october art

Last week I realized that last October our kitchen was full of fun fall art and this October all we had hanging up was a half-finished water colored coloring book page of Ernie trick-or-treating.  I suppose I could blame that on our countdown to baby G and the fact that baby prep has come before toddler art but that excuse makes me sad so over the long weekend we did a few projects to make our house a little more seasonal looking.

We did my most favorite Halloween project last year but this year's were cute too.  A few months ago we needed cotton balls for one of our many dog ailments of the year.  I don't think M had ever really seen them and he took to playing with them and calling them "bunnies."  I knew he'd like this project because it included cotton balls and ghosts, a new favorite since a neighbor hung a big ghost in the tree outside their house.  We used about 10 cotton balls (spread apart) and black construction paper cut into a ghost shape.  

I spread glue over the ghost first but if M were older I would have had him handle the glue.  He had to take the cotton and stick it on.  Being the efficient two-year old he is, he took all the cotton at once and dumped it on the ghost so we then had to work on spreading out the pieces.  

We also did a paper plate pumpkin that M enjoyed painting.  He loved using the big foam brush.  We've been playing with pumpkin faces lately so once he finished painting and the paint was still wet I let him stick on the face pieces by himself and then I glued them as he had left them.  He did a pretty good job and I love the crooked-ness of it.  

We also started a special project over the weekend that I've been looking forward to.  We can't finish without baby G so this is a "to be continued" part of the post for a few weeks from now.  About a month ago I bought two small canvases especially for this project.  While we had the paint and smocks out for our pumpkin I figured we should get M's piece done because I clearly remember how hard it is to get a newborn handprint on anything.  

On each canvas will be an M handprint and a G handprint.  One will hang in his room and one will hang in her room.  To be continued....

glow tub

M and I have been celebrating "fun Fridays" since I went back to work in September. We do something fun together like the zoo or a park. Today's fun Friday was going to be mini golf and a picnic lunch in our yard but it got rained out.  Instead, we celebrated Friday with a special take-out lunch and then a glow tub.

We got our glow sticks in the Target dollar aisle. They had a large pre-Halloween selection. I almost went with the glow bracelets because there were more in a pack but these sticks were pretty bright. We only had two but M was completely entertained by them both during and after his bath.  Four would have probably been ideal. 

I've seen this on various blogs before.  Our tip- use bubbles. It looks much cooler. 

And after- glow truck

magnetic pumpkin

We're starting our Halloween activities a little early (is it still September?) because our Baby G countdown is on and with her due date a week before Halloween, it's hard to know what we'll get in towards the actual day.

This is our first Halloween/pumpkin activity.  We have a few others here from last year that M could completely do again this year at 2.  We started this activity last week when we painted our paper pumpkin orange.  I was going to use orange construction paper but M loves to paint so I thought he'd enjoy that more.  I also used a sheet of black craft foam to cut the jack o'lantern pieces.  Each piece then had a magnetic strip attached to the back.

We taped the pumpkin to the fridge and stuck the pieces on the fridge next to it.  I made a face to start and M caught right on...

M had already done a pretty good job of giving a real pumpkin a face with his Nonni last week so this worked out well.  He liked changing the pieces.  I ended up making about 4 interchangeable sets of  face pieces.  I almost didn't put them all out because I could picture them all over the floor but so far that hasn't been a problem.  Another benefit- shapes.  M knows a few and likes naming them - win win.

end of summer

This week is the last week before I go back to work.  It's also the last summer vacation week (ever) that will be just M and I, as the countdown to Baby G is at about 7 1/2 weeks.  We've had a fun summer and I haven't had a chance to blog all the fun things we've done.  I thought I'd use this entry to add some activities that haven't made the blog yet.  Even though I've made my best effort to make lots of beach, park, and outdoor activities happen, the bottom line is that we've had lots of indoor fun this summer thanks to this pregnancy.  Putting it in writing now so I don't forget in the (long-shot) chance of #3 coming along: a June baby pregnancy is much more weather-friendly than an October baby pregnancy.  Bring on the fall!

Cardboard caves-
M loves tunnels.  Driving through one is especially exciting but since we don't have a whole lot of tunnels around here, he likes making them for his cars, trucks, and trains.  This idea came from M's dad, who saw it on PBSkids.org.  We simply cut a few tunnels out and added some decor.  I could have spent $100 on a Thomas set but I didn't.

Five Little Firefighters book-

This one admittedly took much more effort on my part than M's.  However, I love how much this child loves books and I love how excited he still gets to read his book so we made a second handprint book about firefighters, another of M's favorite topics.  Another thing I love about these books is that they're made up of handprints that won't be that little for long :)

The Five Little Firefighters poem and book idea came from this great website.  The poem is as follows:

Five little firefighters sleeping in a row.

Ring goes the bell, down the pole they go.

They jump on the engine and put out the fire.

Now they're back home, safe but tired.

We love rhyming poems/stories because after two or three readings M gets really good at finishing the rhymes.  He loves "reading" himself.  Here's our version:

Baby G's lamp - 

I posted about the various DIY projects we did for G's room.  At the time, I mentioned needing an idea for a lamp.  I really love the Pinterest-inspired lamp I made for M's room and wanted something just as cute.  This is another Pinterest-inspired lamp shade idea from a Disney-sponsored website.  

G's room theme is moons and stars in yellow and light purple with a bit of gray.  I traced stars on contact paper and then stuck them to a white lamp shade.  Then I used cosmetic sponges to sponge the paint around the stars.  The paint was watered down to help it absorb better to the lamp shade.  After it dried, the contact paper was taken off.

In addition to DIY pieces for the nursery, I did a lot of Etsy shopping.  As soon as we found out G was a girl, one of the first items I ordered was a letter G for her bedroom door from the Etsy shop, Posh Dots.  When M was born I ordered an M for his door to match the teddy bear theme of his nursery.  Even though his room has since transformed into a sports-theme, his teddy bear M still hangs on his door and will until he makes me take it down.  Here are the M and G, both custom orders, both done exactly how I had hoped:

recycled airplane

M and I raided the recycling bin this morning to find pieces to make an airplane.  I've been meaning to buy some real toy airplanes (like these) to hang from M's ceiling in his room but haven't gotten around to it yet.  This morning we made one of our own completely from recycled stuff.

M had fun looking through the cardboard pieces in the bin, pulling them out, and putting them back in. We ended up taking out a paper towel roll, a toilet paper roll, and a piece of cardboard that used to be part of a box.  We also used a Dixie cup but we took a new one :)

I put the plane together first.  This is my best explanation of what I did....
The toilet paper roll is the main body of the plane.  I cut the Dixie cup down so that only about 1/4 of the bottom was left and stuck it into one end of the roll.  I stuffed some paper into the other end of the roll to hold the cup in place but I only used a little because of the way the wings are placed.  The wings are one long strip of cardboard going through cuts in the middle of the plane.  The tail and the top piece are also cut from cardboard and stuck into cuts in the plane.  The only part that is glued are the propellers on the front.

Then M got to painting (red, of course).  I helped a bit.  It would have been 100% easier to paint each separate piece then put them back together once they were dry but M wouldn't have been as excited to paint his plane if it was in pieces so we did it the hard way...

Here's our finished plane, almost dry and ready to be hung....

milk cap container

M loves putting money into piggy banks, which is good since he has quite a collection of them.  This activity is one we've had for a while and that M has used several times without getting tired of it.  We keep it in his restaurant backpack so he can play with it whenever we're out somewhere.  We brought it on our Philadelphia trip as well.

You need a container with a plastic lid (we used Gerber crunchies but anything with a removable plastic lid would work) and milk caps.  We get our milk delivered and the caps are a little bigger than the caps from regular milk jugs.  At 2, M has a mixture of both in his collection and does great with them but the big ones might be better for smaller hands.

There's a rectangle cut in the lid, big enough to fit the largest caps.  I went around our cut-out with painter's tape to soften the edges.  M's job is to fill his container with the tops.  He's pretty independent with it now because he's learning to remove the cover to get them out again when he's done.

stained glass window

This is an activity I've been meaning to try for a while but I never had clear contact paper on hand. This weekend we bought some for another DIY project for the baby's room so we were able to get this in as well. 

All you need for this activity is clear contact paper and small pieces of some other type of paper. We used construction paper because it was what we had. I think tissue paper would look really neat and give more of a stained glass look but this worked fine too. 

Hang the contact paper sticky side out on a window. We used our slider which worked well because I could put the paper lower for M. Cut or rip the other paper into small pieces then stick it on. 

M took it upon himself to name some shapes as he went, which I wasn't even expecting.  As we worked I thought it would be neat to have pieces cut as specific things that could make a scene (like animal/barn/tractor pieces to make a farm scene).  That would obviously take more prep on my part (as it was we did this kind of on the fly this morning) but I think M would really like it. 

All finished: