Ten kids and a Dog: December 2014

Saturday, December 27, 2014

Happy Christmas, from all 11 Collins' kids

Thursday, December 25, 2014

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

We love our Catholic Mosaic book written by Cay Gibson. Amazon tells us, "A set of study guides for parents and teachers who wish to share Christmas-themed picture books with their children. 30 children's books are featured with discussion questions, vocabulary, and enrichment activities. Includes an extensive list of over 200 Christmas picture book titles, crafts, poems, and recipes."

We have been enjoying the books recommended in this book for many years.

And I always seem to have a new group of littles to enjoy the books and activities with.

The books we enjoyed over the last few days were: The Cobweb Curtain

The Christmas Cobwebs and

Cobweb Christmas:The Tradition of Tinsel.

All the stories incorporated the ideas of the goodness of spiders and how they helped the baby Jesus or helped those who helped celebrade Jesus' childhood.

I found a great printout for a spider snowflake.

We very carefully cut out our spiders and when we unfolded them we were so happy to find beautiful paper spiderwebs,

It take a lot of finger muscles to cut out the paper which was folder many times.

Success!!

We glued our finished spiders onto black constructions paper. We then used out finger to spread on glitter glue.

We found a great print of our spider that we made into Christmas snowflake.

Some to the spiders and a couple of the wonderful books

Now, I am one to catch the spider and put it outside to "be with it's family"

I was so happy to find the simple craft to make a spider suitable to every Christmas tree.The simple dirctions for making a jingle bell spider craft can be found here..they are very cute.

Saturday, December 13, 2014

I'm getting up there....

My family prepared a wonderful celebration for my birthday....

complete with enough candle to warn the family!

Homemade Orange Pomander

We haven't made orange pomanders in a few years...and I just love the Christmassy smell these give off-it's one of my favorite smells.

Start with a good sized navel orange and whole cloves. Hopefully you can find a nice Amish store to pick up the cloves, because if not this is a VERY expensive craft. At Walmart I priced the whole cloves at almost $12.00 a jar.

Stick the cloves into the orange. We like to use a toothpick to make a little whole in the orange skin and then the clove slides in nice and easy.

The kids took a couple days of completing their oranges...it's kind of boring work after a little while, so it is a great thing to do while watching a a Christmas movie.

Once completed..(or as completed as the kids can manage) wrap the orange with pretty netting. I found this red netting at Hobby Lobby. It has nice large openings to let the yummy smell through.

I then tied a ribbon tightly around the ribbon.

At the same time I was putting the ribbon around the netting I strung a piece of ribbon for hanging the pomander.