Our art party on a creative budget

 

In our family, birthdays are a big deal. We don't have extravagant parties every year but with two kids two days a part it only makes sense to do a birthday party that will be fun for both girls and boys spanning several age ranges and make everyone happy. This year we offered the kids a choice, either a trip to Disney or a birthday party. I was certain they would pick Disney and I was wrong. So, the planning and brainstorming for party began. The weather in February can be a bit unpredictable where we live so the party needed to be indoors and be for both girls and boys. This is no small order with my two, but we finally settled on an art and candy party. My son loves art, mostly drawing and my daughter follows after my own heart and loves to craft. In order to make this theme work in our home we had to limit the number of guest to 12, including our two and make it work on a $100 budget.
For our decorations we used table cloths from the dollar tree, construction paper, spaghetti sauce jars for the skittles and paint sample cards to make the happy birthday banner.

When party guests arrived we had fruit loop necklaces for them to wear and eat while we waited for the others to arrive. They also picked out the color of their art smocks and filled their paint trays with their paint choices (trays and smocks were from Oriental Trading)

After most of the guests arrived the kids painted their first initial. Then some of the moms helped me change the table cloths and with fabric markers the kids drew on their own canvas bags. We used these bags to send home their projects.(The letters and bags were from Hobby Lobby, purchased on sale and with a coupon for $1 each).  I probably could have stopped there, but I wasn't thinking about how enticing the kids bedrooms and toys would be, so we went on...




For the third project the kids made paper airplanes and then flew them down the hall. For the final project the kids made skittle art, instead of sand art, with skittles I had sorted by hand and glass jars we found for .99c each at Hobby Lobby.

 

By this point the kids were crafted out so we made it cake and snack time. The candy was purchased at the Dollar Tree and the cake mix and fruity pebbles were purchased BOGO at BI-LO.

I had a game planned where the kids would be blindfolded and draw different parts of the body onto a poster board from the Dollar Tee, but I over planned - which was always a good thing when I taught school, and we didn't get to it, so we did it later that evening as a family.





Our party favors were watercolor paint trays with pop rocks attached. The paper read "Thanks for helping us craft, create and celebrate. You Rock!"

 

I think the party was a pretty big hit and we all got to spend some time getting creative and we have a sweet keepsake to help us remember the fun.

 

 

Homeschooling...am I crazy?

So, here goes, I am a homeschooling momma. It almost freaks me out even to write it. I know it is crazy controversial, I know it's not the "norm", I know it's not for everyone and I get that,  I get that 100%.
In fact, a few years ago, when Jacob was in kindergarten, homeschooling was the expectation set forth by the ranch where we were living as houseparents. The hubs and I bucked "the norm" and sent him to public school and he kinda liked it.
If I am going to be totally transparent, I was anti homeschool. After all, before we became houseparents I was a public school teacher for seven years. My only real exposure to homeschoolers was a child who left homeschooling and entered my third grade class mid year. Sadly, that child was years behind her peers.
So, after several moves and a exodus from ministry I thought we were finally settling in. We bought a house and renovated (I hope to blog more about that in the future) and Jacob began second grade at a new school. I was so excited to be the room mom, to volunteer every Friday and I was applying to substitute, rather than have my own class. I was able to pick him up ever afternoon and we did homework over snacks at the kitchen table. I made that sound pretty good, right?! Well, truth is it wasn't really good, it was really bad. Jacob hated to get up each morning and when he came home we spent an hour at the table doing homework after he had completed a 7 hour day at school and it usually ended in tears and it was too much. He was falling behind in every subject.  He went from a very happy child to one who didn't want to be alive, those words came out of his mouth several times and it was crushing.
When I would go in to volunteer I could often hear the teachers frustrations, unfortunately they spewed out on the children. She was, and I suspect still is, in the trenches with what was being required of her and new standards that were complicated.
Our home life had also become a place of anything but peace. Jacob wanted to be alone, a lot. He was constantly fighting with his sister and with us. If I were to describe him in a few words I would probably use anxious and angry.
So we trudged through August, September, October, and November and around that time Glenn got a new, better paying job and the church I worked for was laying two people off so I volunteered to be one of them. In addition, a homeschooling friend asked around and someone had the entire second grade curriculum they were willing to give me, for free! I really felt God tug at my heart as if to say, "I have made a way for you to homeschool". Glenn and I decided we either needed counseling and medication again or maybe all of this could be fixed, or at the very least improved upon, if I would just agree to homeschool. I still struggled, I went back and forth for months, with whether I was going to do it or not. After all, did I really want the fighting that was going on in the afternoons to be going on all day, every day? We struggled at the table with one hour of homework, how would I possibly teach him four hours a day? Could I really survive with no "me time"?
As Christmas break quickly approached I knew what God wanted, but I was terrified I wouldn't do a good job. Even up until the end of the Holiday party, that I threw as the room mom, on the very last day before break I wasn't sure I was going to go through with it. I had so much self doubt and quite a few fears. Jacob packed up his entire desk and informed his teacher he would not be back, so there you have it, an official decision had been made by my favorite seven year old.
We began homeschooling in January on the same day the public schools went back into session. We started with a unit I had created using a topic Jacob was interested in, The Titanic. That first week was magical. Jacob read for hours on end and hasn't stopped. By the end of the week he mastered addition and subtraction with regrouping, subjects he had been struggling with thanks to the unusual ways of common core. Jacob still whines on occasion about how much work he has to do, but the days where he learns something new or says "today was pretty fun" far outweigh the whine and as an added bonus we are ahead of his peers in math and his confidence is on the rise. 
Now that a few months have passed, I have realized there is less fighting and more love all around. I still get a some time alone, sometimes it's in the bathroom and occasionally it's a dinner out with a girlfriend, but it is well worth it. There is so much peace and we are so thankful to be learning together as a family.