A Couple Fall Crafts

We are doing out best to get all decked out for fall and Halloween around here. The week of rainy afternoons has been helpful since we did crafts because we couldn't go outside. The first craft I did with Lincoln one of the days that he refused to take a nap at nap time. It's an easy one.

We went out our front door and picked a couple leaves off of the bush right there. Then we took fall colored paints and painted the leaves with a thin coat of paint. A thin coat will work tons better than a big globby coat, which we discovered thanks to Lincoln. :)

After the leaf was covered in a thin coat of paint, we pressed it onto a piece of paper. It made cool little leaf prints. You can get 2-3 leaves on the paper before you have to recoat. The second leaf is usually the best looking.

After our pressed leaf paintings dried we turned them into birthday cards and mailed them to a few family members who have birthdays coming up. I love turning our art projects into homemade birthday cards. I think they turn out really cute, and they are each so different. So family members, I hope you like our cards, 'cause we'll probably keep sending 'em.

One of the days this week, Suzy invited us to come over after nap time and make trash bag ghosts. It ended up raining really hard and flooding the walkway of our apartment complex, and since I'm the manager, that meant I had to go clear out the drains so people could get to their front doors without being ankle deep in water. So we didn't end up being able to go over to Suzy's house. But she brought us the stuff over so we could make our own later. So one of the mornings while Adelia was asleep (in her own bed again!!) I decided to do this activity with the boys. Linc didn't want to help at first, so mostly just Ivan and I did the project.

You take a white trash bag and cut enough little squares out of it to make the number of ghosts that you want. Then you need something to stuff the heads with. We used tissues, Suzy used junk mail, but I didn't have any of that on hand at the moment. Ivan handed me the tissues, then I wadded them up into balls, and stuck them in the middle of the white squares. Then you gather the square at the bottom and tie it off, I used crochet thread, because that's what I had, but you could use ribbon, or twine, or even a skinny strip of trash bag.

Then we used markers to draw on the eyes. Ivan's eyes came out mostly as scribbles, but he thought he was so big to be drawing the eyes on his ghost all by himself. :)

Later, we stuck paper clips into the tops of the ghosts heads, and Aaron strung a string across the inside of our window, and we hung the ghosts from the string. They look so festive. :)

Ivan and Lincoln holding the ghosts while Aaron strings them up.

I took this video of Ivan while we were making the ghosts. I wanted to show how well he's repeating words these days. He's learning to talk so differently than Lincoln did. (Surprise, surprise.) Lincoln wanted to make sure he could say the word pretty clearly before he'd ever give it a try, but Ivan is all about trying it out. He'll repeat almost anything I tell him to, and even if he gets the sounds way off, he usually gets the correct syllables and the correct intonation. He's pretty confident in himself too. The other night at dinner, I guess we weren't eating fast enough for his liking, so he folded his arms and started saying the prayer out loud, all by himself. The rest of us quickly stopped what we were doing, folded out arms, and I helped Ivan with the rest of the prayer. He now has the privilege of taking a turn for dinner and family prayers. But here's the video, so  you can hear how cute he is when he talks.

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