Last Day of School!

Phew. We made it. School is over. (Okay, technically we are having a party on Thursday evening but no one has to plan that we just show up to the restaurant.) 

Here's to summer! We have a park play date tomorrow to kick us off on the right foot! 

It feels like school lasted forever, because it did! We started with our little homeschoool preschool coop last April!! My guy was at the very end of being two and he's at the beginning of being four now! Look how he's grown! I can't handle that. 

But onwards and upwards, we are headed to "big school" in August and he cannot wait. Until then, I am just going to embrace summer!!

It's JUNE!

Oh my goodness everyone. It's June. 2016 is almost HALF over already?! Can you stand it? I feel like this year has gone really fast.

In adulting news, we are getting a new roof. Soonish. We've had lots of estimates and picked a roofer. We've picked a color and all that. We just have to schedule the installation. And pay for it.

I am still waiting to feel like I've got it all figured out. But... I don't. So I just look up what to do. :) 

Some people say "Fake it 'til you make it." I say "Research the heck out of it because even if you're wrong you can back up your opinion and actions with valid arguments." 

School is nearly over, which is awesome and so summer begins. We are making a family list of things to do to celebrate summer! The list isn't complete yet, but I am anticipating a lot of fun to be had. It will include things like berry picking and the new trampoline park. 

Memorial Day Field Trip

 Our Memorial Day was spent at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. We had been there once before when C was two years old but I have been meaning to get back. I don't know why I was struck with the idea to go late Sunday night but I did and we decided to go.

The museum is about 45 minutes from our house and we got there mid-morning. The museum wasn't very crowded and we did the main Hoover history portion followed by their traveling exhibit about The Mob in the 20s. 

I am further convinced after a second visit to the museum, that Hoover was a really upstanding man with a good heart. He was a President who would have been revered I think, had the stock market not crashed. He was dealt a bad hand and did the very best he could. He really had a good heart. I wish someone like him was running right now. 

Then we headed outside for the remainder of the national historic site. It includes the Herbert Hoover birthplace cottage, blacksmith shop, Friend's meetinghouse, school, other historical homes that aren't open to the public and the Presidential grave site. It's idyllic and wonderful. If I ever had a lot of money I would do a wandering production of The Music Man and perform it using the different locations in the historical area. There's even a bridge! 

The setting was wonderful for taking some pictures. We had a little lunch and then we looped the museum again to see more of it. We kind of had to keep moving the first time through (and the second) as it isn't really geared towards children but it was fun nevertheless. 

We went back to "the little white house" (birthplace cottage) because that was what C liked the best and then we headed home. There was a brass band concert starting shortly after we were leaving and the parking lot and grounds were getting crowded, and the kids were getting precariously past nap time and they were hot to boot. 

It was a great educational family outing and I am so thankful to the men and women in our armed forces who have given their lives in service. Without their great sacrifice I wouldn't have had this special day with my loves. 

(Ant)Arctic Party Planning: Pt 3

I am so excited to tell you about the goody bag. I know that some people go over board with the goody bag and it would be SO easy for me to, I swear but I am really kind of proud of the bag we put together without breaking the bank. My goal for the bags were things that weren't complete junk and not too much sugar, but also reflect my guy and his favorite things.

Each bag included a penguin chocolate bar. Which, okay, is sugar. But since this is it I think we're okay. And they're cute!

A polar bear book.

We love the National Geographic Kids Readers and have a lot of them. We are on our second home copy of this book as one met an unfortunate water spill fate. These books are quick reads and full of educational value so I feel great about their inclusion in the bag. Plus there is a picture of a walrus in the book too. Which is awesome. 

Then, the part I am the most excited about. The walrus shirt. My guy actually has a lot of walrus shirts. I am not quite sure how we get so lucky every season to find at least one walrus item, but we have and we'll just go with it. I wanted to make C a walrus birthday shirt and then I got the idea to have everyone get a walrus shirt too! So we made walrus bleach pen shirts. They were so easy and I think they turned out super cute. 

Bleach Pen is still processing here.

1. Pick a shirt. We got ours at Hobby Lobby, with a coupon so they were under $2 each. We did blue for the boys and pink for the girls. Stereotypical certainly, but two of the girls favorite color is pink and that topic is worked into every conversation. C's favorite color is green but blue matched the arctic theme a little better. So blue and pink it is! 

2. Put a piece of cardboard in the shirt so the bleach will not bleed through to the back. 

2.5 *optional step* Draw your design on the shirt with pen or pencil. 

3. Take your bleach pen ($3.02) and trace your design. The bleach pen will come out fast. Bear in mind that the bleach will spread to much thicker lines. You may want a paper towel handy because sometimes the bleach bubbles and you want to wipe that away. I have also seen recipes to make your own bleach gel and put it in like an old glue bottle. That would be even cheaper than the pen, but sometimes time is money and $3.02 seemed quite reasonable to me. 

4. Let the shirts cure. We let them sit for under 2 hours. Basically, when you can see the design on the underside of the shirt, your design is ready! 

5. Rinse the bleach off under COLD water. The gel will have dried a little and you may have to coax it off. 

6. Stick the item(s) in the wash on cold. Then dry them. 

7. Success! A personalized decorated shirt that is one of a kind and permanent! 

I know that C and M will wear their shirts a lot. I have no idea if the guests will really wear them, but they loved them. "Mom! I have a shirt to match C's!" "I want to try it on right away!" Who doesn't need a good pajama/play shirt in their life? I definitely bought them big so they should work for the kids for a long time! 

All finished! C's had a birthday hat, everyone else's did not.

So those three items made up my goody bags. They worked out great! I put them in blue paper lunch bags with their name written on them. I also used those bags to stash their pinata loot. Easy peasy lemon squeezey! And with that I conclude my 4 part Awesome (Ant)Arctic Party posts.

(Ant)Arctic Party Planning: Pt 2

Besides Polar Bear Bowling, Snowball Fight and a water table we had a few more activities at the party.

To start, we decorated our own (Ant)Arctic scenes. Husband printed out an iceberg/water scene. I put out crayons and stickers and let them go to town. C is not usually crafty but loves stickers. And awesome cold weather animal stickers are right up his alley. He had a lot of fun with this actually and it was a great way to keep everyone occupied as others arrived.

I already told you a little about the penguin pinata here. But I did, in fact, plan a pinata. I read on some website about how to have a less chaotic pinata experience by bagging the items individually and every kid takes a bag. While critics of this method think it ruins the fun and promotes the "life is fair" mentality that is ruining our children, it worked for us. Not only was this 4/5 kid's first pinata ever but I was planning on it being an inside activity. *It DID rain on his birthday as I knew it would, but it was earlier in the day and we did wind up going out to the patio*

A little order at the expense of possibly ruining the kids forever was worth it to me. Inside each bag was a bag of fruit snacks, a box of yogurt raisins and a penguin rubber ducky. C's current favorite movie is Cars so we payed a little homage to that. As it happens, they were all terrible at hitting the pinata hard enough to damage it. Baseball players they probably aren't. So Husband eventually broke it in a way where we can fix it up and C is quite happy about that.

The other game I am pretty proud of is our feed the walrus game. This is the one area we went a little overboard with cost wise, but I am totally okay with it because we had the capabilities of going overboard. Husband designed the walrus and one of the companies that he uses for large-format printing at work printed it out on coroplast. (Plastic cardboard just like the stuff political signs are made of.) They even laser cut out around the shape of the walrus and the mouth. It is so great.

I found fish shaped bean bags on Etsy and these little buckets in the Target $1 section. Which pretty much just made the whole thing even better than I could have imagined.

So that concludes the overview of our party activities. If I haven't lost you completely I have one more post tomorrow about the awesome and inexpensive goody bags we had.

(Ant)Arctic Party Planning: Pt 1

When we originally sat down to plan C's Awesome (Ant)Arctic Party, the big question was: what are we going to do with 5 kids? (Our two plus three friends.) I wanted an activity that featured each of the three major animals of the party: Walrus, Polar Beat and Penguin.

During the extensive party prep stage, I found this Arctic Explorer Birthday Party and they had taken a honey bear and painted it for a decoration. Well all the light bulbs went off and I decided right then and there that I was going to make a bunch of them and do Polar Bear Bowling.

In my head I thought we were destined to buy a lot of honey. I was trying to figure out what we were going to do with all the honey because I wasn't going to waste it but where would I keep it? A moot point. After a long discussion, Husband said, "Why don't we just buy empty honey bears?"

Why not indeed? That option wasn't even on my radar but one quick Google search brought me to THESE 8oz Honey Bears. The size bear you would buy in the store is 12oz but I figured it didn't really matter if they were a little smaller. And the price was right. $5.40 for 10 empty bears. They do not come with closures but I didn't need them for my project. I should note here that I did need one closure to paint the bears, but I finished the honey we had anyway and washed that closure for this project.

They came super fast. C LOVED them.  He was so excited!

One night after kid's bedtime I laid out some paper and sat down to work on painting the bears white. Since we did our living room we had some white primer already so I went down the basement and got that.

I took a bear, put about two teaspoons of primer in, put the lid on and shook it all about. It took a lot of effort to coat the whole thing with some vigorous shaking. When the bear was fully coated I held it upside down over the paint bucket. Then on a paper towel for a while to get the excess paint out, for the amount of shaking required I was shocked at how much paint came out in this process. I stood it up right side up to dry and repeated this until they were all white on the inside.

Painting the inside made it so that you could use the black eyes and nose that already come on honey bears, but you could easily spray paint them if you didn't care about keeping the faces.

That is how I made Polar Bear Bowling. Total cost: $5.40 + shipping. A little more if you need to buy paint and closures.

I set up the bowling on our coffee table with a plastic table cloth on top. We used foam baseballs as the bowling "ice" balls. It was a huge success! Perfect for our (Ant)Arctic Party! The actual play of the game was a little harder than I anticipated. But they had fun so it was all good! And the polar bears looked wonderful!

We also had the arctic water table full of blue water beads. We put some of C's Toob animals in, both arctic and penguins and everyone seemed to enjoy that. I love water beads in a sensory table. Hours of fun to be had!

One of our more physical activities was the indoor snowball fight. I just bought a big bag of 200 cotton balls for less than $2, dumped them into a bucket and put it in the middle of the room. And I am telling you it was SO. MUCH. FUN. I really think all ages would enjoy this activity. But buy some more cotton balls if you have more people, 200 was the perfect amount for two adults and five kids 4 and under.

They just ran and jumped, hooted and hollered and it was great. Cotton balls didn't hurt anyone or damage anything. They did leave little cotton strands on my blue carpet but that's nothing a vacuum can't handle! I cannot stress how much fun this would be at a family Christmas or school party.

I will be back tomorrow with more of the activities of the (Ant)Arctic Party.

The Awesome (Ant)Arctic Party

My guy turned 4-years-old yesterday. In honor of him, we planned a super special (Ant)Arctic Party to celebrate him and his love of walrus, polar bears and penguins. It was such a wonderful day and just the perfect way to celebrate C! I 100% admit that while I wanted everyone to have fun, I specifically planned things and details that my guy would appreciate. He did. He didn't miss a detail. And bonus: the three party guests who don't live at our house had fun too!

We kept the food simple because it was a morning party. Arctic Punch. Which was Blue Raspberry Kool-Aid mixed with cheapo Lemon Lime Pop. Blueberries. 

Cheddar Penguin Crackers. Penguin gummies. Which look super cute but also taste great as they're peach flavored! 

And cupcakes, because it was a birthday party. The easiest cupcakes ever. White cake with white frosting in blue foil cups made for our snow and ice. Delicious and easy. Husband designed the walrus, polar bear, Adelie and Macaroni penguin toppers and printed them on synthetic paper so they would just poke right in! 

Last week C's Godmother, Husband and I took a few hours to cut 55 traditional snowflakes and 8 large 3D snowflakes to decorate with. Cheap, handmade decorations that made a big impact. It was magical. It still is, we haven't taken them down yet.

It was the very best party I could have imagined for C. He loved every single second of it. His joy only intensified mine. Gosh I love this kid. And I loved this party. 

I have a series of posts to round out this holiday weekend of ours with some more details of our party, if you're interested.