Homemade Love!

 One really nice thing about watching your pennies is that it forces you to be creative! We weren't able to get gifts for our nieces and nephews this year, which makes me really sad (although, yes, I know that's not what Christmas is about! I still love to give them a gift!) Even though my sisters assured me that their children would be fine with nothing, I had to send a little something. So I made ornaments! I'm so happy with how they turned out.

These are glass ornaments for my nephews. They love sports so I did sports balls. A basket ball, baseball and bowling ball. I am pretty sure none of them bowl but it was the only other round ball I could think of!

These are the backs. My mom had the glass ornaments and I had all the paints and supplies so it didn't cost me anything but labor and love:) I realized I had to spray the paint with something to protect it from chipping and learned that you can substitute hairspray in a pinch! Luckily, I had some around. Worked great!

I hand painted angel ornaments for my nieces. I found the ornaments at Joann's.

I like how they turned out! Sweet. I made some ornaments for my family, too. I'll have to take pictures!

I also finished the kids' pajama pants finally! We decided a couple years ago to make Christmas simple and for our kids we do a pair of homemade pajama pants, a book and a toy. The boys actually really needed pajama pants so I was able to get a deal on fabric and made them two! Samuel's are the red and camouflage, Z's are the monsters and planets and E, of course, gets the pink penguins! Something fun to open on Christmas Eve;)

Eliana dressed herself like a peppermint the other day. I kept calling her my little candy cane! This was taken while we were waiting for the bus. When the bus came, only Zakkai got off and he burst into tears and said, "Samuel missed the bus!" I called the school and they said he was sitting right there in the office and they had another bus come back to pick him up and bring him home. He was a little sad and it took them awhile to shake it off. I told them each that if your brother isn't on the bus, be sure to go tell the bus driver so she can wait! Thankfully, the school was so nice about getting him home.

Today my mom and niece came over and we made Christmas cookies! We both had some dough already made for the kids to cut out with cookie cutters.

They had lots of fun adding sprinkles (lots of sprinkles!) to the colored icing:)

This little munchkin decorated two cookies....and ate two cookies!

Last night I went to my friend's birthday get together. She invited her 4 closest friends to have dinner and come to a painting party at her house. It was really fun and this is my painting!! I absolutely love it:) 4 of us did the reindeer painting and the other did a Christmas tree painting. We just looked at a picture and painted on the layers and added our own little touches. I would love to do this again!

My kiddos adored the painting upon first sight this morning and they all want to do one, too:) Maybe a fun activity for Christmas break! We are also doing a Christmas puzzle, drinking hot spiced cider and wrapping up our Jesse tree for Advent.

Only 3 more days!