Christmas Crafts

Browse Pinterest for a half hour, and you'll immediately feel guilty for one or all of 3 things: your physical fitness, the DIY decor of your home, or the amount of meaningful craft time experienced by your kids. Since the first one is a bit of a lost cause for me right now and the decor is low on the priority list, I thought I'd tackle at least a little of the third.

I realize this is nothing special--no homemade bathtub paint or baking soda/vinegar experiments, but at least Ryan got to do a few creative-related things (other than the creative ways he negotiates how many Curious George episodes he gets to watch in the morning.

1. Christmas Chain
This is a classic that I feel every kid needs to do at least once. The great thing is that the "Sunday School" room he goes to at church gave us a ziplock bag full of the proper number of paper strips and a star. We didn't have a glue stick and liquid glue got a little messy, so I resorted to a stapler and Ryan just chose which color went next. It was a good discussion on patterns and he is very excited to tear one off every night as we count down to Christmas!

2. Sinterklaas Ornament
At the Sinterklaas event last weekend we got an instruction sheet on how to make an ornament. It was a little too hard for Ryan, so I ended up making most of it myself, but we hung it up in his room on his CD player.  Notice he watches over Delmond Young (who no longer plays for the Twins, but who does besides Mauer and Morneau) and that the bobblehead is unfortunately being "sprayed" by the skunk. My apologies.

3. Christmas Tree and Snowman
I got these ideas directly from Pinterest because, well, it's been about 25 years since I've paid attention to any preschool-level crafts and had no idea where to start. Ryan LOVED these projects. One involved drawing a tree on green paper, him coloring it, and then gluing Froot Loops on the tree for ornaments. The second consisted of outlining a snowman with glue and him lining up mini marshmallows. He also directed the drawing of the nose, mouth, and hat and his idea of using Froot Loops for the eyes and buttons.  These pages drive Nika absolutley insane so I'm not sure they'll get to grace the fridge, but he sure had fun making them (and eating the leftovers)

4. Coloring
Ryan usually tires of coloring fairly quickly, but today I got him started at the table and then left to take a shower. He did a great job staying occupied and used each crayon, one by one, to cover the pages.

5. Stickers
Ryan, like most toddlers, loves stickers. He usually just gets to use free address labels that come in the mail with donation requests, but today I found some Christmas stickers for him to decorate his coloring pages with.

Ahem...I said PAGES.

Oh well...he had fun and is very proud of all his "crafts."