making christmas - car playmats

so these were a really fun project to work on.. i made car playmats for sammy, aaron, and oscar.

sammy's was finished first (since it needed to be shipped to ohio) and i used ribbon ties on his. he also got a park with a lake that he could drive to and a store.

after making his and having a couple weeks of other projects in between, i decided to use something different to fasten the folded mat together:

aaron and oscar got tabs on theirs with velcro. i liked this solution a lot more, and wish i had thought of it the first time around.

instead of a park, they both got a used car lot. aaron loves to line up all this cars in a row, so he needed some extra parking lots. i was working on oscar's at the same time, so i made it the same as aaron's in hopes that he wouldnt figure out it was his.

he did notice there were two different ones, but figured that one of them was for sammy.

making christmas - pj pants

and for dad and the brothers, some soft flannel pajama pants. it is so hard to come up with ideas of things to make for men!

trapping

one night oscar and jeremy set traps all over the apartment using oscar's stacking cups and play food.

then while they weren't looking, i snuck in oscar's room and grabbed a pile of stuffed animals and filled all the traps.

trapping became oscar's favorite activity for the next few days.

i bet you didn't know you could catch giraffes with shrimp and frogs with english muffins!

stash update!

so today i was washing baby clothes and diapers and thought i'd share an update of the fluff stash! i bought 2 dozen newborn prefolds and 2 dozen small prefolds from green mountain diapers because i had read really great reviews about their prefolds. kristen had a baby that outgrew the newborn prefolds in no time, so i bought 11 more from her. i have 5 covers with velcro and 3 covers with snaps, and that should be plenty! other new additions to the stash are the various prefolds, the two brown/pink fitted diapers, and a bag full of rockin' green detergent from the baby shower. also, i bought an orange fuzzi bunz diaper - love it! and when i bought that i got a free light purple bum genius 4.0. i also got a wet bag to shove yucky diapers in in my diaper bag and a pail liner to haul those stinky pants downstairs.


here they are all washed, sorted and ready to go. the small and regular sized prefolds dont fit in there, but by the time i'm using them, most of the newborn size can come out. (there's also a cameo of the belly in that shot)

tada!

things still on my list to get: the pail to put the pail liner IN, diaper sprayer, wipes, some sort of wipe solution (though i will probably try making my own), and maybe some diaper rash cream that's ok to use w/ cloth diapers.

busy boys

i haven't been the only busy one this month, i've also put the boys to work crafting-


oscar and aaron both made some martha stewart puppets that i had picked up on clearance a couple years ago. oscar did santa

aaron made a reindeer.

it was a really easy craft to do with them - all peel and stick. a lot less time consuming than gluing their advent chains together!

oscar also got put to work making cookies with me. he was the official butter unwrapper.

and also helped to decorate the cookies. he did a FABULOUS job decorating cookies. you can't really tell the difference between the ones jeremy and i did and the ones oscar did!

making christmas - brother-in-law magnets

for the brothers-in-law, i made some magnets with images from their favorite football teams.


ohio state for mike (of course)

these were a really fun little project, and i ended up making a bunch with the international breastfeeding symbol for the ladies at work.

and auburn for vic.

the glue we had was quite fume-y, so jeremy ended up finishing the auburn ones for me. here is the tutorial for those.

making christmas - sister aprons

for robyn and angie, i whipped up some aprons. i'm really super excited about these aprons and hope to make one for myself.

instead of a loop or tie that goes around the neck, these have two long straps that are connected at the top which go over the shoulders, cross in back, slide thru loops at the waist, and then tie in back. a bit hard to explain (i included a drawing of what it should look like in the back when i wrapped them up).

this was my own invention, so hopefully they will get used and then robyn and angie can tell me if the design needs tweaking before i make one for myself. (dont worry, i did iron these a bit before wrapping them!)