Greening Sam and Avery

outdoor play party - santa style clean up

Hello Outdoor Play Party!

We are filled with the Holiday spirit at this house and decided we needed to do something nice. I am trying to teach my girls that there is more to the season than giving presents and lots of beautiful decorations.

So, I told the girls that we were going to play Santa for the day. Since he does something nice for us we should "be like Santa" and do something nice for other people. Sam responded by saying "Then Santa will see me being nice and put me on the nice list!". Not exactly the lesson I was going for but I guess it is a start!

Anyway, we got our Santa hats on, grabbed some trash bags and headed to one of our favorite parks.

The girls (and our friends Petyon and Taylor) got very into finding trash! I loved seeing them so committed to getting every piece of trash.

It was a pretty good clean up for only being about 30 degrees! And everybody had a good time.

Great way to combine outdoor play, exploring and a helpful clean up project for our community.

 Now on to the feature of the week! Happy Little Messes had a great idea this week to save some big seeds and let her kids "plant" a autumn garden. I love the idea of kids getting seed planting practice, digging in the dirt and using gardening tools just like they see their parent's using.

Great outdoor play Happy Little Messes! Thanks so much for sharing.

How did your kids play outdoors this week?

Share your ideas for outdoor play activities with us! Here’s just a few guidelines for sharing.

• Any kind of children's outdoor play is welcome. If it happened outside, then please link it up!

• Please do not share any competitions, promotions, or posts that are not related to Outdoor Play.

• Please remember to link back to this post and help us spread the word about the importance (and fun!) of outdoor play!

• Each week we will feature an activity from the previous week. By contributing you are giving permission for an image and link to your post to be republished.

our christmas tree

Here is our adventure from today picking out, cutting down and hauling out our own Christmas tree.

Inspecting what might be OUR tree.

Yup, this is the one. Time to cut it down.

And then somehow we have to get it back to the car! Oh yeah, that is why we have dads!!!

Sam loves how the "tree monster" chases us out of the tree lot!  And it was a LONG hike to find that tree.

What a great way to spend our first day back in the states.

No photos of the finished product yet because, well, I have decided to make Christmas magic at my house tonight and have all the decorations (over the whole house) be out and done when the girls wake up tomorrow. Gonna be a LONG night people!!

BUT I am not decorating the tree over night by myself, so that will wait for the girls to help tomorrow night.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

The Nitty Gritty!

Some may think it is not very green to cut down a tree or to have to replace your Christmas tree each year. BUT the land that Christmas tree farms are on is wonderfully useful land. The trees, grasses and other plants that are on the tree lot provide great habitat for animals, birds and insects. Because the families' livilihood depends on their being lots of trees each year for costumers they have to be constantly replanting and tending to the trees. We love supporting a local family farm instead of buying a plastic tree made in some other country. Plus, our town has Christmas tree recycling programs that turn the trees into a number of things, such as mulch for sale, for town playgrounds and are sunk in lakes around here for fish nurseries.

So, even though it might not be the "greenest" option, we love every part of our HUGE, wonderful smelling, cut-it-down-ourselves, real Christmas tree. And we make it as green as we can!

thankful

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am thankful today for a safe and easy travel day.

I am thankful for a beautiful house and beautiful scenery to spend the next week.

I am thankful for family, both near us and far away.

My daughter's are thankful for "blankies, the pool and you mommy".

Hope you are finding yourself filled with reasons to be thankful today.

homemade crayons

Crazy crayons got me motivated to try recycling our own crayons and making some new crayons.

Just the other day Sam was coloring and purposely broke a crayon in half, then handed it to me and said "this one is broken, I need new crayons". This ended her coloring session for the day and we had to have a long talk about why we need to be more careful with our things. But sometimes crayons do break on their own. We have a lot of little broken crayons that I insist to Sam are still usable but she refuses to color with.

Today I grabbed all those little pieces and tried out making our own crayons. I actually have a tree mold from making christmas candy, so I made tree crayons today!

Super simple stocking stuffer made entirely from stuff I already had! LOVE THAT!! 

Have a homemade Christmas (yes, I am now using the name. who are we kidding...Christmas will be here before we know it!) post up already that you would like to share? Please leave the link in the comment section, I would love to see what you are making and share some green christmas ideas on my facebook page as well.

________________________________________________________________________________________

The Nitty Gritty!

This is a project that Sam could have helped with and if it weren't a stocking stuffer for her too I would have let her help. She would have loved peeling all the paper off the crayons and breaking them into even smaller pieces. I would have had to do the oven part of it but she could have helped me pop them out of the molds.

I can see this being a fun kid project that we will do again in the future!

it's beginning to look a lot like

Nope. I am not going to say it. I am not going to say the name of the Holiday that we are all already thinking about. I can't say the name because it is too early to start thinking about it but I just can't help myself!

Presents have already been bought and hidden. Thought maybe there were some other moms out there as crazy as me and getting things ready already. So, I will share a few of the things I have set aside. Mostly books but a fun little treasure that I picked up for all the little girls in my life!

Books first because every little explorer needs new books for Christmas.

A Garden of Opposites, Nancy Davis

This one is for Avery and it is super cute! I love the simple pictures that are all related to the garden. The colors are bright and fun. And even though the opposites are simple, like same versus different, there is room to expand with your child and have them think even more about the opposites and the pictures. (Like why are these the same? What is different about these two? How do we know they are awake? etc.)

Compost Stew: An A to Z Recipe for the Earth, Mary McKenna Siddals

Super fun, cut paper images that clearly describe all the things you can put into a compost pile in alphabetical order! The long list of things that can be put in a compost pile is presented in a rhyming way that is fun to read. And then at the end it provides simple instructions for how to tend to your compost and what you will get in the end.

Bugs for Lunch, Margery Facklam

This is a great rhyming book that talks about all different kinds of animals that eat bugs. The animals are from all over the world and live in very different habitats so it is neat that they are all connected because of what they eat. Even adults might be surprised by some of the animals that commonly eat bugs!

Where Would I Be in an Evergreen Tree?, Jennifer Blomgren

This one is for Sam because she has recently learned to climb the evergreen tree in our backyard and thinks it is so cool to be up in the tree off the ground. This book talks about all the animals, birds, insects and even plants that live on and around a large evergreen tree. I think Sam is really going to like this one and there are a ton of new animals, words and plants for us to learn about in this book.

And then there are these awesome hairclips!

They are made by an amazing company called The Eco Purse Project. They make hairclips, purses, wallets, bracelets, bags, floormats, bibs and even laptop cases all out of recycled plastic bags and bottles! They upcycle to make some of the most beautiful stuff! And their hairclips really hold up to toddler hands! I bought one for Sam and she is loving it, so I got a few more to share with the other little girls in my life. (Sorry to spoil the surprise Aunt Jojo!)

So, I have bows for the girls and books for each of them! What have you bought already for the holiday that shall remain nameless until after Thanksgiving? And what are you getting your little explorer this year?

Happy Halloween!

 

Day 297: egg hunting

If your kiddos are like mine we will be hunting for easter eggs for the next few weeks. Now that they have done it once they will want to do an egg hunt everyday. SO, I try to mix it up and add in new ideas to keep the activity fun and challenging.

Today even though our easter egg hunt was indoors we still did some hunting for eggs outdoors. REAL ones!

 
 
We have been finding broken bird eggs around our yard and thought it would be neat to go look for them again today. We have also had a LOT of bird nests popping up around our yard.

Some that are falling out of trees.

 
And then some were built in places that don't really work very well for us and had to be removed.

 
This is an incredibly built nest and though I am sad for the birds that won't get to use it I am also super excited that Sam and I got to take a close up look at how it was so carefully built.

 
Sam had fun looking for the real bird eggs and nests today. Along with a lot of other outside fun!

If you also have kids that love egg hunts try using the game to learn about camouflage. Just like we did with the paper rabbits you can hide the eggs in places that match their color and then have great discussions about which ones were harder to find and why.

If you have access to grasses, straw, sticks and mud you could also build BIG bird nests to hold your plastic eggs. Try and find some birds nests to look at first as examples and then let your kids to to town with the materials making their own.

Hope you all had a Happy Easter and a great weekend!

_________________________________________________________________________________________

The Nitty Gritty!

Just a few more updates for those that might be interested.

The mud kitchen got its first use today and Sam was SO excited.

 
And I am not sure this is what my mom had in mind for her antique kitchen utensils but Sam loved playing with these things today!

 
I put out old pans, cookie sheets, cutting boards and other unusable kitchen items for Sam to play with. She had a blast with it today and actually did not get as muddy as I had expected her too, but since it wasn't that warm she probably did not really want to get that wet. When summer comes and we can hose off after mud play I think she will probably get much messier!

We also got the bird feeders back up and fully filled. The Target paint your own bird feeder that we made is holding up pretty well, it does need to be filled VERY often but is pretty cute when the birds are using it.

 

We also went for a family bike ride, got the first grass cutting of the season taken care of and started working on Sam's water wall (more on that later!). A great outside day!!

Day 295: helping henry on earth day

I wanted us to do something special to celebrate Earth Day. Originally my plan was for us to explore a new natural area that I had discovered not too far from our house. But rain and cool temperatures did not make that idea sound very pleasant for the two girls and I.

SO instead I got to thinking what could we do from the comfort of our own home. We decided we wanted to help an animal. The Henry Vilas Zoo has a "Befriend an Animal" program where you can make a donation to a specific animal at the zoo to help with food, habitat and programming costs for that species. I showed her all the animals that they had listed as options and she picked Henry the Lion.

We filled out all the online forms and sent in our contribution to help Henry. Then I asked Sam if she wanted to send a thank you card to the person that takes care of Henry, his zookeeper. She asked what that meant, what did a zookeeper do. So, I explained that just like she had a mommy and a daddy that cooked for her, cleaned her room and helped her when she got hurt Henry had someone that took care of him too. Sam told me that this was a pretty important job!

I helped her with the writing and then she decorated it.

 
I showed her the picture that I took of her sign and she asked me where she went. She decided we needed to take another one.

 
She liked the second picture so much that she insisted that we send that too to the zookeeper.

We put them both in an envelope and mailed them off to the zoo. I put a little note in there explaining that she wanted to thank the staff member that took care of the animal she had just "Befriended". 

This was a great project for Sam today. The program that we donated to will send her a picture of the animal and a certificate in the mail. She is very excited for when that will come!

How did you celebrate Earth Day today?

_________________________________________________________________________________________

The Nitty Gritty!

Need some inspiration for celebaring Earth Day a bit more this weekend? Or just want to hear about what some other green folks are up to? Check out these posts!

Backyard Mama

Good Hiker

Go Explore Nature

C.R.A.F.T. - all green crafting ideas! Some great stuff here.

Who's Green?

Butterfly Wishes and Wonderland Dreams

Jodified

Lots of great ideas and good reading! Happy Earth Day.

Day 228: we made it to the top

Our conversation yesterday -

Husband: What do you want to do tomorrow night for Valentine's Day?

Me: It is suppose to be gorgeous again. Let's go back to Pheasant Branch and try to hike that big hill with Sam again.

Husband: Serisouly?

What? Not everyone wants to take their kids for a hike in the muddy, slushy snow on Valentine's Day? Well, it was my idea of an almost perfect afternoon.

Sam made it to the top all on her own, with the help from a bag of pretzels, water, songs, hand holding and breaks to check out plants, birds, airplanes and the moon!

But the hike to the top wore her out pretty good so she got a little help on the way down!

Happy Valentine's Day! Hope you got to spend it doing exactly what you love to do.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

The Nitty Gritty!

Need some help getting your little ones out on the trail, keeping them happy or moving?  Check out these posts I have done with stories, tips and tricks about hiking with kids!

Day 86

Day 124 - A simple game/learning activity to make and take on the trail.

Day 141 - Our first attempt at this hike.

Day 178: being the example

It is not just about giving green gifts but about recieving them as well! I am super excited about some of the green gifts I got this year. Thanks to all the family that knows me so well and knew just what I would like.

Check out this amazing bag my Uncle Wayne MADE for me! And he made that little knife too.

 
Not sure the nature center wants me carrying around the knife at work but the little bag will come in handy at work and for collecting things with Sam on our walks.

My sister also got me some of the those really neat reuseable snack bags. They are super cute and we are using them on the plane tomorrow! I am not sure what brand they are otherwise I would put the link up.

My parents got me a Tervis Tumbler which are some of the best insulated cups around. Helping me avoid disposable to-go tea cups is always a good green thing!

And the BIG gift this year for me (and Chris!) was a Power Mieter Saw! This thing is huge and amazing! I am going to be able to make some serious tree cookies and crafts with this thing. I can't wait to get started. Be sure that there will be some new projects to share after our big trip.

Two other things that I don't have much to say about right now but I am super excited to learn more about are "Nature's Playground: Activities, Grafts, and Games to Encourage Chidlren to Get Outdoors" by Fiona Danks and Jo Schofield and "Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots: Activities to to in the Garden" by Sharon Lovejoy. These books look great and like they will have some great ideas for us.

Did you get green gifts this year? Do share!

________________________________________________________________________________________

The Nitty Gritty!

List or no list? When you know someone in your life (husband, mother, sister, brother, etc.) is going to get you a gift do you provide them with suggestions of what you would like? Do you trust that they know you well enough to pick something out?  My family always asks for suggestions but I am a pretty open book and talk to my family so often that I know they could pick something out that I would love even without telling them.

Today was a day of traveling.  Sam watched a new movie in the car, "Happy Feet" (thanks Aunt Jojo!) and she really like it. Such cute little penguins. We saw an amazing sunset on our way home and it got us all excited about seeing sunsets on the beach next week! We have also been reading "Ladybug Girl at the Beach" by David Soman and Jacky Davis to help get Sam excited about the beach and ready to play in the water.

And I promise tomorrow we will get back to actual activities and things I am doing with the girls!