DIY

DIY chalk/water paint wall

August 19, 2020August 21, 2020 Courtney RubenLeave a comment

Ever since my daughter was born, we have been on a pretty tight budget. But even being on a tight budget, I try to re-create things at home that bring joy.

We’ve been so lucky to receive a generous annual gift of a membership to our local botanical garden. Each year, we explore the gardens and attend all of their amazing events. Pre Covid of course…

Out of all of the sights to see and the beautiful sculptures and water, her favorite thing to enjoy was a giant slate wall with water and paint brushes used to create. It’s a bit hidden in the children’s garden, in fact I didn’t know it even existed for a while.

When she was about 2 1/2 years old, I had the crazy idea to try and figure out how we could replicate a similar wall at our home. Her father and I brainstormed first a bit and finally decided to do it. It would be the perfect addition to the small fairy garden I was creating for her.

We were able to find affordable pieces of slate at Floor and Decor. I tried getting several pieces wet to make sure that water would show up when we paint with it. Finally, we found a good match. With the size that we wanted, we only needed 6. Well, 6 pieces of slate doesn’t seem that bad, until you pick them up and hold them. We needed something strong to hold it all up and to keep it safe on the ground.

First, we needed to get 3/4 inch plywood cut to the size of our wall and tiling board cut to the same size. We bought 6 2×4’s for holding up the wall, and 1×2 pieces of wood for the border. We needed wood screws and decking nails to put it together.

Then, we had to put together the plywood and the tiling board with the nails. We purchased grout to make sure the tile stayed on really well. And nailed in the border and the wood stakes. We used those 2×4 wood as stakes to bury into the ground so the wall wouldn’t tip over since it is very heavy.

Finally, we picked out colors that we had on hand and decided to paint the legs and trim. We also added a small ledge so we could rest the chalk or paintbrushes and cups of water.

Almost 3 years and a move later, it still seems to be holding up pretty well. And it is working out perfectly for our homeschooling and outdoor classroom!

DIY

When you can’t enjoy a Carnival, you bring the Carnival to you!

July 28, 2020August 3, 2020 Courtney RubenLeave a comment

COVID-19 has really changed plans in 2020 for most people. It wasn’t how anyone envisioned their Summer plans, including us. As I’ve mentioned before, we are very active people. We go to every festival, circus, carnival and fair that we can. But this Summer, all festivities were cancelled. My daughter expressed her sadness at missing these events, so I promised to create one giant big carnival event before we started our new homeschooling adventure.

As with everything I do, I had to get creative, resourceful, and work with a tight budget. I knew we had a bunch of things we could use already around the house. I also planned to make a Dollar Tree run for cheap prizes, games and snacks. I had a few Amazon boxes stacked up that I knew I could repurpose and create with. Lastly, I always search my local free groups for things to have and borrow. It came together perfectly, minus the heat of a Georgia Summer.

So step right up, and come see our Carnival Day, 2020!

We set up a little canopy for food outside of my parent’s garage to help with shade. My parents had an old Nostalgia popcorn machine that wasn’t working but worked perfectly for holding popcorn and for looks. I was fortunate to have been gifted a big box of decorations from two families through a free gifting page. It included the banners and tablecloths and so much more. I had plenty of balloons left from old parties and celebrations as well.

I had a fun Ferris wheel snack display and big top circus display left from my daughter’s Coraline themed party last year. I didn’t really have much to put on it so it was more for looks. Part of the free party supplies were lots of carnival themed food holders for peanuts, pickles, hotdogs and popcorn! I also snagged some animal crackers and cotton candy at Dollar Tree.

My mom has a small drink dispenser that we used to throw in some Turkey Hill lemonade and we were lucky to find a family that allowed us to borrow a Nostalgia Snow Cone machine. We only had to purchase some snow cone cups and syrups. I also made a few syrups at home including root beer, sour lemon, blue coconut, and sour raspberry. Flavors purchased were, blue raspberry, cherry and cotton candy.

This was our little entry way leading to the carnival area in the back yard. It also worked perfectly for our sack race.

Little man wasn’t a fan of the sack race

I made a sign with my daughter to look like an old fashioned sign at a carnival. We used paper towel rolls and cut up cardboard boxes. I found some red stick-on rhinestones at Dollar Tree that really helped make it special. It did suffer a little wear and tear though…

We created a ticket booth with another big box. I had high hopes for it when we cut up some boxes and I glued a whole canopy over hang to it. But it just didn’t hold up. Oh well! I still cut a slit in it to feed tickets through. I ended up buying the tickets for around $4 on Amazon, I think. Some Dollar Trees have them, but the one I went to did not.

The sack race sacks were all given as a part of the free party supplies from another family. My daughter had so much fun jumping up and down the yard with these.

We of course needed a photo op area to document this day! I’m definitely no artist, so I just quickly sketched out a picture of a clown and a strongest person. I decided to make it a female because, women are strong too, especially moms.

What’s a carnival without prizes?! I received a KidKraft food stand for free this past week off a free exchange page. It only needed a screw. It worked perfectly for our prize booth. I grabbed a bunch of Dollar Tree trinkets to add to our prize collection. I grabbed things like ring pops, toy whistles and planes, light up swords, slinky, and a stuffed animal.

I set up a little “Funhouse” by taking out all of our ball pits, plastic balls and tents. My son loved going in and out of the tunnel. It also kept him busy while I cleaned up.

I created a fun water squirter game to be similar to the ones at the fairs. This one, you make a hole in a plastic cup and put a string through it. I had all the supplies already. You can use any kind of water squirter and it will move the cups when you hit it. My daughter liked this game the best.

I don’t think she was playing by the rules…

The box of supplies that were gifted to us had a ton of small red rings. I really wanted to do a traditional ring toss game but I didn’t have any glass bottles that would work. So I took one for the team and drank 6 Jarritos sodas in 3 days. Ok, my daughter did help me a little, but we aren’t really soda people. Thankfully, those sodas are like $1 a piece, so I didn’t spend much. I decorated the box with some rope I had leftover.

My daughter has always loved the balloon pop game at any carnival we’ve gone to. And man, they always con you into spending waaaay more money for the tiniest toy. I recreated this game by taking a flat piece of cardboard and painted it. The key is to poke holes to stick the balloon through where the knot can hold it in place. We had a few nice darts sitting in the garage that were never even opened before. We were able to play several times and never spent any money AND chose the prize of our liking too!

The duck game is popular one, especially with little kids. It’s a guaranteed toy and easy for any child. We had a few random ducks already at the house, but I also found 3 bags of little ducks at Dollar Tree to use. Unfortunately, most rubber ducks don’t float upright in water…. I wrote some “X”’s and numbers on the bottoms of each one to show how many prizes to win. My little guy loves rubber duckies, but he wanted nothing to do with them that day. Isn’t that always how things work?!

I was gifted a nice little Skee Ball game on the local buy nothing group page. I feel like Skee Ball is a common game that you see at fairs and carnivals. It came with 5 wooden balls and I placed them in a Dollar Tree container that I had purchased for school supplies. It reminded me of the long tube that the balls come down on when you play.

Along with the rings, the free box of supplies also contained a ton of ping pong balls. So we had to make the fish bowl game. I had a bunch of perfect glass fish bowls to use but they were all stuck in the back of my storage unit. Instead, I found a few random ones at my mom’s house. We don’t need any more pets and my mom would kill me, so no fish were actually used.

About a week or so before our carnival, I had seen someone selling a Step2 Roller Coaster Toy in amazing condition for less than half retail price. I jumped on it quickly and we’ve been playing with it ever since. It’s gotten a little dirty since then, but it worked great for a ride at our carnival!! If you notice, I also looked up YouTube videos on how to make balloon animals and shapes with a few of the old balloons I had left over.

My favorite thing at any carnival is the food! We made sure to follow tradition and have corn dogs, hot dogs, cotton candy, snow cones and of course funnel cake. My mom already had funnel cake mix and we had corn dogs left from my daughter’s birthday party. As I mentioned before, cotton candy was from Dollar Tree and I purchased and made some snow cone syrups.

Sometimes it’s the small things that really make you think of a carnival. I always think about the light up toys that line the midway as the sun starts to set. We always got souvenirs that lit up when we visited our grandparents at the Circus as kids. I managed to find the last two light up swords at Dollar Tree! Perfect to add to the end of our carnival evening. I also found those light up sling shot toys that fly high and slowly spin down. Last but definitely not least, we needed some face paint. My daughter has recently really gotten into getting her face painted. I had some leftover from Halloween as well as her birthday party.

In the end, we spent way less money than we would have spent going to just one carnival this year. See, kids don’t really care when you end up using the tacky bright blue tape all over the decorations, measure things out perfectly, or when you don’t take a perfect picture to post. They really only care about these imperfect special moments that they will cherish for years.

A Quarantined Spring Break to Remember

Featured Courtney RubenLeave a comment

Back in April, when everything was shut down and we were sheltering in place, my children and I went on an adventure. This was my daughter’s first year in school and her Spring Break week was approaching. We normally wouldn’t go on any lavish vacation or anything, but I always try to make it special. I knew there wasn’t much that we could do so I asked my daughter, “Where do you want to go?”.

Let me jump back a second and let you know about our little family. I have always been the type of person that is active and out and about. We’ve been gifted memberships to local attractions, we frequent all of the free things to do in the area, and every weekend we are at some type of festival, party, or cultural event going on. So for us, staying home has been….difficult. Lucky for us, we have a great imagination.

My 4.5 year old made her list. She decided she wanted to go to France and visit the beach there, go to London and get our nails done and put cucumbers on her eyes, she wanted to go to outer space to see aliens, camp in the woods to earn badges, and lastly, she wanted to explore the jungle and turn into tigers. You know, small requests…🤣

I started to brain storm and use those moments at night, when I’d lay awake and couldn’t help but think about the uncertainty going on. That’s when I would try to distract myself and plan our adventure for the next day. Everything that we used or made was from things we already had available at home. I did not make any special trips or buy anything special to create our adventure.

On the first day of Spring Break, we began our travels on the French Riviera. 🇫🇷 We cooled off for a few wearing our bathing suits and watching videos of the beaches in France. Just lay out a towel in the living room, grab your sunnies and relax!

For breakfast, we made homemade crepes and whipped cream. We filled our crepes with bananas, strawberries and chocolate (nut allergy here, so no Nutella).

After breakfast we watched the movie Leap! It’s one of my daughter’s favorites. Then, we changed into our chicest “French attire”. 😉

For lunch, we ate yogurt parfaits and ham and cheese crepes since I made way too many crepes at breakfast.

My daughter had the idea to create a passport to mark each of her travels. This one we just threw together, but it was fun. I glued a picture of her on it and each day we put a stamp on the page where we went.

Her passport, edited with macarons for privacy 🤣

Later on we explored Paris. I quickly sketched a picture of the Eiffel Tower, nothing fancy. But it gave it that Parisian feel.

In front of Eiffel Tower with passport edited with a tart for privacy

There we saw the Eiffel Tower and shopped the Champs-Élysees for summer clothes. This was fun because I actually needed her Summer clothes put up from winter storage and I got her to do it that way. Haha! We basically just put her summer clothes around the house and she would put in bags and then we hung them up in her closet.

For dinner, I made a quiche Lorraine and dessert was chocolate inside crescent rolls. C’est Magnifique!

On Tuesday, we hopped on over to London. 🇬🇧 We made sure to stamp our passport and then saw Big Ben. I did a quick sketch of the clock and skyline with a double decker bus to put on the wall.

My daughter wore her favorite tea party dress that was covered in tea pots and we put on big hats for our High Tea. I made a bunch of little tea sandwiches which included simple things like turkey and cheese, pb&j, tuna salad, and cucumber sandwiches with a delicious dill cream cheese.

I made chocolate chip scones and even had a go at making nut free macarons (yes, they are technically French, but we were there yesterday and they go well with high tea).

Later, we made royal crowns to wear out of construction paper and gold stickers just like British royalty.

Later on, we went to an outdoor spa where I had a homemade honey and yogurt mask. The person doing my facial sure had fun painting it all over my face! We also put cucumbers on our eyes, as required on her itinerary.

Cucumbers were a must at this outdoor spa

The jet lag must have caught up to my daughter because she actually napped while watching Frozen 2 afterwards. That never happens. Per request, she got her nails done and gave us both a makeup makeover… That sure was a look! 😳She definitely had fun with the mascara, lipgloss, and eye liner.

For dinner, we had “fish n chips” with some authentic malt vinegar! It was finally time to say “cheerio” to London.

On Wednesday, our adventure took us to outer space! 🚀🌌 We found an alien zooming through the galaxy by coloring our own outer space picture for the wall to get into an intergalactic mood.

We then made some lime green alien slime with glue, glitter, baking soda, gel food coloring and contact solution.

Later, we got a little silly making alien faces with our chins. I remembered how we used to draw faces on our chins as kids and lay upside down, so I had to show my daughter and we definitely had fun with it.

We even made little alien eye head bands!

Then we turned all the lights out and played in the dark and looked at the stars, while we watched Wall-E on the tv.

Afterwards, we made some marshmallow constellations, ate some Alien chocolate covered pretzels.

The we made a UFO with paper plates and a plastic container and created a telescope with a paper towel roll.

I created a fun galaxy egg hunt outside from the hand painted galaxy eggs we made a few years ago.

For our silly extraterrestrial dinner, I stuck hard spaghetti through meatballs and boiled them in green colored water. It looked so weird.

Doesn’t look appealing but it was yummy!

For dessert, I tried yummy homemade moon pies. 👩‍🚀 It truly was out of this world!

On Thursday, our Spring Break adventure was to go camping! ⛺️Since my camping stuff is in storage and we can’t go anywhere, we had to improvise. We got out the camping chairs and cooler and set up my kids indoor tent and sleeping bag.

We “camped” at a beautiful spot with mountains, river and waterfall right at our campsite. I created a river with blue painters tape across her room. Then we hung blue streamers with cotton balls at the bottom. I added brown craft paper rolled up to look like logs or vines around the river. I also found some fun vine looking ribbon/string that worked great to throw in a fake plant. We also made a fireplace with paper towel rolls and tissue paper with crumpled up black construction paper. We of course drew a picture of our scenic view from the campsite as well.

My daughter decided we needed an owl in the tree

We enjoyed a hike to the river (small creek in neighborhood) where we made our own fishing pole with string and a key.

We just pretended, there are no fish in there.

I worked on teaching her how to skip rocks and that it was ok to get wet or fall, and we did!

We made sure to keep our energy up with the trail mix we created. We just took cereal, chocolate chips, marshmallows, Chex mix, m&m’s, pretzels, Kix, peanuts, and dried cranberries in a baggie.

It ended up being quite windy that day, so later on my daughter flew her first kite.

She actually made her own sash to earn badges and put them on! We just cut out paper circles to make the badges. These badges included fishing, flying a kite, hiking, camping and sewing.

Since it was too windy earlier in the day, we had to wait to use the real campfire until dessert time for some s’mores! And before bedtime, she had required that we sit around the fire and sing songs and tell ghost stories. I can’t wait to take her out camping again, but for real!

Our week went by so fast! We visited France, London, Outer Space, and camped in the deep woods. On our last day, we visited a jungle with lots of tigers in Indonesia🐯.

We started our day wearing our favorite animal prints and did a “jungle breakfast”. We did these in Girl Scouts as a kid. Adults tie the food up in trees and kids have to get down what they want.

My daughter’s request was to do tiger face paint when we visit the jungle, so she became a tiger and turned me into one too. 😳

We made binoculars out of toilet paper rolls to use on our tiger tour. We searched and searched but no tigers in sight.

Searching for tigers in her favorite cheetah dress

Later, I made the hallway turn into the thick jungle forest filled with vines and they had to make their way through it.

Jungle obstacle course (top leaves edited in)

We then made a rain stick to listen to the sound of the rain from the jungle. We used a paper towel roll, foil, and rice.

Rain stick in action

What a great way to end our adventurous spring break that we will never forget.

While this pandemic has caused stress of being “stuck” at home, this time has also really given me and my daughter the ability to reconnect. It’s been kind of a difficult year for us with moving in with my parents. And, I know our relationship has really struggled since the birth of her brother. Over spring break, I actually heard her say things like “you look so happy, mommy!” And “this is the best day ever!” ❤️ All the hard work was worth it. It truly was the best Spring Break, ever!

Just a little creativity and imagination can go a long way.