Thanksgiving Thankfulness

So, my kids are very little, in comparison to... um... other people's kids??? Anyway, so we're working on gratitude and thankfulness since it's that season (I am a FIRM believer in Thanksgiving. Do not talk to me about Christmas until NEXT Friday, do you understand?) And since I love Thanksgiving and what it means, I want to instill in them the importance of being thankful for our blessings.

Since they are so very young, things like, "my toys" are high on their lists, which I recognize is important. But, I want to start cultivating in them that deep-seeded joy that comes from realizing that we have WAY more than a lot of people, and are indeed, richly blessed.

SO, tell me friends. How do you teach and cultivate that gratitude in your children? How do you help them recognize what they have?

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Halloween Traditions

From October 2010

Halloween can be SO fun, especially for families. There is a lot of gross, scary, nasty stuff out there, which I despise, but there is also tons of fun to be had. If you're struggling with how to celebrate a totally silly Holiday, here are some ideas to make it "mean" something (even if these days Halloween means basically nothing!)

1. Decor (which we already talked about!) Kids seeing the same decorations year after year gives them a sense of tradition. I *still* love my mom's Halloween decorations and many of my own mirror hers. The kids have their favorites too, which is fun.

2. Pumpkin Gathering. However you do it, make it fun! Pumpkin patches are a blast, but so can a special trip to the grocery store wherein you buy pumpkins and candy corn.

3. Pumpkin carving. This can be a whole evening experience. Have a special dinner, watch "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown" and carve away. Do it in the week before Halloween. Make it a ritual.

4. Special Halloween Meal. This can be Halloween-themed or not. We eat Chinese food. I don't know why. but if you have a lot energy, you can do seriously fun things with food on All Hallow's Eve.

5. Trick or Treating. This might be becoming a lost art where you live, but around here, it's still going strong.

6. Other venues for costume-wearing. I mean you either spent money to BUY the costume, or you slaved away to CREATE the costume, right? You really ought to find reasons to drag your kids around town in their costumes. And you can call it a tradition. Library story time in costume? TRADITION!

No matter what you decide to do, if you find things that are TRADITION your kids will always remember, and they will love it.

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How to Make Easy Halloween Decorations

Well, if you're like me, the fact that Halloween is this week is BLOWING MY MIND. I mean, seriously.

Anyway, so I have my standard Halloween decor that goes up every year, but this year, we've had a blast creating our own fun things. Spencer and Henry are big enough to do very simple crafts, and turning them into decorations has been so fun for them. To see THEIR work decorating the house has been cute.

So, here are some simple, easy decorations you can make this week to jazz up the house before All Hallow's Eve.

1. A Halloween banner. Either with Halloween paper or fabric, let the kids help cut out the shapes, and if you're using paper, staple them to a bias tape or yarn, if it's fabric, sew it on. SO easy and fun.

From The Diet Coke Diet

2. Q-Tip Skeletons. I just found the skeleton picture on Google Images and then cut up Q-tips in different sizes. They glued them on as "bones." If your kids are older, they probably wouldn't even need the template.

From The Diet Coke Diet

From The Diet Coke Diet

3. Bats on a stick. Ours got ripped, but we made construction paper bats and then taped them to skewers. The plan was to stick them all over the house plants, but like I said, ours got loves a bit too much. So no pictures.

4. Paper Towel Roll Mummies. Ours are actually a wrapping paper roll cut up, but toilet paper would work as well. We made "paper mache" which was actually white glue, diluted until it was pretty thin. We dipped white strips of paper, about 1 inch wide and 6 inches long, in the glue and paper mached the rolls. It took a whole day to dry, but when they did, they were rock hard. Then, we traced the paper mache lines and had our "mummy" look. We added faces, and BAM cute mummies.

From The Diet Coke Diet

5. Halloween collage. Simple as it sounds, we drew Halloween pictures, and stuck them to an orange piece of poster board. Viola. Collage.

From The Diet Coke Diet

So there ya have it, five projects for the week. The only things I actually purchased were the supplies for the banner. Everything else was stuff we had on hand.

Have fun!

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