Merry Christmas!
By mom4life | Category: Activities with Kids, Creating a Home, Family Focus, Home Crafts, Kids Crafts, The Journey of Motherhood | Posted Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Our two oldest kids are home from school and we have been really loving the lazy days that provides us. Thanks to Pinterest, I have been inspired with some fun new ideas, crafts and traditions. I will share some of my favorites below and encourage you to see all of the ideas I saved here.
In order to spend the most time with my family, I will be taking a blogging break for the remainder of the year (my assistant may write up a post or two if we decide to have any product sales). Until I write again in 2012, Merry Christmas!
Psssst: if you missed it earlier this year, you can see the digital Christmas card that I created here. Then I linked that card to our family slideshow video (also shown below).
Activities and Crafts:
-Recycling socks with holes into the most adorable sock snowmen you have ever seen! I now have a special place to put all our socks with holes for making more snowmen 
.
-Gathering up past photo Christmas cards, hole punching them and connecting them with two book rings. Each night the goal is to pray for one family using these cards as prompts. This is a great way to continue to enjoy photo cards from year to year!
-Making peanut snowmen tree ornaments.
-Making snow globes out of baby food jars, glitter and small plastic toys.
-Making a new Christmas Card holder using a wooden embroidery hoop, wood glue and clothes pins.
-Curling Ashlyn’s hair using strips of cloth.
-Teaching Hunter how to play Monopoly (and finding out he LOVES it)!
New traditions:
-Using the free Jesse Tree advent devotional from A Holy Experience.
-I wrapped up 24 Christmas and/or winter themed books and from December 1-24 the kids took turns opening one to be read.
Purchases:
-A $12 oil pan at WalMart to make a great magnetic surface for fridge letters as well as a drawing surface for dry erase markers.
Baked goods:
-These oreo truffle balls were unfortunately VERY GOOD .
-I am wanting to make these healthy peppermint patties!
If you have not read it year’s past I will leave you with one final Christmas reflection. Wishing you peace, joy and hope this Christmas!
((hugs))
Do Together Craft: Easy Wreath Ornaments
By kristinabjornbak | Category: Activities with Kids, Home Crafts, Kids Crafts | Posted Monday, November 28, 2011
Christmas is rapidly approaching. Usually, this is the time of year that I bust out the paper crafts with my kids, but this year I thought we could make some ornaments. Enter these adorable, easy, and super cheap wreaths. This is truly a do-together craft, as some steps the kids can do, and some steps the adults or older kids have to do, such as the hot glueing. Even better, these little wreaths are fully customizable. If you have four kids doing this craft, you will have four completely different wreaths. Even better, if you are a sewer or crafter, I can nearly guarantee you have the materials needed around your house. Can you say, “Scrap busting time!” If you aren’t a crafter don’t worry! The materials for this craft are very inexpensive.
Easy, adorable, eatable, fall acorns
By mom4life | Category: Creating a Home, Kids Crafts | Posted Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Today I want to introduce you to a very dear friend of mine. She is one of those people that just overflows with fun creative ideas and has a great eye for design. We were visiting last week and I asked if she would be willing to write a guest post so that she could share a fun fall edible craft with you and she said yes! Welcome my sweet Selina! ~Heather
Hello Mom4Life readers!
I am very excited to be guest posting for Heather. Heather and I have been friends for 4 years. I actually met her through ordering a product from her website and when I saw there was tax added on my item I looked up the location of her “store” and it was just down the street! It’s a small world after all. 
Anyway, I’m Selina from Creative Juices Décor.
What you will find on my blog is lots of inspiration for all your Creative Juices! I am an interior designer by degree and LOVE home design/decorating, thrift store shopping, healthy recipes and crafting. I have 3 young kids so I also have fun crafts for them too.
Today’s craft is EASY and so much fun. (really, my kids made these, I just took the pictures!)
What you’ll need is:
* Hershey Kisses
* Mini Vanilla Wafers
* pretzel stick,butterscotch chip, or caramel bits.
* brown icing
Simply use a dab of brown icing to attach the vanilla wafer and then another dab to attach the stem which can be the pretzel piece, butterscotch chip or caramel bit!
Let them sit for 20 minutes so that the frosting can harden.
Tada! Look whatcha got. A bunch of adorable eatable fall acorns
I am going to make a little fall gift basket for the kids teachers with a candle, a small decorative pumpkin and a baggie of these treats. It would be a very fun fall snack to hand out to classmates too.
Come stop by, I have a fun pottery barn knockoff and a old map turned art piece you guys might like.
Be still my beating heart: Pinterest
By mom4life | Category: Creating a Home, Home Crafts, Kids Crafts, Organize Me! | Posted Tuesday, April 26, 2011
My friend Kira recently introduced me to a website that I LOVE! Have you heard of Pinterest? It is like the marriage of Evernote and Facebook with a little Flickr thrown in for good measure. Or another way to describe it is an eye pleasing, super easy to use, share and find, idea garden for crafts, projects, tutorials and more. (Oh ya it is free too:) ).
Snow painting with food coloring!
By mom4life | Category: Kids Crafts, The Journey of Motherhood | Posted Monday, January 10, 2011
Two things are guaranteed to make life seem more fun.
1) Grandparents
2) Food Coloring*
Put these two together and you have a fool-proof recipe for a good time.
For Christmas this year, Grandma and Grandpa Ledeboer gave Hunter and Ashlyn a creative “snow toy” which consisted of:
-Squirt bottles
-Food coloring
Simply fill up the squirt bottles, add your desired color and amount of food coloring and then set your Pissaco’s loose in the outdoor wilderness to color their world! I do suggest that you remind your little artist(s) to focus the squirts on the SNOW and not others and I won’t be held responsible if there are any colorful additions to your child’s snow suits BUT they will have fun!
*Please note that I personally prefer to stay as far away from food coloring IN our food as possible.
(After seeing that Grandma was wearing sunglasses, I had to dig out sunglasses for my kids. They felt so very stylish matching Grandma!)
As a side note: we discovered that our “yellow” was rather anti-climatic since our dog Wesson had already done some snow painting of his own outside. (No, you won’t see any yellow snow in the photo below ).
