The kids loved the painting chocolate kit from Costco last year and for some reason, I had an extra one (I probably thought one box between 2 kids was tons of chocolate). So, the chocolate painting activity is coming out again this year.
My daughter has a dance recital tonight and I wanted an extra easy activity for the day. I try to organize the activities so the easier to prep, less messy, less time consuming activities are during the week when we’re busy with school and after-school activities.
Following along with today’s chocolate theme, the elf got into the chocolate stash last night and had a little party on his own. The kids thought this was pretty funny.
Last December, when I was rotating the kids’ toys and looking for our most festive and Christmas themed items, I realized that we didn’t have any holiday puzzles. I found a couple on sale at Book Outlet after Christmas last year and put them away for this season. By the way, Book Outlet is a great place to get bargains on books, puzzles and activities. I’m not affiliated, I just find it’s a great, inexpensive place to find holiday related items to add to our rotation.
So, all to say, the elf (the kids say he’s an elf) brought a couple new holiday puzzles this year.
The adorable little sign and mini puzzle is from Eye Spy Club. I love Meaghan’s stuff, it’s all hand-drawn and always has a unique twist. The mini puzzle was probably my daughter’s favourite of the three. A nice, easy and mess-free activity for a busy weekday. Let the puzzles begin!
Day 12 we will be playing with playdough. The elf dug out all of our Christmas play dough tools and accessories this morning.
Everything is from previous years, but the kids were excited to explore it all because they haven’t seen it since last year. Some of our play dough is getting a bit brittle so I made some fresh peppermint swirl playdough.
I’m on a mission to find the softest, squishiest playdough. This time I tried a new recipe from https://teachingmama.org/super-soft-playdough-recipe/. This recipe uses baby powder instead of corn starch and I did find it made very soft dough, even though I had to substitute coconut oil for baby oil. My only complaint is that despite adding peppermint extract to the dough, I could still smell the baby powder. I don’t love the smell of baby powder, so I will continue the search.
Today’s activity is to make a donation. My daughter’s school organized a food and personal hygiene goods collection, so she took some things this morning to contribute.
I thought it would be fun to do something funny with the elf/ pixy in the morning. I set him up to have a garage sale with a few of the kids’ toys.
The Garage Sale sign is from https://www.ithinkwecouldbefriends.com/2017/10/21/new-elf-shelf-ideas-garage-sale-35/
Unfortunately, my son did not wake up in a good mood and was not impressed to see all his toys in a pile on the counter. I explained that the elf was making a joke and trying to play a game. After my son woke up more and his mood improved, he thought the little scene was more amusing. I think because my kids are still so young and can’t read, they prefer the simple elf scenes.
We started the day off with a little pixy mischief. He was zip lining from the kitchen over to the Maileg Christmas Chalet.
My husband was down with the sickness today, so the kids, their grandparents and I went to Stanley’s Christmas Village. The weather was not the best, but we toughed it out – taking a tractor ride to a magical Christmas Village, seeing farm animals and visiting Santa. It was too cold and wet to take the kids snowsuits off and take a pretty Santa photo, but the kids managed to have fun in some difficult conditions – so I take that as a win.
This morning, the elf got up to some more (easy) antics. He showed up in the Christmas tree with two new ornaments. Once again, the kids were pretty interested in how he got there. My daughter decided she’s going to sleep with him tonight because he’s always moving around at night and she needs to keep an eye on him.
Today’s activity is to look at Christmas lights. Our community has an event tonight where everyone goes out for a walk in the neighbourhood and looks at each others’ Christmas lights. Some people offer hot chocolate and adult beverages along the way and there is a collection of non-perishable goods to donate. It’s a fun night to go out and socialize with neighbours.
Today was supposed to be a Professional Day for my daughter so I had planned for us to do a few Christmas crafts during the day. It turned out the whole family stayed home sick, so the activities were less organized and a bit more chaotic than I had envisioned.
We kicked the day off with a much more elaborate pixy/ elf scenario than the previous days. He was working on his own craft project – decorating the lights.
It definitely got the kids attention. There were lots of questions about how he got up in the light, what he was doing, and how he got up there himself? My son kept repeating “we have to solve the mystery!” I see why parents go to the effort of Elf on the Shelf. The kids loved it. It filled their heads with Christmas magic scenarios and started the day off with some joy.
I had three Christmas crafts planned for the day, but we only ended up having time to start two of them. We may get to the third one this weekend.
Craft 1: Salt Dough Ornaments
This was my first time making salt dough and it turned out okay, but was not quite as straight forward as anticipated. We are making handprint ornaments that we will paint to look like Santa faces. We made 6 so we could give some to family.
I used the typical salt dough recipe:
4 cups flour
1 cup salt
1 1/2 cups warm water
The instructions are straight forward.
Mix dry ingredients
Mix in water
Stir and kneed dough into a ball
Roll dough flat (used flour on the rolling pin, but have since read that putting parchment paper over the dough and rolling it may work better)
Press hands into dough
Cut around hands with butter knife
Make a hole at the top of the ornament with a straw
Place on baking sheet lined with parchment paper
Bake at 200 degrees F for 2 hours
Possibly because it is dry where we live, the dough was difficult to kneed together and had cracks when I tried to roll it out, so I ended up adding another 1/2 cup of water. It still cracked when I rolled it out. I probably could have added more water, but it’s my first time doing this and didn’t want to stray too far from the recipe.
I baked them on 200 degrees F for 2 hours and the tops felt hard, but the bottoms were still dough-y. This is possibly because I made them a bit too thick, but it was difficult to make them thinner with the cracking. I decided to let them air dry for the rest of the drying process, so it may be a few more days until we can paint them.
Update
I ended up letting the ornaments sit on bakers racks for a few weeks until I was sure they were dry. My daughter and I finally got around to painting them on December 24th, just in time to give them as gifts to family members. They turned out very cute, I especially like how my daughter put eyelashes on her Santas.
Craft 2: Acrylic Wrapping Paper Ornaments
Our second craft was making acrylic ornaments with images cut out from Christmas wrapping paper. This was a perfect craft difficulty level for my 5 year old daughter. We cut out images from wrapping paper we liked. She chose bright pictures and I chose some images from leftover Maileg wrapping paper I had. We painted each ornament with a layer of Mod Podge, placed the cut out on the ornament and then painted another layer of Mod Podge on top. Then I placed the ornaments aside to let them dry.
This is where I made a mistake.
Amateur Tip: Do not place the Mod Podge ornaments on box board! When I tried to pick them up, the backs had stuck to the box board and I had to scrape the box board off the back.
Other than my drying mistake, this was a nice and easy craft for my daughter and I. And they turned out pretty cute.
That’s as far as we got on craft day. I will post the finished results of the salt dough ornaments in a few days.
Today we are doing some Christmas colouring. The pixy brought some colouring/ activity books (from Souris Mini) and new festive art materials (from Sewing Seeds Play and Dollarama). Thank goodness because both kids are home sick and hopefully a quiet activity will help keep them occupied and entertained. Looks like I won’t be getting much done today.
Day 6 will be to watch The Polar Express tonight. My kids are in the phase where they want to watch the same thing over and over and their movie of choice right now is The Grinch. My daughter was not thrilled that today’s activity is suggesting she expand her movie horizons. We will see if I can convince her to give it a try tonight.
In keeping with the Christmas train theme, the Pixy showed up riding a new train this morning. We already had a small collection of Christmas theme Little People that we got from the Little People Advent Calendar a few years ago (it’s a fantastic advent for young kids). We continue to bring the toys out every year at Christmas so I thought the train addition would be fun. My 3 year old son was more enamoured with it than my 5 year old daughter, but I think that’s okay. Some advent days are more exciting for my daughter than my son. It all evens out in the end.
My husband received some adorable window gels for the kids from a co-worker last Christmas, but didn’t bring them home until well after Christmas. So, I put them away and brought them out this year for Day 5. Pixy was waiting at the window with the fun window gels when the kids came downstairs in the morning. The kids loved that the gels were personalized with their names and were entertained putting all the letters and figures up on the windows.
The Santa advent calendar has a pocket for Day 5, so I put two of the adorable Maileg reindeer in for an extra little gift. An easy Day 5.
