This Emmanuel banner was my quick and easy craft project this year. Seriously, this took me about 15 minutes to make with some card stock, pre-cut letters, ribbon, and hot glue. Inspired by HopiQ’s Thanksgiving banner.
I’m loving this so much, it almost makes me forget my wish for a mantel.
We spent Thanksgiving at the beach with Trent’s family. Despite the look of these bright, sunny pictures, it was cold! Of course the kids begged to go down to the beach, then they begged to dip their toes in the water. It wasn’t long before they were splashing water all over their jeans and then Micah belly flopped into the water. After about five minutes of being completely soaked, they started shivering and so we hurried back inside to get some dry clothes on.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!
Hope that God blesses you this holiday with the joy, peace, and contentment that are so elusive in today’s society, yet so directly follow a right attitude of thanksgiving.
… that was the name of our Thanksgiving play at Time Travelers. The direction of this production fell to me though my experience with such things lies somewhere between extremely little and non-existant. Still, when you have such adorable actors and actresses you can hardly go wrong. The kids did a fantastic job and I loved all their costumes.
After the play we enjoyed crafts, games, and a delicious Thanksgiving feast.
Emmaline turned seven years old September 15, and we celebrated with an animal adventure party the following Saturday. Given that theme, I wasn’t sure what direction to take it at first, but we finally decided on a safari-based scavenger hunt.
As the guests arrived I informed them that some animals had gone missing and during the party today we were going to have to find them. To start, we needed a Missing poster for each of the eleven missing animals. The table was set with crayons and posters ready for a picture of the animal to be drawn.
Once all the guests arrived and had a chance to work on their posters, we served the pizza, my very favorite party food. Then we moved on to our next job: identifying the tracks of our animals. I googled images of the different animals tracks, printed them and glued them to pieces of construction paper. While the party-goers were eating their pizza, I snuck onto the porch with their posters and lined them up on the floor. The kids had the job of matching the tracks with the correct poster. Once all the matches were made, we flipped over the construction paper tracks to reveal a clue: This is no beach, but you could build a sandcastle here. That sent all the kids running to the sandbox where they found this:
Can you read that? It says, “Use the compass to decode the arrows. The next clue is at the machine that does this: _____ _____ _____.”
The sandbox had three large arrows drawn on the sand that pointed south, east, and west. Emmaline and Micah led the race to the sewing machine where they found this:
Which unscrambled into this:
The kids ran back outside to find a little plastic bird hidden in Emmaline and Micah’s “climbing tree.” They had to sing one song to the bird before I revealed the clue hidden inside it.
The clue inside the bird simply said, “big, blue bucket” and it didn’t take the kids long to find this big blue bucket:
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The instructions here told each child to choose a fish. Written on the underside of each foam fish was a clue. The clue that appeared most often was the correct one. There were 2 wooden houses, 3 gardens, 2 mailboxes, and 4 green wagons.
Here the kids had to dig through this fresh sand for “food packages”. I used little bags of runts candies for this, though it turns out if you shake a bag of runts really hard to get all the sand off, the bag breaks open and sends your runts flying into the grass. Oops. Once everyone had found a prize, I revealed the last clue: “The animals are hiding in a place that would get way too hot if it was turned on.”
Okay, I had a hard time finding a place to hide the prizes that would be easy to access but not easy to see early on, so the prizes were in the oven. I used plain brown lunch bags decorated with copies of the animal tracks and tied with ribbon. Inside each was a toy of one of the missing animals and a good handful of candy.
After that was cake and presents and it was all said and done within two hours, just as planned.
Happy Birthday, my beautiful Emmaline. I love you!
Micah Lion (6 1/2 months) and Isaac Lion (5 months)
Sleepy Lions
Our costume decisions were made rather last minute this year. Grammy is a sewing wonder, so she put together Emmaline’s beautiful Dorothy dress in just a few days. Micah’s costume was up to me. The thing is, I didn’t inherit any of those sewing skills, but I’m kind of a stickler about homemade costumes. It feels like cheating to buy a costume straight off the rack.
My first tin man thoughts involved dryer vents and hat boxes, but Micah is all about comfort and I knew he wouldn’t be happy for more than two minutes in something with the slightest bit of stiffness or itchiness.
So with some brainstorming help from my mom, here’s what I came up with:
Yes, the magic ingredient in his costume was spray paint! I bought el cheapo pants and a turtleneck at WalMart, and a plastic funnel from the auto department and spray painted them silver. I simply put some paper between the layers of cloth, sprayed, let dry, flipped, and sprayed again. It wasn’t terribly shiny, but enough to get the effect. The funnel was easy to paint inside and out and then I used an awl to make holes for the elastic band. The heart is made from red and white foam sheets and safety-pinned on from the inside. The crocs were bound for the trash because of the gaping hole in the toe, but I sprayed them silver too for one last night out.
I had to air it out for a few days, but the great thing was the paint didn’t stiffen the fabric at all so it was probably one of the most comfortable costumes ever.
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I adore matching costumes. Once Emmaline decided to be Dorothy I couldn’t resist talking Micah into being the Tin Man. I had already been planning on Isaac wearing the lion costume Grammy made for Micah four years ago, so they all went together perfectly. Emmaline’s costume was made by Grammy and the ruby slippers we recently inherited from some friends (thanks, Emily and Natalie!)
We continued our tradition of trick or treating at Downtown Disney. Our trio of yellow-brick-roaders attracted a lot of attention which of course they all loved. Isaac probably won the most oohs and ahhs but the three costumes together got a lot of compliments. The most often heard comment though, was “You need a little scarecrow!”
The kids got enough candy, but not too much, we ate ice cream for dinner and rode the carousel before we were all exhausted. Thank goodness for the extra hour of sleep that night!
Even though we just about melted, we still enjoyed Winter Park’s Fourth of July festivities in the park. We ate hot dogs, listened to the music, and watch the kids as they bounced and slid on all the inflatable attractions.
It’s always fun to see who we will run into at the park too. This year, we saw Megan and Matthew, and we chatted with a colleague of Trent’s while in line for the slides.
Once we’d had our fill of the Florida sun, we ducked into the blessedly air conditioned shops on Park Ave before heading home to make chocolate chip cookies. Mmmm!
