Coffee Filter Pumpkins

Coffee Filter Crafts are our new favorite thing around here! This is our 3rd coffee filter craft and I see no end in sight! (the 3rd is coming to a blog post soon).

I mixed red and yellow food coloring to get orange and they separated out a bit when they dried, but we still love the way the pumpkins look. They look awesome from outside at night and one night after a night walk, Sweet P said, "LOOK! Look at our pumpkins!" She thought they looked pretty cool from the outside, too.

These were made just like our Coffee Filter Trees, but had the added bonus of adding jack o' lantern faces! Sweet P loves making faces and I just love how hers turned out (I got to do a few, too!). She informed me that the one in the middle on the bottom with the triangle eye and the square eye is winking, and no, those aren't earrings, they are cheeks. She also loved the one with the funny mouth on the bottom right and we practiced making that face several times.

What do you do with coffee filters?!

Shaving Cream Spider Web

This week we're doing Letter W and I was giddy that we could do tons of WEB activities that would tie into Halloween!

Sometimes we do an activity and I'm so excited about it that I have to post about it to show all of our family members. As silly as it might seem, this is one of those posts!

This might just be the easiest activity ever! 

Simply spray out a web and add spiders! Insta-fun. 

And clean up led to even more fun in the sink! 

Tot Preschool: Letter Hh

Sweet P is 30 mos old.

Gammie got to be with us for most of letter H, too. We had a great week full of Halloween and fall activities. We also went to 2 Halloween parties, the Great Pumpkin Party at our church and trick or treating at the mall! 

Verse: Every good and perfect gift is from above. ~James 1:17

Bible figures: Ruth and Naomi

Activities:

 Foam shapes and stickers: Sweet P picked the cat and decorated the foam shape with foam stickers. Taking the paper off the back of the stickers was a great gross motor skills activity.

H collage: Leftover hearts I cut out during Valentine's Day last week worked great for her collage this week! She also had lots of horse stickers and houses to put on it.

Letter H hippo: While it looks a little like a rabbit, that purple H is a hippo. The eyes and teeth are stickers and the ears are card stock. I drew the nostrils.

DLTK's doadot H is for Hat: Lots of dotting with the pink doadot marker!

Jack o'Lantern activity: I cut out circles, triangles, squares, rectangles and crescents for his eyes and nose. I also cut mouths to match and Sweet P matched the shapes correctly. After we did it several times, she wanted to glue the pieces to the paper so she made a face on the back and the front.

h is for house from A Heart for a Home: Sweet P gets better and better at these each week!

Making Learning Fun's 5 Little Pumpkins magnet page: Sweet P used her pumpkin stamp and cat stamp (from the Target 1$ spot) to fill in the dots on this page. We said the 5 little pumpkins rhyme as we did it.

Upstairs Shelves:

Animal puzzle from Target 1$ spot

Numbers puzzle from Target 1$ spot

Wooden puzzle from Gammie (from Goodwill)

Foam lowercase alphabet puzzle from Dollar Tree

Halloween/Fall Sensory Bin: We used the foam pumpkins to illustrate 5 little pumpkins as we read the book.

Other Activities:

COAH doadot H with heart beads: Sweet P wasn't really into this until I showed her how to put the beads on the H and told her heart starts with H. It turned out really neat! We needed a change up from the stickers.

Alphabet and Number puzzles from Target 1$ spot: We use our pocket chart for these and put one side in the chart and the other in front of her. The numbers are a challenge, but she matches all the letters correctly.

Halloween puzzles: We gave this as a treat for the treat bags at one of the Halloween parties we went to. Sweet P colored the puzzle and then we broke it apart so she could put it together. (Note: these are pretty cheap puzzles and it was hard to get them back together!).

Painting Pumpkins! See this post for more details.

File Folder Fun Hearts Alphabet match: Sweet P did great with this activity and matched all the letters! She also loved putting the hearts back into the pocket on the front of the folder.

Pumpkin sorting: I found these pumpkins at Wal-Mart and she really liked using the tongs to put the pumpkins in the ice tray (Dollar Tree).

Happy Halloween from our little Pirate!

Halloween/Fall Sensory Bucket

I know it's after Halloween, but I just got around to taking a picture of this yesterday. I got most of the items at the Dollar Tree, Target and Wal-Mart. She loves the little bugs and LOVES dumping the whole thing on the floor.

Pumpkins and gourds
Foam pumpkins
Pumpkin straws
Halloween stencils
Bugs, skeletons, spiders and bat rings
Stuffed spider
Sparkly leaves
J is for Jack O'lantern flash card
Shiny pumpkins
Halloween colored pompoms
Pumpkin erasers
Bat erasers
Jelly bracelets

Pumpkin Painting

I wasn't sure how Sweet P would like this because sometimes she's in to paint and other times, well, she's not. She L-O-V-E-D painting this pumpkin (it's from the farm!).

I used tempera paint and put 6 colors in a palette, then let her go to town. She started out doing single colors and then decided to mix them all.

After it dried she put foam Halloween stickers on it.

It turned out pretty awesome, don'tyathink? Such a fun, easy and cheap craft!

Pipe Cleaner Spider

I saw an activity with pipe cleaners and a strainer awhile ago at The Imagination Tree and thought it'd be a great way to make a "spider" this week.

Auntie RoRo got Sweet P these super fun pipe cleaners. They are sparkly and Halloweenish colors. After showing Sweet P how to stick the pipe cleaners into the strainer, she went to town.

We talked about how spiders have 8 legs and she even made it into a hat!

She couldn't wait to show the Farmer her spider hat when he got home.

20 Years Later

I know Halloween was 2 months ago, but I finally got around to photoshopping these pictures together. Obviously the one on the left is Sweet P. The one on the right is Auntie Kannon. Yep. Same costume. 20 years later. Have you ever seen cuter dalmatians?

Happy Halloween!

Hope you and yours have a fabulous Halloween today! Here in Des Moines, kids trick or treat on the day before Halloween. And it's not called Halloween. It's called Beggar's Night. And you don't say trick or treat. You tell a joke! So strange to me! But I didn't hear any jokes last night. Not a single trick or treater came to the door! I suppose that's what happens when you live across the street from a cemetery. I wouldn't trick or treat at my house either.

So Sweet P and I had a nice night in. I made her pizza and we played with some toys we got from various Halloween gatherings this week. I didn't take her out trick or treating, but she was able to dig into some bowls of candy at the last Farmer's Market of the season, yesterday. Did she eat the candy? Ha, of course not. I did. We missed the Farmer (the market wasn't the same without him). I had a breakfast burrito since I hadn't had one all season and bought a small bag of caramel apple popcorn (that I'm hiding from the Farmer because he'll eat it all if I don't).

Trying to hand me her spider ring at the Farmer's Market

What we're MOST looking forward to today is that Daddy comes home!!! He won't be home until after Sweet P goes to bed, but this farmer's wife can't wait!

Hope you enjoy your Halloween and don't eat too much candy!

Wordless Wednesday: Night Eyes

So...not so wordless. The dalmatian costume Sweet P has on was actually Auntie Kannon's...20years ago. Gotta love that Gammie keeps everything. We were at Night Eyes at our zoo.

The Great Pumpkin

On Monday night, the Farmer and I took Sweet P to a Halloween event at a local church.

She wore her Tiger costume (and if one more person called her Tigger I was going to scream) and I put a red bow on the ear so people would know she was a girl. That, however, did not stop the photographer at the photo booth from saying,

"Can he sit up by himself?"

To which the Farmer replied, "SHE can sit up by herself, yes." So he plopped her down on a bale of hay of which she promptly grabbed a handful and stuffed in her mouth.

Why is it that the words never come out fast enough when you're in a situation like that? Here I am as a bystander while the Farmer is sitting next to her and I can't get the words out. But I eventually did and we got the hay out, too. I know babies like putting stuff in their mouths, but ours is sometimes a bit overboard.

They had a lot of made up games downstairs (like throw the ball in the bucket), but also had a battle of Guitar Hero where two kids about the age of 5 were going at it (and one was a girl). We got a kick out of watching kids and looking at the costumes. It was VERY apparent who got to pick out their costume and who had to wear what mom and dad said to wear. Like the kid dressed as this:

Funny costume? Absolutely. But the Farmer said, "Did you see the look on his face? You know he's looking around at all the kids dressed as Transformers and thinking, 'Man, why am wearing this?'"

We wanted to see if it was worth bringing her to again and we probably will. Our one complaint though?

They weren't giving out enough candy to the adults.

Unmasked

Probably not the best title for the blog, but it'll do.

Approximately a year ago, the Farmer and I saw Sweet P for the first time. She was roughly an inch in size and I was 11 weeks pregnant. I have one of the photos of her in a frame and marvel at how such a tiny thing can be so detailed. About a week before that we had our first appointment with the midwives and found out our due date was May 2nd (which is now Sweet P's birthday). And 6 weeks before that I peed on a stick and handed it to my husband so he could be the first to know.

"What does it say?"

"Preliminary results say, "Yes."

And the whirlwind began. The point to all of this is that around this time last year I received a package from Gammy (my mother). It was a gift for the baby (who at this point was "the baby" because we didn't know if she was a he or a she, yet). I opened it and there sat a tiger costume. This costume was partly for Halloween wear and partly for her to wear to an LSU outing. I wasn't sure she'd get the chance to do the latter.

I was also a little bummed that the Halloween costume choice had somewhat been decided for me. Thankfully, we have more than one Halloween party to go to so I reasoned that it was perfectly fine to buy another costume. Or 2. So now Sweet P will have the chance to be not only a tiger, but a skeleton and a pumpkin. (Oh, there will be pictures). I figure this is the only time in her life that I get to decide the costume (because I'm sure from here on out she will be the boss of the costumes) so my first choice was a pumpkin. The skeleton is just a pink onesie with a skeleton on it.

And she'll definitely get to wear her tiger costume for what it was meant for at Auntie Kandida's swim meet next weekend. Yes, that's right. Sweet P is going on another flight. I'm a little nervous for this one because she's a bit more mobile and opinionated as this point. But I'll keep you posted.

And as far as I'm concerned, there's not much cuter than a baby in a Halloween costume. So what are you (or your kids) going to be for Halloween this year?