Valentines

M doesn't go to daycare so we didn't have any little friends to make Valentines for this year.  Instead, we made some for a few of our relatives.  These were fairly easy to do and M had a pretty good role in helping to make them, which is always my goal.

We started by gathering a bunch of our pink and red construction paper sheets and painting them.

Next I traced M's hands on cardboard and cut out several of each hand from the paintings he made:

 Last, I cut out some hearts and glued a left and right hand onto the heart.  We had extra hearts so I made a decoration for the door to our basement as well.  We tend to hang a lot of M's art there:

On the back of each I wrote them out and then M "signed" them with crayon.  There's always something I don't get a picture of!

magnet cut-outs

This is basically a mom project but M has enjoyed playing with the product so I'm including it here.  I originally intended to make some of these magnet cut-outs of friends M doesn't see all that often.  He loves looking through his photo book and naming people he knows so I thought this would be fun for him too.  I haven't actually gotten to that point yet but I did make some of M and our immediate family. He loves pulling them off the fridge and putting them back on.

I started with these magnetic sheets.  They work just like the magnetic strips except they're 4x6 size so you could just attach a regular sized photograph to make it magnetic:

Next, I cut the picture down and cut a similarly shaped section of the magnetic sheet.  Then I attached it to the magnetic sheet.

I did end up wasting some scraps this way but since the backing of the magnets have one sheet on adhesive this was the best way I could figure to do it.  After the trimmed down photo was on the magnetic sheet, I cut around the people to make the cut-out.  Very easy and a big hit with M!

rainbow snow

M loves the snow.  He's been outside to play it in a handful of times this year and tends to stay out as long as we'll let him, followed by screaming and crying when it's time to go in.  This morning when M saw the snow he was dying to get out into it and he wasn't too happy when the dogs went out without him.  Since I was not ready for a 9am romp in the snow we brought the snow inside to us and had some fun.

I filled a 9x13 glass casserole dish with snow.  It's great snowman snow and made snowballs very easily, which M loved.  I also got three small containers, filled the each with cold water and added a drop of food coloring to each.  I gave M a big mixing spoon and a cooking brush to "paint" with.

At first M was pretty surprised that the snow could change color.  Pretty soon he was painting and eventually dumping the water into the snow.

We used yellow, red, and blue water which worked well because it mixed into green, purple, and orange so at point we had a pretty good rainbow of colors going on...until it turned to a peach colored slush.

We made snowballs, a snowman, and built some towers that M enjoyed knocking over with the spoon. Eventually about half the snow had melted leaving a coating of water on the dish.  The snowballs that were left could easily slide and spin on the wet surface, which M really enjoyed too.  All in all it served it's purpose- pushing our journey outside back a few hours.