Craftiness

So I have done a little crafting lately that I wanted to share.

Yarn wreath...
(Mine is for Elizabeth, the one right on the left of the pumpkin dress. The rest of the dresses were made by my friends - they are all so cute but I really love the modern one on the left!)
Peasant dresses...

I used my leftover fabric to make a dress for Amelia. I'll have to get a picture of the 2 girls together!

Last I pinned this book pumpkin on pinterest and I finally made it. I'm trying make my pins!!

It looks a little better in person! :)

Man I love to craft!

Some new Stuff...

I have been getting out my sewing machine and for the first time decided to try a pattern, and I made Elizabeth this dress!
I was pretty happy with it, even though I had to redo lots of it, many times! :)

I think she was excited to be wearing a dress that her mommy made her! :)

While Tom's family was here we got a picture of all the siblings who were in town, we got 7 of the 10! Pretty good!

Tom and his siblings, with their parents, John and Carole. I actually got my camera out when we had dinner at Maria's house. The kids had fun playing games inside,

and out.

Our group, hanging out.

Maria and Craig even had a slip n slide for the kids to play on.

Ben didn't want to play on it ?? but Elizabeth had a great time.

Tom's younger brother, Mark, and his wife Annie recently found out they were having a baby, so we had a little mini baby shower for them.

We also got this fun thing! Not really fun, but exciting for me! :) It's a safe room/tornado shelter! It has worried me for many years that we didn't really have a safe spot to go with the kids when the tornado sirens went off. It took a lot of twisting Tom's arm to get him to agree to get this :), but luckily our county was offering a rebate for half of the cost of shelters, so that helped finish the twisting! We're ready for storm season!! (Now hopefully we just won't ever really need it!)

Last Weekend

I know, I know, it's a terrible picture! It's the only picture I had of our Daisy Scout garage sale that we had last weekend. We did a fundraiser for our troop in our leader's yard. The girls made baked goods and lemonade to sell. The moms sold all of our stuff!! It was pretty successful, we made $400! Here's Elizabeth at the money table. The girls took turns sitting at the table, giving cookies to everyone who bought something.

We also went to the zoo and met our friends Joanne, Jay, Jane, Jill, and Jena. It was super cold, but luckily we brought jackets so we were pretty comfortable.

Jane, Jill, Elizabeth and Ben. The best picture of the older kids.

I started making this wreath for Elizabeth's upcoming birthday. I didn't take a finished picture, but I really love the way it turned out. It took SO many balloons though, a lot more than I thought! It's going to be my birthday wreath for the front door any day someone in our family has a birthday.

I have also been loving my cricut and vinyl. I bought these buckets at Michaels for a $1 - and added the kids names. I'm not sure what we are going to do with them, but I think they're cute! In case you can't read the above...

Name: Elizabeth

Excellent on math.

Good on reading.

I was sunning for sun. (not really sure what this means - maybe it's on the yellow slips at her school?)

Elizabeth and her friend Emma were playing school and giving each other yellow slips (for being good) and their brothers were getting blue slips (they were being bad, I guess). It was pretty funny. I loved seeing this on the counter with her spelling - especially the excellent! It was a fun weekend, and we have a crazy week this week ending with Elizabeth's birthday party! I should have a lot to post in the upcoming week! Now if I only had time to post them!

Campbell is born!

Our niece, Maria, had her first baby last week. His name is Campbell Kelly (Kelly after Maria's father) - and he is so adorable! We went up to the hospital to meet the precious boy.

There he is!! We are so happy for them!

Last Friday I had our neighborhood playgroup over for a crafting session with the moms. Let's just say after the chaos of trying to craft with the kids, we decided our next craft night will be in the evening! All the surfaces in my kitchen were completely full with craft stuff so the kids had to eat on the floor!

Part of the mess going on while we were busy crafting.

That evening I had a crafting night with friends, which is when I actually got something done - I couldn't do anything while trying to referee all the kiddos! It was a fun time, though!

Snow Days x5

Tom and I were laughing (in a little bit of a horrified manner) because we realized that
excluding this past week Elizabeth had gone to school for 2 days in 3 weeks! First we were gone for a week in Disney World. The second week Elizabeth went to school on Monday and by Tuesday morning Elizabeth had woken up with a fever, it turns out she had the flu! She was out of school the rest of the week. The third week we went to school on Monday and by Tuesday there was a major ice storm, we were out the rest of the week. Craziness!!! So, here are some of our pictures from our 5 snow/ice days.
We were looking for things to do to keep us occupied. I saw the activity that Ben is doing on a blog. He had to bite the mini marshmallow in half and push it down on the outline of the heart. Super easy but fun! Then we had to go play in the snow! Ben kept falling down because under the 3 or so inches of snow was about 2 inches of ice! It was so slippery!

That's our street behind the kids. I felt badly for Tom that he had to drive in that to work!

All the snow throughout our street.

The kids had a blast just running around, going crazy! The snow wasn't great for packing so we couldn't get a snowman going or anything.

We went sledding one afternoon after Tom got home from work. Ben was at the end of a virus so the cold really affected him - all of his face that wasn't covered by his hat and coat turned bright red!

Check out the unbrushed hair - we really didn't get dressed or anything for 3 or 4 days!! Elizabeth is working on her 100 day project for school.

Ben got a bike for his birthday so one afternoon Tom put it together. It turned out to not be as easy as we (he) thought it would be! :)

Elizabeth was sick with the flu for a week, then Ben got a virus the second week. Poor kid was layed out on the couch for a lot of our snow days.

E's finished 100 day project.

This was one of the other snow days. It was absolutely FREEZING! We only lasted for 5 minutes.

Elizabeth got an easy bake oven for Christmas. She made us all cookies during our "shut in".

Doesn't that look appetizing? Mom forgot to Pam the pan!

Elizabeth got a turn to make a heart.

I'll end with a beautiful shot of Ben's rash! I was worried about that boy - I thought for sure he had his sister's flu, but that came back negative. Then I thought strep, maybe this was some strange version of strep rash (it turned pretty itchy and hivey), but all of that came negative. So, it was just a virus! We're glad we are all finally healthy!