spring celebration

During Lent this year, I attended a parenting workshop which was wonderful.  One of the things that I took away from it was the idea to be more celebratory.  In other words, taking every day life events and making them special.  Sooo, in an effort to do this more, we had a big celebration to welcome Spring back in March.  It was easy to get my little crew on board with this one!  And they had so much fun, that I thought I'd share.  Here is what we did . . .

We created a banner out of old scrapbook paper and I printed out the letters to spell "Spring".  Then we punched holes in the triangle shapes of the banners and strung a ribbon throughout so it could hang.  Then we decided we needed a garland (and I thought this would occupy my little sweetie for quite a while!).  She and I cut strips of scrapbook paper with various pastel designs and then we constructed it by creating rings, looping them through each other, and stapling them.  Very high tech!

   

I bought some white flowers at the grocery store and had my sweetie fill up some glasses with water.  Then, she dropped different colors of food coloring into each one.  She definitely loved this part!  We put the flowers in the water and hoped that they would soak up some of the color by dinner time . . . and they did!  Bonus, we decided that this would make an awesome science experiment for the science fair next year.

Finally, I had her make some little place cards, which turned out super sweet.  She used rocks from her strangely enormous rock collection to prop up the cards.  They each had our names and a flower that she drew.  Very cute.  I had enough left over flowers to put one in a small glass by each of the girls' place settings, sorry Daddy!  As you can see, it turned out so very sweet.   I bought some wonderful pink lemonade cakey cookies and we each had half of one for dessert.  Yummy!  All in all, a very festive Spring celebration that actually only took a few hours of crafty time with my girl to pull off.  She loved it.

The next morning, we all got up early and took a big walk to welcome Spring.  I had her go on a "scavenger hunt" to find each and every thing that meant Spring using her senses . . . ears, eyes, etc.  It was really so wonderful until the little people got tired of walking/being in the stroller . . . a bit of a whiny end to our Spring celebration!  Oh, well, there's always next year! 

Read more...

smiling

"Peace begins with a smile . . . Everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing." - Mother Teresa

Today I noticed so many things that made me smile.  I remember reading that some researchers did a study where they had people read the comics and then read the comics again with a smile on their face.  The second time they thought the comics were a lot funnier.  Do we smile because we are happy or are we happy because we're smiling?  I don't know the answer, but I don't think it matters.  It is so peaceful to have joy in my heart and have you noticed, the more you smile, the more peaceful you feel.  Seeing others smile back is a great feeling.  How happy am I to have such beautiful smiles to look at?

Read more...