crafty

We recently spent one of the colder mornings making these suncatchers, courtesy of Family Fun magazine. It was a hit, mainly because it involved food coloring (= messy) but it was also fun for Susannah to keep checking the melting progress as the day warmed up.
Bonus: do a whole tray of colored ice cubes, hide them in the yard and get the kids to find them all before they melt. This can seriously occupy a whole half neighborhood of kids of a variety of ages for at least as long as it takes for them to begin losing feeling in their toes and fingers!

Other crafts we're slated to complete soon include a pretty doily stenciled tee and salt dough ornaments.

Here's hoping I'm brave enough to send those for her preschool classmates instead of the typical, paper/wasteful cards of nothingness. Heaven forbid I become "that mom" who makes gluten free carrot cakes and recycled crafts but yeesh, I get tired of just buying stuff to throw away later.
Recently, I realized how much plastic just goes in the garbage. I mean, yogurt containers, juice baggies, even the tupperware containers the lunch meat comes in sometimes. Usually, it goes in the trash. And I read recently that only about 5 percent of all these sorts of plastic even get recyled. To quote this lady: "single use plastic bags are used on average of 20 minutes, but they can take hundreds of years to degrade ..."
I am toying with her suggestion of phasing out all our plastic storage and serving ware, but sometimes having little ones around means having non-breakable stuff too.

As a side note, I did save all the small and medium glass jars and lids from when Susannah was eating baby food to create something with. So far we've used some for painted luminaries and I have plans to use some others to make a storage shelf for either kitchen or garage spaces.