alphabet art

Thanks to my neighbor kim who found this cute book called alphabet art - gracie and i started doing it to try and help with learning her letters - anyhow it is super fun and she loves playing with paint and glue and all sorts of fun things - and hopefully in the end it will help her learn her letters! this picture above wasn't a letter but they were brazil carnival masks which we made in honor of alex living in brazil for two years! This was the letter E and it looks more like a butterfly than an elephant but that is what it is suppose to be - it was also fun because we crushed up egg shells and glued them to our letter E - which gracie loved being destructive and ben couldn't figure out why there were egg shells all over the house that day!

D as in duck - this one kind of turned out - gracie is actually pretty good and does most of the cutting herself!

This is a cat for the letter C and gracie was so funny - she named it suzy and would make it do tricks and make me pet it and give it food - to her suzy was a real pet!

This was suppose to be a butterfly - and i never got a picture of the end result because i couldn't believe it but gracie called me in later and anyhow she had drawn a picture of mom- as featured below - it was so cute - and i didn't know she was old enough to draw people! i love it! i think this will be one of my favorite pictures ever - her first picture of mom :)

you can tell we do this in the morning - because gracie is always in her pajamas and her hair is crazy - maybe i should start getting ready first and then doing the crafts so that we get some better looking pictures hahahah

scissors & markers

Gracie loves scissors- what kid doesn't - anyhow her favorite thing to do is cut paper into teeny tiny bits and then scatter them all over the house - it is great fun trying to pick it up - i was nervous at first about letting her use scissors but i threatened her life and gave her examples of all the horrible things that would fall upon her if she should ever cut anything other than the paper i gave her - luckily she has listened quite well - so that is nice -

Markers - another item that moms are afraid of and kids can't get enough of! anyhow i just loved that i came into the kitchen and gracie is laying on the table with her legs on the window just hanging out

Firepit

We love going to the Johnsons and playing around the firepit- there is always stuff to make smores, hotdogs and this time layne made everyone banana boat things - which looked good! anyhow we love it - ben gets to play with fire, gracie gets sugar, and i get to smell like campfire smoke - which are all fun things! anyhow so thank you Johnsons!

This is as close as i let gracie get to the fire to roast her marshmellows - if you notice you can't even see the fire - i always laugh because so far she hasn't really picked up on the fact that everyone else has hot marshmellows and she doesn't