watercolor advent calendar

I love Christmas.  I love the whole season.  It's just the start of cold weather, so it's still fun to get out your cute hats and scarves and boots.  I love Christmas music.  All of it.  No exception.  Bing to Elvis to Mariah to Dean... Justin Bieber could sing a Christmas song and I'd like it.  Does he?  I'll google it.

I want Max and Lola to love the holidays as much as I do.  I want to pass on old traditions.  I want to start new traditions.  Having an advent calendar is one tradition I'd like to start, so I did.  Every year will be a new design.  Maybe some will have treats, but this year I did one with activities.  

I saw this advent calendar image and fell in love.  I love watercolors and it's so visual.  I have a blank wall and thought this will be a great temporary art installation.  That one is a virtual calendar, she had 25 days of blog posts.  I actually printed out activities on the back of each card.  Max and I will peek at the appropriate card every day in December leading up to Christmas and do whatever the card says!  

I made some small (bake cookies, have a dance party, etc.) and some large (go to a hockey game, have a backyard bonfire, etc.).  I think he will enjoy it.

Max taking pictures of "Mommy's work".  Do we have a future blogger??

hey sweater pants!

It's the most wonderful time...of the year.  Time to list my new sweater pants on Etsy!  Here they are, pass it on!

xmas card outtakes

Just by chance I dressed the kids alike one day and I thought, I should take some Christmas card photos!  Well, turns out this is going to be harder than I thought.  About 50 pictures later (not an exaggeration), there isn't one good one.  There are plenty of these though...

And this head crunch is when she started crying.  The end.

max's book of thanks

I don't know about your three-year-olds, but mine has a case of the gimmie's.  It's difficult to get out of Target without a little toy of some kind or another.  So I thought Thanksgiving would be a great opportunity to teach Max about being thankful for what we have. To make it fun and interactive we thought of things he was thankful for and took pictures of them with my Instax Mini.  Then put them together in a flip book since he loves this one I just made for him.

Max's Book of Thanks

A home

Baby sis

A bed to sleep in

Cousins

Learning (his favorite hockey books help him practice numbers and the alphabet)

Hockey guys (Max took this picture)

Good food

Nature

Art projects with Mama

Mommy and Daddy (This is an old picture we found since John was at work, it was a week before Lola was born and I was super fat)

The difficult part was helping him think of things to be thankful for that weren't material possessions.  I let him include his hockey guys because he loves them so much, but it was tempting to add hockey sticks, hockey jersey, etc.  I prompted some of these, but overall he did really good and hopefully got the point!

rad tshirt printing

I love when I can include Max in my projects, it's one of the reasons I started this blog.  But there are some things I want to just make for him...not with him.  The ones when it's pretty likely he will just make a huge mess and there will be paint on my walls.  So, when I had some time to myself this past weekend I decided to do the tshirt printing I've been wanting to try for some time. 

I wasn't sure whether I wanted to make stamps or templates.  I decided on templates.  I didn't have any potatoes...They aren't perfect, I just drew them and cut them out by hand.  They are all old cereal boxes, etc.

Triangles : Circles : Cat : Mountain : Chick : Star

Some I really love, others not so much...but that's how most of my projects go.  The chick template didn't work at all, they were all blobs.  Another note on the templates- you can't really goop the paint on the brush or else it will bleed under the template.  Otherwise I thought they worked pretty well.

I also picked up some gauze to make myself a scarf.

Next time...potato stamps!