T-shirt Scarves

Another cool idea I found on pinterest is changing a old t-shirt into a scarf/necklace.

You take the t-shirt and cut the body of the shirt into strips about 1inch thick.  Then stretch the loops you now have.  Then you can wear them in different ways.  Here are the two I chose.  

I wrapped another part of the shirt around the seams.

These are for me, but it is easier (and cuter) if I have my boys model them for me.

You can wear it long.

Or doubled and short.

I love this face.

 Here I took the big loops and wrapped them around my hand then tied them together.

This is doubled.  It is really long if not doubled.  

You could make it smaller by leaving out some of the loops.

This is Shaden being Shaden.

Now to figure out what to wear these with... hmm.

Breckenridge Snow Carving

Every year Breckenridge, CO holds the annual Budweiser Snow Carving Championship.  Chris and I went a few years back with my parents and it was pretty amazing.  On Saturday we got to go again.  It is impressive to see the huge block of snow (20 tons) the teams start with and then to see what they have turned it into.  The weather was great.  It was nice and sunny, but still only 24 degrees; we bundled up and were fine.  

Jayce all bundled up, playing in the snow castle ruins.

Shaden all bundled up, playing in the snow.

Jayce said this sculpture looked like cheese.  

It made the people around us laugh pretty hard.

I think it would be a little cold on the bottom to ride this carousel.

Here we are standing in front of the block the sculptures start from.

My boys.

This one was my favorite.  They even did his claws out of ice.

The one downside to the whole day was the drive back to Denver... 2 multi-car accidents.  Ugh, we were stuck in traffic for an extra 3.5 hours.  And being the perfect mom that I am (sarcasm, if you couldn't read it), I forgot to bring a binki for Jayce.  He was cranky, stuck in his carseat, and tired, so he wanted a binki and to go to sleep.  Poor thing.  Also, poor Nanna and Papa (my parents) stuck in the car with a crying, cranky little guy and no way to help him.  We made it back to their house and grabbed a spare binki from them and the drive home was nice and quiet. 

Name Signs

I love pinterest.  Have I mentioned that before?  So many fun ideas in one place.  I was thinking about all these neat things to craft and I was also thinking about registering Shaden for pre-school.  I decided I needed to do something to help Shaden learn to spell his name.  I wanted to make one of these cool name signs.  Example here, here, and here.  I've seen a bunch that use wooden letters covered in paint or fabric or scrapbook paper.  They turn out so cool, but I didn't want to scour the city trying to find all the different letters.
So the boys and I used what we had on hand.  Canvas, paints, a printer, scissors, and mod podge.  I think they turned out pretty good.  I had the boys paint the canvas.  Shaden picked yellow (of course, it's been his favorite for the past 2 years).  Jayce picked green (his favorite for the moment).  Then I printed and cut out the letters to their names.  Shaden helped me mod podge the letters on.  They added their hand prints and I sealed it with more mod podge.
We hung them up in their room above each bed.  Shaden loved to point to each letter and tell me how to spell his name.  This morning he even told me how to spell it without looking at the letters.  I was so proud!

Slacking

Okay it's been way too long since I've posted anything.  I've been slacking.
I have great goals for this year... including blogging more.  We have had a rough start to the year.  Everyone has been sick.  Ugh.  But life goes on and so we are taking lots of medicine and trying to get better.
A small recap of the past few months:

Thanksgiving was GREAT!  Chris got back from training just in time for us to drive out to Iowa.  We loved hanging out with some of Chris's siblings.  The boys couldn't get enough of their aunts and uncles.  We got to see the University where Jonathan (1 of Chris's brothers) is now a professor.  His office is really cool.  It has special walls that can absorb sound or make it echo.  My boys loved that.
We also visited a small German village for breakfast one morning.  YUM!

Chris took two weeks off for Christmas.  It was wonderful having him home.  Unfortunately we all got the stomach bug that was going around.  Thankfully none of us had it on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.  Christmas Eve we went over to my aunt's house.  We had tons of food and did a silly, fun gift exchange.
Christmas Day was spent at my parents' house and was wonderful.  The boys loved everything Santa brought them.
We are so lucky to be living in Colorado Springs.  One of the reasons is that we get to see Jonathan and Kate every year at Christmas instead of every other year, because Kate's family lives here too.  We enjoyed having them over on Boxing Day (Day after Christmas).

We took it easy on New Year's Eve.  We did have a feast of crab legs, twice baked potatoes and asparagus at home.

So there is what we've been up to.