Easter Wrap-Up

So this past Sunday was Easter!  It's one of my favorite holidays, mostly because it's all about spring, new life, pretty dresses and spending time with family. 

And of course, Jesus.  Growing up, my favorite church service was the Easter Vigil mass.  Watching the entire church lit up with candles as a child was just magical.  When I was older, I sang in the choir and even participated as a lector. Let's just say that when I was growing up, going to mass was a big, big part of my life.  

Now, I would like to share that love with my girls, but it's hard for me to do.  I keep finding excuses to not participate fully, and I feel like the kids still can't sit still long enough for me to get something out of the mass.  Easter Sunday mass this past week was so, so crammed with people, I couldn't enjoy it.  We were squished.

And out Lent Challenge to not watch tv was a success at first (you can read about it here), then a few weeks in my husband suggested a family movie night.  Which we did.  And then that lead to some tv watching. Which lead to a lot of tv watching, which lead to less tv watching, which lead to playing video games. Ironically, I never wanted a video game system because I didn't want a bunch of video games junkies, sitting around playing video games all day.  Now, I actually like it, provided we are all playing together and it's not just one of kids sitting by herself playing alone.  At least the mind is engaged and it's way better than listening to those snotty girls on the kids movies these days.  (Does that comment make me sound old?) (Side note: someone asked me to write them a letter of recommendation the other day.....it really hit me that I am an adult--yikes!)

Anyways, we did participate in the church's Easter egg hunt after mass, after we stood and waited in the hot sun (and the chocolate candies in the eggs all melted).  We then went to a friend's house and did another egg hunt, had brunch, and let the kids play the afternoon away while the grownups chatted.  It was really nice! Except for the 2 potty accidents.  I could have gone without those.  Every time one of the kids pees her pants, I think of that country song--"You're gonna miss this"---and I think.....No. No, I will not miss this.

I will miss painting and doing crafts with the kids.  Here are some photos of Easter eggs we painted the day before Easter.  We did "partner painting" because M was getting super tired and would start to cry every time her painting wasn't perfect. So I made up "partner painting," which basically just meant that every time she got frustrated, I'd switch paintings with her.  

Problem solved.

The bottom is the first one we did, then I got smart and added lines with a permanent marker--much easier!

Painting an egg....eating an egg.

You might think that I printed the eggs off of some fancy website I found on Pinterest, but no, I just free-handed some eggs and gave the kids some watercolors and away we went. 

Easy and fun. My kind of craft. :)

Hope your Easter was just as relaxing as ours!

~Patricia

The Egg Gallery

Tape skirt

I saw this great idea on Pinterest from UCreate: use fabric markers to create stripes, etc. on a solid color t-shirt. LOVE!!! Here's a link to their post and tutorial.

Here's a photo of my work in-progress. I didn't realize that you could use blue painter's tape on fabric. Good thing I had some left over from when I painted our playroom! I bought this skirt for a few bucks at Target, so I wasn't too concerned with the outcome, especially since I had two little helpers!! The fabric markers I bought were sort of pastel in color, so I didn't turn out quite as bold as I imagined. Big sister got a skirt with stripes and little sister got a skirt with stars! I'll find the finished skirts tomorrow and post!

Maternity Extravaganza!

Lately I've been getting tired of wearing the same old maternity clothes that I've been wearing for my last 2 pregnancies (they've survived some of my friend's pregnancies as well!). Last pregnancy, I purchased a dress from Old Navy that turned out to be just hideous. I've come to this conclusion after much thought about it, and probably only wearing it once, because I realized it had such potential, but something just wasn't right about it. So I turned it into this dress:

And I like it so much better now! I followed this tutorial, using an old tank, some elastic and the skirt off the hideous dress. My advice is to put the skirt on first, and then try it on over the tank top, pinning it where you want and then sewing it together. I tried sorta just eye-balling where to put the tank part first, and had to take it apart because it got a little bulgy in places and didn't lay quite right. I chose this particular tank for this project because 1) it was one size too big already (perfect for a growing baby body) and 2) because it had bleach spots on it. I honestly don't know where those spots came from, because I never use bleach, but that's another story! I realized that some of the little spots where near the top, so after reading about this tutorial on how to change up your dark t-shirts using a bleach pen, I decided to give it a try! Here's how it turned out up close, before I washed it:

And after (which really doesn't do it justice, the lighting is so bad it looks like two different shirts! I promise it's the same one, and that the background color remained the same):

Using the bleach pen was fairly easy (I just put a towel underneath and then washed it separately after about 10 minutes. I'd like to try it again, using a shirt that isn't ribbed, which I think would work better. And I'm going to have to work on my art skills too, maybe find a drawing somewhere that I like and copy it. Overall the dress took an hour or two to make, which made this a really easy, cheap project and finally, something fun for me! ~Patricia