Link love: kid activities

Ahhh, summer. Our mornings are so much more relaxed these days, but there is also so much more time to fill!

Here are some sites to inspire:

photo by Kate from An Everyday Story for Playful Learning

I’ve linked to Playful Learning before, it’s a wonderful site full of authentic activities your children (and you!) will love to experience together. The page of Activities for Kids has all kinds of fun inspiration – from art activities to well being.

Did you press flowers as a kid? I did and loved finding forgotten flowers as I was reading the books I used to press months later. Here’s a little tutorial to walk you through the process.

photo by Skip to My Lou

Skip to My Lou is a fabulous resource of parenting activities – including tons of great gift ideas for teachers! I love this list of literature based activities, especially this lupine seed packet to partner with a reading of Miss Rumphius.

When the weather is beautiful, we like to move our everyday activities outdoors. The girls love to paint outside and the clean up couldn’t be easier. We love using natural materials for stamping or painting.

This just seems wrong, but the girls got sick this week. Ginger seems through the worst of it, but I’m still constantly worrying about Ruby’s cough. We use many of these home remedies for the girls to help them get through their funk. Fingers crossed they’ll be back to themselves quickly, especially because Grandma and Gramps are here!

Any fun activities or helpful sites you can share?

Slow January

This month is always such a strange one for me. After all the busyness of the holidays and making, I just want to curl up with some hot tea and knit. I get a little cabin fever with the dark, cold, wet days too.

But I also feel the pull to organize, resolve, and energize my life. These opposite energies are challenging to balance.

We have sunshine today and I find myself following it around like a cat. I stand in a sunny window and soak it in. My oldest (well, not her age, just how long we’ve been friends) friend and I were inspired by Sarah and are sharing bits and pieces of our lives together via texts. I am treasuring this connection with my cross-country friend and the reminders to take notice and appreciate more in my own life.

I love walking through this little path in the woods near our house. It’s in a neighborhood, but it is hilly and full of birds. I can get there quickly and lose myself in the mossiness of it all.

There is the constant lure of these needles and the calming simple stitches on them. About a week ago I started this sleeve for John’s sweater and am now about half-way done. This is good progress for me who only finds little bits of time to sneak in some knitting. There are talks with a friend to knit together and I cannot wait to make some real progress.

So far, I think we’re making January pretty cozy.

Link love

I recently read a post on Meet Me at Mike’s about how to grow a book worm. I highly recommend reading this if you have children in your life! There were lots of concrete, fun suggestions about getting kids engaged in books. We are tripping over books in our house and Ruby already has so many books memorized, its amazing. I have loved watching her love of books develop. I burst with pride when I hear her “reading”.

Here are some more links related to parenting that I’ve bookmarked. Any you want to share?

Art/Spring/Easter project: Recycled Yarn Eggs

Nature/Art project: Leaf Printing (picture shown above)

Holiday Crafts for kids on Alpha-Mom

Art project: Recycled Guitar

P.S. I’ve updated the links on my sidebar as well.

link love

photo by Claudio.Ar - OUT ... Solving the "global crisis" .

A lovely spring image I found.  Makes me want to travel to Europe.  We’ve been enjoying some gorgeous weather here, promising that spring is coming, but the forecast calls for snow (!) this weekend.  Sigh.

Just a quick post to share some finds on the internet:

Beauty That Moves blog – especially this post – a new-to-me blog that I am really enjoying lately.  She has a giveaway on her blog until Monday (enter quickly!).  I also made these muffins that I found on her blog and they were very yummy.

Stamping with Children post on Maya Made another new-to-me blog.

Free March desktop pictures with or without calendars via How About Orange