A Halloween Sneak Peek

Every year, all the way back to when Aaron and I were engaged, we have always dressed up together as a family for Halloween. It’s so much more fun that way, if you ask me. I have a feeling that this tradition may be on the verge of ending, so I begged and pleaded the family for a theme that I’ve been thinking of  for a while now. Can you guess this year’s costume theme?

Disney’s Up! We love this movie as a family and thought it would work perfectly. The hubby is Carl,  the old man. I’m Ellie, the floating house. Bean is Kevin, the exotic bird. Monkey is Russell, the Wilderness Explorer boy, and Bee is Doug, the talking dog. This picture was taken at Halloween party at our church on Saturday.  I would say that it was a hit! The kids have already put in their request for next years costumes, so maybe the tradition will last a little longer. :)

Monday, when we go trick-or-treating, I’ll take pictures of the individual costumes and break down how I put them together.

Joy Bryant in yellow

Joy Bryant in yellow by kricket3603 featuring buckle belts

Leather Rose

Leather Rose by kricket3603 featuring a crinkle jacket

So, I've been playing around with Polyvore creating outfit sets. This one is one of my favorites and wanted to try the blog post option. What do you think? Like it? Never again?

I was featured!

This past week I was participating in Freckles in April’s 21 day challenge. I wish I had known about it sooner because I would have loved to do all 21 days, but I only discovered it the last week of the challenge. Kayla picked my outfit as one of her favorites for the Sunday Shoe challenge. Check out all the featured looks here.

I should say she picked my shoes. I mean, come on, who doesn’t love these shoes. Adorable, right?! And get this, I found them at a thrift store for only $6!  Awesome, right?!
If you’re interested check out the rest of my outfits from the challenge in my Flikr pool or check out everyone’s outfits in the group pool from the challenge. I loved my final outfit (check it out here) and it even earned me bonus points!

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Summer Fun: Day 7

Library Day (7/13/11)
Today was SUPPOSE to be our first try at the library as a whole group. If all went well we would continue to go once a week the rest of the summer, more on that in a minute….
First, we made personalized bags for our library books. I found these waterproof canvas bags at our Dollar Tree. Great material, not-so-great print. Very 70’s hippie chick…

I had the great idea that we could paint over them, but I knew that regular acrylics wouldn’t cut it. So, I pulled out my latex paint samples. If you don’t have any, they are only like $2-$3 at Lowes. It’s a great excuse to try out all those funky colors you would NEVER paint your house. Or maybe you would, whatever floats your boat…
1. Mask off the section you want to paint with contact paper.

2. Paint in the area with your base color. Mine was white. Think of this like prepping a canvas. With the type of material these bags were made of, it was basically the same thing. I ended up having to do 2 coats to cover the flower prints. They probably could have used even one more coat. Allow to dry between coats. (Note to self: do NOT leave an open jar of latex paint sitting on your bedroom floor, where 2 year-old daughter will paint on your carpet and cutting mat. Yeah, should have seen that one coming…)

3. After the base coats were dry, I let the kids go at it. Some tried painting pictures with the available colors, others just went abstract.






4. Peel off the contact paper. We painted our names and a border in fabric paint. I also added one little shape in glow-in-the-dark paint on each bag, because my kids love a little glow-in-the-dark action. :)

(This picture is before I added a green border.)
5. Put them in the garage to dry so that no one touches them while the fabric paint dries.
6. Freak out when you see your 2 year-old daughter walking across the freshly painted bags, making names illegible, and tracking paint all over the bags and garage floor. Great, just great…
7. Take a deep breath and apologize to everyone especially the 2-year-old as everyone reassures you that it’s okay. It’s just paint and it’s not that bad.
I should have had a clue that this was just the beginning to our day’s troubles. Um, no…
The plan was to go to the post office to mail off our Flat Stanleys, after lunch, and then to the library.  That was the plan…
Let’s just say all chaos broke loose when we entered the post office. One kid was like, “Wow, this is the post office?! Awesome! Let me run around in circles!” Another kid was like, “Let’s see how many things I can pull off shelves before my mom notices.” Another was like, “Listen to how loud I can yell to all the other kids!” Another was like “Let’s hide from mom and see if she freaks out because she thinks I’m lost, or worse, kidnapped!” The last child was like, “Let’s hang on these metal detector things until I set them off, and everyone in the post office is looking at me.”  And I was JUST trying to print a postage label as quickly as humanly possible (while turning beat red with embarrassment). Needless to say, we did NOT go to the library….
Lesson learned, next time I WILL print postage online.
P.S. I promise the kids do NOT normally act like this and they DO listen to me (sometimes). I think it was just one of those days…

Summer Fun: Day 6

On Side Note: We had so much fun with this summer that the blog fell behind. So after much complaining from my mother (love you), I figured I better get us up to date. So be prepared for post overload…

Flat Stanley (7/12/11)

I have always loved the books about Flat Stanley. They are about a boy who is flattened in his sleep by a bulletin board and sent on multiple adventures through the mail. As a teacher, it’s an activity gold mine—perfect for teaching social studies and geography.

image source

I had heard that there was an online exchange community where you could send your own Flat Stanley to a pen pal. I did a little research and found The Flat Stanley Project at FlatterWorld.com

Basically, you create a Flat Stanley or a flat version of yourself and send it to a pen pal. The pen pal takes your Flat Stanley on adventures around their area, taking pictures and writing about their experience and then send Stanley, photos and their letter back to you. FlatterWorld.com helps with a community board to set up international exchanges between parents, teachers, classes, and anyone who just wants to participate.  I was able to find a librarian in New York (with a small group of kids) willing to exchange. I also found a ranch hand at a cowboy and scout ranch in New Mexico willing to let our Stanleys come visit her and her scout friends.

So I dug through my classroom library (currently in storage) and found my Flat Stanley picture book. Then, I went to FlatStanleyBooks.com, the official website for the Flat Stanley book series. 

They have tons of Flat Stanley activities as well as a template to make your own Flat Stanley to make and send on adventures. We printed off our own and colored. We each made two: one to send to NY and one to send to NM.

We took pictures and wrote letters to introduce ourselves and Stanley to our new pen pals.

We had planned on making a trip to the post office that day but Bee was asleep. When a toddler is asleep, DON’T mess with the schedule! (Trust me, we’ve gone down THAT road before….) Instead, we printed off some of the Flat Stanley activities to work on until everyone decided they had better things to do. Oh well…

Check out both websites they are great resources. If your child is not really old enough to do a pen pal exchange (it was a stretch with our 4 and 5 year old), you can take Stanley on family adventures documenting the places you go and things you do over the summer. Plenty of fun all around. You could seriously take an entire week or more doing all kinds of  Flat Stanley related activities. Like I said…Gold.Mine.

Gingham and the Yellow Purse

Over at the Clothed Much blog on Rule-Breaking Monday last week  (yes, I know I’m a little slow), Elaine issued a challenge. Break the rule that your belt, shoes and purse have to match. I can so do this…

If you’ve seen me you know that my main purse/diaper bag is big and yellow. It’s like a yellow bus…it takes everything we need, everywhere we go. I break the matching rule on a daily basis. The yellow bus…


My favorite part about this outfit is that it’s completely thrifted! I bought the shirt, gingham skirt, and wedge shoes at my favorite local thrift store this week. The navy belt is from another thrift store and the yellow bus, I mean bag, was bought at a garage sale down the street. This outfit (purse included) probably cost me a total of $15 at most. Score!

Without the purse. (I actually took this picture first, and then remembered that I left my bag in the house.) It was amazing how many compliments I got from friends at church today. Plus, I love how the combination of the high-heeled wedges and high-waisted skirt make my short chunky legs look long and lean. Love it!

Ignore the goofy face and awkward pose, the hubby (who was taking the picture) was trying to make me laugh and hurry me up at the same time so we could leave for church. Yes, I tend to squint my eyes and crinkle my nose when I laugh.

I made both the necklace and the earrings.

A close-up of my awesome $5 wedges. I really liked these pieces and will definitely remix them into some more outfits. So what do think?


 

Grey, Yellow, and Blue!

Source: google.com via Marissa on Pinterest

I know when I shared my inspiration I promised pictures of the bedroom redo in process. Since  some of my favorite blogs were doing link parties, I figured now would be a good time to give you a sneak peek.

 

As you can guess, I went with grey, yellow and blue (like a turquoise). I am so in love with grey right now and it’s quite funny.  I love white painted furniture and the hubs wants black, so the happy medium? Grey, of course! And in my opinion, nothing goes better with grey than yellow and turquoise. My hubby is on the conservative side when it comes to decorating our home. So grey and white will actually be the dominant colors in our room with fun punches of yellows and blues.

Hubby and I built this headboard on Valentine’s day a couple of years ago (true love, I tell ya) and then it just sat in our garage, waiting to be painted. Yes, two years. Why did I wait that long to paint it? I have no clue. But I love it now!
Remember this $10 desk?

Well, now it’s transformed into this grey beauty!

(Pay no attention to the clod of dried paint on my carpet—long story.)

I painted the desk grey and spray painted the brass handles a lovely yellow.  The lovely rose drawer pulls that I swooned over (until I found out you can buy them at Lowe’s) were switched out for a white ceramic drawer pulls that I had taped off and painted the brass parts yellow. I SOOOO love this desk now! It’s the perfect spot for my sewing machine.

This is the nightstand on my side of the bed. Sorry, no before picture but imagine the same drawer pulls on a pine colored nightstand. This was another $10 Craigslist find. Solid wood, yeah baby! My original plan was to paint these drawer pulls yellow as well but I’m still debating. I kind of like them this way and conservative hubby thinks they should stay this way, but part of me just wants more yellow. :)

So that’s it for now. I still have a wall full of yellow, turquoise, and white picture frames that need to be hung, and lamps that need to be refinished.…Oh, and a few more pillows to recover….and convince the hubby to let me paint the dresser grey. :)

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Today's Creative Blog

Summer Fun Day 5

Lego Day
My boys are obsessed with Legos. Seriously. They love building with their Legos, playing Lego games on the computer, watching Lego movies, drawing Lego pictures, coloring Lego printables, and anything else that uses Legos or is related to Legos. No joke. So I only thought it fair that we have a Lego day.
We started out building and playing with Legos all morning. Then, I printed some coloring pages from online. To do this go to Lego.com and then “products”. Each product line has their own website, click here to see an index. Clicking on the picture of one of the product takes you to that product website. Coloring pages are usually under the “Funzone” or “Download” tabs. Then, just download and print.
Some of the websites also had printable stickers. They are basically just pictures that you can print on sticker paper and cut out. We printed them on plain paper and used them to make dioramas. Most of the kids just glued them flat onto a background. I was pretty impressed when I saw Bean’s 3-D version.


I also saw these Lego puzzles on Pinterest…

Source: icanteachmychild.com via Marissa on Pinterest

...and decided to make our own with some clipart cutouts. I just taped over a picture using clear packing tape on two blocks and then used an Exacto knife to cut apart the blocks. The kids had fun putting them all together.


Later I saw these and wished I had more time to make some like them…

Source: ilovechesterrific.com via Marissa on Pinterest

Then, the boys wanted to make a movie. We took about 70 pictures, each time moving the Legos a slight bit and writing our dialogue on a dry erase frame. The plan was to take a bunch of these pictures and when put together in quick succession it would look like they were moving, playing out the story. However, after all our work ,we realized we didn’t have any video editing software on our computer.  We did have a slideshow DVD maker. So we did that, adding some fun music. Unfortunately, I can’t upload the video here because it’s only on the DVD. So here’s just a few snapshots from the video….

To be continued…
The actually video is pretty cool. So if you’re ever at our house, ask Bean to see his Lego video and he will be more than super excited to show you!