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Pom Pom Pig Craft

Pom Pom Pig Craft - Adorable crafts for kids

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My daughter is only 3 1/2 & is forever changing her mind. Today her favorite book is ‘Are You My Mother?’ Last week it was ‘Harold & the Purple Crayon’. Today her favorite character is Milly from Umizoomi & last week it was Joy from Inside Out. A few things have stayed consistent. Her favorite thing to play with is Play-Doh, her favorite color is pink & her favorite animal is the pig.

She was playing with a bag of craft buttons the other day & began separating all of the pink ones from the pack. She explained that she was saving them because we needed to make piggy noses out of them. That brought us to this adorable craft.

Pom Pom Pigs

What you will need:

Pink craft pom poms (2 for each pig, one larger than the other)

Pink foam sheet

Pink pipe cleaner

Pink button

Googly eyes

Glue

 

Directions:

Cut the ears & feet out of the pink foam & put to the side.

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Glue the smaller pom pom to the top of the bigger one.

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Glue on the ears & feet.

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Cut a piece of pipe cleaner & curl it into a spiral tail. Glue the side of the tail and place it so that the curly end sticks off to the side.

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Glue on googly eyes & a button for the snout.

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Mai needed a little help with the eyes, but otherwise put her pig together by herself. She did a great job.

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Mommy made a cute one too.

Pom Pom Pig Craft - Adorable crafts for kids

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Pasta Shell Footballs

Pasta Shell Football Craft

Next week starts football pre-season. While I don’t actually care for football (see my post ‘A Football Widow’s Rant’), my husband does & so does my daughter. She watched her first game at only one week old. I am not actually sure if it is the game that she enjoys or the fact that she gets to cuddle up with her father & eat chips & dip.

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With football season quickly approaching, I thought that a football craft was essential.

As you all know, I am a huge fan of making pasta crafts. I especially love working with jumbo shells. They were perfect for what I had in mind.

Pasta Shell Footballs

This is an easy & quick craft. All you will need is jumbo pasta shells & brown & white paint.

Directions:

Paint the jumbo pasta shells in brown & let them dry.

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Use a skinny paint brush to paint white lines on the shells & give the appearance of a football.

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Let your little footballs dry.

I thought Mai did a great job on her football. She painted in her lines very carefully.

Pasta Shell football craft for kids

I painted a football field for our tiny pasta footballs to sit on. Mai wanted to make pasta football players too. Maybe another day little girl.

Football Pasta Shell Craft

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Paper Plate Fire Breathing Dragon Mask

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We ate at Wendy’s this weekend for dinner. My daughter got a kid’s meal. It came with little cut-outs from Dreamwork’s Dragons. My daughter was so excited about this. “Mama, what is this dragon’s name?” She asked me this with each character that she picked up. She played with these until bedtime. Right before she fell off to sleep, she asked me if we could make a dragon craft the next day. She woke in the morning still wanting to make her dragons, so of course dragons are what we made.

Paper Plate Fire Breathing Dragon Mask 

What you will need:

Paper plate

Solo cup

Tissue paper in red, yellow & orange

Acrylic paint

Googly eyes

Construction paper

Glue

Tape

Directions:

Cut the bottom of the cup off & trim any jagged edges.

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Outline the cup onto the bottom portion of the paper plate & cut out the circle.

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Paint the plate in the colors of your dragon & let dry.

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Cut out shapes for the dragon’s horns & head fins.

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Cut out strips of the tissue paper to form the fire.

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Tape the tissue strips into the cup with the strips sticking out of the cut end.

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Put the cup through the hole in the plate & glue it in place. Add googly eyes & a craft stick for the mask handle.

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Place the mask up to your face & blow through the cup to blow your fire.

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This is fun for little kids & big kids alike.

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Jelly Fish Crafts

Cupcake Liner Jelly Fish Craft

For the past few weeks we have been preparing our house to put it on the market. We have been packing for weeks & trying to get all of the clutter out our home. I don’t think I realized just how much craft stuff Mai & I actually had until I started trying to box it all up. I have been having a hard time throwing any of it away & an even harder time picking which items have to get packed away & put into storage until we move. Right now I am just trying to use any loose pieces of craft material or pre-painted or pre-cut items. Mai wanted to work with cupcake liners and make jelly monsters. She had a very specific idea in mind.

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While she created her jelly monster, I worked on a different kind of jelly creature.

Cupcake Liner Jelly Fish

Directions:

Cut a wavy pattern into the bottom of a cupcake liner.

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Cut 4 pipe cleaners in half. Curl the ends of all 8 pieces.

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Place the liner on a piece of paper & arrange the pipe cleaners underneath. Use a liberal amount of glue & glue the pipe cleaners to the paper. Do not worry if not every section of pipe cleaner touches the paper, when the glue dries the cleaners will hold. You may weight down your pipe cleaners while they dry if you want them to lay flat.

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Add googly eyes to finish off your cute little sea creature.

Cupcake Liner Jelly Fish Craft

We had several egg carton sections that Mai had painted last week for a different craft. We used those to make another jelly fish craft.

Egg Carton Jelly Fish

Directions:

Paint a section of egg carton & let dry. Poke a hole through the center of the egg carton section.

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Poke a string through the hole & tie a knot on the inside of the section.

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Similar to the craft above, cut pipe cleaners in half &  & curl the ends. Glue the pieces of pipe cleaner to the inside of the egg carton. Let the glue dry & add googly eyes.

Egg Carton Jelly Fish

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Toilet Paper Tube Waving Flag

There are 2 weeks left until the 4th of July and we are already enjoying the sounds of the holiday. I can hear the fireworks going off nearby & it makes me smile. We have two more weeks of fireworks popping at night, two more weeks of everything red, white and blue and two more weeks of 4th of July crafting. This is simple cardboard tube craft looks like a flag waving in the wind.

Create a waving flag for the 4th of July out of cardboard paper tubes. Kid's crafts and activities

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20 Paper Plate Crafts

20 Paper Plate Crafts

We are big fans of paper plate crafts in our home. They are cheap, readily available & make great canvases for painting, markers or glue. They are also more durable than paper, so the crafts hold up longer. There are so many great possibilities & ideas. Here is an assortment of some of our favorite paper plate crafts.

 

Paper Plate Tropical Bird

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Paper Plate Carousel

Paper-Plate-Carousel

Paper Plate Jack-O-Lantern

paper plate jack o lantern

Paper Plate Emotion Masks

Paper Plate Emotion Masks

Paper Plate Elf Mask

Paper Plate elf mask

Paper Plate Easter Bonnets

paper plate bowl easter bonnets

Paper Plate Tissue Paper Fish

paper plate tissue paper fish

Paper Plate UFO

Paper-Plate-UFO

Paper Plate Leprechaun Mask

Paper Plate Leprechaun Mask

Paper Plate Spider Web

paper plate spider web

Paper Plate Umbrella

Paper Plate Umbrella craft

Paper Plate Octopus

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Paper Plate Melting Clocks 

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Paper Plate Hand print Wreath

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Paper Plate Scarecrow Mask

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Paper Plate Owl

Paper-Plate-Owl

Paper Plate Hello Kitty Mask

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Paper Plate Pocketbook

Paper-Plate-Pocketbook

Paper Plate Sunshine & Rain

Paper Plate Sunshine

Paper Plate Wig

Paper Plate Wig

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20 Paper Plate Craft Ideas

 

 

 

White-Out Resist Painting

White Out Resist Painting

 

Yesterday we found ourselves in a little bit of a dilemma. We did not have any childcare for our daughter. I was just returning from being out for a full week after my gall bladder surgery & my husband could not take the day off either. We were not sure what we were going to do. My brother-in-law volunteered to take her, but would not be able to get her until the afternoon, so I asked my work if I could bring my daughter to work for a few hours in the morning. They said “No problem”, so Mai came to work with me.

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8 Reasons Why Dads Are More Fun Than Moms

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I have always considered myself to be a pretty fun person or at least I thought I was. My daughter & I have a lot of fun together. We do arts & crafts together. We go on fun outings when daddy is at work & we have a lot of smiles & laughs. For some reason though, it seems as if those smiles are wider & those laughs are louder when daddy is around. I know that I am not alone in this either. What is it about daddies that make them so much fun?

1. Dads like to rough house. They will throw you up in the air & swing you around by your arms, as mommies cringe in the corner watching. They are freer with their play & not as cautious. A scraped knee to a father is a lesson not a catastrophe.

2. Dads aren’t afraid of a little dirt. They are not afraid of mud pies, puddles or messes quite as much either. Dads know that the bigger the mess, the more fun that is had.

3. Dads have no problem serving Doritos & jelly beans for dinner. I am constantly stressing about what we feed our daughter. While I am grinding up vegetables to try to sneak into meatballs & smoothies, my husband does not bat an eyelash about bringing home a box of munchkins for breakfast & McDonald’s for lunch. What kid wouldn’t prefer a Happy Meal to a strawberry/spinach smoothie?

4. Dads can act like big kids themselves. I can get pretty silly & goofy, but my husband can always take it to the next level. Whether he is climbing into a crib to read a bedtime story, jumping on the bed or riding around on our daughter’s tricycle, his inner kid comes out to play & our little girl loves it.

5. Dads don’t care what you wear. If you want to wear pajama pants with rain boots and a cowboy hat to school it is fine. Who cares? Mommy does a little. I laid out a perfectly cute outfit.

6. Dads don’t say “No” quite as often. My husband often refers to me as the “No” mommy. If I am the “No” mommy, I guess that makes him the “Yes” daddy. If my child wants to stay up late, or have that sugary snack before supper, it isn’t mommy that she is going to ask. Dads don’t mind bending the rules a little bit.

7. Dads build & fix things. When you get that new bike for Christmas or one of your toys breaks, it is daddy that is the hero. This does not mean that mommy can’t do it of course. We just let him handle the tools.

8. Dads think farts & poop jokes are funny too. Toilet humor is a favorite of little kids & dads alike. They share giggles with every passed gas & chuckle about stinky poops. My daughter even has her father’s toilet lingo down. Last week at daycare, she said to her daycare provider “Miss Laura, I need to go squeeze one out. It’s going to look like a strawberry.” She is her father’s girl.

8 Reasons that dads are more fun than moms

Itsy Bitsy Spider Craft

Itsy Bitsy Spider Went Up The Water SpoutLast week Mai asked me if we could make a craft with sunshine, rainbows & clouds. We made a couple of cute paper plate crafts together with all of these things, but when we were finished, she looked at me and said “Mama, you forgot the spider & the spout.”  I apologized for being a silly mama & told her that we could make our spider craft another day.

My daughter does not forget a thing, so of course she did not forget that I promised her an Itsy Bitsy Spider craft.

What you will need:

3 toilet paper rolls or 1 paper towel roll

Craft pom poms

Pipe cleaners

Glue

Paint

Yarn

A sheet of cardstock

Optional: construction paper, cotton balls, buttons, markers, crayons or other embellishments to make your background.

Directions:

Cut your paper rolls open lengthwise. Paint them white & let dry. Craft a spider using pom poms & pipe cleaners. I let Mai glue hers together, but then used a glue gun to make it more secure. Glue a long piece of yarn to the end of your spider. The piece should be long enough to feed through the whole spout.

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Glue the painted tubes to a piece of cardstock, cut side down. Open the tubes slighty to widen your spout. Cut a small section of tube in half lengthwise & glue it so that it comes out of your gutter.

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Run your piece of yarn up the pipe so that the spider dangles below the spout. Let your toddler pull the spider up & back down.

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Add embellishments for a background to create a scene. Mai drew in a big bird & even dedicated her craft to me. Awww.

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