Fall Fun: Hay Ride & Pumpkin Patch

A couple of weekends ago, Alayna's school invited us to a great hay ride/hay maze/chili & hot dog dinner at a nearby ranch. We didn't take many pictures, but we had a wonderful time visiting with Alayna's teachers, fellow classmates, and their parents. Alayna was so excited to see the farm/ranch, complete with barn, tractors, animals, and farmers! :)

Here we are hanging around the bonfire.



Here we are on the hay ride which took us to a nice little maze made out of hay bales.




Then last weekend, we went to a pumpkin patch to pick out some jack-o-lantern pumpkins. Here are some pictures of us goofing around the pumpkin patch.




We have been reading "The Littlest Pumpkin" by R.A. Herman, so Alayna decided she wanted to find the littlest pumpkin in the whole patch.



We also got a medium-sized pumpkin and one nice big one to make jack-o-lanterns out of, and Alayna was delighted to get to ride with the big pumpkin to the car in this little wagon. Pictures of our jack-o-lanterns will be coming soon!

Craft Monday: A new look for an old toy box

This Craft Monday has ended up turning into a full craft month, as this was a big project and we have been very busy with Fall and Halloween activities, but we are happy with the results!

I have this old toy box that my dad put together when I was little and, well, let's just say it's seen much better days. Because of its rough condition, I didn't want to keep toys in it, so we've been using it as storage for winter hats, scarves, and gloves, but when we found a great deal on a new storage bench, I decided it was time to move the winter stuff into the new bench and fix up the old toy box.

Here's what it looked like before the renovation.


I took the lid off, filled in the holes & cracks with wood putty and got some nice new hinges.



Alayna had lots of fun helping me paint the box (and herself) with white semigloss latex paint. It needed at least three good coats.




I found this cute bird fabric on sale at the fabric store and decided to use the small birds to cover some foam to make a cushion on the box lid. And I cut out the large birds to decoupage onto the box.



I got this bird-themed scrapbook paper and used it to cut out flower petals and leaves.



Then, I echoed the pattern on the bird fabric by painting similar tree branches onto the box with acryllic paint.




I broke out the good old Mod Podge and decoupaged the fabric birds and paper flowers and leaves onto the box. I put a couple of extra coats of Mod Podge on as well as sprayed it with a clear acryllic sealer to make sure it well protected.



Finally, I replaced the cushioned lid, screwed on some lid supports so it won't crash down on little fingers, and here is the final product!

We filled it up with toys and moved it into Alayna and Cecily's room.

Craft Monday: Tissue paper Flower Centerpieces & Cards

We decided to make some tissue paper flowers as centerpieces for Alayna's birthday party. I used to make these in Spanish classes for Cinco de Mayo and El Dia de los Muertos. They're super easy and fun to make and all you need is some tissue paper and green pipe cleaners. For detailed instructions, you can check out this website. Here are the girls helping out and showing off our finished flowers.



Aren't they so sweet?



Here are our completed centerpieces!




After Alayna's party we, of course, had a lot of extra tissue paper from gift bags, so I thought it would be nice to use some of that paper to make our thank you cards. See our stack of paper:



I folded and stacked up one piece of each color, then had Alayna trace around a candle and some glasses to make circles of three different sizes. (Ha ha! You can see Ranch dressing in the background because we had a veggie snack right before starting. No Ranch is required for this project!)



We took a pencil, put the eraser in the center of each circle, and twisted. Then we glued a large, medium, and small flower on top of each other onto folded cardstock.



Alayna then used a green marker to draw a stem and we cut fringe in green tissue paper for grass and glued it on. Here's Alayna (excuse me, I mean Snow White!) with two of the finished cards. Thanks again to everyone who came to our party and to all of our family who sent such great presents!

Happy 3rd Birthday Princess Alayna!

Alayna's 3rd birthday was on Sunday. We had a really nice princess party at our house. We ended up having eight kids at the party and we were blessed with beautiful 80 degree weather.







Cecily was amazingly good as I was running around taking care of everyone, and she had fun playing with the other babies!




I made a princess cake based on this online tutorial, but I added the cool edible princess decals to each side and the purple embellishments. It turned out pretty good and was delicious too!



Alayna had so much fun and got a lot of great presents! Here she is playing with some of her favorite ones.