Delightful December day 7! Gingerbread House Fun!

The Christmas Season has always meant gingerbread houses! I love the simplicity of this project and how much family time it seems to bring about. As my children get older, I try to make this 1 activity last a few days, with multiple related activities! LOL! We start by coloring a gingerbread house page. It always starts as a 'map' of what their houses will look like, but of course never really seems to work out! Hahaha!

I like to serve the candies in kid sized cups and portions, this way little mouths don't get too full of candy during the project! If more is needed, no big deal to grab more! We use marshmallow fluff and frosting. They both make a glue like bond when they harden. The Fluff is more soft and snow-like and the frosting hardens like a rock.

A Milk carton base is a MUST, little kids LOVE to load on the candy and the weight is just too much on the graham cracker house alone. This also give the children something sturdy to push down on as they SHOVE the candy into the sides of the house! We learned this trick 3 years ago at a school decorating event!!

My daughter loved making small houses for the gingerbread pets! She had a lot of fun using the fluff and then decorating them, but her fun was stopped short when her little brother began to slowly sneak 1 candy at a time away from her houses!

I'm wondering at what point our Gingerbread House, became a candy mountain?! There are no doors, windows or even a chimney! They all seemed have just went crazy with the frosting and candy!!

Our next project is making gingerbread men cookies to line up around the house in 'snow'! First we will color our own gingerbread men and see what we would ideally want our cookies to look like.

As I began to clean up the leftovers, I noticed that both boys had of course made graham cracker, frosting and candy sandwiches! They were unlucky that I noticed, but lucky enough to have already eaten 1 each! All in all, we are having fun times together creating memories that will last many years to come, even if the candy doesn't last long at all!

ENTER TO WIN THIS!!!!

Our friends at THE TOY BOX YEARS are giving away this awesome art pack!!

Menu Plan Monday...errr Tuesday!

Did you know how easy it was to make popcorn in a brown paper bag?! I couldn't believe it myself when I had first wondered if it was possible. All you need is popcorn kernels, a paper bag and any toppings you would like!

Take 1/2 a cup of popcorn and pour it into the bag. Fold the bag over twice (NO STAPLES!) and crease with each fold. Put it in the microwave at POPCORN setting and you are all set!

We made ours with cinnamon sugar, but you could use butter or any number of spices, but the popcorn comes out soooooo light and fluffy that you wouldn't need to add anything at all!!

Now, on to our menu this week!

Monday: Lentil Soup and Biscuits

Tuesday: Steak Taco Bar with Chips & Guacamole

Wednesday: Pesto Shrimp over Angel Hair Pasta with a garden salad

Thursday: Christmas Program at School, out to dinner afterwards!

Friday: Burgers with Chips to celebrate the start of Christmas Break!

This is how I feel about my family!

Delightful December day 6! Caps Caps Caps

Hello friends! I trust your weekend went well. It was busy as always but still fun. I cannot believe how chilly the weather is getting here in the midwest, I just may have to break out my Winter coat soon! After our Thanksgiving getaway, we put up our Christmas decorations and got ourselves into the Holiday Spirit! The children each have their own Christmas tree and we decided to let them make their own this year! We have quite the cap collection from all of our crafts, that i decided we would create ornaments with caps!

We gathered stickers, glitter, markers, mod podge, my hand drill, paper clips or pipe cleaners (for the ornament hook) and covered our work spaces with mats (I bought several packs of flexible cutting boards at the dollar store!)

Drill a hole at the top and then place your pipe cleaner or paper clip at the top for your hook and get ready to decorate! Use markers to draw your design, stickers as the centerpiece and then mod podge over them! Add the glitter into the mod podge to make your ornaments sparkly!

They dry super fast and are so much fun!!! Enjoy your week everyone!

Sunday Tips!

Before your kids come home from school or wake up, pull out a long neglected toy and put it somewhere it will be noticed straight away! Watch your children delight in playing with this 'new' toy for hours! 

Make even fast food last longer than a a quick eat! I always have some kind of card game or small board game in my tote in the car. This allows us to still play a family game, no matter where we end up at the end of a long day!

Happy Sunday my Friends...

Lunar Eclipse!

This morning my oldest son and I were able to get up early and catch the Lunar Eclipse! We are lucky that the house sits on a hill and were able to catch most of it, but due to the moon setting, we of course could not see the entire show.

Yesterday, in preparation for this event, we read information from THIS SITE so that he could understand what all he was seeing. We loved doing the research together and though I invited my other 2 children to join us, it seemed that he was the only one truly interested! 

After the moon set in our area, we went online HERE to see the entire eclipse live so that we could catch up on any parts that we missed due to living in the Midwest. It was an amazing sight that brought up a lot of questions!

A hot chocolate bar awaited us as we discussed what we had seen and researched even more. I love when I get to teach my little ones new things and together we go on to learn even more! Happy Saturday everyone!!! I feel like we already accomplished so much :)

Charlie our Elf! 2011

The time has almost come to say goodbye to Charlie and the people most saddened by this little fact? Mom & Dad! With 3 days and 13 hours until  2 days and 14 hours a whole year until Christmas, we know we will miss our little friend when he heads  Now that he is back to the North Pole. We have had an absolutely delightful year and are thinking of binding Charlie's adventures into a book for the children to enjoy year round!

Charlie is our Elf on the Shelf! He has come to our family to report his findings to Santa! I've mentioned him before, but figured I would try and keep 1 post where I will just post all of his mischief! I will add new photos to the top of this post! Remember to check back daily! The photo of Charlie over on the left sidebar of this  <-------blog will take you right to this post!

Christmas Eve arrived and we found  Charlie Bungee Jumping with Garland from the loft! He is so silly, but he really knows how to make us all laugh! Charlie knew that we would all be sad, so he was found with a note left to our family and a picture of himself so that we don't forget him!

Charlie was found on the photo table, clutching the countdown clock that said only ONE MORE DAY! He also happened to toilet paper the living room! That sneaky elf certainly loves toilet paper! We found an entire roll pooled in the floor of the bathroom!

Charlie is a serious racer! He gets in to Mario Kart just as much as the boys do here! I think this was an all out challenge!

SNOWBALL FIGHT!!!!!!!

This morning we found that Charlie had raided the Marshmallows and rounded up some friends for an epic 

snowball fight! Of course he made sure his friends lacked the fort protection that he had! We certainly are 

going to miss all of Charlie's antics when the he heads back to the North Pole for the final time on the 24th!

As we rounded the corner into our kitchen this morning, we were welcomed by the sight of Charlie sitting on the counter with small footprints into some spilled flour. OOPS! Mommy had baked some bread in the breadmaker overnight and I had completely forgotten to put it away. Charlie of course could not help himself! Silly little elf.

As I turned around to begin serving the breakfast dishes, I almost slipped in THIS! That silly Charlie had made 'snow' angels out of flour on the floor of my kitchen!! The kids were stunned into silence and then slowly let out a giggle, but then they wondered who would clean up this mess??? Oh Charlie, how truly mischievous you are!!

Charlie was found at our kitchen table today! The children are over the moon wit the fact that he brought us a gingerbread village to decorate. It came with 5 houses, which means 1 for each of us!! We have a chance to see if these turn in to real houses and NOT a GINGERBREAD MOUNTAIN! Looks like we have our activity of the day!

Oh no! We caught him toilet papering our tree!!! The tree was covered in toilet paper and he managed to knock down a few of our prized ornaments! Good thing nothing was broken!

Looks like Charlie was hanging from Daddy's RC Helicopter and he had a crash landing! The kids thought this was absolutely hilarious and are planning to stay up late tonight and see if they will catch him doing it again! 

Uh-Oh! Charlie is starting to discover other areas of our home! Today he was spotted on Mommy's Bike in the garage! Was he sneaking out for a ride??

Cookie Capture! We found Charlie this morning munching on gingerbread men inside of the cookie jar!

Charlie Loves to read! He was caught reading The Polar Express and even spelled out a message to the children, using their oversized letter tiles! He gave them each a Bell that would only ring for those who believe!

That sneaky elf was spotted in our tree! He had brought the kids some fun posters to color all the way from the North Pole!

We collect Walt Disney World pins and keep them in a glass shadow box style case. This morning we noticed that Charlie was hiding inside!

Here we found that Charlie had gathered his buddies and started up a game of Scrabble! The best part was that the children had so much fun reading the words that their favorite stuffed animals had put together!

Charlie found his way into the office and was nestled on one of the tables with a picture book and vocabulary cards! Even elves love to read!

Charlie took my camera off it's charger and took photos of himself! He then replaced all the photos of the children with ones of himself!! 

Oh Charlie what have you done?! We caught him building a tower of cups from the chandelier! 

 One morning, we had found that he papered the Kiddie Bathroom! 

He ziplined from the dining room into the family room! This was one of our favorites to see him do! The children said he had the idea to move from one room to the other too late and he heard the front door open, so he had to freeze in place and didn't make it to the other side!!

Charlie had a blast emptying out our entire Advent Calendar of candies! The kids counted them all and concluded that Charlie ate quite a few!!

One morning, we found that he had built himself a castle that created a bridge over our race track that goes around the tree! The kids liked this home so much that they left it up, just in case he needs a place to rest!

This sneaky elf went to town on all of the photos in the Family Room! He drew silly doodles all over the faces and we even caught him red handed! (Marker Handed??)

2012 Elf on the Shelf Ideas Are HERE!

2013 the Elf did visit us, it was just a lot quieter on the blog with trying to homeschool for the first year and there was just so much going on. 2014 and he will be back on the blog with more fun adventures!!