Craft Stick Snowflakes

Recap of the last month of my life... horrifically busy.  As I am sure all of your Decembers were.  Ours was intensified by a two week venture to California.  That's right.  Half way across the country with three, three and unders.  I had been dreading the seven hour travel day since we had purchased tickets months ago.  However, I am going to have to boast a little.  My monsters did remarkably well.  With the aid of a dual dvd player and usually off limit candies (don't judge this bribing mommy) we survived as did the rest of the plane.  I had thought about bringing treat bags for those surrounding us (including ear plugs) but decided against it since it was just one more thing to get through security.  Thankfully, they were unnecessary.

In all actuality, the plane was the easy part.  The two weeks of no naps, a baby who refused to sleep in the crib provided for us there, wonderfully bad for you food, weird half Cali half Missouri time change thingy and absolutely no structure was the hard part.  They kept it together pretty well until mid-week two where it became evidently clear that toddlers, although great at creating it, do not bode well for chaos.  Looking back at it now, we did some pretty awesome stuff while visiting though.  Got to catch up with lots of friends and family we hadn't seen in way too long, Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, Aquarium of the Pacific, trips to the beach, shopping, eating, eating and more eating.  Don't get me wrong, FANTASTIC vacation, but man was I glad to be back home to the normal chaos that is my house. 

So, in the days to returning to normalcy, I decided to lay low until our precious structure reappeared.  However, the girls were bored within minutes...  So, I came up with this wintertime craft to occupy them so they didn't destroy our house in the plethora of downtime they had.  Winter is hard on toddlers.  And mommies.  And furniture...

I had the girls paint 24 craft sticks each white.  That part was glorious.  It took them, no joke, a half hour of concentrating silence to master that first step.  Great thing about washable tempera paint is it dries pretty quick.  So by the time they were finished painting, the first ones were already dry for the next step.  We laid out our pattern on the table to make sure we had enough pieces and began gluing them with Elmar's glue.  My kids love to glue so I let them.  However, once they went down for their nap they had to be reinforced with a hot glue gun.  I hot glued some ribbon on top and viola!  A pretty non-Christmas winter decoration.  The girls were pretty proud and I have to say they came out pretty cool.

They are pretty big since I only had jumbo size sticks on hand.  So, I hung them in the kids play area in our basement.  I kind of am digging how their inconsistent paint job makes them look rustic.  Which, being my toddlers, I am pretty sure they meant to do that...