R for Rainbow finished

Here are the remaining activities that we did that were noteworthy of showing:

Rainbow cupcakes- YUMMY- we had to wait for Nana and Grampa to bring us the white cake mix so we could get the colors right!

Batter in the tins prebaking:



Post baking, what they looked like:


Insides:



And we made these waldorf stars. I got the kite paper from this site, Palumba. And I got the directions here from Garden Mama. These were very simple to make and very fun, you can use all kinds of color combos for all different occasions. With each pack of kite paper, you can make about 12 stars! They look very nice in the sunlight. Below the photo, you can see some of the laminates shamrocks I hung on the window with different number values for Nathaniel to use as target practice with his nerf shooter, also aids with his addition practice adding up his points!

St. Patrick's Day (part II)

Here's the rest of our St. Patrick's Day, we had a small get together at our house to decorate cookies. I made green sugar cookies, in the shape of circles and colored icing for the kids to decorate them with. I made each kid a plate with a "color pallette" of frosting to decorate with:



For snacks we had green popcorn, of course. I made it by melting green chocolate and drizzling it over microwave popcorn:



Finally, my masterpiece, a fruit rainbow:



We also played find the pot of gold. I hid five clues around the yard and the last one led them to a pot of gold (a black bowl filled with any candy I could find that had a gold wrapper, resee's miniatures, twix, gold coins, and hersey's kisses with almonds). The kids were a bit disappointed that it was candy, not real gold, duped by the leprechaun again!

Happy St. Patrick's Day (part I)

I just finished setting up the kitchen area for St. Patrick's Day, since it's already so late, I figured I'd post the pre St. Patrick's Day pictures, as I'm sure there will be a lot more to post about after our little party tomorrow.

I'll start off with our leprechaun trap. It isn't as elaborate as I've been imagining it would be, especially since we didn't start it until this afternoon at four and didn't finish it until after dinner at 8:30. Nathaniel came up with the idea on his own for it to be a rocket and then when the leprechaun got inside, it would blast off into space!




We had some action figure with boots I was able to twist off, I left one inside the house, where he had placed five fake gold coins and then one dangling on the ladder, shown here:



With the fake gold, I made a trail to the couch, where I left 4 ten yen coins and 1 five yen coin in a pile under it.



For decorations, I was trying to be environmental and used the same streamers we had up from Addison's birthday, that I conveniently just took down yesterday. I made a streamer rainbow, I realize the cloud looks silly made of the white streamers, but hey, it's all I had to work with.



I ran shiny gold ribbon from under the stuffed leprechaun to three different locations, each hiding a small treasure:



For our other decorations, I had printed some coloring pages from the internet, then I printed some outlines of shamrocks, which I had left on the table all week, with a set of watercolors, and our dot to dot markers. After they were colored, I cut them out and taped them onto the edge of the island, I think the colors look neat.



The leprechaun is sitting on a black pot filled with gold fabric scraps (if I have time tomorrow AM, I will finish the gold coins I started three weeks ago). Also, in the pot, are these lucky penny cards. I found the idea here at pumpkin petunia. I did wash the pennies with lemon juice/salt solution and they don't look brand new, but do look a LOT nicer!



I couldn't resist these wicked cute cupcake toppers! I found them at Living Locurto. For now, they are sitting on the counter, but tomorrow, they'll be on cupcakes, in my dream, they'd be sitting on some chocolate chip muffins right now.



From our R for Rainbow theme with the little ones, I traced the word rainbow onto paper and let them fill it in with their dot to dot markers:



Finally for this post, one of my favorite things, a game I made up tonight. I have been trying to think of an addition game to help Nathaniel be lightning quick with his single digit addition facts. I used our dot to dot markers and some shamrock stickers to make the game. I laminated it for more durability. I cut out gold coins from my shiny gold scrapbook paper, and I found these cute shamrock dice here, such an unexpected gem of a find! I'm not sure how we're going to play yet, if he'll just move based on the dice count and if he lands on a large shamrock, he'll get one gold coin, and a small colored one, he'll get 2 gold coins. I do know if Owen or Hazel plays, they will use the colored spinner from our other homemade games and just go by color. Owen could probably just do the one dice method too. Regardless of the rules, I just love to look at the colorful game board, don't you? Oh, did you notice the orange and green cars above the board? Of course, we love cars here, so being that they're the Irish flag colors, we laminated them to be our playing pieces for now :)