Cute park pics

We went to the park today.  It was the most beautiful weather!  I took my camera along so I could practice taking pictures with some backlighting. 

While Caleb was playing on this large swing, I decided to put Nathan in there too.  They loved it!  These might be some of my favorite pictures of the boys together.

Family pictures sneak peek

We took our family Christmas pictures already, but I haven't created the card yet.  At first I was discouraged that they didn't turn out as I hoped, but we ended up getting some cute pictures!  I really want to post them all, but I don't want to ruin the fun of getting our Christmas greeting in the mail.  So here is just a sneak peek at the pictures we took.  I'm not going to post one of all of us, because I don't know which ones we'll use yet.  :)

I love my boys!!!  :)

Pinterest hits and misses

If you've never heard of pinterest (pinterest.com), where have you been??  Living under a rock??  Just kidding.  But it's this neat little website that you can "pin" stuff you see around on the internet so you can go back and revisit it later when you want to do that craft or recipe or whatever.  It's much better than having 10 tabs open on you computer for weeks on end because you want go back to it eventually.  I still do that sometimes though.  :)  And you also can go to pinterest.com to see what other people are "pinning."  I think of it as a modern magazine.  Instead of reading a decorating, cooking or craft magazine and cutting out the ideas and saving them in a folder, you can do it all in one place online.  It's slightly addicting.

Anyway, I've found lots of ideas I like on there.  Most of them, like decorating ones, have to wait until we sell our old house and have money.  Sad, because I'm wanting to make our house feel like a home.  But that will have to wait.  The things I've done so far were free kids stuff with Caleb.

First, we made a Thanksgiving tree.  I've been wanting to do one for awhile.  But I didn't know if I wanted to do fabric, paper, felt, or make it reusable, or just add to it each year.  So for now I decided to have Caleb gather sticks for our tree, and we cut out his hand shapes as the leaves.  Then we wrote things we're thankful for and hung them up.

We tried making salt dough Christmas ornaments.  It's just salt, flour and water.  He liked mixing the dry ingredients together the most.  Then when I rolled out the dough, he had fun using the cookie cutters to cut out the shapes.  Then you bake them to dry them out.  I wanted to do hand prints of the boys in the dough, but it didn't work.  Maybe you need a different mixture with softer, more pliable dough.

 Here is how they turned out.  Kind of plain and rustic looking.  You can paint them.  Not sure how long they'll last.  I read you can put a polyurethane coating on to help them last longer.

I tried to do a Christmas tree with our family's thumbprints to be Christmas lights.  The indentations didn't work that great, kinda like the hand prints.

Then we tried an interactive play thing for Caleb called cloud dough.  First you take a bar of Ivory soap and put it in the microwave for 1 minute.  While in the microwave, it softens and puffs up like this:

Then you are supposed to add water and rip off pieces of toilet paper and add that to mixture too.  Then it becomes this "dough" that you can mold and squish.  Well, Caleb was not into it at all!  He's never been one for play-doh or getting messy.  He wouldn't even put his hands in it and try it.  And this was a big step for me to even do this activity because wet toilet paper grosses me out.  Gag!  But the nice smell of the soap helped me not think about it.  He just wanted to pull the toilet paper off the roll.  What I had planned on being a 30+ minutes fun activity, turned into 5 minutes of mom playing and showing him how much fun it could be, and 5 minutes of mom cleaning up.  Oh well.  We tried.  I think I'll stick to dry, cleaner activities.

We also tried a pinterest idea for our Christmas card pictures.  I'll post those later.  :)