My Wish List....Please help

Since I am off from daycare for the next month and a half, I have been working at getting things ready for when I start back up.  It is going to be a little crazy in my house for a few weeks because I have all new kids starting, and have 3 one year olds starting on the same day!! (insert gasp here!)  So I have been working on a wish list of supplies that I am always looking for.  Thought I would post it on here, so that just incase you lovely people are cleaning out garages, bins, cupboards, houses etc you would think of me and save them!  I will even pick them up from you!  So please take a quick peak at my list and let me know if you have anything!  My kids will be truly greatful!
Thanks

 The List

• large magnet (doesn’t have to be horse-shoe shaped, just nice and strong)
• wooden clothes pegs (the old-fashioned kind, not the ones with a spring)
• eye-droppers (or medicine bottles with a dropper i.e. infant Tylenol)
• plastic syringes
• aquarium stones
• rotary phone
• jewellery box
• magnifying glass
• jumbo calculator
• silk scarves
• milk crates
• watering can
• felt-board & pieces
• flat sheets
• plastic table cloths
• steering wheel
• mail-box
• car mat (area rug type with roads or activities on it)
• buttons
• beads
• sea shells
• sea glass
• costume jewellery
• plastic “gem stones”
• magnets
• teeny collectibles & miniature sets of anything (animals, dinosaurs, sea-life, houses…)
• scrabble tiles
• board-game pieces
• artificial flowers and leaves
• tissue paper
• bubble wrap
• ribbon/fabric scraps
• stamps/ink pad
• spray bottles & squirt bottles
• wine corks
• feathers
• pipe cleaners, felt, foam shapes/letters, pom-poms, jingle bells, sparkly stuff etc
• stickers
• paper plates, coffee filters,
• crêpe paper streamers
• card-stock
• spools (wood or plastic)
• paint brushes (any size)
• white glue, glitter glue, modge-podge
• tape!! (painter’s, masking, scotch, coloured etc.)
• tempera paints, finger-paint
• food colouring
• Easel
• sorting trays (wood or plastic)
• muffin tins
• wood baskets/bowls
• plastic storage bins and containers
• mason jars
• tweezers (metal or plastic)
• tongs
• stethoscope
• chopsticks
• castanets
• finger cymbals
• maracas
• tambourine
• wind-chimes
• jingle bells
• triangle
• harmonica

Oh yes, it is a long list! But if you know me, you know I am always working on crafts with the kids, and always needing new things!

Thanks for reading!!

Egg Carton Snowmen

Well, the kids are still really sick and both boys are on antibiotics, but we are still doing some nice and easy crafts!  Monkey was really wanting to make some snowmen (like I said, he is really into Frosty right now)  I kept telling him that once we finished the eggs, we could make some really cute snowmen with the egg cartons.  Well, yesterday the day finally came.

First thing I did was cut the cartons so that I had three in a row.  Then I set Monkey up with some white paint and told him to get it completely covered in snow.

Once it dried up, I set Monkey up with some pipe cleaners for arms and scarfs, googly-eyes, pompoms and Sharpies.  First thing we did glue on the pompom buttons, and the googly eyes.  Monkey asked me to draw the mouth on his.  Then we cut our brown pipe cleaners into 4 pieces (sneaky Mommy with those scissor skills). It turns out that pushing pipe cleaners through the egg cartons was more difficult than I thought, so I used the exacto knife and pushed little holes through first.  Then Monkey was easily able to get the arms through.  We then cut the sparkly pipe cleaners in half.  He wrapped half around to make the scarf.  As we finished, I realized (or rather Monkey pointed out) that I had forgot about hats!  Monkey then suggested that we use the other half of the pipe cleaner. This was a great idea because the 'hat' actually served as a hat and a hook to put it on the tree.  The pompoms weren't sticking that well the egg carton, we ended up hot gluing them to make sure they stayed put! 

Here are Monkey's 2 snowmen, a Mommy and a Daddy snowman.

Here is the Daddy hanging nicely in the tree.

These little guys were really easy and I was able to do it with Monkey while holding Logey (who is just plain miserable!!)

Octopuses Day 2

So today was Day 2 of learning about Octopuses!  Most importantly for Monkey, it was craft day!  I had 2 octopus crafts planned for today.  Both are the same idea, but done differently. We are going to making Octopuses with Toilet Paper rolls and with  paper.  We started with the toilet paper rolls because we had to paint them, and then worked on the paper ones while we were waiting for the paint to dry.

First thing we had to do was paint 4 TP rolls

I set out a variety of colours, because as we learned yesterday, Octopuses are masters of disguise!  Monkey had blue, green, red, orange and pink to paint with.

Once he was done painting all the rolls, we put them aside so they could dry while we worked on the next set of octopuses.

However, Monkey started painting the paper....

...and then the finger painting started....

...and then the body painting started....   So we had to do a bit of a cleanup before we started the paper craft!

Ok, so I printed out this template on some card stock in different colours.

I thought that since I had printed on different coloured paper, that would be good enough, but of course it wasn't!  Monkey coloured all the tenticles and, of course, the smiley face!

And then came the tricky part...Cutting along the dotted lines.  Monkey really has trouble with scissors.  He really wants to use both hands to cut, so I figure I will let him go with it for now and hopefully his hands will get stronger so he can use one hand.

Then we taped them together and VOILA!  Super cute Octopuses!

Of course, like everything Monkey does, as soon as he was done he said "Lets hang it on the playroom wall"  This is a little tricky with circular octopuses, but we came up with the idea to hang across the window with some string.  So we cut the string to (almost) the right length and then we put 2 hole punches in each octopus.  Monkey laced the string through the holes and then we tapes the ends up to the wall!

Now, the TP rolls took a whole lot longer to dry than I anticipated, so we are going to finish that one tomorrow.  So stay tuned to see how they turned out!

While we were waiting for them to dry, Monkey asked to watch more Octopus videos.  We found an ABSOLUTELY AMAZING video that you all need to see.  The end (starting at 1:30 right until the final second of the video) is by far the most spectacular thing you will ever see...well maybe not ever be it is really COOL (as Monkey said)

Here is the video: