Cookie Decorating with Toddlers

I'd been wanting to make a gingerbread house with Olive all month long and I decided to do something about it yesterday.  I stirred up some gingerbread (I don't have a tasty recipe - Mine is solely for building and being HARD)  I posted a tutorial & my recipe last year along with some pretty precious baldy baby pictures :)

I was getting ready to start rolling out the dough for my house, when I realized that it would be much faster and just as fun to cut out gingerbread men & women to decorate.  Olive wouldn't know the difference and she'd have a blast with the icing and candy.  That's how the house idea got scrapped and we moved on to decorating gingerbread people.  

My friend Erin at Bambini Travel wrote about setting up an activity for her twins when they were napping and leaving it out as an invitation to them as when they woke up.  She let them find the activity on their own and then they got started when the kids discovered it.  I thought it was a great idea so I set up a little gingerbread invitation of my own for Olive to find when she got up from her nap.  I got all the supplies ready and was looking forward to Olive finding it.

 I rarely buy new candy for our gingerbread house.  I try to save candy from Halloween-Christmas and use that on the house.

Olive went straight for the candy and started counting it.  She knows ONE and TWO so her counting went something like this 1,2,1,2,2,1,1,2,2,2 :)

 Nerds were fun to shake, fun to sprinkle and even more fun to eat.

 She was all business with the butter knife.

I squirted some icing out in a mound for her to play with.

Olive played with the gingerbread set up for an hour

and was not thrilled at the hint of the words time to clean up.

 Our finished products :)

 Another day of making messes AND making memories together.

Christmas Tree Foot Prints

I try to make personalized gift tags for my family and friends each year and always enjoy putting them together.  Last year I did photo gift tags with a cute picture of Olive on them.

I wanted to be a little more crafty this year so I started thinking about hand print or foot print options.  I browsed pinterest a time or two and decided the foot print Christmas tree idea was my favorite.  I had 100% of the supplies in my craft closet so the DIY Gods must have approved of this project - haha!

Supplies you'll need:

blank gift tags

yarn

green paint

sponge brush

wet wipes

various paint colors

glitter glue pens

towel to put down on the floor

My toddler is 18 months old and never sits still so I have to be a little creative when I want foot prints.  I opted to put her in her high chair, feed her lunch with a side of PBS and start stamping while she was distracted.  It worked brilliantly!

I set all the supplies out ahead of time and got everything ready.

I stamped all of the tags at once and then let them dry for several hours.

 Once they had dried, I got busy decorating those trees.

 I let all the glitter glue and paint decorations dry over night.

The tags looked so cute!!

I was really happy with this simple DIY and I hope our family and friends are too!!
You've still got 7 days left until Christmas so give these a try!!

Making Memories AND Messes

I'm a very task oriented, organized person.  I make lists, cross things off and feel happiest when I'm being productive.  I typically avoid chaos, unpredictable things and messes.  This is usually a strength of mine, but it can sometimes get in the way of a good time.  I've been baking sugar cookies at the holidays for my whole life and this year was no different.  I bought all the ingredients, picked out the perfect cookie cutters and was ready to knock this project out.

I laid out everything to make sure I was ready to start one morning and I realized that I could include Olive in this project WITH me.  I love teaching her how to do new things and introducing her to fun family traditions so this was going to be perfect.  It wouldn't be as fast or as efficient as doing it myself, but it would definitely be more FUN.  I pulled up a chair and told her we were going to make cookies together.  She excitedly cheered out a big YEAH!

She went straight for the flour and loved digging in it!  She checked out the cookie cutters and was curious about that large spatula.  She was jabbering a mile a minute and most of it was incoherent baby babble.  It cracked me up and I knew she was really enjoying herself.  I had fun watching her and photographing her first Christmas cookie baking experience.

 Olive was so curious about the flour that she decided to give it a taste.

Ho Ho Ho from Santa Olive

 It took me less than 10 minutes to clean everything up when Olive went down for a nap.  She had a great time and I enjoyed sharing this experience with her.  Looking forward to making Christmas cookies with her for MANY more years.

 We gave the cookies out for our neighbor gifts and co-worker gifts.

They were very well received!!

Are you making memories AND messes at your house today??