I just found an adorable shop on Etsy full of handmade novelty soaps: Annie's Powder Room. The shop has so many cute soaps that would make fabulous stocking stuffers! I could not resist ordering snowflake-shaped soap for a Christmas gift.
The shop proprietor is a homeschooling mom of three girls that loves hot sauce and root beer floats, though hopefully not together. Clicking on the photos above will take you to her shop.
Some of My Etsy Favorites! |
The above matrix shows a few of my current Etsy favorites. Clicking on a picture will take you to the Etsy shop where you can purchase the item or browse through many more. I plan to update these featured items each week until the Saturday before Christmas.
Nearly everyday, my children beg me to print coloring sheets off the internet. They are obsessed! We use Google to search for their favorite topics and then wade through dozens of pages to find the one that is just right. While I would love for them to draw their own designs on plain paper, they get a lot of joy from pre-printed pages, so I trying to just roll with it.
One of my current favorite pages is this pirate with a treasure chest full of books. How cool is that?! After we printed this today, my kids filled a box with books and then played pirates. My son likes Lee Hansen's pirate-themed sheets, including the treasure map.
The girls are currently interested in cats, wolves, horses and unicorns (there aren't many good unicorns online). Whenever we find a realistic sheet on an informational website, we stop for a bit to learn more about the animal.
I personally love Fisher Price's selection of printable alphabet, shape and number pages. Most of the designs are simple enough for young learners. I try to incorporate them into our structured learning time and will be using more of them now that the weather is keeping us inside more.
Another great site that we recently discovered: Sudoku Today.
It appears that solo parenting for several weeks has made me more appreciative of the simple joys in my life, because I have a long list this week! While it is nice to occasionally have the big bed all to myself, I am so thankful that Mr. Q is finally home. He even has the day off tomorrow! Without further ado, here is my list:
Many thanks to Jaspenelle for sharing one of the sweetest little things possible: nesting. Please share your small blessings in the comments or on your blog.
We observed this fuzzy woolly bear caterpillar today at Fort Stark in Newcastle, New Hampshire. According to the old wives' tale, the width of the brown mid-section of this caterpillar indicates the severity of the winter to come. The wider the brown, the milder the winter. This is the caterpillar stage of the Isabella tiger moth, Pyrrharctia isabella. It will hibernate as a caterpillar over the winter and then spin a cocoon in the spring.
The weather today was certainly mild; about 10 degrees above normal. We enjoyed being outside in the sunshine on the beautiful seacoast. In addition the the woolly bear, we found a neat a skeleton (probably a bird), broke open milkweed pods to watch the seeds fly, took a lot of pictures and wrote our names in the sand.
