(And All My) Work Be Praise

It's been ages now since I promised you information on the crafts I did for Levi's first weeks of preschool, but by golly, I'm going to follow through!  We spent the first two weeks talking about creation, but only did crafts for the first four days (plus a generic one on Genesis 1:1 ).  Now, a month later, every time I tell Levi we're going to do a craft, he asks if it's for day five.  Mental note: don't start things you're not going to finish! Note: the picture-numbers shown above each craft can be found here . GENESIS 1:1 First we made a coffee filter earth : color with blue (water) and green (land) markers on a coffee filter, spritz with water, let the colors bleed.  Everything I read warned about not getting the filter too wet, and in the end we didn't get it wet enough -- you can still see the marker lines!  Oh well.   Then I poured a little bit of white paint into a bowl, dipped a paintbrush in, and helped Levi use a second paintbrush to t...

A while ago, I blogged about the best mothering advice ever : Rachel Jankovic 's assertion that everything gets better in twenty minutes, if you simply do the work in front of you instead of complaining about it. Today, I remembered another little nugget that has kept me sane over the past year or so.  Most of the interaction I have with women is with mothers just a little ahead of the game: 5-10 years older than me, with kids up to twelve years old or so.  So when I chanced to be talking to an "older" woman, whose children are in their late teens and early twenties, I listened closely: her children are amazing, godly individuals.  Whatever she and her husband did, they did it right! At the time, Levi was about eighteen months old, and giving me quite the constant headache.  "Oh, yes," this woman nodded knowingly.  "Those half-years were always the hardest for me, from six months all the way up to 5-1/2 or so."  It seemed odd to me, but the piece o...

Over the past several weeks, I've actually followed through on some of the ideas I've gleaned from Pinterest .  I really love to scrapbook, but finding the time is nearly impossible these days, so it's been fun to do a few quick projects, just to release those creative juices a little bit: For example, when you need a special dessert, like these cute birds' nests I made for Easter: This next one, a year-long calendar journal , is still a project in the works.  The original is super cute, in an upcycled fruit basket with vintage postcards as dividers.  I'll upgrade from my recipe-card plastic box when we start visiting the farmers' markets again!  Even in this simple fashion, I've enjoyed jotting down little things from most days, and look forward to being able to see "what we did last year on this date" as I continue it into the future.  (I didn't make this until mid-February, so January is sadly blank!) Ah yes . . . on March 16, Isaac a...

(With apologies for the blogging hiatus while everyone was sick and life got crazy . . . ) Today I tackled a little project that has been driving me just slightly batty for years: open bags in my cupboards.  You know what I mean: that twist-tied bag of rice, half-used bags of stuffing mix from last Thanksgiving, all of those things that get piled up on the shelf and come sliding off at my head when I want to find something underneath or behind it all. Also frustrating me in my kitchen: the overwhelming number of recycled jars stacked in the cupboard above the microwave.  Applesauce, baby food, spaghetti sauce, peanut butter [yeah, those are plastic, but I save them anyway], jelly, endless jars of salsa . . . I just can't bear to throw them away!  The salsa jars are perfect for freezing 1.5-cup portions of chicken broth, but I'm nearly out of broth right now and the cupboard is positively overflowing.  Bags of rice sliding at my head aren't so scary, but a dozen g...