Mardi Gras and Lent

The Valentine's decorations have come down and the Mardi Gras decorations have gone up-well, all we have right now is garland, but it's up! I plan on making a trip to the party store soon to see if they have anything to add to my collection.

Catholic Icing blog/Facebook just posted a cool "Countdown to Lent" calendar. Please check out her blog for many wonderful ideas. In the meantime, I am trying to prep some Mardi Gras crafts for my kids. I'll be sharing those here as we complete them.

Prayer Cube

My daughter brought home a prayer cube from RE that has made it easier to teach our young kids a variety of prayers. It is a box with a different prayer typed and glued on each side. After we say our prayers for others, we roll the cube and say the prayer that lands face up. The kids LOVE it! We had to make a spreadsheet to keep track of whose turn it is to roll the cube.

PICTURE coming soon....

Valentine's Day Crafts

Most of these ideas are from Oriental Trading Company, you can go to their website and order the kits.

From the Catholic Icing website.

These recipes can be found on my cooking blog.

I love, Love, LOVE to gather craft and recipe ideas for each holiday. As a matter of fact, I am a little OCD about it. I save all the pictures I find in a folder on my computer, and then I print out the page of pictures and keep it in my family planner. I figured why not keep them here on the blog as well? For my recipe ideas (so far), click here. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below, but remember to leave an email address for me to answer you.

Lunchbox Love Notes

I just started looking into putting "love notes" in Lauren's lunchbox. Since my fabulous husband makes her lunch, I figured he and I had better make a lot of them in advance and he can put one in each morning. So while I am gathering everyone else's ideas, I am going to put them here...so they are all in one place.

Here is a new one (found 10/7/11) on TipJunkie.
Here is a site where you can print a few cute cards.
Here is another.
Attach these to your fruit.
Lunch box bible verses.
Lunch box notes.
Lunch box jokes.
Disney character notes.
Dora printables.
Little Bill notes.
Blue's Clues notes.
Heart of a Mother notes.
iMim Valentine notes.
Fruity jokes.
Some Thanksgiving and Christmas love notes from iMOM.

And here are a few phrases so far:

• You are special.
• I love you.
• I'm glad you are my child.
• You are important to me.
• I love the way you smile.
• You are the sunshine in my life.
• I am very proud of you.
• You are a wonderful kid.
• Thank you for helping me clean up after supper. I can always count on you.
• You have the best manners. Thank you for being such a gentleman.
• I look forward to seeing you after school.
• I can't wait for you to come home so we can have snack together.
• You studied very hard last night. I am proud of you.
• You are smart and pretty/handsome. I am the luckiest mom/dad on this earth.