a little Christmas in the air...

The day after Thanksgiving S had to work all day. G woke up with the thought of Christmas decorating in her head (we have been telling her for weeks that unlike all the stores, we didn't decorate for Christmas until after Thansgiving). I was not about to attempt getting out our decorations with 3 kids and no S! But in catching up on a few blogs in the am while baby C slept, I noticed this post on Simple Mom that linked to a craft idea for making a "snowstorm" in your window. I thought it was pretty cute, and something that the kids, or at least G, could help me with! We did not have labels and were not going to get anywhere near the stores on black Friday, so we improvised:

1. let G pick out light blue and white patterned paper from my scrapbooking stash
2. used big circle punch to punch out a big stack of circles - G and W both helped with this!
3. G organized the circles in 6 stacks according to pattern
   
4. grabbed pkg of dental floss (yay for having that in bulk from Costco!)
5. G helped me string out the floss and tape it to the kitchen table
6. G & W brought me 2 circles from a stack and chose where they wanted to put them on the strings (with a little direction from me so we could have a random pattern =)
7. placed one circle, pattern side down, under the floss
8. rolled a piece of G's tape (she is scotch tape queen at our house - has her own mega dispenser and everything, thank you again Costco!), and put it over the floss on the circle
9. put matching circle over taped circle, pattern side up
10. when all the strings were done, we detached them from the table and hung them in the big window in the front room

So now we have a little Christmas in the air at our house! The kids love these. They love looking at them from inside and from outside too, and the "snowflakes" move and flutter when the heat kicks in or when the kids blow at them which is really fun. Plus our window smells minty fresh! =)

Now that W's procedure is over and done with, we can focus a little more on Christmas and will hopefully get out the Christmas tree, rest of the decorations, Jesse tree, and Fa-La-Lattes in the next week. May you all enjoy your preparations for this blessed season!


*****Reality check*****
This was a super fun craft to do, but it may not have gone as smoothly as it sounded. Most people could probably do this in less than an hour. It took us ALL DAY! With many tears because I wouldn't let G pick out red and green elf paper, frustration when W rolled his car over the strings and detached them all, grrs from the momma when none of the kids would listen to what I was telling them to do, and 50 million interruptions of just the normal kid things of the day making me crabby because I just wanted to finish the project, and ending with S sweeping in when he got home to save the day and help hang up the strings like it was that easy. =)