Valentine's Ideas

Yes I realize it is March. Yes I realize Valentine's was almost a month ago but if I tried to save these cute ideas we did until next year JUST to post them BEFORE the holiday then I'd forget. Trust me I would. I'm like that. So I thought I'll post them now and YOU can try to save the idea somewhere until next year! Cruel aren't I?

First I had to share this picture of my daughter in her preschool class. They do the classic Ice-Cream party where you collect every imaginable horribly sweet junk food you can find and let the kids make their own sundaes!

This is not for the faint of heart I will warn. Huge amounts of sugar are sure to be devoured by your little one! You've been warned.

As for my class with my energetic 2 year old's I started the morning with heart shaving cream trays!Just make hearts with your shaving cream and place a plastic car beside it for them to vroom around in it with and get nice and messy! And believe it or not when the two year old's had the trays versus putting the shaving cream directly on the table (which I'm known to do at times) they did keep it pretty well contained to their tray and their space. This even helped keep it off their clothes a little more! Huge accomplishment in my eyes.

We read lots of cute books which I really should have taken a picture of but I remember one was Corduroy's Valentine's Day and another one was Elmo's Fuzzy Valentine. Cute books and age appropriate. And we did too much art to explain but the one I wanted to share was this VERY simple idea for a card from your little one:

Make their hand prints where their thumbs face down and their pointer fingers almost touch and you will have a heart shape in the middle!! I glued a heart in the space to make sure the parents saw the heart shape. This would be easy to do for grandparents or aunts and uncles and pop it in the mail. This was a SIMPLE version but you could really jazz it up some and make it look even nicer. Happy crafting!

I'm a horrible person

I apologize. I apologize. I apologize. Wow I was just going through some old blog posts (again facing the cold hard reality that I have BARELY blogged lately due to increase in life activity!) and realized I had blogs that SAID I would continue posting on them such as my December "Spread the Love" quest which I only posted FOUR days worth! Again: I apologize!

I really am too busy to keep up with my blog the way I really wish I could. And it's sad because man I have some incredible post ideas that never make it to pen and paper...um excuse me keyboard and computer screen. So today I just apologize. I will attempt to stop making posts that I must follow up on because let's face it I've been like Bob the Builder this last year - starting all kinds of new blog posts and adventures and not being able to finish ANY of them! well maybe a few, but most no.

But let's be serious, if you are a wife, a mother, a youth pastor, and well just a woman in general you often get overwhelmed and overextend yourself. Or maybe it's just me. But I really think not. However I did accomplish something I'm very proud of last year and that was that I completed Beth Moore's Siesta Scripture Memory Challenge to memorize 24 verses in 2011. And with increased hours at work, increased hours my kids are at school and just life I think often of the first 8 verses I memorized last year -they made up Psalm 121 in it's entirety. So if you feel overextended and under accomplished today may these verses comfort you too.

Psalm 121
"I raise my eyes toward the mountains, where will my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. He will not allow your foot to slip, Your protector will not slumber. Indeed the protector of Israel does not slumber or sleep. The Lord protects you, the Lord is a shelter right by your side. The sun will not strike you by day, or the moon by night. The Lord will protect you from all harm, He will protect your life. The Lord will protect your coming and going both now and forever."

(and yes I typed it from my memory so if a couple words are off I apologize)

Mother/ Daughter Day

So it's just one of the months where everything seems to be happening all at the same time! I was gone for two three-day weekends in a ROW! So by the end of all that my daughter was REALLY needing some mommy time! Which wasn't that hard to oblige her with! Since we are both off on Fridays I told her at the beginning of the week that Friday was girls day! I built it up all week, reminding her and telling her I had a surprise for what we would do that day. I came up with a Photo Scavenger Hunt!

The idea was this: Everywhere we went that day and everything we did - she had a checklist that she had to complete of items to take a picture of!

So for example - our first stop was Hobby Lobby. I needed a couple things and she actually enjoys shopping with me so on her checklist for Hobby Lobby were the following things:

1. Something made of glass
2. Something made of wood
3. A decorative basket
4. A mirror

I think that store was definitely the easiest because I mean holy cow the options are endless!!
We continued on with where we went for lunch included things such as a napkin, a ketchup packet (she wanted Chic-Fil-A) and someone else's shoe! A stop at the frozen yogurt store had items such as sprinkles, a plastic spoon and her finished frozen yogurt creation!
It went on a on because we had QUITE the full schedule for our day but I successfully wore her out (and me too in the process) and she was SO thankful for our day together! It was so fun and it's so important to take those moments to set aside time, yes even whole days, to just devote to your son or daughter. Would you like to see a couple of her pictures?? hehe...okay.

(picture taken in Hobby Lobby)

(picture taken in Tutti Frutti)

Don't you just love how I modeled her plastic spoon for her??! The day was so fun - try it with your baby girl (or boy)!

Valentine's Day Bulletin Board Idea

Here is a simple and cute bulletin board idea for the toddler classroom. The way it is shown here is by taking a coloring page of I think it's Tenderheart bear?? and having each child color their bear (pink for the girls and blue for the boys) Then I took ink stamp pads and put the kids thumbprints in the heart on the tummy and the pads on the paws and ears.

I used pink for the girls and purple for the boys.

Other alterations could include:

1. Printing out the kids faces and gluing them onto the Care Bear's face so it's literally YOUR students on the board!

2. If kids are older you can have them paint or decorate with something fuzzy like yarn or cornmeal or sugar (just dye the cornmeal or sugar to desired color).

3. If you have a small enough group print out all the different Care Bears (tenderheart, hugs and tugs, braveheart, grumpy, etc...) and each child can be THAT Care Bear!

How to entertain a little boy...

In my class this week we were learning about Abraham and Sarah and their trip to Ur. I had planned on bringing suitcases and bags with common items you would pack for a trip. The kids were going to have to pack the bags! However one day it was dumping rain and we had tornado warnings and I got distracted by the bad weather and headed out the door without the suitcases. So when I got to school I had to think fast! My idea for the kids was to make a road out of masking tape and have car and trucks out for them to TRAVEL on the road with!

It was a HUGE hit! The boys especially loved taking the cars and zooming them down the road! It was an accident but I'm glad it happened. Now I only had about five minutes to make this one little road (as you can see in the photos) but you can get as creative as possible! Just tape a road onto a kids table or maybe make a whole map out of a cheap rug! The sky is the limit!

Here was my small version - and since it was such a hit I actually did it on most of the table the next day, excluding my little railroad track thing.

A good rest and a good read

Oh my sweet blog! How I've missed you so! However, as crazy as my fall and winter had gotten I really needed a true rest. I spent Christmas in Kansas with my entire family, then laid around and read as much as I possibly could on my Kindle and just finished spending three weeks with my parents visiting here! And I don't know what "parents visiting" means to you but to me it means that between my mom and I's cooking we eat GOOD food and a LOT of it, we get to go do something fun and magical cleaning fairies always appear while I'm away at work! Haha, it really was fun and I hated to see them go but it's time to get back to a regular schedule and hopefully some more regular blog posts! Wouldn't you say?!

I am working on a couple of posts for the future and one very good guest blog post which I think you will be highly interested in, however until then since I have been avidly reading during my break I decided to share with you what I've gotten myself into.

The Percy Jackson Series by Rick Riordan

I was leery of reading the series because yes it has all the Greek gods and goddesses and demigods etc. in it. However a friend in the faith whom I trust told me she read it to her older son and that she, and her boy, really enjoyed them and as long as it's to an older audience that knows this is FICTION then it does have some educational value along with a great storyline. With every god or creature it introduces it tells the history of it as per Greek Mythology. I have never known a lot about the subject so this easy reading series has been very intriguing to me. It has adoring characters and is written with humor and cliff-hanging suspense!

So I don't know what your thoughts are on the series but it has been some great reading and awesome entertainment to me for a few weeks now. I only have one book left!

Holiday stress-buster: Spread the Love Challenge

Over Thanksgiving I finally had time to catch up on all the magazines that have been staring at me begging me to flip through them! One of them was my Better Home and Gardens magazine and I loved this article in the back of the December issue that was called "Peace Offering". It was about tricks we can easily do that naturally fight stress and those bad free radicals it releases! The number one item was to "do a good deed daily." Here's what it said under it:

"Researchers have long known that altruism - such as volunteering at a hospital - raises levels of dopamine, a feel-good brain chemical that shields the body from stress hormones. What's interesting is that no selfless act is too small, says clinical therapist Serena Wadhwa, Psy.D., director of the TriQual Living Center in Chicago. To sustain a helper's high, aim to perform a simple act of kindness every day. Easy examples include bringing the mail to an elderly neighbor, surprising a coworker with a cup of coffee, or slowing your car on a busy street to let another driver turn. Optional: Singing "Joy to the World" as you do it."

So I have decided that I'm going to do just that. Not only do I have stress wrapping up Christmas Parties at school (my students and both my own kids) and finishing my final paper for my college class along with just the regular Christmas shopping, wrapping and mailing etc, but showing love is our mandate as Christians and we should be doing this daily anyways!

So for this entire month, yes even the few days AFTER Christmas I commit to do at least one good deed daily and I will post them all on here to help give others ideas. I challenge you to pray about doing the same, it's never too late to start.

Here is what I've done so far:

December 1st: Curled my daughter's hair. That may seem ridiculous but it was her Christmas Program and I asked her how she wanted her hair and she wanted it all curly and done up. So even though I was running VERY late to be there early for our staff photo I accepted being late and made sure her hair looked gorgeous! She was so excited and proud!

December 2nd: Made a Jingle Bell Necklace for my son. His school has the 12 days of Christmas and so every day of school in the month of December has a different theme to dress as. It was "wear a jingle bell" day and we have long lost all the necklaces and other jingle bell items so I found a lose jingle bell and put a string through the top and tied it off so he had a jingle bell to wear. Oh and to double up I cleaned his room up and gave him a freebie for the day :)

December 3rd: Complimented a girl's outfit. It said no deed is too small! My husband and I went on a double date with two of our old teenagers so yes I still call her a "girl" and she was looking all cute so I made sure I really complimented her and made her feel good!

December 4th: I bought Dr. Pepper BBQ Sauce for a bridal shower! This one is bizarre and let me assure you I had a bag full of other good things for the bride-to-be, however this BBQ sauce was actually on the registry which we later found out was because the groom had the registry gun!! I know the guys always feel sort of left out when it comes to wedding gifts so I bought him the BBQ sauce to make his day!