Shamrock Shirts & Leprachaun Traps

I had nearly forgotten the fact that St. Patrick's Day is this weekend when A came home from preschool today buzzing with excitement about leprechauns.

An Ice Cream Birthday

I cannot believe our littlest is three years old! We had a wonderful time celebrating with a very small, but successful ice cream themed party. I made four flavors of playdough for our few guests to enjoy: mint, strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla. The chocolate recipe came from Pre-Kinders, but for the rest I used my favorite playdough recipe. (Hint: if you use boiling water, the process is much faster).

Pony beads and heart-shaped beads were set out as sprinkles, cardboard cones stacked ready, and I filled an old Hershey's container with yarn "chocolate syrup."

Bowls and spoons also stood by ready and waiting.

Instead of party favor bags, each child was given an ice cream scoop with their name on it...

As well as their own apron, courtesy of my talented mom. She made the girls' aprons out of sheet material and the boys out of bandanas!

Menus stood by for the adults to put in their orders.

We kept our party deliberately small, but the few guests there turned our pretend ice cream parlor into a hub of activity!

Yum! Looks good enough to eat! (And yes, most of the kids did try. :)

When they'd filled up on pretend ice cream, we let them have the real thing: an ice cream pie. For this one, I simply spread softened strawberry ice cream (A's favorite) in a prepared graham cracker pie crust and topped with sprinkles. After an hour in the freezer, it's ready to serve.

For more ice cream themed party inspiration visit:
- Sun Hats & Wellie Boots
- Spell Outloud (where I found my printables)
- "Ice Cream Cone" Cupcakes
- One Charming Party (for the best cake idea!)

Playdough Fairy Garden

I mixed up some of my favorite play dough to let A make her own fairy flower garden. This play dough turns out so smooth and non-crumbly, I much prefer it to store-bought. Today we used it as a base for the garden.

I gave A a basket of silk flowers (leftover from E's Fancy Nancy party last year) and let her arrange them in the "garden."

She's got her grammy's gift for flower arranging! When she was finished, I gave her a few of these adorable fairy cupcake toppers to add to the garden. Aren't they precious? My boss found them at TJ Maxx and had to pick them up for my girls.

Half an hour later, and she's still playing in her garden. I don't blame her... I might just join in!

Fairy Colors by Caroline Repchuk

This is about the cutest book I could find on fairies, although it's a little young for A. As you may have guessed, the story is about different colored fairies getting ready for a ball. It's a nice reinforcement of colors, and the sparkly pages will probably hold the attention of babies and young toddlers.

But I want something better. So spill it... other than Disney and Dora, what fairy-themed books are worth reading to my kids?



I'm linking up to:
- stART @ A Mommy's Adventures

Monsters! Cyclops Visor Craft

Inspired by this visor on Makes & Takes, I created a Cyclops Visor for my own little monsters.

Foam visors would probably fit better and are easy enough to find, but I happened to be at Target today, and they had these black plastic ones in the dollar spot. All it took was a little craft foam, a really random scrap of fuzzy fabric, and a hot glue gun!

Both girls enjoyed wearing it around and growling at me (of course, because what else does a monster say?).

Jeremy Draws a Monster  by Peter McCarty

Jeremy is a child recluse who never goes outside but loves to draw. One day he draws a monster who immediately begins to demand more and more things: a sandwich, a television, a hotdog, a hat. Exhausted, Jeremy is glad when the monster decides to go out, but is quickly disappointed when the monster soon returns. This time, Jeremy takes matters into his own hands and escorts the monster out of the building. Stepping outside, a group of children invite him to play.

The story is quirky to say the least, but it's the illustrations that sold me on this book. McCarty's drawings are sparse but expressive, and make excellent use of the white space on the page. His monster is not scary, but rather comical, particularly when he dons his huge purple hat. Older preschoolers will enjoy this understated story in the tradition of Harold and the Purple Crayon.

I'm linking up to:
- SOYS @ Fireflies & Jellybeans

Because we're tired of bunnies...

I'm starting to feel a little Easter-ed out, so we took a break today from the bunnies to do a simple little froggy craft to go along with this simple little froggy book:

One Frog Too Many by Mercer & Marianna Mayer


This wordless book is chock full of gorgeous ink drawings. With a stroke of the pen, the Mayers convey a full range of emotions through their lovable characters: boy, dog, frog, turtle, and new frog. The story unfolds as Boy receives a new frog as a gift. Old frog is not happy about the new addition and does everything he can to oust new frog. When old frog goes too far, he learns the ugly side of jealousy.

We've owned this book for over a year, but this was the first time I pulled it out and asked E to "read" it to me. She did such a great job; I wish I had taped it. This is a wonderful activity for early literacy, even for kids like E who are already reading.

Just look how the illustrations clearly show jealousy, guilt, remorse, anger and grief. I know my kids can relate to frog's naughtiness!

To go along with the book, we created this Little Rock Frog from E's precious pebble collection. I was inspired by this page on Martha Stewart. She has examples of frogs, turtles, and even a dachshund, so you can create the entire cast of characters if you'd like.

All we did to create this little guy was glue together three pebbles using super glue and a hot glue gun (it's what I had). E painted him green and then add spots with a paint pen. I put on the finishing touches. In no time he was all dry and ready to play outside!

And just so A wouldn't feel left out when she woke up from naptime, I painted this little lady bug...

I'm linking up to:
stART @ A Mommy's Adventure
Feed Me Books Friday @ The Adventure of Motherhood 

Fancy Nancy Party - Accessorize!

Little girls seem born with a desire to look and feel beautiful. At E's Fancy Nancy party, we did our best to help them feel as lovely outside as they already are inside. How? By accessorizing, of course! (It's the Fancy Nancy way.)

At La Salon, I applied the eye shadow color of their choice. Q-tips let me buy just one sample pack of eye shadow for all the girls. Each child was allowed to pick out a lip gloss to keep, and I applied a very light coat to their lips. (Minutes later - once they had the lip gloss in their own hands - nearly every girl looked like Ronald McDonald.)

While I played makeup artist, my mother-in-law gave the girls manicures. Again, we let them pick from several nail polish colors.

At the same time, my mom assisted girls in picking out a feathered boa.

Then they were asked to take a bangle from the top of the Eiffel tower, a jeweled ring from the bowl, a hat and a flower. My mom hot glued the flower onto the hat and then wrote the girl's name on the inside of the rim. (The boas and bangles were from the Dollar General. I found the basic straw hats and silk flowers at The Dollar Tree, and the ruffly hats at Target's dollar spot.)

I would have loved for the girls to cover the hats in lots of flowers, but it was too time-consuming with the hot glue gun. Many of the girls chose to wrap their boas around the rim of the hats, which worked great and looked fabulous.

When the make overs were complete, I sat all the girls down and let them take turns walking the "runway," pausing for me to take a picture of each of them while everyone cheered. I later used these pictures to make our thank you notes.

Doesn't the birthday girl look gorgeous? Wouldn't Fancy Nancy be proud? She - and the other children - had a blast getting dressed up and playing with make-up. I heard several times, "my mom never lets me do this!" After the fashion show they had worked up quite an appetite. Check out all my posts this week for menu ideas, decorations, and other tips for throwing the perfect Fancy Nancy party.

More Thailand for Toddlers

Sawadee Ka! We're learning about Thailand this week. Last night, we talked about how children in Thai mountain villages sleep. I explained to E how people build houses up on stilts and keep their pigs, chickens and roosters under the house. The kids lie on grass mats under mosquito nets and listen to the animal noises as they fall asleep.

Just before bedtime, we created our own pretend village hut. E loved pretending to be a Thai village child. Daddy and the dog weren't as excited about their roles.

The pretend play was a perfect lead-in to our bedtime story:

Hush! A Thai Lullaby by Minfong Ho

This prequel to Peek!: A Thai Hide-and-Seek follows a similar format. A Thai mama hurries around her home telling the different animals to be quiet because her baby is sleeping. (Having slept in a Thai village myself, I can attest that it is a noisy place!) The rhythms and repetition are wonderful:

"Wee-wee, Wee-wee," A small mosquito.
Mosquito, mosquito, don't come weeping. Can't you see that baby's sleeping?
Mosquito, Mosquito, don't you cry, My baby's sleeping right nearby.

The baby, of course, does everything but sleep, climbing out of his hammock and following Mama around the house. Kids will love trying to find the hiding baby in each picture, as well as enjoy learning the different animal calls in Thai.

For another related activity, I worked with A to build this Paper Plate Elephant. A came down with hand-foot-mouth disease and is absolutely miserable from all the blisters on her tongue and gums. I tried to distract her this morning with this simple craft. Using this template, I cut out the pieces and gave them to her to put on the plate. She chucked the ears at my head, so I did those for her and then she got the idea and helped with the nose and googly eyes. The googly eyes were a huge hit with her. I swear I only turned my back for a second!

Tomorrow I'll show our attempts at an ancient Asian art form.

Adventure - In the Land of Makebelieve

The Book - The Three Pigs by David Weisner

I've warned you before that I am in love with David Weisner. This man can draw. His illustrations are everything a children's book illustration should be: detailed, beautiful, imaginative. I'm a lover of words, but Weisner uses few (if any!) narration. His artwork is strong enough to carry the story.

The Three Pigs is a great example. The story starts off as a traditional telling of the three little pigs, until the first pig escapes out of the frame of his story. He convinces the second two pigs to join him outside the scene and together they discover a world full of pages from storybooks. They hop in and out of classic stories and nursery rhymes, picking up friends along the way. Eventually the piggies re-discover their own story and decide to return... with a few adjustments to the plot!

Weisner struts his stuff throughout the book, changing the style of the artwork for each of the stories the swine enter. When the pigs are in the no-man's-land between stories, they look like they might just step off the page and into your room. Little Page loves it when one of the pigs looks out us and wonders if there is someone out there. This is definitely a story that thinks outside the box!

The Activity - Let's Pretend!


On our way home from school today Little Page created an elaborate scenario in her head involving princesses and fairies and me as the queen (of course!). She asked if we could play "pretend" when we got home. My first reaction was to think about 20 other things I needed to do instead, but I pushed those aside and said "yes"!

So we donned our imaginations and headed outside into the land of...

Dragons guarding tall towers!

Fairies flying through the air!

A princess hidden in her cottage in the woods...

And the Queen Mum!

I'm linking up to:
- Where in the World Wednesday @ Lemon Drop Pie