Last year we interviewed the kids on New Years Day, and we’ve decided to make it a new annual tradition. It’s a great way to capture their little voices, mannerisms and opinions while they are still so young. (And it’s so cute to look back and see how much they’ve grown in the past year.)
These are the questions we asked last year:
How old are you?
What’s something that you’re good at?
When you grow up, is there anything that you want to be?
Do you have any favourite books?
Are there any foods that you think are really yummy?
What movies do you like to watch?
Do you have any favourite things that you like to?
Is there anything else that you’d like to talk about?
What did we see last night? How did the fireworks sound? What colours were they?
The kids have started thinking about their answers (and what they are going to wear). We’ll probably ask these same questions this year, and add in some new ones. But I’m not 100% sure yet, as we like to keep it a bit informal. 🙂
I can’t wait to see and hear what they come up with tomorrow!
xx Danya
PS: We used our DIY blackboard platter as the date prop, so we can easily look back and see which video is for which year. We’ve had this blackboard platter for several years now, and we bring it out whenever we want to add a visual date or occasion name to a photo, like the first day of school etc.
Happy new year everyone! I’ve been thinking about goals and resolutions these past few weeks. This year I want to focus on people, feelings and my approach life in general. So for 2015, my resolutions for an intentional positive new year are:
say ‘I Love You’ often
give hugs
laugh lots
don’t sweat the small stuff
enjoy the little moments
be patient
don’t be hard on yourself
learn from your mistakes
find some fun in every day
and, above all else, be kind
I think I might print this out and stick it on the fridge, for those moments where I need a little reminder. 🙂
Easy DIY glitter party poppers – fun for kids parties or New Years Eve.
With the Christmas hustle and bustle behind us, we’ve been enjoying a few lazy days at home. I wasn’t actually planning on making any New Years Eve arts & crafts this year, but lazy days at our place tends to involve making something or other, and with the excitment of our first proper New Years Eve celebrations approaching, we made some very sparkly homemade party poppers that are easy for the kids to pop and refill again. Hours (or at least minutes) of entertainment! 🙂
These party poppers are actually remarkably easy to make. You’ll need:
empty toilet paper rolls (or other similar cardboard tubes)
a few good quality balloons
scissors
craft glue and super fine glitter (optional)
your choice of small and light weight fillers (see below for suggestions).
The first step is to gather your TP rolls, balloons and scissors. You can make your own party popper with just these three items. Helium quality balloons work best.
Tie the end of the balloon and cut a very small section off the other end.
Then stretch the cut section over the end of your TP roll. Some balloons might split at this point, so it’s good to have a few spare. I found that the lower quality / old balloons from my stash split really easily, whereas the higher quality helium style balloons were much better.
And technically that’s all you need to do to make a DIY party popper! You could even make these after the party has already started, especially if you have balloons and confetti or similar on hand. It seriously takes less than a minute, and costs just a few cents.
Pour your filler into the open end, pull back on the knot ‘handle’, let go and watch your fillers shoot out! It even makes a loud popping sound. And you can refill to pop over and over and over again.
Or, of course, you can always add in an extra step and decorate your party poppers. You could paint them, or wrap them in washi tape. We chose to coat them in copious amounts of glitter. 🙂 JJ helped with this part – we painted the party poppers with craft glue inside and out, sprinkled on super fine glitter in silver and gold, and left them overnight to dry.
We tried out a few different filler options:
glitter works really well – it shoots out like a stream of sparkles. (The very top image on this post is edited, because glitter shooting out is VERY hard to photograph, but it is quite a good indication of what it looks like).
cut sections of sparkly pipe cleaner was my favourite of the fillers we tried. They are really light weight, so the party poppers could shoot them a long way, and they are big enough to make them easy to pick up to refill (or clean up afterwards).
little sequins work well (ours were star shaped), especially when combined with the glitter and cut pipe cleaners. My main concern was that they are so fiddly to clean up afterwards.
tiny sparkly pom poms sound good in theory. They did work, but they were slightly disappointing. They tended to get caught in the bottom of the balloon knot bit.
we didn’t try confetti but I think this would work well too. I’ve seen metallic sparkly confetti for sale at craft shops that looks like it would be perfect for this sort of thing.
JJ has declared the gold one hers ‘because she likes gold best’ and the silver one Bee’s ‘because Bee likes blue and silver best’.
Now we just need to wait for the big night – which is coming up VERY VERY soon!
See you in 2015!
xx Danya
Here are some of the other TP roll art & craft ideas we’ve tried.
And I even have a Pinterest board dedicated to this versatile craft material!
New Years Eve is just around the corner, and we’ll be taking the kids to see the fireworks over Sydney Harbour for the first time. They are super excited! To prepare us for the visual onslaught, I thought we could do a little fireworks painting at home beforehand.
I set up this simple invitation to paint with dark construction paper, pre-cut toilet paper roll fireworks stamps, paints (white, yellow, red, gold and silver glitter), and a ‘spare’ toilet paper roll and scissors. Then I waited to see who would take the bait….
After a minute she spied the ‘spare’ toilet paper roll, and started to cut her own stamper (just as I’d hoped). Her cutting skills have really improved lately.
Two and a quarter year old Bee then joined in as well. JJ showed Bee what to do. (They play so well together at the moment, that I almost don’t want to say it out loud in case I jinx myself).
I think they turned out rather well!
You do so many things with TP rolls. Here are some of our other ideas:
