Christmas Came Early

Today my kids were surprised with an early Christmas present:

His name is Roofy and so far he's been the center of attention. The kids were so excited to finally get a dog.  They absolutely love him.  He's so cuddly, and loves to play and give kisses.  What's not to love :)  Merry Christmas early!

Christmas Countdown

I'm so excited about this project.  Every December my family likes to pick a different Christmas story to read each night.  I wanted to incorporate this tradition into a Christmas countdown.  Here's what we came up with:

We collected 24 different Chrismas stories and found an ornament to go along with each story.  Each night in December we'll read a Christmas story and put the ornament up on the tree, counting down to Christmas.

I didn't take pictures along the way, but the tree was cut out of a piece of 3/4 inch MDF.  It's 6 feet tall and I was able to fit 2 trees on one MDF board by flipping one upside down.  I was super proud of myself because it's the first time I ever used a jigsaw.  After sanding the trees I primed them and spray painted them in an Italian Olive color by Krylon.  I added hooks that just screwed into the trees to hang the ornaments on.  Finally I added a vinyl number under each hook to countdown to days until Christmas.  We'll start by adding the ornaments to the bottom and working our way up.  Once the tree is full of ornaments Chrismas will be here.

Picture Projects

I love pictures! I love seeing the faces of my family around my home, but just putting a picture in a frame and hanging it on the wall can get a little old, so I've been trying out some new ways to display our pictures.

This first one is a black and white photo mod podged onto a wooden board that was painted black and distressed.  I love it displayed on a stand.

I also did up an antiqued picture of the temple my parents were married in with their wedding date the same way.  I originally saw this idea at http://www.lilluna.com/.  She's got lots of temple pictures already distressed and free for your own personal use.  You can also add whatever saying or words you want to them. Go check it out.

Next, I used some of my left over wood blocks and created some photo blocks with pictures of the kids on them.

And the last project was a set of coasters.  I mod podged the pictures to the tiles, then added a piece of felt to the back.  I put a few layers of mod podge over the top of the pictures to protect them since they would be holding drinks.  These are my kids favorites.  They've already tried them out.

Halloween

Halloween is always a fun holiday.  Our celebrations started out on Saturday by carving a few pumpkins.

SnowWhite

Spider

Clown

Monster

Tinkerbell

We also painted a few:

On Sunday we went to my Mom and Dad's for a costume party and dinner.  The kids loved seeing all their cousins dressed up:

Monday Cody and Whitney dressed up for school, but their school does things a little differently.  They have a Classical Characters Assembly and anyone that wants to dress up has to dress up as a historical figure or a character from a classical book.  Cody went as a Hobo and Whitney was Pippy Longstocking.

We finally wrapped up the day with a little trick-or-treating.  The weather was great which made it so much fun!

Cody remained a Hobo, Whitney transformed into Smurfette, Hailee was a cheerleader and Jaxon was the star of the football team!  Happy Halloween!