Black

When I was a young girl, never being one to easily make up my mind, I had a range of favorite colors. Mint green, baby blue, turquiose blue, brick red...and others depending on the day, the purpose and my mood. I have always liked color. (except when I was depressed but thats another story for another time...) I remember vividly the day in school in about the second or third grade when it dawned on me that the "cool" little girls all liked pink and purple. Pink and purple EVERYTHING. Even sweet tarts, even though the yellow ones tasted better. Maybe I didn't externalize it as much, wanting to fit in and all, but deep down I still thought back then that mint green looked better with pink than purple did! Oh, these grade school dilemas, so deep and important. ;o)

Now I have a little school girl of my own. She keeps life interesting, challenges me to no end, and makes me chuckle often. ...and apparently no one has yet told her that she ought to just like pink and purple! And maybe they never will, which would be fine with me. Her favorite color when painting or coloring is black. ...sometimes dark blue, purple or brown, perhaps a little bit of pink, but especially and above all...black. Sometimes respecting her choice is a bit of a stretch for me...can't we add some COLOR to that!? However, I try not to interfere in her art.

She has been begging me for three days to paint eggs, so this morning I blew the breakfast eggs and saved the shells for painting. Ever looking for a way to combine school and play I announced that we were going to paint winter eggs. We talked a lot about the kinds of things and colors that remind us of winter. I told them to paint their eggs with colors that reminded them of winter and then I let them have at it. I knew better than to interfer any further with their color choices.

And here's what we got!

A paper full of black splotches...

...and two of her three eggs were black : )
...oh, she does make me chuckle so!

Her brother proudly pointing at his creations.

A fun craft

Another homeschool Mom passed me the idea for these easy peasy little flower fairies. The online tutorial is here http://familyfun.go.com/crafts/flower-friends-667264/ (sigh, now why can't I make that link hide under the word"here" so that you just click on the word like other times!? Me and technology...but I digress...)
One of the really neat things about this craft is that it is super adaptable, to anything you want to make and whatever materials you have avaliable. I had a link to a blog with a bunch of fotos of different versions which, of course, I lost. And have wasted the last half hour trying to find, to no avail...but anyho, she had winter angles with feather wings, babies, starwars characters, black spiderman, princesses, acorn boys,...all kinds of stuff just based on this general idea.
I had all the materials on hand for our little people except something for the head, none of the stores with in walking distance had any wooden beads, so I got a couple small styrafoam balls for about five cents a piece and pierced them with an awl. They worked great!

And best of all, my kids enjoyed helping make them and now are having a blast playing with them. Making something inexpensive, cute, usable and fun makes me all shades of happy! ;o)