With the crazy winter weather and the plethora of late
starts, early dismissals and just plain old school cancellations, I've had plenty of time to use ideas from
Pinterest to help keep my kids occupied during those extra, unexpected family
times.
Pinterest is a website that acts like a corkboard. If I find
an article I want to read later or a recipe I'd like to try in a few weeks, I
can "pin" it. Then, later, I can look at my different corkboards to
see what's there. Pinterest also allows me to search other people's digital
corkboards to see what they've pinned. So I've been searching these other
boards to get some really great activity ideas I can do with the kids on these
snow days. The fact that Mark Dayton called off school days in advance was
fabulous for actually planning ahead.
A few years ago, at a graduation open house, one gal had a "photo booth." She and her family had provided props like
hats, feather boas, oversized plastic glasses, pitchforks, picture frames, fake
lips, mustaches and more so people could dress up and have their photo taken as
a memento for the graduate. Our family had a blast and various members went back more
than once.
So, as I was surfing Pinterest, I came across a few boards
created by bloggers who had already searched the internet and pinned photo
booth printables. These are 8.5 x 11 inch documents that have things like fake
noses, mustaches, reindeer antlers, and hats that you can cut out and turn into
props for your own photo booth at home.
So Sunday night, I printed off about eight sheets of these
printables, including a copy of the hat Princess Beatrice wore to Prince
William's wedding. Then Monday morning, the girls picked which ones they wanted
to use and cut those out; we attached these props to pencils and wooden
skewers. (The directions called for dowels, but I didn't have any handy so we
improvised.) That took about an hour or so. We also threw in a couple props
like a Santa hat and dolls.
Some of the samples I had seen online included cute
backdrops of fun wallpaper taped to a wall or more involved backdrops with
white Christmas lights behind sheets. We settled for a blank wall and moved our
couch in the living room so we could pose in front of the only blank wall in
the house.
We had a blast! Annika has a fascination
with mustaches so she donned a top hat and
mustache and created a mustache for her 18-inch doll as well. Emily chose the Santa hat and beard. Lauren, at one point, was
Santa's helper, and Megan was a reindeer, a cowboy and an elf throughout our
shoot.
During the rest of the day, we made our own pizzas on pita
bread (great tasting with a good crunch and just the right size) which we have
done before and then played a customized bingo I had made on freebingomaker.com
using words that I knew our newest six-year-old could read like her sisters'
names, our street name, and color words. I got that website off of Pinterest as
well.
My
cousin used Pinterest for wedding planning ideas; friends use it for home decor tips.
I use it for kid activities as well as recipes. And a company I work for uses
Pinterest as a way to pin articles and activities that are relevant to training
and development so other trainers can easily borrow ideas, too. As long as what
you want to pin has a picture, you can pin it.
The moral of the story is that if you are online, check out Pinterest. It's a great place to resource ideas and not recreate the wheel.
***
Of course, we've also had Christmas and three birthdays since the last blog post, too, so here are a few pics from those.
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| Annika began playing flute this year. This is at her first concert. They sounded good! |
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| Em and Meg received a homemade bow with arrows from Annika and Lauren for Christmas. |
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| Cousin KK--very expressive :) |
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| Cousin W with Daddy |
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| We borrowed a dog from Derrick Hautamaki for this photo shoot. |
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| Uncle Brad took this pic as the kids played in the snow with cousins in the Twin Cities. |
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