Joyfully Weary

We are big on family traditions and celebrations in our house. I've shared here before that I grew up in a chaotic unhealthy home **. There wasn't enough structure to have rituals and traditions. Naturally, I want to provide better for my kiddos.  There are several reasons I think traditions are so important. They become a joyful constant in our lives despite the many chaotic changes that happen. They give our kiddos and us a time to look forward to when life starts to feel mundane. Most importantly, they create shared memories which create strong bonds. Holiday traditions and family rituals are an easy way to create a lasting family identity.  In our home we don't just celebrate the major holidays like Christmas and birthdays . Minor holidays, like St. Patrick's Day and May Day , also get a bit of celebration. We have seasonal rituals as well. We use a chalkboard where at the beginning of a season we write down our plans: apple picking, ice skating, Shakesp...

It been hard for me to find time this past month to visit/update this blog. We've continued to struggle with various cold and flu bugs. Plus we've had quite a bit of work done on our home. We were blessed and thankful to receive a grant that paid for new windows and doors, some plumbing, electrical, HVAC updates, and a few other repairs. I'm obviously not complaining but adding workers, even the most pleasant and conscientious ones, brought a whole new level of  frenziedness  to our already chaotic home.  Despite the upheaval we were able to stick to our Valentine's Day traditions...well most of them. We usually have some sort of sweet pastry for breakfast but I was just too tired to do any baking. I ended up sending Jeremy to the store for some fun cereal - the kids didn't complain. 😉 Our other traditions are red and pink balloons covering the living room floor and a heart search. We write ten things we enjoy/love about each kid on the hearts and then hide th...

One of the boys' favorite activities is playing with baking soda and vinegar. A couple weeks back I surprised them with some heart shaped baking soda and they enjoyed it so much we decided make some more for their valentines. 

This unit came together pretty easily. I picked up a few fun heart things (toothpicks and jewels) at Dollar Tree, that I then added to some activities we've done before. If you are still trying to get children to master a skill sometimes simply changing a few of the materials makes the activity exciting again.  Language - matching lower case letter hearts to the correct upper case letter carton the hearts are plaster-of-paris poured in to a silicone heart tray. the egg carton was  originally made for matching letter buttons and has also been used for letter easter egg matching filling in letters with heart jewels *the cards are from,  early learning activities . i printed two per page so they'd be a bit smaller. My youngest two enjoy using these cards to practice spelling their names. sorting hearts pushing heart toothpicks in to the matching color i used sharpies to color the styrofoam, toothpicks are from ...

In the past we've never really decorated for Valentines Day , except for the day of when we hide hearts. This year, though, I had a couple ideas I wanted to try and we've also decided Little Lady's birthday party theme is going to be hearts.  It's still almost two weeks before the party but this way I figured we'll get a lot of bang for our buck.  All these decorations are really inexpensive - maybe $6 dollars a piece, at the most. They are also all pretty simple - the kids helped a lot. Another thing I like about these ideas is that with a couple color or shape changes, they work for pretty much any holiday. For example, if you substitute green for red/pink and shamrocks for hearts you'd be all set for Saint Patricks day. 

This Valentine's the kids woke up to the living room full of balloons. We also continued our tradition of hiding hearts as little love notes around the house for the kids to find. They were each assigned a color and had a blast running around hunting them down. Maca also came over in the morning with donuts and a few other treats and treasures. The rest of the day was pretty low key but that afternoon we did decorate some cupcakes. This marshmallow fondant recipe is amazing - it's tasty and as pliable as play-dough so even very young kids can work with it.  Here's a cute video of the kids "surprising" Maca with a few of the cupcakes. 

Yesterday was a fun day!  The night before Husbandie and I cut out hearts, wrote down some of our favorite things about our kids, and then hid them around the house.  The boys noticed right away and were super excited to find them all.  After finding them, we lined them all up on a blank wall and the kids asked me to read them several times through out the day...I'll probably be reading them a lot over the next week or so. :)  We did not do too much school work but Big Buddy did practice writing his name on lots of Valentines - it was hard work because the space was much smaller than he's used to. Once all our Valentines were addressed we taped them to some heart shaped lollipops we had made over the weekend and then tried to be very sneaky as we delivered them to our neighbors and friends.  We did however get caught - they might have had a tip :) - at Maca and Papa's house, where they invited us in for heart-shaped donut...