Memorial Garden

This was a wonderful project spearheaded by the Roots & Shoots program at Red Pine. It is a memorial for Sophie's kindergarten teacher who died of cancer. We spent several days working on the garden and it looks beautiful!!

Missing These Cute Faces

Craft Strorage

What do you do with all of the pretty crafts your children produce? We end up displaying them for a while on this shelf, the fridge and clipboards in the toy room. I try and photograph most of them with the kids holding their artwork and then throw them into the recycling. I keep a couple of favorites each year in a bin (which I really need to organize) and send many of them to their Dad as well.

Hand and Finger Trees

Here is another cute craft involving paint - I just used a foam brush and washable children's paint. Yes, it does make a bit of a mess in the bathroom as the kids wash all of that brown off their arms.


When pressing their arms on the paper, make sure to tell them to open their fingers wide and then press gently on their arms and hands to get a good impression. It took a couple of tries with the baby.


For the leaves, we used green paint and another foam brush. You could also use a green stamp pad.

Last Trip to the Zoo

We are really going to miss The Minnesota Zoo. So many fun memories and a one of our favorite places to visit! During this visit it was raining, so we had the outdoor playground all to ourselves!

Bee Crafts

In reality, I have arrived safely in Portland, have moved in with my sister and am working on a resume. On this blog, I am playing catch-up so you'll see a few more daycare posts before I get to our trip the the Northwest.

These are a couple of bee related crafts we made a while back. The first is made by painting a toilet paper roll with yellow and back stripes and then gluing on wings which I just cut free hand from some useless Power Puff girls coloring book. We also folded a pipe cleaner in half and taped it inside for the antennae.


This one is just made by painting the kids feet yellow with a foam brush and helping them step down on a piece of paper. Have a tub of baby wipes nearby.



I always had paper, coloring books and bins full of crayons, markers, glue sticks and scissors down at child level so the kids could choose to create whenever they felt like it. Of course they also had to clean up afterwards. This guy was discovering the joys of using the body as a canvas!