This evening, Miss G and I put together something I loved making as a child… a simple paper chain. We started with some paper scraps I had left over from a Christmas bunting and used a paper cutter to trim them into neat strips.
Miss G then chose her “special starting paper”, loaded one end with several swipes of a glue stick…
And I helped her roll it up and she pinched it tightly while counting to ten.
Together, we added ring after ring…
Until we had this sweet little holiday-themed paper chain. I’m not sure what we’ll do with it yet… In my classrooms, I’ve always used them as a countdown tracker of sorts, snipping off one link until the big day, but I’m not sure that Grae is going to want to cut apart the creation she’s so proud of. It may just be a sweet little addition to the holiday decor we’ve slowly been adding around our house.
♥
Don’t ask me how I come up with these things… Tonight as I was running a bath for Miss G, I randomly decided to surprise her with a special themed bath. I basically gathered up a few things from our 
Gracen was super excited when I dramatically flung open the shower curtain to reveal her surprise bath and immediately jumped in.
I was a little bit worried about her sitting on the hard items by accident, but she automatically cleared them out of the way as soon as she climbed in without me having to say a thing. 
Two things to keep in mind when converting your bath tub into a mini ocean… Make sure the ocean items are washed in warm soapy water first (duh!) and try to pick rocks and shells that are smooth so that no little tushies are poked during the fun.
The huge part of the fun of course is swimming around in the tub with sharks and whales and crocodiles… We got these little sea creatures at the dollar store quite a while ago, but you can find them at toy stores and teacher stores too. 
While we had our painter’s tape out for our 
♥
This afternoon as Gracen and I were working on our 
I’m not quite sure how it all happened, but before long, we were both sitting on the floor ripping off pieces of tape and creating this little indoor roadway.
As I snipped pieces of tape in half lengthwise and begun adding our lanes, Miss G gathered up her car and tractors.
She started driving her vehicles around on it as soon as she could and we even had a few “races” {and collisions}. 
This is such a simple {and inexpensive idea}, yet it brings hours of fun and endless possibilities. Brad came home from work and immediately commented on our dead ends, so there may revamp in our near future. 
Of course, when it’s not being used as a roadway for cars, it can aways be used as a roadway for people. ☺
Making one of these sweet little ribbon wands for Miss G has long been on my project list, and since her last dance class took place today, it was the perfect motivation to not only make one for Grae, but to make one to gift to each of her little friends too. 
If you poke around the internet, you’ll find tons of different styles of ribbon wands and methods to make them, but when we stumbled upon these adhesive picture hanging strips (available at hardware stores), we came up with a way of our own. 
First off, we took wide satin ribbon and cut it into strips approximately 125 centimetres long, cutting one end straight across and one end at an angle. Then, using a lighter, we sealed off the cut edges.
Next, we took the adhesive backing off of the picture hangers and firmly attached them to the straight end of the ribbon. At this point I was going to sew the picture hanger onto the ribbon for added security, but the adhesive was so strong that it wasn’t necessary. 
With our ribbons ready, we moved onto the wand part of the project. Using painter’s tape, we taped off our 6 inch dowels about a third of the way up.
Then using crafter’s acrylic in colours that coordinated with our ribbons, we painted the bottom third of each dowel with two coats of paint.
When the paint was good a dry, we carefully removed the painter’s tape to reveal the handle part of our wands.
Next, we used a tack to poke holes in the top ends of the dowels. 
Then it was time for these guys – small eye hooks available at all hardware stores.
We screwed the eye hooks into the recently made holes by starting the process by hand and using pliers part way through. (One thing to be mindful of at this point is that if your eye hooks are on the larger side (like ours), you don’t want to force them down into the dowel too far. You’ll get a pretty good sense on when you should stop twisting, and please do so. Spoken from experience, if you force them down too much, the dowels will split open.)
Your wand should now look like this. 
Now the final step… We hooked the metal picture hanging hook onto the eye hooks and use pliers to squeeze the hook shut tightly.
And there you have it – a pretty little ribbon wand.
In order to transport them to dance class without a big tangly mess happening, we simply wrapped the ribbons around the wands, and secured them with a bit of polka dotted washi tape.
Gracen and I whipped up one of our all time favourite treats this afternoon. Sadly, I can take ZERO credit for the amazingness that is this dish… It’s something my friend Lara made all the time (she even has a special dish!) while we were living in Kuwait and it was just too amazing not to steal and call my own (sorry, Lara!) It is seriously the easiest, yummiest {and naughtiest} appetizer ever. Bring it to a party and you will instantly win everyone over – I promise. 
Here’s the lineup of ingredients… A wedge of brie, garlic, and sun-dried tomatoes.
First, remove most of the rind off of the top of the wedge.
Cut the wedge into chunks in order to fit it snugly in the baking dish.
Next, round up between 2 and 4 garlic cloves, depending on how garlicky you want your dish to be.
Enlist your sous chef to peel them for you…
And chop them up into small pieces.
Sprinkle the garlic on top of the brie. Sneak a few pieces down along the sides too if you can.
Next chop up a few big pinches of sun-dried tomatoes.
Sprinkle them on top of the brie too.
Pop the cheese into the oven and watch it melt into a delicious bowl of cheesy goodness.
Remove from the oven when the cheese is bubbly and beginning to brown. Serve with crackers or fresh baguette rounds.
During nap time, I used different objects from around the house as tracers to cut the large sheets into an assortment of shapes. I placed the shapes, along with a spray bottle filled with water, on a tray next to our large front window, and left it there for my curious little monkey to discover upon her awakening.
Of course she beelined to the tray the moment she was up. I explained that we could use water to help the shapes stick to the window, and she was off. A little mist….
And stick a shape on top. 
Voila! Instant window art. Super fun and super easy.
It didn’t take her long to realize that looking through the shapes was pretty cool too… “Mama! Everything is all pink!”
Of course the previous method works well for seeing the outside world in pink, but this is much more effective for making your house turn pink.
The really cool thing about the fact that our shapes are primary colours is that they lend themselves to colour mixing very well. Grae was amazed at all of the colours she could make by simply overlapping two shapes.
And after experimenting with colour mixing, she tried sorting the pieces into groups based on shapes and colours.
And soon after that, the pieces started becoming pictures of things. The triangles stacked on top of one another became her tree and the tower of large circles became her snowman (if you look closely, you’ll see she is in the process of adding buttons to her snowman’s belly).
I was raking leaves like a mad woman when I noticed that Grae had invented her own little game in the pile of leaves she was playing in. She played round after round as I sat back quietly chuckling to myself as I watched. First, she’d toss her little rake into the pile somewhere, then burry it with leaves and call out “Where’s Grae Grae’s rake? Hmmm… I don’t know!” while holding her hands out up to the sky wandering through the pile…
Then she’d sort through the leaves, eventually find it, and retrieve it.
Then proudly stand up and announce “There it is! There’s Grae Grae’s rake!!!” 
