How to Make Pop-Up Cards!

I don't know about you, but lately we've gotten quite a few requests to make cards for people! Our boys' school had a teacher appreciation week, my great grandpa's memory care home is asking for us to send cards to our loved ones, and our church has adopted a local nursing home to send cards to the residents!

So, when I received an invite to be a special guest on our church's daily "Lunch Break," I just had to show the kids how to make pop up cards!

Ever since the kids have been home from school, our awesome kids' pastor Matt and early childhood coordinator Natalie have been eating lunch live on Facebook, every week day from 11:30-12:00 central time. They take some time to say hi to everyone tuning in, pray for our lunch, compare what everyone's eating, tell jokes, announce birthdays, give away prizes, play games, and have special guests! (Everyone of course is welcome...you don't have to attend our church or even be a kid!) My boys and I are big fans of lunch break so they were pretty stoked that Mom was going to be on.

I showed the kids how to make three different types of pop-up cards! Since the kids at our church were sending cards to people they didn't know in the nursing home, just to make them smile, I thought it would be fun to incorporate some jokes into the cards. Of course, I had to also have a little fun with Pastor Matt and Miss Natalie as well, so I pulled some photos off the internet of them to incorporate...

 These ones above both utilize a simple mechanism that you can glue pictures to and make them pop up! The top card has one pop-up element, and the bottom one has two. Watch the video to see how to make this...it is WAY easier than you'd think!

Below are two more types of cards we did. The cowgirl joke utilizes a paper "spring" that we made, and the duck card is just one simple cut and a fold to make a fun beak!

If your kids have a particular object or animal they like to draw, just google it for jokes! I just did a Google search for "duck jokes" and "bike jokes" for these. Help your kids though, so you don't end up pulling up something inappropriate for them! ;-) One of my boys' favorite duck jokes is, "Why do ducks have feathers? To cover their butt quacks!"

My boys made cards for their grandparents too. I took a photo of Sam with his arms reaching out, he cut it out and turned it into a "hug on paper," since we couldn't hug our grandparents due to social distancing! ;-)

Click here to watch the full episode, and learn how to make three kinds of pop-up cards! Materials you'll need are:
- Paper
- Scissor
- Glue
- Something to draw with

I'm super excited to be back on Lunch Break again tomorrow, Wednesday, April 29th, where we'll be doing some really fun origami projects! These will not just be pieces of paper folded into shapes...we will be making cool things that kids can play with! Stay tuned for a recap of that one! Until then, keep smiling and be well!!

Cursive Writing + Crock Pot Tortellini

What does cursive writing and crock pot tortellini have in common? Well, nothing really. That's just how 100% of our days go as moms though, right? One minute we're having our morning coffee, a second later we're troubleshooting Zoom audio issues for a kid's school, the next we're helping our husband find his lost whatever, the next we're getting in a little bit of our own work from home, then letting the dog out, back to work, dog in, putting a band-aid on an owie, a few more minutes of work, a text from a friend, back to work, throwing in another load of laundry, some more work, take out the garbage, help with yet another Schoology issue, put dinner in the crock pot, 2 minutes of work, taking out the garbage, 2 minutes of work...needless to say I'm not getting much work done but the fires of the day now determine my schedule!

Today I decided that since my boys have been getting their schoolwork pretty much done by lunch, I'm going to use the late afternoon spots on our new quarantine whiteboard wall calendar to jot down some other to-do's they need done each day. They can still decide when to do them, which they are loving these days, but they will always have SOMETHING to do in addition to school each afternoon. This helps extend mom and dad's sorta-quiet time to get work done while they are doing things that are also productive.

Anyway, here's one thing I'm going to try to put on their list at least a few days a week...

Last year I decided my boys need to seriously learn how to read and write cursive. They do learn it still in elementary school here, but they are never made to USE it so they immediately forgot it.

Toby's notebook full of stickers!

So I printed out some cursive practice sheets online and laminated them (so they can practice with white board markers), printed out a cursive alphabet, and designated a notebook for each of them for cursive that they decorated with stickers. (I got those notebooks with the handwriting lines)

Each day (well, not every day but when I think to do it) I write a sentence on a page. I ask them to copy the sentence below it in cursive. At first I had them repeat it till they filled a page, but now I'm just writing more sentences...

It's been fun coming up with sentences to go with the day. In October I wrote something about what they were going to be for Halloween. One time I had Sam write a sentence about how awesome his mom was because she went on a field trip with his class, haha! So it's almost accidentally turned into a journal. Now instead of filling the page with repeated sentences, I'm encouraging them to do the sentence but then add on a little more to it.

Okay, yeah, I know people don't use cursive a lot anymore. But I still think they should know how to read and write it. They got to use their skill first hand last year when we took a trip to Washington, D.C. and they got to see the Declaration of Independence and other amazing, historical documents, all of course in cursive! I just tell them, at least I'm not making them use a quill pen and ink pot, haha!

SO, that was my long explanation of one thing I am putting on their extra list of stuff to do!

Today amidst juggling a zillion "mom things" and business stuff, it was "bee day!" My honeybees arrived which meant I had to drive a little over an hour one way to pick them up, and back, stopping for a curbside pickup of an order I placed online for some Easter basket goodies at Michaels. When I got home I had to make sugar syrup for the bees, then leave again to go "install" them in their hive. (Click here to see a video of me putting the bees in on my other blog!) All of this was of course done while properly social distancing! It was nice to get out of the house, be alone for a while, and listen to an audio book!

But I was gone a lot. Which meant I didn't want to get home from the bees and immediately have 3 starving guys asking what's for dinner. SO, I made one of my favorite crock pot staples, tortellini!

Crock Pot Tortellini

Ingredients:

- 2 cans diced tomatoes (garlic/Italian flavor)

- 1.5-2 C chicken broth

- Package of tortellini (I use 2 of the shelf stable packages from Aldi)

- A bag of spinach

- one 8oz block of cream cheese

- 1 package of Italian chicken sausage

Directions:

In the morning I sliced and browned the package of Italian chicken sausage and popped it back in the fridg until it was time to assemble.

Just before leaving to pick up bees I got the boys eating lunch, dumped in everything EXCEPT THE TORTELLINI. Save that for later or it'll all turn to mush! And no, you don't have to drain the tomatoes, just dump the whole can in, juices & all.

I turned it on low (for 4-6 hours) and left to go pick up the bees.

Got home, made my sugar syrup, and then dumped in the tortellini. This is important that you wait until the last TWO HOURS to put in the tortellini. So this recipe might not be great if you start it in the morning, and want to come home to dinner all done....this one works well for me because I work from home and am typically in and out throughout the day.

Okay, here is proof that I am NOT a food blogger, and that my mind is all clogged up lately with work-school-corona stuff...I forgot to take a picture of the end result. But it ends up being pasta, spinach and sausage in a yummy, creamy sauce. We scoop it into bowls and top with parmesan. I got all extra fancy with the extra 10-15 minutes I had and baked a can of crescent rolls, and pulled a few slices of chocolate cake I had stashed in the freezer back in January after a birthday party when I still had the will power to wrap up and freeze left-over cake!! :-D

Yum! That's how I survived one busy day anyway. I hope you are too, taking it one day at a time!

Pandemic Scrapbooks: Documenting a Major Life Event!

What if I had told you a month ago that in a few weeks schools all over the country would close, stores would run out of toilet paper, every event in the world for the next couple months would cancel, grocery baggers would be essential to our survival, and jigsaw puzzles would be hard to come by? You'd think I was NUTS!

Any way you look at it, the experience we're all going through right now is one for the history books! Nothing like this has happened in my lifetime before, and hopefully it won't happen again, at least for a long, long time. Because of this, I thought it might be a good idea to have my boys document this crazy time in their lives. Not only will it be helpful for them in-the-now to process their thoughts, feelings, and what they are going through, but someday it will be very cool for them to pull out a book of pictures, articles and journaling to show their kids and grandkids!!

So, one of those days when we were stuck inside on a rainy day, over spring break with no school and no place to go, I sat down and made a few pages for them to get started. I found a ring binder for each of them, slipped in a cover page, punched some holes and voila!

Click HERE to download a FREE PDF with some starter scrapbook/journal pages!

Here's what you'll find on some of the pages:

- Church and school: what's different and what's the same?
- A list of things to do if I get bored
- What I've been doing to pass time
- Page to list the movies we've watched & books we've read
- Picture pages to glue in photos of family fun or draw pictures
- Space to write what's making you happy and what's making you frustrated/sad

Working on their books out on the deck yesterday

I designed these sheets to have space on the left edge for hole punching. This way you can stick them in any binder, and it'll be easy to add to them, or punch holes in articles or other things you'd like to include. The back sides can be blank for more writing, drawing, or space to glue things!

What else can you stick in your scrapbook? 

Punch holes in some thicker paper for gluing things to. My boys wanted to add some of the funny memes that have been floating around Facebook lately, too. Here are a couple of their favorites:

Print out some photos of their new e-learning space in the house, maybe an email from a teacher about their school schedule, or a photo of them having a Zoom meeting with their friends!

I actually started my OWN scrapbook too...normally if I do a big trip I find a little blank journal to glue things into and jot down what we did or saw each day. It helps me remember the order of things and names of places/attractions, for when I later make a photo book. I would have done this right now, as I was originally scheduled to travel to Europe to teach at a face & body art convention in the Netherlands, which was of course cancelled. We were going to spend a few days in Italy! So, since I had a blank book in the house I started my own for this new "trip" we are all on! In mine I'm gluing in photos of empty store shelves too, newspaper articles, the post card we received in the mail with the president's recommendations, etc.

These are things we would not normally have the time to do, but I think one day the boys will enjoy looking back on this and having something to show their own kids!

E-Learning and Working from Home...How to Keep it All Straight?! (+ Free Printables)

A collage of my day...

As I write this I'm being interrupted about every 10 minutes to fix tech issues, replace broken headphones, move a drum away from my conference-calling husband and into my son's room for his band class, get Schoology back up, email a pic of a project to a teacher, and calm my over-achiever who is on the verge of tears because on teacher's Zoom went long and now he's not as ahead as he wanted to be...whew!

This is a busy week for a lot of you juggling your kids getting back to school, and we're all in the same boat! Before I share how I'm trying to coordinate it all, I want to pause to make one point:

We are NOT "Homeschooling!"

I just want to say, in my house we are NOT HOMESCHOOLING!! We are SO incredibly fortunate that we have an amazing district with the technological resources and incredible teachers who have been working their butts off re-defining their jobs on the fly and orchestrating e-learning. I am not home schooling. My job is to referee my two boys, cheerlead, offer tech support, and make sure they are physically, mentally and emotionally well enough to focus when they need to. Hats off to our teachers who not only will be teaching OUR kids online, but have to also juggle their OWN kids' online learning at the same time, who many times are in different districts! And to my friends who home school for real...I know you also work your butts off figuring out curriculum and jumping through government hoops. You are amazing!! I will NEVER claim to be taking on either of your jobs! Thank you to our district, Westonka public schools, for everything you're doing for our kids this week, and making my job "easy," in the grand scheme of things!!

Organizing 4 Schedules in One Home

Okay, so I'm a huge organizer, and I like to have a plan for what's coming up. While I'm not a huge fan of the fact that there is no end in sight for all of this, I'm trying to focus on what I CAN control and plan for. Right now I need to organize four very different work days for:

• My husband - who works for General Mills and is now working from home, needs a quiet place to work and do conference calls all day.
• My 12 year old - who has a schedule lasting until lunch, including band (he's a drummer).
• My 10 year old - who has a full day's school schedule lasting until 3:00, including zoom meetings throughout the day.
• Myself - a small business owner who is normally used to working at home in my quiet office with everyone else gone for 6-7 hours of the day.

Conflicts we've identified early on are:

• Simultaneous need for quiet for calls and noise for Band/music practice
• Bandwidth issues with overlapping zoom calls and kids wanting to stream movies
• Mom's sanity as she faces reality that her normal job of dropping everything to come to everyone else's aid is now a nearly 24/7 one.

In order to keep it all straight, I've created a giant white board schedule on the wall:

I had a roll of adhesive-backed white board paper, because I hoard these strange things from past projects. Hey, 'ya never know if you'll need it! My material hoarding has come in very handy many times just over the past couple weeks!

 I decided to use this little short bit of wall that juts out between our kitchen and living room, because it's really a central area we all walk by all day long, and it's easy to see from across the whole house. I covered it with adhesive-backed dry erase paper, and then used some thin masking tape to create a column for each member of the household. (To the left is a frame that used to hold a drawing, and now holds cork board and magnetic white board) I picked this spot because the wall sticks out and I can cover it edge to edge. If you're taping off a section of a flat wall, make sure to have some sort of frame or buffer zone on the edges...otherwise you may end up with dry erase marker dust smearing onto your wall. I think I can avoid this, but am fine with having to re-paint this little spot if needed when we're all back to normal!

I created a header and figured out what size space I had to make little 1/2 hour time block labels to fit on my wall. Here is a jpeg you are welcome to copy and print for yourself, if you have a space that works! Right click or option-click to download it and print from your computer:

I laminated this and cut them out, and stuck them up with poster putty. If you're using a magnetic white board, that's even better, you can use magnets instead!

I also created some little signs to stick on to mark when people have Zoom meetings, meals, activities, etc...and "No Netflix please" for when Dad is doing a video call, as we found Neflix and Zoom weren't playing well together on the same wifi! Here's a jpeg you can download and print for your own use, too! I may be adding more here as we discover the need for others!

I also used some skinnier scraps of the adhseive-backed dry erase paper, stuck to pieces of colored paper that stretches across all 4 of our columns, to create events that we are all involved in at the same time...like going for a walk together. I can write the activity on the white board paper, put it across all four of our columns during one time slot.

One of our spring break days when it was rainy, we made this little holder for our white board markers, signs and poster putty out of cardboard tubes & glue! I painted it white and let Toby decorate it. Heck, anything you can turn into a project is a plus right now!

So far this method has worked pretty well for the first day! I think I'll come up with a few more signs, and we have other things to tweak here & there to get all of our very different days to sync, but I think we're off to a good start.

What are YOU doing to keep track of all the conflicting schedules in your house? Please share your tips & tricks in the comments so we can all help and learn from each other!

Toilet Paper Still Life, & Other Fun Project Ideas!

My completed piece! Charcoal, marker, watercolor, acrylic, perler beads, pastel, collage, colored pencil and pencil.

I know, I haven't blogged here in a while! But now that nobody on the planet is holding events due to COVID-19, my face painting business has come to a screeching halt, which means I have some more time to share fun ideas with YOU, in between playing tech support for my boys' online schooling!

I thought I'd start with some fun projects I've been doing with my boys since we've started staying home a couple weeks ago!

I took the opportunity one day to have a little still life art lesson with my boys. They say art imitates life, so I figured, what better subject matter for the current times than...a roll of toilet paper?!



I put one of our priceless, coveted rolls of toilet paper on a pedestal on the kitchen table. (Don't worry, no TP was harmed or wasted in the making of this project!)

I cut up pieces of paper into 4" squares, which is...you guessed it...exactly the size of a sheet of toilet paper! Our goal was to create 9 renderings of a toilet paper roll, using 9 different mediums.  So, I cut up squares of drawing paper, watercolor paper, marker paper, and cardboard. I think the small paper size made this more fun and less intimidating....less space to fill so that they were motivated enough to keep doing more, and spreading it out over a couple days, we had a nice grid of 9 in the end.

This was really fun for me, too! My finished product you can see up above, the first pic in this post. Do this along WITH your kids! You might be surprised how much fun you'll have too!

Once we were done I spray mounted them on a piece of poster board. Don't they look cool in a nice, square grid? Kindof Andy Warhol-esque.

Here are some ideas for different mediums you can try:

• Markers
• Colored Pencils
• Crayons
• Watercolor paint
• Acrylic paint
• Oil paint
• Pencil
• Charcoal
• Pastels
• Collage/paper
• Ink/pens
• Perler beads

For me it was really fun to dig out some of my art supplies that I haven't used since college! The boys learned about perspective, how circles turn into ellipses when viewed at an angle, shading cyllinders, and how to use fun tools they haven't used like kneaded erasers, eraser shields, different

Another thing we did last week was Perler Beads!! We have tons of these things and Sam had the great idea that we make honeycomb!! This is an easy way to get everyone involved in making one, larger project...since we have a couple bead trays in hexagon shapes, two of us can be making honeycomb cells at any given time. 

I made some parts for a bee while the boys did some comb too! This kept us busy for a whole day, and then some....I put them away when interest started to fade. We can easily get them back out another day and add on to our comb! Eventually I may glue them together to a board!

My boys are 10 and 12. If yours are too little for this kind of thing, here are a couple more fun ideas I saw on Facebook recently....

Even BABIES can create a masterpiece! Make sure you put something good underneath to protect your floor....sandwich some canvas or paper with blobs of acrylic on top, topped with some plastic wrap. What a fun idea!!

I loved this idea for combining art with enjoying a sunny day outside!

What kind of art projects are you and your kids doing to keep busy and have fun? Share in the comments!!

Rock / Geology Themed Birthday Party!

Last December we had a party for Sam's 9th birthday, and being the rock hound he is, he of course wanted a ROCK theme!!  Despite the lack of rock themed party supplies available on the market, I definitely had fun with this one!!

Activities:

I set up a couple activities on the kitchen table for the kids, although the grown-ups got into it as much as the kids did! There were supplies to make pet rocks (pipe cleaners, paint, google eyes, pom poms, glue), and I also found some cool rock themed line art online to print out for coloring sheets!  We had pages of fossils, crystals, giant agates to color and a maze! Every kid also got a little geode to bust open, which Dad helped with in the garage. ;-)

Pet rocks, coloring sheets, and break-your-own geode!

Some of the many rocks made that night!

Decorations:

I did get a front loader balloon, but they just don't have "rock" balloons out there!  Being from Minnesota, the pinata is a Lake Superior agate of course! That was a simple one to make...just your classic paper mache over a balloon.  I punched it in a few places to make indentations while it was still a little wet, then added more layers to make it dry that way, and painted. 

I made the big "9 Rocks" sign and little rocks with a sheet of fluorescent poster board and some black poster board from the dollar store.  For the "Rocks" I just sprayed some random spots with silver spray paint to get a rocky texture, and then cut out the letters.  All the scrap paper I just made rock shapes, and then taped them all around the house!

Food:

For the cake I made a gold pan dipped in the water.  This was a fun one...I had some shiny gold sprinkles, and also used some yellow rock candy for gold.  For special treats I found some rock candy on Amazon, some loose crystal rock candies, and some chocolate rock candies.  I got a set of sand shovels to use as scoopers.

Edible rocks!

Goodie Bags

I can't seem to find a pic of the goodie bags.  But, each bag had a geode to break, a few cool arrowheads, some fools gold, a rubber ball that looked like a rock, Pop Rocks, and a rock candy on a stick!

It was a really fun time, and a great theme...we have a lot of rock lovers in our family!!

The following month was Toby's art themed party, which I'll blog about next! Stay tuned! :-)

IDMommy Project: Cardboard Robot Fun!

Toby & Sam with their cardboard robots!

Here's a SUPER easy and cheap activity to keep your kiddos entertained this summer on rainy days!!

When I was little my siblings and I used to make "robots" out of cardboard boxes.  I kept mine probably until I was in college...it was only maybe 10" tall and all decked out with a real antenna from a broken radio, and a red plastic calculator screen for the mouth. His name was Radar and I also installed a retractable tape measure that could pull out from his side!  My sister and I even made a larger model named Rodney, that we could fit inside the back of to make his arms move!

Years ago when Sam was maybe 3 or 4, I thought it would be fun to help him make a cardboard robot of his own.  He was into Curious George at the time and loved the "Yorbo" episode, so he decided to name his Yorbo.  I spray painted a cardboard box with silver paint, and the rest was up to him! (though I helped wield the X-acto knife when he needed a precise hole cut) We took a trip to AxMan, our local surplus store, and loaded up on cool random parts.

Our shopping trip to AxMan, and robot construction...

Now Sam is 8 and this year I thought we'd help his little brother Toby make one too.  Sam still has Yorbo and keeps adding more features to him! Toby now has two robots.  This is such a fun and simple project for kids, and one that you can be as involved or not involved in as you want.  You can spray paint a box and let them go wild, or help coming up with ideas! Once Grandpa found out about their robots, he started saving cool parts from his workshop for them to add as well!

Supplies & Where to Get Them:
This project can be as cheap or expensive as you want it to be.  All you really need is a cardboard box, glue, tape, scissors, and random stuff from the junk drawer.  A can of silver spray paint really makes them look cool to start with, but isn't required of course.

A trip to the surplus store can add up fast, but they have so much fun with this part, even if I limit their spending.  We got some cool metallic silver duct tape there which got completely used up very fast! They also got some fun buttons, switches and wires.

Don't want to spend money on parts? No problem!  Keep an eye out around your house or ask your friends if they have any broken electronics or toys around.  We had a broken remote control car they just wouldn't let me get rid of, until they started making robots, and then they were thrilled to dismantle it for parts! Win-win! When my printer died a few weeks ago, we all had fun taking it apart and finding many cool circuitboards.  (Of course you should help when dismantling things like this! Some electronics can be dangerous to open, not to mention messy with ink like this printer, so use caution!)

Garage sale FREE boxes are a treasure trove for robot builders!!  Last week my boys found 6 remote controls in a free box and were SO excited.  They now have cool rubber buttons and little circuit boards.

I had to do some robot face paintings too!

They now each have a plastic bin to hold their robot parts. You can make unlimited robots, but it's fun to keep adding features to one, especially if you don't want your whole house overrun with robots! ;-)

Need some Inspiration?
Rent or borrow a copy of the movie "Robots" to get your kids inspired! I was able to snag a brand new, unopened DVD of Robots at a garage sale for $0.50 and the boys love it. Or, show them this post and just start taking apart a broken toy or electronic! Once they get into it the possibilities are endless!