Judah's Car Mat - Christmas Gift

I am so excited about this Car Mat for Judah.

I have been working on it for a couple of months now, but it's been going a lot quicker since I got my sewing machine!! It is possible to make this if you don't have a machine - it'll just take a long time to hand stitch everything.

I wanted to make him a car mat with lots of different scenes that he could rearrange the order of everything depending on his creative mood.

I found bags of red, white, black and green felt at the Dollar Store - $1 for 10 or 12 pieces. Each piece is about 5x7. On top of 4 bags of that felt I picked up a few other pieces at a craft store and used some scraps I had on hand. Some of the scenes still need a few details, but here they are up close:

 

Starting with the top scene:

A city (with a clothes line between two apartment buildings)

Fishing pond, apple tree, garden

Christmas tree, sled, snowman

Parking lot (the black line will be a light post, just need to add the button light!)

 

From left to right:

Rain clouds and puddles

Train station and train tracks

Sun, telephone pole with bird, stop sign

 

From left to right:

Tent, snake

Forest

Fence, barn

I will probably end up adding on to this if he plays with it as much as I am hoping he will. He has seen me working on it, and at the beginning I let him test it out just to see if he would play with it, and he totally loved it! I think it would be fun to let family and friends design a scene for him too.

Gingerbread Man Cookie Countdown

I saw an image somewhere that inspired this idea - a Christmas cookie countdown. I don't know how our ginger bread men will fare over the next 22 days - they have been wrapped very well with plastic wrap so I am hoping they don't go stale. But even if they do go stale, what little boy cares about stale cookies?

We made some gingerbread cookies (I'll share the recipe we used later, it's so yummy!) and cut out enough gingerbread men to count us down til Christmas day. Judah helped with the entire process - mixing, rolling, cutting, and of course dough sampling!

After the cookies had cooled (I actually left them over night) I wrapped each cookie in red plastic wrap. If I had to do it again I would just use sandwich bags - cutting 24 pieces of plastic wrap was a pain!

I put a small piece of tape on the bottom part of the plastic wrap to make sure it stayed tightly sealed, and then with the top part I twisted it tightly and tied a piece of white ribbon around the twisted piece of plastic wrap. I did that to each of the 24 cookies.

I then tied the other end of each white ribbon to a wide 12 foot long ribbon. About every 6 inches I tied a cookie, trying to make sure the knot ended up on the backside of the ribbon.

When everything was tied in place I took the ribbon to the tree and draped it over the tree like so:

In case you can't see where it starts here's an arrow to guide your eyes! 

The plan is for Judah to enjoy one cookie per day as we count down til Christmas day. If we like this idea and decide to repeat it next year then I will let each boy pick their own shape and we'll have twice the amount of cookies on the tree. This year Wesley is happy to eat the head of the gingerbread man while Judah enjoys the rest of it.

Don't forget to enter the giveaway that ends on Saturday!

Tin Foil "Stained Glass" Ornaments

I plan on making these with Judah soon. It's super simple and you can really do so much with these - change the shape, use glitter, add trim to the edge - whatever you think of! I posted this idea a couple years ago, so I am just copying from that post.

You will need 

a piece of stiff paper

 cardboard or card stock

tin foil

hot glue

Sharpie markers

hole punch

ribbon

Directions:
Cut paper to desired ornament shape.
Drizzle hot glue over the stiff paper to make sections.
Once dry cover with tin foil.
Color the sections in with colored Sharpies for stained glass effect.
Use the hole punch to make a hole to place the ribbon through. 

 

If so desired color the 'glue dividers' with a black Sharpie. I don't really like how that looks, so I'll be leaving ours plain.

Christmas Ideas

A week or so ago I sat down with Paul to talk about the upcoming Christmas season. We decided on a few things that were important to us and hopefully we'll stay focused and have a memorable and peaceful holiday season. I've written them down in my Household notebook. It is nice having talked about it together and having the ideas written down.

I received December's Southern Living yesterday and it had a similar idea - pick three key words and write them down in a public place. Then when you have the opportunity to do something use those three 'ideals' to help you determine whether you should do it or not.

Our Ideal Christmas List -as it's labeled in my notebook- is:

• peaceful
• spent at home
• having family and friends over
• a lot of baking/cooking
• creating lasting memories/traditions
  

As you can see it's a simple list, but it is also a very focused list for us. From that list I made a much more detailed list of activity ideas that match our Ideal list. Ideas on that list include:

• Bake Gingerbread men
• Read Christmas books in front of the fireplace
• Play games in front of the fireplace
• Put up the Christmas tree together
• Go for a drive to look at Christmas lights
• Eat popcorn and hot chocolate for dinner
• Make a Christmas craft
• Read the Christmas story
• Make a Gingerbread house from cardboard boxes
• Watch a movie (on the laptop) in the back of our car
• Make 'snowmen floats' (peppermint ice cream and ginger ale)

I have set up two baskets under our Christmas tree.
The one in the top picture holds activity supplies. I thought it would be much more likely that we'll do activities if the supplies are already put together. It's obviously not holding everything we would need, however it has some fun items already, such as:

• Nutcracker 'dolls' for when I read them that story
• Marshmallows for the hot chocolate
• A coloring book of the Christmas story 
• A few different craft items
  
  
  
  
  The second basket holds all of our Christmas/winter related books - I have been scouring our local thrift store for more books to add to the collection. Most of these books have come from there. The boys favorite is a pop-up book of the angels announcing to the shepherds the birth of Jesus Christ - they love pop-up books!
  
  The I Spy book came from some friends and Judah is the perfect age for that book now, and it's a favorite too!
  
  
  
  
  

I had wanted to do a Jesse Tree this year, but I don't think we will. Instead we will just use our nativity sets to tell them the story of Christ's birth over and over again throughout the month. This morning I let them play with one of the sets - after I had told them the account of Jesus' birth, using the characters to act out the story.
While Judah was playing he said to me;
"Mommy, this wisemen is hungry. I think he wants to eat this sheep."

And then he proceeded to act out the wiseman eating the sheep.

I'd never thought of it before, but I suppose they probably did eat the sheep =)

Ornament Swap

If you live in the US and are interested in participating in an ornament swap with your kids check out THE CRAFTY CROW for details on how to sign up and be a part of this!  I am so excited about this!

If you aren't interested in participating, or can't because you live in another country, check out her website anyway, she has an incredible assortment of craft ideas - it's one of the blogs I check daily!

To the Ceiling...

Here is our tree! After a great debate as to what we should do this year, we finally decided we would buy one - it was slightly painful spending money on a tree knowing that in a month it will be 75% cheaper... but we did manage to get it for 40% off reg price. so it wasn't so bad.

I love our tree! It is 7 1/5 feet tall, and with the star on top it touches the ceiling. I love having a tall tree, and Paul loves having one taller than him =)
The only place that the tree would fit in our apartment is in our bedroom!! It is kind of fun waking up to a Christmas tree in my face each morning.

Tomorrow I need to go grocery shopping and I think I am going to buy ingredients to make some of our favorite Christmas cookies and candies ... we were wanting to avoid all the extra calories, but I am so missing all the yummy stuff! We'll just have to have a few holiday parties to help get rid of everything :)

Pictures from Christmas