa had the girls all day while my sister and I went shopping (I love IKEA!), and this was a fun activity for them to do. They used warm water, cold water, hammers, forks, etc. to excavate their treasures. After they finished excavating the treasures, they immediately filled the containers with objects and water again, so they can do this activity again soon!

I just searched this blog to see when we did this activity last summer, and we did it almost exactly a year ago (July 8 this year and July 7 last year). What a coincidence!

Miniature Bowling Game

I've wanted to make a mini bowling game for O since I saw a similar game on a blog around Christmastime. I can't find the blog that I saw this on, so I apologize for not linking :(
To make this game, I ordered 10 mini bowling pins from Casey's Wood Supply. I painted the pins using acrylic craft paint and used paint pins to make the dots. After the paint dried, I painted the pins with a layer of mod podge to give them a matte finish. The wooden ball is from Hobby Lobby. This game will be one of O's handmade Christmas gifts. I'm glad to have another item from my list completed!

What to do with stained onesies???

Tie-dye, of course!!! I have lots of stained hand me down onesies, so we decided to tie-dye them to make them beautiful :) I found a tie-dye kit at Michael's in the clearance section (it was normally 20 dollars, and I paid 5!), and we had a tie-dye party for Little Kicker on July 4th. It was fun to have Little Kicker's grandparents, aunt, cousin, and all of us (Elliott, O, and me) involved in making something for her. We tie-dyed 14 onesies, a t-shirt, 4 shirts for the girls (O & M), and 4 adult t-shirts, and we still have 5 packets of dye left!!!



Little Kicker is going to be a hip little kiddo :) After I took this picture, O said "I don't think 15 onesies are enough."

A Sea Shell Necklace

While we were at the beach we collected shells with holes in them so we could make sea shell necklaces! We originally planned to use dental floss for the necklaces, but I didn't like the idea of O having dental floss around her neck, and it would have been very difficult for her to string the shells onto the floss. Then, I realized that pipe cleaners would be perfect. It was easy for O to put the shells on the pipe cleaners, and I didn't have to worry about the necklace being a strangulation hazard :)

O was very proud of her necklace!

A Sea Shell Sculpture

We were so busy playing in the sand and water at the beach that we didn't have time for beach crafts. However, we brought shells home so we could craft at home :)

To make a sea shell sculpture, we mixed up plaster of paris.


Then we poured the plaster of paris into a large shell. O put smaller shells into the plaster to make her sculpture. This was a simple and fun activity!

Disabling the Right Click Function

Several of you asked how to disable the right click function in the comments section, so I decided to just post how to do it rather than respond in the comments section. Thanks to My Boys Teacher for the link!!!

People can still steal your pics and content, it just makes it a little more difficult. Here's the link: right click disable

This is very fast and easy to do!

You've probably figured out...

that I've decided not to delete this blog. I enjoy writing the blog, and it seems that you enjoy reading it, so it just didn't make sense to let one person's bad choices ruin all of that. I've disabled the right click option, which doesn't prevent people from stealing my images and content, but it does make it more difficult. I'm also being more careful about not showing my girl in the pics. Thanks to all of you for your support and kind comments!

I have lots of posts saved in draft, so the posts will keep coming for a while. However, I have a feeling things will slow down a bit as my pregnancy progresses :) My hands and feet are SO swollen, and breathing is not easy :) Only 8 more weeks...

Fun at the Beach

We had such a wonderful time at the beach last week! Here are a few highlights...

Beach sand foot massages



Watching "Grasshopper" the Stingray grow. He's our most realistic looking growing animal, and several people thought he was a real animal that we'd caught in the ocean.


A mama and O shadow shot


A short game of memory using the beach shell memory game that I made last summer.

Alphabet & Number Crayons

O and I made alphabet and number crayons for party favors for her 3rd birthday party. She enjoyed breaking the crayons, but she wasn't much help with peeling the paper off the crayons :) After we filled the number and alphabet molds with crayons, I put them in the oven for 20 minutes at 275 degrees. I left the crayons in the oven to cool so that the colors wouldn't mix and become muddy. Now the hard part...removing the crayons without breaking them! The idea for this activity and the number and alphabet molds came from Let's Explore.

Happy 4th of July!

We had a very busy and fun 4th of July, and this cake was one of the highlights!!! Guh-guh made an angel food cake, and the girls (O and my niece) helped her decorate it using cool whip, blueberries, and strawberries. The girls and Guh-guh had fun decorating the cake, and it tasted delicious!!! We hope that making (and eating!) this cake will be a new 4th of July tradition!

Handmade Birthday Invitations

Last year we made O's birthday invitations using dot painter art, and this year we are using salad spinner art :) We had lots of fun painting the paper for the invitations. We mixed up watery powdered tempera and either splashed it into the salad spinner using a paintbrush or poured a little bit in on the paper.

Here are our finished papers.

I finally finished the invitations, and now we have to deliver them. I'm a little worried that they won't hold up in the mail since I used a glue stick to put them all together, and I'm just stapling them and putting the addresses on the outside. We'll probably hand deliver most of them, which is more fun anyway!

Magnetic Artwork

I always take pics of O's artwork since she gives most of it away to her grandparents. I made the artwork magnets by printing wallet sized pictures of her artwork on magnetic paper and cutting them out. O was excited to see her miniature artwork when she woke up from her nap today :) I think these magnets will make fun gifts for grandparents!