Seeds of the Heart: Bram

Showing posts with label Bram. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Arrrg, Mateys!

This weekend was my son's 5th birthday party. He wanted a Jake and the Neverland Pirates theme. I came up with too many ideas again, and went into overkill mode. Bram loved it! He told me he wanted a Bucky cake, a treasure hunt, and treasures. So, I made a few things from cardboard (like a chest, swords, etc), and filled goody bags with candy, a ring pop, glow bracelet, party blower, and Jake tattoos, and put them in the chest. Then went to work on the treasure hunt and turning our yard into neverland.

First, the goody chest.

Here's the map with the instructions on how to find the treasure.

First, we had to dress like pirates at Hangman's tree, then sail three times around skull rock.

Then Captain Hook wanted to be sure they were pirate worthy by having them play Hook Toss on the Jolly Roger. If they lost, they must walk the plank.

They didn't mind losing. ;)

Next we went to Shipwreck cove and shot cannonballs at each other... or, you know, plastic balls.

Then the fairies needed our help blowing bubbles at Pixie Hollow.

Off to Tiki Forest for a game of Musical Tikis. This was fun! Then time for sword practice at Jake's hideout.

Off to Neverland desert to dig for gold doubloons (I hid three per child in the sandbox... er... desert)

Lastly, we had to cross crocodile creek before finding the treasure in Pirate cave (not sure why I have no pics at this point... too busy I suppose).

After all that fun, the kids played while I set up the food. And we had lots of treats.

On the menu were Hooks Pirate ships (pigs in blankets with paper sails), Tick Tock Crock's Swamp Water, Bones Popcorn, Sharky's raisin pearls, Cubbie's fresh veggies, Jake's Sword fruit kebabs (sword toothpicks made this a hit!), Smee's Blue Lagoon Jello cups, and of course, a Bucky cake centerpiece. I decorated with grass skirts as a 'roof', gold doubloons and red rubies scattered for treasure around the trays, and Dollarama came to the rescue with the blue table cover I cut for the cake tray cover.

The boys loved the cake. And I was thrilled with how it turned out as well!! I spent hours on it... no idea actually how long with all the interruptions, but I was super thankful for the purchased fondant, even if I had to color it. Oh, and pretzels make the perfect railing and ladder!

The cake turned out looking 'just like Bucky' to the delight of my five year old. He insisted on there being a slide, and a bell. A tip... let the fondant harden/dry out before adding it to the cake, and you should be good! Took a lot of patience on my part to let the pieces dry before adding them (the back panel and the bell, mostly. I let the slide mostly dry around the handle of a soup ladle before adding it while still a little pliable to get the shape right). The back panel is my favorite! And I love the portholes... even added the little hinges to the top of them (forgot to take a close-up photo of them though... darn).

The party was fantastic! The boys seemed to have a great time, my son loved it, and there was enough food for everyone. I'd call that a success. It didn't rain either! Which was exactly what I was hoping for! :)

Happy Birthday to my little man... how is it that you've grown so big already? I still cannot believe you are 5 years old, and will be off to school this next fall (WHAT?!). You have such a big heart, you are super smart (I think math will be your strong point as you are amazing with patterns and numbers already... counting past 100 with ease, and noticing the pattern of balloons above the window for your party of red yellow blue yellow red yellow....). I look forward to watching you grow. Hugs to my not-so-little-anymore boy.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Recycling Crafty Fun

My son is turning 5 this week... FIVE! For his party, he wants a Jake and the Pirates birthday. With our newest addition, I'm just not wanting to do much in the way of sewing and whatnot... and since we have so much cardboard, I decided to make good use of it.

To start... paper bags make great map invites! I cut open the bag, made the whole thing wet, crumpled and straightened it out, then let it dry before ripping into the size needed for the invites. I printed Jake logos and glued them on, then used Sharpees to write out the info (and make the 'map' portion). The boys loved them!

Bram really wants a scavenger hunt (oops... ahem, a TREASURE hunt) at his birthday, so I'll be making maps of our yard similar to the invites, and the end will lead to the treasure... a chest full of loot bags for each guest. So... to make a treasure chest, I used a box.

Yes... this is kind of a 'before and after' pic, side by side as I had two of the same box. I just turned the one inside out (yes, that is a thing, haha), cut it to make it have a rounded lid, and used extra pieces of cardboard and black duct tape to trim it up. And sharpees make it look like wood. ;)

Since I thought it would be fun to have the boys pretend to be pirates, I wanted them to have swords they could keep. Unfortunately, they no longer had them at the Dollarama. :( But hey, I've got loads of cardboard... I can make them! I cut 12 pieces of 'sword' and glued two together for each sword, then drew on them to make wood grain. Bram loves them! He and A played with them for awhile while wearing the paper 'pirate hats' I made for the party as well. I'm hoping to make a few things so that the boys can 'decorate' their own hats, but we'll see how much more I wish to do. I also bought some cute stick on mustaches from the dollar store... a pack has 6, which is perfect.

Yesturday I pulled out a bunch of cardboard and fashioned two pirate ships from them... the boys will be able to play in the ships (hopefully, weather permitting and all that). I need more duct tape so I can properly assemble them, and I am just going to use sharpees once again to draw on some portholes and planks. I also aim to take a board and make a 'walk the plank' out of it for the boys from our deck (which is going to be the Jolly Roger on our maps, haha). Today I want to make the two large maps (Bram wants there to be two teams of 3 looking for the treasure chest), and maybe the signs for on the yard to help them know what each area is (I'm making a Skull Rock, Pixie Hollow, etc with a sign on something that could kinda sorta be that in our yard). I think decorations will be limited to that and balloons at the end of the driveway and maybe on the ships and by the food and stuff. I'm still not sure how to do his cake. He wants Bucky... but I'm not sure I want to do a complicated cake. I'm so tired lately, and my two youngest girls are so very clingy this week... we'll see what I can get to. Otherwise I was thinking of making cupcakes to look like a treasure map. No cake cutting required.

So much fun stuff you can make out of what is essentially trashed. :) I LOVE it!

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Bedroom Progress

The last two weeks have been busy! I've been trying to get the bedrooms worked on, and since we don't have the basement done yet (not even close), we have to attempt to get the work done while the kids are still in their room, and we are still in ours. First thing we needed to do is move the door in the bedroom from the bathroom to the hall.

So, this here is the 'before' picture prior to getting any of the work done (wish I had taken more in between pics... oops)

And below is the after! I reused the casings/baseboard, door, frame, inner wall (we moved it over... you'll see in the next pic), etc.

Yay! We have an entry point into the 'third' upstairs bedroom!

Below is the bedroom side of the change... with a few in between pics.

So... door going into the bathroom above, and now the door goes into the hallway (below). And yes, I cut the wall out where the door frame used to be, and my husband and I took and moved it over (I think I posted about it last week... but I'm just so excited that I'm posting pics again).

There's baby A! :)

We also put up the wall frame, and cut some panels to make a wall.

This will separate the bedroom into two.

Notice the purple wall color? My son will be taking this room, and he wanted red and grey (in keeping with a cars theme). I went to the basement and found out we actually HAD red AND grey paint! Yay! Didn't need to buy any. However, the red paint wasn't enough to cover the wall in two coats. :(

This last week I did a lot of mudding and taping, sanding, etc. I've never taped before, so it was a bit of a learning curve. My husband has pictures of that on his phone... I think... I don't have his phone, haha. So, no pics.

I finished sanding the mud on Saturday, only to find that it needed a little more mud on the bedroom side (I was not going to worry about it so much on the bathroom side, since that is a closet). After mudding a little more, I was able to sand just before bed. Sunday I cleaned up all the drywall dust, washed down the walls, and primed the first coat. Yesturday I was thrilled to be able to prime the second coat of primer on the mudded wall (and the 'new' wall and the closet door I never painted in all the years we've had it up, haha) before the kids woke up! I did the bathroom before making breakfast, and then later in the day I painted the rest of the bedroom, finishing the second coat of grey (and cleanup of paint supplies) around midnight! YAY! (I think I spent a good 3-4 hours painting yesterday).

So, here's the pics of it now! The red still needs a second coat, and the closet doors in the first pic are going to be red, too (they are primer white right now).

Haha... I never noticed that the bedroom door was in the way when I took this picture. The red wall is a lot bigger than that.

The above pic of the black wall is the 'new' wall that wasn't there before. It's done up with chalkboard paint. :) I want to put a ledge all along that will hold chalk and brushes (and contain any chalk dust that flutters down instead of it all getting on the carpet). I may just buy one from Ikea to make it a little easier on myself. We'll see.

I am excited to get this done! My husband is getting more red paint today, and I'm hoping to, just maybe, get some of that magnetic primer, too (it is pricey... a 1L pail costs $30-40, and it only covers 25 square feet. It will be enough to do a road along the wall (kind of like a wavy border), plus maybe some fun things on M's side of the room. I want to put magnets on the bottoms of some of my son's cheap cars and put them on the magnetic road after all is done).

I am so excited! Things are finally looking like they're happening! I want to go through the kids stuff today and get it all ready to move upstairs so we can wash and paint that room before we move into it (and yes, we'll be using up plenty of the paint we have in storage rather than buying any new). Then, after we move downstairs, we can paint what will be M's room before moving her in. Carpets need to be cleaned in between everything, too. Glad I have a carpet cleaner right now!

So far, this renovation project has cost a grand total of $90 (for the 2x4s and panels for the barrier wall, some mud and tape. Everything else we already had and reused). With paint purchases, I'm expecting it to total about $150 or less... unless we decide to buy another color for our bedroom. I'm not sure if we need to buy any baseboards as I know we have a bunch in our workshop... I'll have to check when we get that room empty enough to put stuff in there.

Hooray for cheap renovation projects!! Now if only we could get that basement done. (actually, the farm's insurance company contacted us to say that we HAVE to get rid of our oil furnace and replace it with gas or electric by the end of 2014 or else the farm insurance will be affected. My husband is working like mad to try to get the hydro company to finally answer us on if we qualify for their programs or not. We've been working at this for well over a month now with no answer, and they didn't even know the information they needed when we asked them in the first place. They now told him they need some papers he has to drive into the city for, and pay for as well. He gave them what they asked for when he called them weeks ago, and they went and changed it on him. Sigh. I think qualifying is riddled with trials so less people try to get into the program.)

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Costumes and Pizza and Sweets, Oh My!

We didn't want to 'celebrate' Halloween this year by trick or treating, decorating, or anything of that sort, but I do love costumes so very much! My daughter had 'costume day' on the 31st at her school, and wanted so badly to be Mary Poppins... in the white dress... which she decided a week before she needed the costume. I said there was no way I'd be able to do it if I didn't have a dress to modify... and I didn't. So, she said she wanted to be Alice in Wonderland. That I could do! I was fairly certain we had a blue dress for her that she wore during the summer, and so on Saturday, I sewed the apron from some scraps of white fabric I happened to have on hand.

Turns out that the blue dress was FAR too small.

Out came some old blue fabric that has been sitting in my fabric drawer for over 10 years, and I sewed a circle skirt on Sunday out of that. Nice thing was that it didn't need hemming. That fabric was perfect for the job! And the skirt will work for so many other costumes my little girls are going to want to wear eventually (Ariel's blue dress, Belle's blue dress, Anna's blue skirt...).

Monday I sewed the 'shirt' portion of the dress, and found a black ribbon in my scraps which became the headpiece. M was thrilled! Here she is, modelling the costume with A by her side.

Friday morning, all ready for school, we took some 'tea party' pictures with the white rabbit she brought with her... as part of her costume of course.

I absolutely adore how it turned out! And I was able to borrow a few petticoat type skirts for under the skirt. I only found out later (after school) that I should have pinned the skirt to the shirt, as the fabric is so slick that it kept sliding down while she was in school (probably due to how she sits down, actually. Been trying to teach her to sit instead of slide into her seat). But she is so cute!

We had some grocery shopping to do, as well as hair cuts, so we grabbed some costumes for our younger two while our oldest was in school, and off we went to town. A garnered quite the attention while running around as a little pony all over the grocery store.

Our evening consisted of watching Lady and the Tramp while noshing on homemade pizza, and other sweet treats I made myself. No bake Snack Bars (they taste a lot like Eatmore bars... but next time I'll add more cocoa and less dates), pumpkin fudge (another one without sugar... they need to stay in the fridge/freezer), Caramel corn, and pumpkin rice krispie squares (the pumpkin in the squares makes the rice krispies a little soggy in texture, though. The flavor was wonderful!). The caramel corn is such a hit in our house, I may need to start making a double batch. I think we ate half of it before the movie! It was gone by the next day. The other treats are still around, although the rice krispie square only has about 3 pieces left (probably gone by the end of today) and the other two are in the freezer (they needed a food processor, and while I was making the first one, the processor broke and wouldn't work anymore. So... the texture isn't as good as it should be. They still taste great, though, and my arms got a workout in chopping and mashing dates and nuts).

And here is our little cutie with a bag of chips she got from grandma and grandpa. They came over earlier in their costumes. They had quite the adventure going to their grandkids houses that weren't trick or treating and then later to the store. Makes me want to dress up for fun again. Not easy to do with my giant belly, haha.