Salt Dough Ornaments

Today, we made salt dough ornaments.  Such an easy recipe: salt, flour and water.

 The girls each picked cookie cutters to use

 and fought over took turns cutting them out.

 We used a straw to poke holes in the ornaments for the ribbon.

 Once the ornaments were dry we painted them

 When the paint was dry we did a coat of glitter paint to add some shine.  We added ribbon to finish them off.

 This is where the picture of all our cute little ornaments should be.  As usual, I forgot to take one!  Since I am writing this post in the middle of January I did manage to find a picture of Katie opening one of them.  I don't remember which girl painted this one, but isn't it cute:-)

Advent Day 6- Hot Chocolate and Game Night

The advent for tonight was hot chocolate with all the fixings and playing a game.  I printed out these Bingo cards for us to play.  The girls colored the pictures on their cards today.  

We made hot chocolate and had whipped cream, mini chocolate chips and M&Ms to top it.

Good times!

Crystal Ornaments

One of the activities on our Advent Calendar was to do a Christmas craft and decorate the house.  So, today we made crystal ornaments.  We followed this tutorial.  They were super easy!

Story Bell posing while mixing in her Borax.

 I did make one pretty big mistake.  I am only going to tell you about it, so you don't make the same mistake if you make these...

The directions called for a wide mouth glass jar.  We dug around in our glass recycling and found a couple of jars for each of the girls.  We then shaped our ornaments with the pipe cleaners.  The girls each made their initials and a snowflake. 

 The snowflakes were pretty wide, so we just bent them to get them to go into the jars whose mouths weren't very wide.  Well, once the crystals were formed on the pipe cleaners the pipe cleaners could not be bent...  So, we had beautiful crystal ornaments stuck in jars:-)  Luckily my husband didn't mind helping us out.  He had to break the jars to get our ornaments out!

This is where the picture of the finished crystals should be.  But, I forgot to take any.    I will try to add some at some point...

Cheekwood

We have wanted to checkout Cheekwood for awhile now.  When I received a half off email from Groupon, I jumped on it!

The girls had a good time checking out the train exhibit.

We enjoyed walking around the grounds. 

They were having cookie decorating for the kiddos.

Everyone had a good time in the tee pee.

We had a great time waling through the art museum looking at all of the Christmas trees.  Unfortunately, no pictures were allowed.

A couple of modeling poses before we left:-)

We can't wait to visit again!

Christmas Parade

We went to the Christmas parade downtown tonight.  Devon and I weren't sure if we wanted to brave the cold and walk to attend, but we were feeling brave:-)

We are so glad we did!  We had a great time!

Lyric and Cadence hitched a ride on the way downtown.

 The hooded blankets Mimi J gave the girls worked great to keep them warm!

 I thought this was going to be a cute picture of me and the girls.  I didn't realize I was taking a picture with a dragon and a ladybug:-)  Cadence is sure cute:-)

 A cool picture from the pedestrian bridge.

 We had to be creative to entertain the girls while we waited for the parade to start.

 We walked across the street to get hot chocolate.  We also ended up with a scoop of ice cream- Cadence didn't mind that it was freezing:-)

 Story did some dancing in the street while we waited.

 We were all surprised when the fireworks started.  They were really beautiful!

 Sweet sisters trying to push each other out of the wagon loving each other!

 Silly Lyric

 We played Rock, Paper, Scissors.  I learned Cadence knows how to cheat:-)

 Everyone was pretty tired on the way back to the car, but it was worth it.