Marbled Easter Eggs

Yesterday Sawyer & Sutton made marbled Easter eggs using a dozen wooden eggs that I got at OTC last year (on clearance after the season, of course!). We used the same technique that we used last summer with actual marbles to paint marbelized paper.


We use disposable roasting pans from the dollar store, lined with a piece of white construction paper, to minimize clean up. This also gives you a nice bonus piece of artwork at the end of the project!


Add a wooden egg, a few blobs of acrylic paint...you'll notice that we stuck stickers to a few of our eggs in an attempt to recreate the loveliness we saw HERE...but, the truth of the matter is that the paint gets too thick and gloppy for it to work properly. I couldn't even find the stickers under all that paint on most of the eggs when we were done! We'll probably try it with regular egg dye when we do the traditional egg dying later next week. In the meantime, skip the stickers for this project :)

Give your kiddos their trays and start rolling them around. It works much better if you actually pick up your tray and tilt it side-to-side like Sawyer is doing here. If you take Sutton's route and try to roll the egg around the paint with your fingers, all you're going to do is succeed in getting Mommy paranoid that acrylic paint covered fingers are going to end up in places they shouldn't ;)

He finally caught on to the proper technique and was totally thrilled with how his eggs looked

See what I mean about that bonus artwork in the bottom of the tray? We're going to cut ours up and make Spring/Easter cards to mail to our family and friends.

When your egg is mostly covered (it usually won't get 100% covered because its odd shape rolls kind of awkwardly), have an adult take the egg out of the pan carefully and dip the remaining white spots right back into a swirly blob of paint. That should take care of covering the whole thing!

Place on a sheet of waxed paper to dry overnight. After a few hours I turned the eggs on their sides so that the gloppy bottoms could dry. The paint was THICK, so it took quite awhile to dry.

You can see that the sticker idea didn't work out the best. I'm too big of a perfectionist, and the lines weren't crisp. Honestly, I like the solid look of the marbled egg much better anyway.

Assemble your egg display (and ignore the fact that the only tablecloth I have that fits over my dining room table is bright Christmas red - oops! Time for some bargain shopping!) and let the kids admire their masterpieces. I'm going to coat these with a layer of varnish so that they will last over the years, but that's going to require a trip to Home Depot...

This Week's Activities

It's been a busy week around here! Spring Break started for Sawyer on Wednesday, so he was out of school for half of this week and all of next week. Since we're at home (and I'm finally feeling better - yay!) we dove back into a bunch of new homeschool work. I know that most people probably think I'm crazy for making my kids do homeschool work when they already attend preschool (well, one of them anyway...they won't both be going until June)...Isn't that what I pay them for? The truth is that I really, really like doing homeschool with my boys, and they seem to enjoy it too. It gives us something to structure our day around, and having "jobs" all ready set up for them to do helps us avoid the "I'm bored...there's nothing to do" trap.

Honestly, with the nighmare of kindergarten registration looming in our not-so-distant future, I'd truly consider homeschooling my boys through early elementary if I wasn't going to have another baby to worry about taking care of. Last week people camped out in line overnight to try to register their kindergarteners for the school down the street from us! Apparently the schools are so overcrowded that there's not even enough space for neighborhood kids to be guaranteed a space anymore. It's insane! It looks like they're not even close to building the second school that was supposed to open in 2012...so why am I still paying Mello Roos if they're not building schools or parks around here? Ugh, don't even get me started. Luckily I already have my kids on the waiting list for the Montessori Charter elementary school in Rocklin. Hopefully they'll get in there and I'll be able to avoid the kindergarten registration horror story next year. For now, we're having fun at home :)

Sutton and I made maracas from decorated plastic Easter eggs and rice. He scooped the rice and taped the eggs closed all by himself. I didn't really have to do much except sit there and take pictures. His allergies are acting up, and his eyes are super sensitive to my camera flash these days. Out of 100+ pictures that I took this week, there are only about four where his eyes are open!

Sutton loves this egg matching game that I printed from Confessions of a Homeschooler. He has done this activity at least once a day since I printed it out (and he's gotten really fast at it too!). The goal is to match the individual egg cards with their twin on the full size sheet. I have absolutely fallen in love with the Confessions of a Homeschooler blog, and we've been printing and laminating things off of there like crazy. I think I might purchase their entire preschool curriculum so that I have easy access to all their files - they're awesome!

Thursday was International Waffle Day, so the boys requested that we make rainbow explosion waffles with chocolate chips (add a large amount of rainbow jimmies to the waffle mix, and they'll dissolve and turn into colored polka dots in the final product). I even let them top them with powdered sugar and syrup for a sugar bomb start to our Spring Break.

We painted our own Easter jigsaw puzzles

Another one of Sutton's new favorite activities is number matching/recognition. He has gotten SO good at recognizing all of his numbers - he reads them everywhere we go, especially all the price signs at stores - and he loves to count. This activity is also from Confessions of a Homeschooler, and here he has to match a number labeling card to the large card with the correct number of butterflies. I tried to get a cute picture of him doing his work...but the eye thing was at work again...

He may look goofy, but he is having fun - I promise! :)

Funderland

Today we went to Funderland in Land Park. I haven't been there since I was twelve or so, and it looks pretty much like it looked back then...as in, they probably haven't painted the place or done much upgrading or updating to it since 1990. The boys had a TON of fun, but as an adult, you can't help but notice that it is missing a lot of its original luster. We visited there today intending on checking it out to see if it would be a good place to hold Sutton's birthday party next month. I'm still undecided, but leaning towards not...the kids will love it, but the place is pretty run down, and even though the rides were in fine working order, you sort of get the feeling that they're on their last legs.


The first ride they went on were the teacups. I remember that back in the day they had a Tilt-a-Whirl, but I guess they've since replaced it with teacups.


I was actually kind of glad that their section wasn't spinning very much since we'd just eaten lunch!

Next they went on the log flume. This was the longest line that they had to wait in (about 10 minutes) since the ride only runs 4 people at a time.

Splash! Unlike the bigger version of this ride, the kids didn't really get wet except for a bit on their shoes (yay!).

As always, they both loved riding the old time cars

The airplane ride was next

It was also a big hit! Huge smiles all around :)

Next they decided to tackle the dragon coaster. Sawyer was beyond excited, but Sutton wasn't really sure what to think about it. Sawyer was telling him that it might be a "tiny bit scary" but that they were going to have fun!

Going up...

...and coming down...Sawyer is LOVING it...looks like Sutton is doing okay with it...

...or maybe not! By the second trip around the track his knuckles were white, and he was completely ready to get off! Poor guy was SO scared - he was crying and saying "I don't want to ride that dragon. It's TOO scary!" :( He's definitely going to be waiting at the bottom of the thrill rides with me while Mitch & Sawyer ride them.

We decided to calm our nerves and settle our tummies with a mellow train ride.

Sawyer & Mitch wanted to take another spin on the rollercoaster, so Sutton and I hit up the carousel. He still doesn't want to ride the horses, but he loves to sit on the bench. I have to admit that this thing spun way faster than I thought it was going to! By the end of the ride I was totally nauseous again - yick!

We finished off the day with a couple of rainbow snowcones, a bag of popcorn, and a nice long drive home so the kids could both squeeze in a nap. It might not be the fanciest place for a birthday party (though there were plenty of them going on while we were there), but it was a really great way to spend a few hours with the family on a Saturday afternoon.

Park Picnic

Friday was another gorgeous sunny day, and Holly and I both had the day off with all of our kids at home (for once!), so we decided to take a picnic lunch to Wesley Park. We took the kids' bicycles and scooters, and they had a blast riding around all the pathways there while Holly and I chit chatted and got some sun. It was a beautiful day, and it was so perfect to get to spend it outside with our best buddies!

St. Patrick's Day Shirts

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Yesterday the boys and I made some fun shamrock shirts to get into the St. Patty's spirit. We picked up the following supplies at Joann's: green t-shirts (on sale for $2.50 each), compressed sponges (2-pack on clearance for $1.25) and a bottle of lime green acrylic craft paint ($1.00). Total spent = less than $10 for 3 shirts



This is what a pack of compressed sponges looks like. They come two to a pack and are about as thick as two pieces of cardstock, so you'll have to use some sharp or heavy duty scissors to cut them. I printed out two different shamrock shapes that I found online, and then had the boys drop them into water. Sawyer at first was skeptical and asked "why?" but they were thrilled when they discovered that the paper turned into sponges. They even wanted to hydrate all of my little leftover scraps! Put some newspaper inside your shirt so that the paint won't bleed through, and then let the kids stamp it up!







They are SO proud of their shirts and have been showing them off all around town and at the park today. The size small shirts are actually a size 6/8, so they will be able to wear them next year (and probably the year after that as well) - not too bad price-wise if you think about it that way!


I even made one for myself since I'm running out of things that fit over my expanding baby belly :)


We played with the shamrock matching file folder game that I made last St. Patrick's Day. It's amazing to see how their skills have progressed in a year! Last year they had some trouble and a little confusion with a couple of very similar patterns, but this year they were done with this before I could even get the next project out of the cupboard!

Soccer

Last night was a beautiful evening, so Sutton and I tagged along to go watch Mitch & Sawyer's Daddy-and-Me sports class. This week they were working on soccer skills (in previous weeks they've done baseball and basketball).





Sawyer liked all the warm up running drills, but when it came time to actually play soccer he was a little underwhelmed with it all. Mitch said that's the way he's been with most of the classes, which surprised me because Sawyer is constantly telling me how much fun it is and asking me "is it sports class day yet?" Let's just say that if this class were a baseball game, he'd have probably been the kid who laid down in the outfield and picked grass instead of playing :)

He did like the part where they actually got to shoot goals though!

Sutton, on the other hand, was SOOO into soccer! He kept asking if he could go join the class, and when we told him that he had to be four to play soccer, he kept pouting and saying "I can be four. I can be bigger." Truly, he probably would have fit in with the other kids in the class just fine, but since the class is for 4-5.5 year olds, he's going to have to wait another year before he can try it. Luckily there were some extra soccer balls laying around, so we had plenty of time to kick it around with each other. He's really good! I definitely think that Sutton is going to be our athlete...maybe Sawyer can try something like guitar lessons next time :)

Once it started to get dark and the mosquitos came out, we put away the soccer ball, and Sutton helped me take this picture of the cool cloudy sunset on the hill above us.