This morning as Miss G created play dough costumes for her animal figurines (her new thing), I sat down beside her and worked on a quick and easy project of my own – making her a poppy to wear in honour of Remembrance Day, as they’re not available here in Kuwait.
While we’re all set up in our new place with the day-to-day essentials, we’re still working on making our house feel like home. So far, Gracen’s room seems to feel the most homey, largely in part to the fact that it’s the only space in the house with anything on the walls. It’s still a work in progress, but we’ve framed several photos and a couple of my favourite downloadable prints, and we’ve been working on adding a few homemade pieces too.
After taking down our Halloween footprint bunting during our major clean-up today, Gracen and I decided we needed something new on our apartment door – something to help celebrate Remembrance Day. After searching around the web for a few minutes, we found this beautiful poppy wreath craft kit and decided we could make our own version. We didn’t have red tissue paper on hand and it feels like we’ve worked with coffee filters a lot lately, so cupcake liners it was!
I get such a kick out of making holidays special for Miss G… Perhaps a little too much so, but that doesn’t stop me. ☺ Late last night (okay, early this morning), long after I should have been in bed, I randomly decided to transform Miss G’s usual mason jar into a frankenstein cup.
Turning jars, juice boxes, and chocolate bars into mummies for Halloween is certainly nothing new, but I think it’s an adorable idea. So in my quest to pull together fun and sugar-free Halloween treats for Miss G, I decided to make some mummy string cheese to add into the mix. String cheese itself is a huge treat in our house because we never buy it, but I think these little mummies will be even more fun for Grae.
After yesterday, I decided that Miss G and I needed a very low-key day around the house today. We spent our morning making these cute little Franken-SLIME Halloween favours, and we both just love the way they turned out.
With Gracen being a sugar-free kid, I try my very best to make sure that she doesn’t miss out or feel resentful about the fact that we don’t let her eat junk. So in addition to making sure she has yummy {healthier} treats for the Halloween parties we’re attending, I wanted to make sure we had something fun and sugar-free that she could hand out to her friends and fellow trick-or-treaters. Now while we’ve done sparkly slime treats for Halloween and Valen-SLIME treats for Valentine’s Day, slime is so much fun that we couldn’t resist doing it again. Only this time we switched things up a little and turned the favours into little Frankestein heads!
A couple of mornings ago during breakfast, Miss G turned to me with the sparkle in her eyes that means she’s got a brilliant new idea bubbling, and said, ‘Mama, I have an idea… We should decorate our whole apartment with Halloween stuff! Like ghosts and bats and jack-o-lanterns and all that spooky stuff.’ I agreed and got to thinking about all of the fun holiday items and decorations we had to leave in Canada when moving to the Middle East.
Last year I asked Gracen what she was thankful for, and her answers melted my heart. This year, I decided it would be fun to make a visual representation of her responses so that we could revisit and reflect upon them throughout the weekend.
A thankful tree is something I’ve actually done in my classroom many times before. We start the project out as a group with a read aloud, a discussion, and everyone contributing a few leaves, and then throughout the week the students are free to add leaves as they are reminded of things they’re grateful for. It’s always turned out to be a gorgeous project that serves as a wonderful reminder of just how much we all have to be thankful for. Our smaller at home version was no different. We’ve revisited it many times and added things as Miss G has requested to and the entire project, start to finish, was a lot of fun.
It started a week or so ago in our courtyard with a stack of coffee filters, some watered down food colouring (we used approximately 3 tablespoons of water for 10 drops of colouring), some droppers, and an old piece of cardboard as a work surface.
Using a stack of 2 or 3 at a time, Grae squeezed our homemade watercolours out onto the filters and watched the colours run and mix to create gorgeous colour combinations and patterns. Here in the October heat, they dried so quickly that I was able to cut them into very simple leaf shapes as she continued painting more filters.
Throughout the week, we talked about things we were both thankful for and I recorded one idea on each leaf.
Some of the things she felt happy to have were really eye opening. While I do appreciate the construction across the street from our building for the entertainment / education if provides Miss G, often times it just seems like a whole lot of extra noise, dust, and traffic. Well, Gracen doesn’t agree. She said she’s happy to have it because “it’s really cool and we get to watch all of the cool stuff happen like big trucks and cranes and cement coming”.
When we were ready to assemble our tree of thanks, I sketched an outline of a leafless tree onto an Ikea flatpack I had tucked away. Brad cut it out and we hung it in our main room using painter’s tape rolls.
This week, Miss G and I are participating in a candy play series with several other mamas and munchkins… On Monday we created beautiful glossy paint using Skittles, on Tuesday we created mouldable and edible candy clay, and yesterday we sorted, counted, and graphed SweeTARTS.
Gracen and I have been having so much fun coming up with interesting ways to play, learn, and create with candy this week. Since we almost never have it around, she thinks being able to play with candy is really cool, and with Halloween coming up, I’m thrilled to have some tried and true ways to put her candy stash to good use without it going into her belly or the garbage can. Today’s activity was crazy simple {in a good way}, and we had a ton of fun with it. Not to mention that it was perfect for my little lady who adores dress-up, jewels, and crafts.
Halloween is quickly approaching, which as a mama of a sugar-free kid, means it’s time to get extra creative. Creative with the goodies we make to hand out to trick-or-treaters, creative with the candy alternatives we have for Miss G, and creative with the mass amounts of treats she’ll inevitably come home with after Halloween night here at The Dunes.
So while we’re still not ready to let Miss G chow down on the sugary sweets she brings home from candy collecting with her little friends, we are more than happy to help her put it to use with art projects, learning activities, and science experiments, and that’s just what we did a couple of days ago. Using a bag of Skittles, a couple of other things we already had on hand and some inspiration from this post, we created a thick, sticky paint that smells delicious and dries with the most beautiful glossy finish.
During a quick stop to my very favourite grocery store in all of Kuwait, Gracen and I came across ditalini pasta and both immediately saw the potential in its shape. She carefully selected a specific bag from the shelf and tossed it into our cart with gusto {and a giggle}.
Contact paper is one of those art supplies that we always keep on hand. It’s awesome for using with glitter and is a ton of fun stuck up on a wall, plus if you pick it up on the roll at the dollar store like we do, it’s really inexpensive too. Knowing that it can be found here in Kuwait (my team of first grade teachers used it all the time during our first stint here), I didn’t pack any with us from Canada. So imagine my dismay when I found myself amidst a giant back to school / office supply display the other night with not a single roll of clear contact paper in sight {the horror!} The lovely lady working in the section did turn me onto something else, however, and in fact, I think it’s even better than the rolls we usually get. When she first handed me the package, I was skeptical. Clear book covers? For real? But then I realized a few things… 1) They are essentially just pre-cut sheets of contact paper. 2) They are inexpensive and sold in packs of 10, which covers a lot of future projects. 3) They come flat so I’d have to wrestle with tightly rolled contact paper no longer – score {ecause we all know how annoying that is}!
This summer, Gracen absolutely fell in love with a set of glittery glue paints that Grandma Charlotte had stashed away for her. They were different than regular glitter glue as you didn’t squeeze them on – they came in little pots that had brushes attached to the insides of the lids {much like nail polish does}. For several days, Grae sat in the shade of a tree and worked on painting a giant fruit box with them, delighted by how beautiful they looked when applied. So when she brought them up in conversation a few days ago, I figured we may as well try making a copy cat version since we didn’t bring them with us to Kuwait. And you know what? They turned out beautifully!
Let’s be real here for a moment… At 43 degree this afternoon, it doesn’t feel like fall here in Kuwait in the least. So when I told Gracen that today was the very first day of fall, she glanced out the window, furrowed her brow and said, “It certainly doesn’t look like fall!’ in an almost accusatory tone. Hah! Gotta love her spunk. I told her that she was right and that the desert is tricky when it comes to seasons, but back home in Canada, fall changes are beginning to happen. We read a stack of fall-themed books which seemed to help convince her, then decided to create a fall tree in celebration.
I’m all about special little traditions. Half birthday traditions, Christmas ornament making traditions, Valentine’s Day traditions… They just make me happy. One of the ones I love most is is the handprint canvas Gracen and I make each year together.
When I first decided to start it just before Miss G’s first birthday, I picked up 5 small square canvases thinking that would last me forever and now we’re more than halfway through our stash. Hard to believe.
As always, Grae picked out the colour combination.
It’s crazy {and exciting and sad and overwhelming} to see how much this little hand grows each year (see last year’s print here).
Here’s this year’s masterpiece. Sadly, this one will stand alone here in Kuwait until another birthday rolls around, but one day in the future, she’ll have a collection of handprints, each one slightly larger than the last, displayed on her bedroom wall for all of us admire.
Check out last year’s handprint canvas post too!
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