Happy Thanksgiving

We are spending Thanksgiving with family in Concord, North Carolina.  M & L had the chance to do an art project with Mimi.  M was in charge of the Indian and L took care of the pilgrims.

This friendly Indian brought the corn.

These pilgrims apparently weren't invited to the feast.

I hope everyone has a fun day filled with yummy food, great football, and wonderful conversation.

Pumpkin Painting

Painting pumpkins is one of our favorite Halloween activities.  We have several dozen containers of acrylic paint and I let the kiddos each pick 4 colors to share.  This seemed to go well and we ended up with a nice variety of colors, rather than just various shades of green and purple.

Not pictured: purple and white

This year the kiddos really got into the idea of painting "spooky" things on their "Haunted Pumpkins."  Matthew painted a ghost (complete with hair!) and Lauren had a nifty pink and purple pumpkin theme going on.  They were really excited to do this and were very meticulous during the painting process.  To prevent any clothing fatalities, I dressed the kids in my old t-shirts and tied up the sleeves with some yarn.

Our finished products!

Mama pumpkin and her babies.

Matthew's pumpkin is the one with glasses and a pig "snot."

I did the one in the background and Matthew wanted to try his hand at painting a jack-o-lantern face, so I dragged out another pumpkin for him. 

Glittery Goodness

Since my previous post was a bit heavy, what with the looming threat of mold and collapsed ceilings, I decided to do a fun one today.  What could be more fun than glitter and glue?  (Actually, glitter, glue, and UNICORNS would be more fun.)  In any case, M has been asking to play with glitter and glue for a while now, and given that things have been a little out of whack around here, I decided to cave and let them have a go at the glitter and glue craft.

Not pictured: -The Jewels.

The kids had a fun time using the glue - experimenting with how hard or soft to squeeze the bottle to get the desired shape.  As much as I wanted to micromanage their artistic expression, I held off and let them make whatever shapes or designs they wanted.

M started strong with an 'M' and a ladybug.

L is more abstract.

Once we had gotten used to the glue, I unleashed the glitter.  I had to step in several times to make sure the kids didn't just open the entire container of glitter.  I must have said, "sprinkle, not dump" at least two dozen times...to no avail.  I also brought out some jewels for the kids to glue to their papers as well.  They got a kick out of the jewels too.  L took a break from dumping mounds of glitter to sort the jewels by shape.  M, of course, had to get involved by sorting those jewels by color, which essentially undid all of L's sorting work.  It was tense for a moment, but the allure of gluing jewels and sprinkling glitter won out.

The ladybug turned into a glue puddle once M realized that puddles were way more fun, and messy, to create.

She was very meticulous when it came to the jewel application.

M, with glue and glitter on his hands.

The kids had a blast, but they were pretty quick to beat it out of the kitchen when it was time to clean up the glitter.  There's still glitter in the kitchen and even in other parts of the house, for some reason.  I suppose it could be worse (see pictures in "Oh What a Week It's Been").  Perhaps if I wish hard enough, when the recovery company comes to cut out Matthew's ceiling, they'll find piles of glitter, jewels, and perhaps even unicorns in the attic, rather than icky clumps of wet insulation.