Advent Calendar

Just wanted to share a cute advent calendar I found for Z baby. I'd been looking for awhile now. I had one growing up and loved it. We always got a small a gift each day and its something I will continue with my kids. And we started with Z this year! It also was nice to spread her gifts out. We have awesome relatives that didn't mind me giving her some of her smaller gifts as her advent gifts. Z gets a bit overwhelmed opening a bunch of gifts all at the same time so this was a great way to spread it out. The calendar I found at fisherprice.com. Z loves playing with it as well and an added bonus you can use it as a matching game to help learn to match up numbers as each little piece has the number on the back :)

Fuzzy Polar Bears

Another Pinterest idea I found somewhere and can't find again otherwise I'd link it since I can't take any credit for it being my idea. I cut some basic heads on my cricut on white cardstock. I just did a large circle and two smaller ones for ears, welded. Then I washed out some little fruit cups. The small plastic individual ones. Z baby gladly ate the fruit first for me. She's my fruit monster! Then I painted the inside of the cups white and glued them onto the head cutout for the nose. Then I gathered cotton balls for the fur and found a bunch of colored puff ball things I had intending to use those for just the eyes and top of the nose. Z baby and her BFF had other ideas though! We ended up with some mighty colorful polar bears! Love the creativity :)

I just smeared a bunch of white glue all over the head and then let the girls go to town with the cotton balls and puff balls. In hindsight I should have used more glue, many were falling off. Or I could have let them dip each ball in glue and stick them on that way. Next time!

Gobble gobble!

Turkey time! We always brine our turkey and then smoke it on Thanksgiving. This year we had a helper making sure the brine was up to snuff :)

She didn't actually try it, just pretended. Our lil chef Z! We use Alton Brown's recipe for Roast Turkey but just smoke it instead of roasting. Love me some Alton recipes!! We brine it in one of those igloo coolers. The tall tube ones with the spout at the bottom. Just have to be careful not to get too big of a turkey so it fits in! One year we did two turkeys and used one of the regular igloo ice chest things.

Spider hands and ghost feet, oh my!

Quick, easy, craft! We did this at Z's playgroup. We did the ghost feet the year before as well and it was a lot of fun to see how much bigger all their little tootsies are!

Super simple instructions. Use non toxic paint and paint their hands or feet and gently push down on cardstock. Add smiley faces and a name and date and voila! I used a white gel pen on the black spiders. Totally cute craft that fits in a scrapbook album :)

Jessie Costume

Z baby is obsessed with Toy Story so I decided she will be Jessie for Halloween. I wanted to make her costume so I found her a boys plain white button up shirt, a jean skirt and some boots. We dint go with traditional cowboy boots only because I couldn't get her feet into any :) so I found some cowboy-ish looking ones at Children's Place that will have to do. The beginnings:

Finished outfit:

I found a hat at the dollar store. It was a bit big but oh well! I used a hole punch and punched around the brim and added ribbon. Added a ribbon around the base too. Hat done! The shirt I found a picture of Jessie online and used Z's Jessie doll as a guide and free handed the design using fabric paint. My only issue with doing that was the paint made the shirt really stiff. Zoey didn't mind thankfully. For the skirt I found some cow print fuzzy fabric at the fabric store. I sewed a simple tube basically. And then I just used stick on Velcro to stick it to her skirt. Initially I was just nervous about sewing it right onto the skirt, figured i would screw it up as my sewing skills are seriously lacking! But then decided I liked the idea of being able to take it off after and retain the plain skirt so I went with that and it worked perfectly. I also made her a belt using ribbon. For the belt buckle I used those foam sheets you can but at Michaels and free handed the design onto it with a marker. The buckle is my least favorite part of the outfit. Wish it looked a bit better but oh well. Z still rocked her outfit!

Pumpkin plates

Simple Pinterest craft I found somewhere along the way :) I took paper plates, flipped them over and let Zoey paint them orange. Shes always a serious painter!

I cut out some eyes, noses and mouths from black cardstock and a stem out of brown cardstock. Stuck a little glue on and let her place them. I helped with one pumpkin, the other I just let her have at it with the face :)

Baking soda and vinegar experiment

Loved this craft/ experiment! Found it on Pinterest of course. I just took some flat-ish Tupperware and dumped in some baking soda. I then used some small plastic cups and put in vinegar with a little food coloring to make her a few different colors. I have some little squeeze dropper thingys and put one in each cup of vinegar. I showed Z how to use the droppers and put it in the vinegar. She got a huge kick out of the bubbles! It did take awhile for her to have the coordination/patience to use the droppers, all part of the learning experience. She loved it so much I had to give her another Tupperware of baking soda!