Police Officer DIY Photo Valentine

My son loves cars, especially police cars!  When trying to decide what to do for his school Valentine's, it wasn't hard to guess it would have to do with cars.

The one challenge was he wanted to give Peppermint Patties as a treat with his Valentine's cards.

This is what I came up with:

We got the pj's at BabyGap last summer (I've seen similar ones at many stores).  The hat is part of our dress up collection.  I had him point to me like he was going to arrest me.

The police car is from another picture that I cut and pasted in using photoshop, which if you don't have it, you should be able to download a free 30-day trial and I know a lot of people use picnic.com to do photo editing.  I printed them as 4x6 pictures at Walmart 1 hour photo.

I used an exacto knife to cut a line across the top of the police car (I left about 1/2 inch at the edge of the card).

I cut out red rectangles, 2.5" by 3.5" and attached them to the back of the card to create a pocket.  I found stapling to the bottom, and taping to the top right corner worked best.

I flipped the card around, slipped a Valentine's Peppermint Patty into the slot, then closed the right side of the card with a small piece of tape.

If you look closely at this picture, you can see in the front card, on his arm on the right, there is a tiny heart punched out.  I had a mini heart punch and I wanted to punch out a heart (you stole my heart), but the punch didn't reach far enough in to his chest and I didn't want to wrinkle the card.

I totally love how these cards turned out and I think I'm going to arrest him if he doesn't put this picture on a mug for me for my birthday ;)

Travel Felt Play mat for Cars

As if I would only make play mats for three of my kids.  You know the fourth one is a car lover.  I've actually had it in my head to make him a travel car carrier for a while, but even better, it's a play road too.

I made it the same way as the other mats.

All cars in their lots:

Driving around:

Rolled up and ready to go, police car button closure and all:

This one was the easiest to make, the hardest part was deciding how to lay out the roads.  Happy driving!

Car related activities

One of my sons LOVES toy cars.  These are a few examples of what I find around my house everyday (who needs toy garages, my couch functions not only as a place to sit, but a parking lot):

It was an easy decision last spring to make one of our monthly topics of study cars.  In fact, that month is this month. Unfortunately, with how sick I've been, I ended up enrolling him in the montessori preschool that both his brothers went to.  He is only there half a day, so he still participates in the few activities I've been able to muster up the strength to do with them.  Luckily, Nathaniel isn't that bothered that I haven't delved into the topic as much as I had planned to.  Here are a few things that we've done related to cars.

We bought model cars this summer for the kids to work on with their dad:

We built a car wash out of a cardboard box.  This is something I've had on my mind for a while.  For Owen's birthday, he picked out a plastic matchbox carwash.  The thing has never been properly put together and the pieces are always falling off.  This one we made from all recycled materials, so if it falls apart, I could care less about throwing it away.  This was a project I had Nathaniel work on with his dad on his day off on Monday.  The middle two "twisting brushes" are vitamin jars hot glue gunned onto the bottom of the box (I realized that because they are child-proof, they always twist).  Then, we hot glued some furry sponges around them.  The water is a cut up gift bag from one of the kids' birthday parties, hot glued to the side.

In action:

Next, we made some cupcakes in the shapes of cars.

My brother gave me this pan to thank me for letting him stay here last week:

Admittedly, I thought it was awesome, so did Owen, but I NEVER thought I'd get them to come out.  Look at this:

I had some energy today, not enough for a cake from scratch, but we did have a box of funfetti cake and Hazel has been begging me to make cake.  So, with the help of Nathaniel, we made the batter and baked the cakes.  Of course, I was worried about what to decorate them with so that you could still tell they were cars, and I did not have the energy or patience to do different colors of icing and carefully put it on in the right places.  I just made a vanilla glaze, set up two bowls, like below, and poured icing on top.

The results (they sort of looked like they'd been through a snow storm:

Owen wanted no one to eat them and me to refrigerate them until June for his bday party.  I convinced him I could make more and they finally got to enjoy them, he still wanted to me to turn out the lights and sing Happy Birthday to him.  His favorite thing to do since we got the pan is ask everyone which car they want for his party.

Here they are with tonight's selections: