Smal Successes

"It’s important for moms to recognize that all the small successes in our days can add up to one big triumph." Danielle Bean

This week's Small Successes are not so much thing I did--but more like "things I made it through"

1. Yucky, yucky sickies have invaded the house. 4 down, a bunch more to go. It is a 48 hour bug that returns if you try to do anything too soon, like stand up.

2. Between sickness there were three ball games and daily musical practice, religon class, a raffle party the Pat emcees', 2 full time workers, all with 1 working vehicle. (Although I did call for help from Grandma and big brother when a few times someone was "left behind" waiting for a ride somewhere.

3. Laundry continues non-stop--especially when sickness is around--if not, we are in BIG trouble.

I need to add #4

I made and sent out a few surprises this week, all for the love of Our Blessed Mother.

Make sure to head over to Faith and Family Live and share your Small Successes.

April's Shower of Photos-Little Hands

April's Shower of Photos-Growing Season

Unplugged Project-Yellow-Egg Carton Daffodils

The Unplugged Project of the Week was: yellow. Around here in April--yellow mean daffodils, so I did a search and found these very cute egg carton daffodils from DLTK crafts.

The first thing you do for this craft is paint a single section of an egg carton yellow. My kids just love to paint---everything.

I love the look of little hands "working".
The stem of our daffodil was simply a rolled up piece of green paper, taped securely.The DLTK link has a printable pattern of the large petal and leaves. We printed this on cardstock and painted the petal yellow and used green markers for the leaves.
Staple the large yellow petal to a flattened end of the stem. Glue the yellow egg carton section onto the center of the large petal. Staple on the leaves and your lovely daffodils are finished.

We are blessed to have beautiful daffodils in the yard. So I sent the kids out to pick a bouquet while our homemade daffodil's glue dried.

It's hard to tell which are crafted and which are real!!

Next weeks Unplugged theme is: powder (I have no idea what to do with this theme.)

April's Shower of Photos--Oh No!!!! Here We Go!!!

They Clean-Up Pretty Well

They clean-up real well, especially for two kids that have missed most of school this past week.

Amy with a concussion and Danny with an awful stubborn bug.

Megan, Michaela and Amy

Opening Day at the Ballpark

Who could believe that it was April in Central New York and the temperature was 86 degrees..

We were hot,

and we had to buy a new bottle of sunscreen.There may still be no leaves on the trees, but the sun was glorious!

We had to find the sunhats.
Gracie up for her first ever at bat!!! She got a hit!!!

She was a great little outfielder also.

Luckily, since we were at the ballpark for 5 hours, a creek runs close by.

Perfect for little explorers.

It is also great for finding rocks to paint into ladybugs----photos coming soon.

We found and identified a Round-leaved Yellow Violet.

She looks like a real slugger.

Mark has moved up to the "big leagues", so this is where he spends a lot of his time, which I am happy about because I think he is too small compared to the other players. (Daddy says he is just fine, leave him alone.)

He did get in the game, and I think he was pretty excited. I did quickly stop taking pictures of him in the outfield because this is what he did.

Wouldn't you know it, he got a hit at his first at bat, first pitch--I am glad I had the camera ready, it was my only chance.

He even made it home during this inning. (Notice the size of the opponent)
This is what Luke did during the game---he getting very good!
Kimberly spent her time in a more lady-like way----talking on the phone---to Auntie Kim.

April's Shower of Photos-Bathing Beauty

Button Caterpillars and Coffee Filter Butterflies

All you need for this fun, easy craft is your button collection and pipe cleaners.

I first saw this button caterpillar at this site.

I had recently bought bags of bright colored buttons. They came with about 100 buttons per bag in many wonderful colors.

We used 1/2 a pipe cleaner for each caterpillar. I secured the first button onto the pipecleaner tightly with pliers.
Everyone had an easy time stringing the buttons onto the pipecleaners. If you do not fill the pipe cleaner up with buttons, but leave a little extra space, it is easier to bend the caterpillars into cute positions. I finished them by using pliers to bend the end of the pipecleaner back into the last button.

Add some wiggle eyes and you have a very cute caterpillar.

Our caterpillar family.

Before I continue with our butterfly craft, I need to share with you how pleased I am with this Color Splash! Liquid Watercolor. I had no experience with liquid watercolor and I purchased the 8 oz. size bottles. (I now realize that these may last us the rest of our lives!) You dilute the color 3 parts water to 1 part paint. For our project I used about 1 Tbls of color to 3 Tbls water. This gave us enough paint for all our painting and some left over for mixing and painting on paper. The colors are so bright, I will never buy the cheap watercolor paint in the box again.

We began our butterflies using paint, droppers, and coffee filters.

We have never used coffe filters for art. We will definitely be using these more often.

Fold the coffee filter like you would to make snow flakes. We then used the dropper to carefully add watercolor to the coffee filter. Remember, the fun thing about the coffee filter is that the colors disperse quickly.

We made many different designs.

Unfold, and we had gorgeous results.

Of course, we needed to wait for this to dry before continuing with our butterflies, but I was surprised that they were completely dry within an hour.

We enjoyed seeing the color "wick" up the coffee filter.

We all could have kept on making coffee filter art--we just need more projects to use the finished products with.

Kim and Luke just dripped the color onto the filter.

A lovely pile of painted filters.

Needed for butterflies:

painted coffee filters

clothes pins

pipe cleaners

wiggle eyes

Fold the coffee filter accordian style:

clip the clothes pin onto the center of the filter:

make antenna out of pipe cleaners, clip these on the clothes pin:

glue on wiggle eyes:

open out the wings

Enjoy!!
We are going to hang our butterflies from the ceiling and enjoy---our caterpillars are destined to crawl in some of our plants.

Check out all this week's We Made It: Friday Showcase!!