I've always wanted to be a creative person but always thought I wasn't. I've always wanted to learn to paint and sew. I've tried a couple times but nothing really catching on. Well, the creative bug has been itching. And I saw this wonderful clip from President Uchtdorf (an apostle of our church) about creating and I thought of course I am creative (maybe not like others). It was inspiring. I was inspired. Here's the clip.


I bought a pattern and fabric for some shorts for Douglas. Before I begin, let me give a shout out to Travis. One of my biggest flaws is my lack of confidence. Travis on the other hand doesn't let other's people opinions bother him so he is a confident person. He'll try just about anything. If he messes up, no sweat. So I made him walk me through step by step the sewing pattern. I love you Travis. Thank you for having confidence in me. You ROCK.
The shorts are TOOO cute. I cut out some extra fabric and sewed it on a plain shirt to match. Harrison has a matching shirt. (Not the best picture. The shirt has the movie "cars" emblem on the sleeve.)

Do you see the little cargo pocket on his shorts? I also wanted to make him an "I spy" bag for his Easter basket. He seems uninterested in it now but hopefully in the next few months he'll get the concept of it. One side of the card has pictures of the objects (for non readers) and the other side has text. There is clear window on both sides.
Then I saw a blog that had an elephant and giraffe stuffed animal for babies. I had a baby shower THE NEXT DAY and one in the future so I went to the store and got the stuff and made it THAT NIGHT. This was my FIRST sewing project all by myself!!! I'm so proud!! I'm making one for Harrison too. One side has stripes and the other dots. The ribbon on the side are loops and Harrison loves little tags and ribbon.

Have you ever seen Bakerella's cupcake pops? Here they are. Well, a good friend and I threw another good friend a baby shower today. I wanted to make them for her baby shower as a guest favor. We did the shower in blue and brown. So here are my cupcake pops. It would be better if I had a 1 inch flower cookie cutter. Mine was 1.5inch. Anyways, I'm trying. I realize I'm copying other's creative endeavors but that's still something, right? :-)

Don't worry this is the last potty picture I'll post.

I need potty training advice. Did you read any book? What age did you start? Please describe how you did it. You can email me if you want. We bought Douglas a potty chair this weekend and Travis has been having him sit and read books all weekend for like 20 min at a time but nothing. He picked out Thomas and Cars underwear. This morning Travis woke him up and sat him on the potty with milk and after 20 min Douglas peed. He hasn't sat on the potty since or told me he needs to pee. According to the signs, I'm not quite sure he's ready. However, kids are potty trained much later than in the "olden days". What's the difference? If kids did it early then, why can't they do it now?

Having a learning theme went well last week. I'm starting a different program this week so I'll post pictures of that later. Here are some shape activities we did last week.

We traced shapes with our fingers in pudding. Not as succesful as I had hoped for but different.

Used square, circle, rectangle, and triangle sponges to paint a butterfly.

Used his shape toys to dip in paint. Douglas liked this activity alot.

I've decided to start weekly themes for Douglas. Through play and crafts I want to "teach" him things. The theme for this week is shapes. We are doing a different thing each day to learn the basic shapes. Today we read Douglas' shape book and then with masking tape we made a large square, circle, and triangle on the kitchen floor. Then we "drove" Lighting McQueen, Mater, and Filmore (all from the movie 'Cars') along the shapes. Douglas mainly just pushed the cars on the kitchen floor. However, I would have Mater and say "Mater wants to drive on the triangle, show him where that is" and he would do that. It was fun playing with him. He is into the characters from the movie Cars BIG time right now. He got the blue Lighting McQueen and Filmore for Easter and he already had red Lightening McQueen and Mater so all day yesterday and for most of today so far he's been pushing his cars around. Today is Tuesday which is our day for Muffin tin meals (see previous post). So I kept with our shape theme.Egg (circle), Milky way (square), grapes (circle), ham (cirlce attempt), cheese triangles, square crackers .

I thought the purpose of this muffin meal was in vain until at the end he held up a piece of cheese and said "look, triangle." So rewarding!

I've started a couple new things with Douglas. We've started doing crafts. He loves them and so do I. A blog I found has ton of preschool type crafts and sometimes books that correspond to the craft. Last week we checked out a book on garbage trucks and then made a garbage truck. Douglas sponged painted on the cardboard I cut out. He enjoyed it. We talked about the squares, circles and triangle that made up the truck. He also made a cute flower with water colors and today we did the letter E. He colored the E while I cut out eggs from misc. paper. He also used an egg and bunny stamp on it.

This is something we will definitely continue. I've made a schedule of crafts to do this month with him and things to teach.

The other thing we started today is muffin tin meals. I saw it once and didn't thing of it much until I found this blog. Every Monday is "Muffin tin Monday". She puts out a theme and gears the meal toward that theme. It is put in a muffin tin. I thought it was such a cute, clever break from the ordinary. So we will start doing Muffin tin Tuesdays b/c I want to see what people do on Monday. The theme this week was Easter/spring. Here is Douglas' meal.

Starting at the top left: drink, peeps bird, "bird nest"/spaghetti, pistachio pudding with sprinkles, bunny face bread, lady bug apple

That's what this week has been... BLAH! Douglas and I have been sick all week. Monday and Tuesday I had the slightest head congestion but boogers were pouring from my EYES. Talk about disgusting but more than that it was just plain ANNOYING!!! I couldn't see several times b/c the film covered my eyeball. Wed the eye leakage slowed down and then I felt worse. Luckily Harrison and Travis have so far missed this. Plus mother nature (since Harrison's birth) has been cruel to me once a month (sorry tmi) so it's just no fun everywhere. At least I have both annoyances together instead of back to back.

I'm looking forward to Saturday and Sunday. I'm looking forward to it being General Conference for 2 reasons. 1. Travis won't be able to do much home improvement so I'll get to spend all the time with him. 2. I need the prophets and general authorities inspiration. There is a pit of worry in my stomach and I need some relief. Yea for general conference. We'll be watching it at home on the internet hooked up to the t.v. So hopefully I'll be able to pay attention. Pictures to come of Douglas new crafts. (I found an AWESOME preschool blog.)