Valentine's snacks

Sorry this one is a day late.  Little Princess is pretty sick so we have been having extra cuddles.
We had so many fun snacks and food yesterday.  Little Monkey loved the french toast first thing in the morning.  It was a preschool day so I had to get up a little early but it was worth it!  I just used a heart cookie cutter to cut out the centre and filled it with heart shaped strawberries.  I also put a little pink food colouring in Little Monkey's milk.

Up next was lunch.  I was a little stuck on what to do.  I had deli ham in the fridge and a block of cheese.  I have to say the cheese was the hardest to cut.  I had to cut a smaller size chunk and then cut in width wise to make it so I didn't end up with a lump size heart!  The kids loved it!  They were pretty excited that their food was all heart shaped.  I even managed to get the pickles into a (somewhat) heart shape.

Next up was dessert.  I did up sugar cookies for Little Monkey and Little Cousin to do.  They had lots of fun painting (decorating) them.  I didn't get many during pictures because I was trying to encourage them to put the icing on the cookies and not directly in their mouths! :)  

We were going to do cupcakes after supper, but Little Princess woke up feeling yucky so we settled for some books instead.

I did make a counting printable for the boys that we didn't manage to get to, but I wanted to share any way.  It is very similar to the Leaf Counting.  I did up envelopes instead of trees and we were going to add valentine's stickers to the envelopes.  Maybe we will do it next year.

Heart Counting

I am going to take a few days off before getting back at it.  I have 18 Lucky Days planned out already and I am almost done planning Easter fun!  I think we will finish off February with some cars and trucks themed fun.  Little Monkey and Little Princess will be very excited about that.

I hope you enjoyed my 14 days of Love, I sure had a lot of fun doing all the fun activities.  If there is something you like to see us try leave a comment, I would love to hear from you. :)

Crayons

I have done crayons lots with the kids.  I thought it would be a fun idea to do heart crayons for Little Monkey to take to all his friends at school for Valentines Day.  Little Monkey really likes to help with making crayons.  His favourite part is breaking them after he gets the paper off.  Today he told me ' I can break them because I have strong muscles from eating good food.' So cute!
I used new crayons because we don't have enough broken ones to make many new ones at all.  I would advise using Crayola crayons.  I have done them before with dollar store ones and they came out chalking and quite a bit of wax on the top.  I use a knife to get the paper off.  This is a Mommy job only.  :)  Heat the oven to 200 (F).  I put parchment paper down on a cookie sheet to catch any that might overflow.  Put them in for 25-30 minutes and they should be all melted. If they aren't just give them a few more minutes.  Let them cool for at least an hour.  I put them in the garage because it is cooler so they set faster. :)  Make sure they aren't still warm when you go to pop them out.  If they are still warm they will break coming out.

Now onto packaging.  This was my favourite!  I found the boxes at the dollar store.  They are so cute.  I had the shredded paper (also from the dollar store) for Christmas.  I found the printable labels here.  I cut off the to/from part and we stamped hearts with Little Monkeys thumbs on the back.  I absolutely love how they turned out.  

Tomorrow is my last day of 14 Days of Love and I am going to end it with one of my favourites, FOOD!  I have lots of fun snacks planned for tomorrow.  Oh and we have another Little Cousin coming over for the day.  Lots of fun!

Heart symmetry

Today we did some heart symmetry.  I found the idea on pinterest and I thought it would be a fun thing to try.  I was planning on doing it with both kids but Little Princess is under the weather so Little Monkey and I did it during nap time.  I used acrylic paint because it was the only pink paint I had.

Little Monkey had lots of fun making drops!  Eventually he squeezed a little harder to get more paint on the heart.  He got really excited when he started pulling it apart and there was paint on the other side.  

I really like how these turned out!  We are going to use them for Little Monkeys preschool teachers.  

Up next heart crayons.

Heart Butterflies

This is something I used to do with daycare/preschool kids.  It a fun quick craft.  It was nice to have something quick and easy so we could spend more time playing with Little Cousin!  

You also need you little ones little feet :)

I punched little holes in the top of the butterfly to push the antenna through.  Little Monkey did great with it.  I had to help Little Cousin and I had to do it for Little Princess.  

I can't believe I only 3 more days left!  I have more ideas than days.  

Up next is heart symmetry.

Home made stamps

I just noticed I said I would do this post yesterday....sorry.  Better late than never right!? :)
This one was pretty easy and Little Monkey and Little Cousin had lots of fun with it.  Little Princess just tried to eat the stamps.....so she got some different ones.
I have an over abundance of plastic lids.  I keep saving them thinking I will do something with them and well now I am finally doing something!  I have a lot of foam stickers as well, so I just stuck them to the top of the lid and voila stamps.

I have a great ink pad from Melissa and Doug.  All the ink is washable and comes off really easy.  I started of with red construction paper, but the stamps didn't show up very well so we switched to white cardstock.  

Now I get to use 'my' stamps because I tried to eat the other ones! :)

I decided to do up some letter stamps as well.  It took me longer than I would like to admit to figure out I had to flip the stamps to get the letters come out the right way!  I stamped out three Valentine's words and thought it would be a great activity for Little Monkey and I to work on letters.  I had the sheets pre-stamped.  I laid out the sheets and stamps for Little Monkey.  I got him to tell me all the letters and then he had to find them and stamp underneath.  He did so great with this activity.  He did notice that some of the letters were 'funny'.  I told him we had to do that so they would show up the right way on the paper, and he seemed satisfied with that explanation.  

Up next foot print / heart butterflies!

Hearts and buttons

We have Little Cousin over for the weekend so we have been pretty busy.  We did manage to make button hearts though.  Sorry the pictures are a little dark, we did it after supper.  Little Monkey has loved anything we get to make with buttons since we did the button rainbow last year.  I made a button heart on my LOVE canvas I did so I figured it would be fun to do with the kids.
As soon as I brought out the buttons Little Monkey was all over helping me.  He helped me pick out red and white buttons.  I couldn't find my pink ones so we added in some pompoms.  I cut the hearts out of felt.  The kids had lots of fun with this one.  Little Monkey and Little Cousin put their own glue on, I did it for Little Princess.  This was a pretty quick and easy craft and the kids really seemed to have fun with it.