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Happy October 1st! We are well into the fall activities around here. To make the most of the season Little Miss and I made Fall Bingo cards to keep track of our activities. This is Little Miss' Fall Bingo card, she wanted to spend lots of time outside, so her activities reflect that. We had a lot of similar activities, apple pickung, pumpkin patches and decorating. We decided that we would work together to check off as many boxes on both of our bingo cards.  This craft was a wonderful mess! Just like with a vision board, there is a lot of cutting and flipping through magazines and scraps of paper. It was a great time to think about the upcoming season and all the activities that we always do this time of year.  Happy Fall and happy Halloween month!  

  Over the years we have spent many weekend mornings crafting. It has been one of my favorite times to spend crafting with the kids. Last Saturday morning Little Miss asked Little Man if he would help her build a castle for her dolls. The two of them went out on the back deck in their pj's. They dug through the recycling and brought out lots of crafting supplies. It was such a heartwarming, moment.  Little Man doesn't like to craft as much as when he was little, understandably but when his sister asked for help with her castle he said, "yeah, I know how to make a castle, how many turrets do you want?"  This is their finished product, complete with a  drawbridge and kleenex box beds for the doll princesses. 

  It's that time of year again! Back to school, back to schedules and back to making lunches. This also marks the beginning of the 'ber' months. It's almost time to decorate for Halloween! But first, let's decorate for the 1st day of school.  My decorating this year was again, centered around school supplies. This year I made large pencils and a large loose leaf piece of paper. It was easy and effective. I made the pencils out of paper towel rolls and construction paper. For the large loose leaf paper, I used the flip side of a calendar page. I drew the lines and then printed the lettering using my cricket Joy. Other than that I used books and paperclips. The overall effect was good but missing something so Hubby added the finishing touch, an apple on top of the stack of books. Happy Fall and happy crafting!

When I was little my aunt would cook a big turkey dinner in the middle of summer when she got tired of eating salads and barbecue.  Similarly, I like to decorate for Halloween when the heat gets too much for me. Celebrating Halloween in summer aka: summerween is a thing in stores this year! I'm so very excited to see spooky ghosties camping and sun bathing this summer, it made me so happy!  One of the themes in stores this year was summer fruit as jack-o-lanterns. One year Little Miss and I carved a watermelon, as they did in the Gravity Falls Episode 'Summerween' and that was a lot of fun. I found this fake succulent in a watermelon slice in Michael's, I gave him a jack-o-lantern face and voila a spooky slice of watermelon (although, he looks a little sad because his seeds look like tears, poor guy.) Similarly, I created this jack-o-lantern pineapple by giving him a face (the mustache is explained below.) Hubby gifted me this ghostie nightlight from Amazon and it fit r...

This last June we hosted my sister's forest themed baby shower. I attempted to make the babyshower a surprise, she surprised me twice with my baby showers so I really wanted it to be an epic surprise. In the end I had to tell her to make sure she was there but I was able to keep the theme and the guest list a surprise. That was all worth it when she walked in to see the decorations, her reaction was priceless.  One of the ways that I was hoping to bring forward the theme was with the food. I wanted the table to look like it could be in a forest with natural accents.  Little Man was keen to help prepare the baby shower, my sister is his godmother and he wanted to help. He made this flowery foccaccia with vegetables and herbs from our garden. It turned out great and was delicious. For the party favors we gave out baby plants that our guests can take home and watch grow! I also know that there are some of our guests who are not plant people at all so I picked up some fake plants ...

This year we had two parties within two weeks of each other. One was Little Miss' 8th birthday party and the other was my sister's baby shower (which I will share soon)! Little Miss chose Stitch for her theme, no surprise there! With the new movie coming out there was no shortage of Stitch decorations and party ideas.  At first Little Miss asked for a cake in the shape of Stitch's face but I don't think that I have the skill for that. Instead, I found the idea for this beach cake on Pintrest. It was pretty easy to make and I used an idea that I have seen many times, I bought a cake from the grocery store and scraped off the icing and decorations. I used blue icing to make the water and Graham cracker crumbs to make the sand. I used Graham cracker teddy bears and fruit roll ups as decorations as well as little paper umbrellas and flamingo toothpicks. I was very happy with the end results, it was very summery. For our craft we decorated pencil cases and notebooks. I bough...

This is the last week if school so I am in summer prep mode. I love preparing for the summer, coming up with fun activities or a bucket list.  One year I planned to go to all the free activities in our town. A few years in a row we documented all our summer activities and made a Summer Scrapbook . This year is a little different, I am working full time and the kids are getting older and don't need the summer planned out as much as they used to. I still wanted to do something special for the summer, for them and for me. One rainy weekend this Spring we went to a book store that we all like. I told the kids to pick out a book for a summer project.  Little Miss chose an activity book for kids going into grade 3. She saw this page and she was sold. She loves math, mental calculations are something she is working on right now (it is so wonderful but she doesn't get that from me!)  Little Man's summer project is to write a graphic novel. He found a graphic novel of how to writ...