Family craft- Halloween decor

I've never purchased Halloween decor before. As the logical result, we never did a lot of decorating for October. We'd cut out paper shapes of bats to hang from the ceiling, paint some windows, carve a pumpkin, and call it good. This year we wanted something more festive, so we made a family craft. I wanted to share it because it was a fun family activity suitable for a variety of age ranges.

We purchased a variety of Halloween fabrics from a local fabric store. I bought 1/2- 3/4 yard of each fabric, and picked about 5 different fabrics with a variety of prints.  We took these home and cut them into strips about 2 inches wide and 8 inches long. I didn't measure any of this, just go ahead and eye ball it.

Sarah loved organizing the fabrics as it was being cut. It was very serious work for her, like being the banker for Monopoly! She really enjoyed being in charge of all the fabric, and was very meticulous about keeping the edges aligned on the stack of strips.

Take a string of white Christmas lights (or buy the orange Halloween lights...I like white because you can buy them on clearance after Christmas and use different fabrics to make several garlands: one for each major holiday!) and tie the strips of fabric around the light cord. I put 3-4 fabric strips between each light.

 

I taught Sarah and Matthew how to tie the fabric stips onto the cord and they really enjoyed this part. We sat around the table tying fabric onto our own sections of cord, and we chatted about our week while we worked. Daniel was too little to tie the fabric, so he enjoyed picking out the colors of fabric for me to use. It was like a game for him.

We also attempted to make homemade fuzzy spiders out of pipe cleaners. I wouldn't recommend this craft for kids. It was much harder than I thought to make the legs look even and decent. After a LOT of frustration, Matthew made one spider that he was very proud of. 

After tying on all the fabric on the string of lights, we hung the Halloween garland over our front-room window. This string of lights happened to be one of the 'twinkly' kind, so it's been very fun to have it turned on. I'm surprised how 'magical' twinkly lights make me feel....Nathan's teased me a bit in this regard. The joy and excitement just bubbles up from inside of me and I can't stop myself from giggling. It's fun to share the joy of simple things with my kids!

I'd love to hear what family traditions you have for Halloween, whether traditions from your childhood, or ones you've started recently! I'm always looking for fun ideas, so please share!

General Conference weekend

Okay, I know this is late. Tough luck. That's the way the dice rolls when I have homework and exams :)

I LOVED the spiritual feast we were blessed with in General Conference! It was so incredible! I can't wait to print off the talks and peruse them all again.

I like the idea of having family traditions for GC weekend, so this year we started some. Nathan made crepes for breakfast on Sunday, which is a fun treat we enjoy for birthdays, so it helped make the day already feel like a holiday. The children LOVE building their own crepes and choosing their own toppings. My all-time favorite topping is a sweetened sourcream that Nathan cooks on the stove over low heat. It's light and slightly tangy and OH-SO-GOOD. I crave it often! Yummy! We also love to spread on flavored yogurt, plain yogurt drizzled with honey, Nutella (oh yum!), peanut butter sprinkled with powdered sugar, jellies of various sorts, cut up fruit (think berries and bananas), and whipped cream. You just can't have a bad day when it's been started with such delicious food!

In the GC sessions, we gave the children all Bingo cards with different gospel words/pictures that they needed to listen for. I think every LDS family has played this, and there's a reason why: it's so much fun! The kids were so excited every time they could mark off a word.

We also placed a bowl of marshmallows and M&M's on the side table. Whenever they heard the name of Jesus Christ, they could take a candy. They decided to save all the candy in a little bag so they could have a pretend party after the session.

Between the two sessions we did family activities. We recenlty found a puzzle that is made with 3 different sizes of puzzle pieces. It was made so the entire family could work together on one puzzle. Brilliant! We really loved it! We all worked together and had a great time. Sarah and Matthew were pretty good at putting pieces together, and Daniel was so proud of himslef for getting one pice put in place. Daniel's main job was to look through the box of pieces and find all the pieces with a straight edge so we could do the perimeter.  Or we'd have him look for all the pieces with a certain color, like when we were putting together a portion full of pumpkins. He'd find all the pieces with a splash of orange.

 

400 pounds of bananas!

I'm allowing my husband to write this one:

My wife is an angel. This morning she called me at work: "Do we have any plans this evening besides FHE?" She asked. "Not that I know of" "How would you like to make some banana bread?", she asked. "Sounds like fun. What's up?" "Sister Chavez works at a local soup kitchen and they were going to throw out some overripe bananas. She said they would bring them to us.", She said. "That's great!", We hung up the phone. A couple hours later, Renae called again. This time her voice had more of a panicked sound to it. "They dropped off the bananas..." "Ok?" I replied cautiously. "They tried to get me to take more but I stopped them after they unloaded ten cases." She said. "...?" "Yeah- they're 40 pounds each. We have 400 pounds of overripe bananas sitting in our kitchen." Renae was able to give away 4 cases leaving us with a mere 240 pounds of bananas. She then proceeded to peel, mash, and freeze bananas for about 6 hours, in addition to taking the kids to school, picking them up, and taking them to their art lessons. She finally stopped when we were out of lemon juice and freezer bags and every cubic inch of our deep freezer was full of bagged bananas. We fed most of the banana peels to the chickens and I buried the rest in the compost pile. Renae then mopped the floor which was unbelievably sticky, fed the family dinner, and led us in an excellent FHE. I fear that I may lose her any day to being translated. It's a serious concern for me.