Christmas Surprise Balls

I made Christmas surprise balls for the girls a few weeks ago, and they are nestled near the top of our tree.  O is SO excited about opening hers!   I'm going to let them open them on December 23, so they won't get overlooked in all of the Christmas excitement. 










E's center gift is a holztiger cat Holztiger Katze, klein, grau.  I started a collection of holztiger animals for her for her 1st birthday.  We gave her a giraffe since we fed giraffes on her birthday.  She'll get this cat and a zebra for Christmas, since she is obsessed with cats and she dressed as both a zebra and later a cat for Halloween.




O's center gift is a pack of silly bands, but I'm sure the chocolate will be her favorite!




I made a Valentine's Day Surprise Ball for O this year for Valentine's Day.  I explained how I made the ball and included a pic of the process in that post if you are interested in more details.

Meet The Ingalls Family...

Since O and I (and E...although she usually falls asleep) have been reading the Little House on the Prairie books for the past 5 or 6 months (we only have one more to go!), I thought she would love to have a set of Little House on the Prairie dolls and a covered wagon for Christmas. 


I thought about adding more detail to the dolls, but I think I'm going to wait and get O's input before adding anything more to them.  After I finish the dolls completely, I'll paint them with a layer of Mod Podge to seal and finish them.


I searched and searched for a covered wagon and finally found one on Etsy at Tweet Toys by Willow Baus.  The wagon wasn't exactly what I wanted, so I emailed and asked for a custom order.  They made it just like I wanted it, and it only cost a few dollars more.  (I love that about Etsy shops!)

The covered wagon even came with 2 little people.
 


But they had to move over to make room for the Ingalls.






I really enjoyed painting these dolls, and I hope that O loves them.

Baking Cookies

We let O skip school on Tuesday, so that she could sleep late and have a good nap before she had to be at the auditorium for her Nutcracker performance.  We needed a quiet, calm activity, so baking cookies seemed like the perfect thing to do.

We took the easy way out and had frozen sugar cookie dough that we  thawed, rolled out (with a Kleen Kanteen since I can't find our rolling pin), and cut with cookie cutters.  E was excited to help us!




O loved pouring sprinkles on the cookies!



Our book of the day was Cookie Count by Robert Sabuda. 

Hot Chocolate and Chocolate Spoons

We did lots of Christmas activities on Saturday, and we all stayed in our pjs all day long.  I love pj days!  Our daily book was the Grinch.  After we read the book, we made chocolate spoons and hot chocolate with lots of marshmallows.  Then we watched the Grinch movie. 


To make the chocolate spoons, I melted semi-sweet chocolate pieces in the microwave.  We rolled the spoons in the melted chocolate until they were completely covered and then decorated them with sprinkles and marshmallows. We put the spoons in the freezer to harden before using them to stir our hot chocolate.  





Our hot chocolate was extra delicious since we stirred it with chocolate spoons!

After we finished our hot chocolate, we decorated our gingerbread house.  I always buy gingerbread house kits after Christmas when they are 50 to 75% off.  I pack them with our Christmas decorations, and when we decorate them, we have the perfect excuse to not eat that yucky candy and icing...it's too old!  We have lots of fun and no kiddos beg to eat candy :)




After we decorated our gingerbread house, we all took a nighttime pj ride to see the lights in our area.  Unfortunately, there was only one house with a lot of lights...we drove by it 4 times!  After the fourth time, O asked "why does daddy keep driving by the same house?" 

Felt Gingerbread Village

Setting up our felt gingerbread village was one of our advent activities last week.  O had fun at first, but she lost interest quickly.  I, however, had a great time.  I really love this little village!  It's so much fun to set up and decorate the houses.  I'm hoping that O will have fun with it later and that E will love it next year (this year she just wants to put the pieces of felt in her mouth, so it's set up out of her reach).






Here's a link to the directions for making this village.  Unfortunately, the pictures are missing...sorry about that. 

Velcro Ball

  The girls and I had a fantastic time playing with this velcro ball yesterday afternoon. 

To make this activity, I cut small pieces of sticky backed velcro (the sticky side) and put them all over the ball.  When I was making it, O was wearing a fuzzy hat that I knitted for her on a round loom.  I threw the ball at her head and it stuck...the look on her face was priceless!  After that I thought we probably shouldn't use the hand knit hats because the threads pull out with the velcro.  I thought the knit hats from the dollar section of Target would work well, but they really didn't.  I think the knit is just too flat.  However, we had a great time trying to get the ball to stick to O's head.  The novelty of having a ball thrown at your head and actually doing the throwing was very entertaining for both of them.




The gloves (from the dollar section of Target) worked well for catching the ball.




O's tutu worked best of all!




I saw this activity somewhere last winter...probably either in Family Fun magazine or on a blog.

What a Wonderful Night!

O did an amazing job as a cherub in The Nutcracker Ballet last night.  She glowed as she ran across the stage.  It was clear that she loved every minute of it, and she was not nervous at all! (I was much more nervous than she was!)

E also did an amazing job...she sat and was completely enthralled by the ballet for more than 2 hours.  AMAZING!  This child does not sit still.  She's a walker, runner, climber, pulling everything out of everything kind of kid, so I was very worried about how she would handle being so still and quiet for so long.  I talked to her several times during the day yesterday about how she was going to have to be very quiet while she watched the dancers.  She seemed to understand, and I guess she really did!  Hooray for our amazing girls!!!!

Tiny Angel Ornaments

O and I made tiny angel ornaments from Non Dairy Diary today as our advent activity.  I actually printed these angels last year, but didn't have time to make them.  They turned out so cute, and O loves them.








O cut out the circles, and I cut the head and wing cuts out with an x-acto knife.  We worked together to fold the angels.  This was a fun, simple activity that went along nicely with one of our Christmas books.