Thankful Leaves

Our Thankful Leaves

I love Thanksgiving. This might seem strange coming from an import to the United States, we certainly don't have Thanksgiving in the UK. However it really is what every holiday should be, a time to be thankful for all we have, a time to help those that are not so lucky and of coarse a time to come together as family and eat too much! No presents or other hallmark gimmicks, just good times.

As such I have willingly adopted this holiday as one of my favorites. And as I enforce my love of holiday celebrating on my nearest and dearest a few years back I created our thankful wreath. It is now a family tradition and one my kids look forward to as they count out candy from Halloween.

Our wreath is built up in the count down to thanksgiving. On November 1st I have the kids come up with the things they are most thankful for. This year these range from family to favorite blankets, from trucks to trees and my favorite weekends. 

I write each persons contributions on separate leaves cut from construction paper (this year I cheated because Target had a pack of 30 leaves on sale so I bought them).

Everyday one child gets to pick a leaf from our thankful pile and peg it to a long ribbon. By Thanksgiving this year we will have 28 things pegged up to be thankful for:)

Window Spiders

Looking for a non messy Halloween craft. This was a simple idea and my little guy loved getting to use the scissors to cut his own yarn. Looks good on the window too.

You need:

Contact paper
Black yarn
Scissors
2 Goggly eyes
Glue
Black paper

I cut a piece of contact paper and taped it to a window, sticky side out.

Next I handed D the child scissors and yarn and let him cut away - his current favorite activity. He stuck the pieces of yarn to the contact paper. (I did guide him for the first 2 but then he got the idea).

While D was busy cutting and sticking I cut out a spider shape out of the black paper. Then I had D glue on the goggly eyes. When he was done with cutting and sticking I gave him the spider to stick to the web.

He was so pleased with himself and its looking pretty spooky round here!

Almost Halloween

With one day left till halloween I felt it time to start recapping on our costumes for this year. But first heres an extra, the Trunk or Treat at my boys school. Everyone was so creative and the kids had a blast but here is our effort. The girls LOVED being the big kids and handing out the candy.

So this year I was lucky, no hurricanes or huge snow storms here in the North East to disrupt our Halloween plans. And you have to understand these plans have been discussed since around about October 31st last year. In fact if you ask my 5 year old he can tell you what he wants to be up till about age 15.

Anyway I digress, this year the boys finally settled on police officers (It was a close call with Ninja turtles). As they already had police outfits from our dress up I told them I would also make them police cars to drive and I think that sealed the deal. So working off my school bus plans from 2 years ago I went out and bought white and blue duct tape and saved 2 cardboard boxes. From there its pretty simple, you tape. White all over and a blue stripe down the side, I added tin foil windows and printed out NYPD badges and voila. Here they are heading to the first of our Halloween festivities this past weekend.

And the girls, well my 2nd grader being a super reader and Pippi Longstocking fan chose that as her costume. Her older sister originally was going to be Pippi's pet monkey, (If you've never read the books do they're a lot of fun) but not one to ever want to be a side kick this morphed into the sock monkey over the past year - as I said we discuss Halloween costumes for next year while still eating our candy from the present year.

Cant wait for next year:)