Lemonade Sensory Bin

This hands on activity is perfect for engaging the senses while serving up an awesome opportunity dramatic play for preschoolers.

Harper and I both love lemons. We like the way they smell and taste. The last time I sliced up a few lemons for my eating pleasures (yes, I eat lemons like oranges!) Harp was intrigued by the seeds. She sweetly demanded  asked to pick out all of the seeds. 

There are worse things a girl of her age could be interested in doing, and an idea was born. I knew we could throw together a really easy lemonade bin that would keep her happy all afternoon. 

Supplies:
A Knife
Clear Plastic Bin
Water
Ice
Lemons
Serving Spoons
Cups
Dishes

Directions:

Pour several cups of ice and water into the plastic bin.

Slice a lemon or two and float the slices in the water.

Add spoons, tongs, cups and bowls for instant fun.

Invite your little ones to make lemonade.
They will want to touch, maybe taste and definitely smell things in here!

This is the perfect way to spend a hot day. Let the kids splash, squeeze and dish up cool spring refreshment!

If you liked this sensory play idea, keep scrolling babe, cause I have so many fun ideas for sensory play!

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Homemade Lilac Perfume

Homemade Lilac Perfume is the perfect easy gift. It is made with the most unlikely ingredient that you may already have at home, vodka.

Lilacs are one of my favorite parts of spring. I love to pick them and fill small vases and bowls with them. The fragrance is almost intoxicating. I have been known to carry scissors on my walks in the spring so that if I run across a bush I can snip a bunch of delicate flowers. How I wish I could preserve that fragrance and enjoy it on winter days!

This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I earn a small fee from the seller.

The next best thing is this easy to make and super economical perfume. It uses vodka and lilac oil to make a simple and elegant fragrance that is perfect for daily wear. It doesn't smell like alcohol. The jojoba and lilac will blend with it.


I like to make two bottles at a time, one to keep and one to share with a sweet friend.

Homemade Lilac Perfume Supplies for 2 bottles.

20 drops of Lilac Fragrance Oil
1 tablespoon of jojoba oil
1 tablespoon of distilled water
2 tablespoons of vodka

2 smaller roller ball perfume bottles
A small funnel

Directions:

Mix all liquid ingredients in a small glass bowl.
With a micro funnel pour the perfume into the 2 small roller ball bottles.
Shake well and wear.

You can find all of my DIY posts here.

FREE Saint Patrick's Day Coloring Page

Get a free coloring page for St. Patrick's Day below. Print one for your kids or enough to share with the whole class!

We love St. Patrick's Day! It is such a fun way to break up the end of winter and get excited about all things green! We get excited about making easy shamrock crafts, reading all of the books, and of course, seeing what antics the leprechaun has been up to when he stops by our house.

If you are looking for some ideas for easy fun for the kids this St. Patrick's Day you are in the right place. I have loads of ideas for you. From free worksheets and coloring pages and even a green sensory bin.

Click HERE to Print the At the End of the Rainbow Coloring Page

Keep the fun going with these easy shamrock puppets.

If you have an idea for some easy activities or crafts for the kids to make this St. Patrick's Day, leave a comment to share your ideas!

15 St. Patrick's Day Books for Kids

St. Patrick's Day is a great time to dive into a magical story with your kids! I have gathered 15 of my families favorites to share with you. Each of these books are perfect for sharing a little luck of the Irish with your family!

These are affiliate links. If you make a purchase I will earn an advertising fee at no cost to you.

How to Catch a Leprechaun

The Itsy Bitsy Leprechaun

Happy St. Patrick's Day Curious George

There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Clover

Ten Lucky Leprechauns

That's What Leprechauns Do

The Little Leprechaun Who Loved Yellow

Lucky Tucker

The Story of St. Patrick's Day

Pete the Cat and the Luckiest Leprechaun Chase

O'Sullivan Stew

The Luckiest St. Patrick's Day Ever

The Story of Saint Patrick

How to Trap a Leprechaun

The Story of the Leprechaun

While you are here why not grab a few free printable pages for the kids?
St. Patrick's Day Coloring Pages

Or craft up a little St. Patrick's Day fun?
Easy Shamrock Puppets
3D Shamrocks

Fine Motor Counting Activity

This easy activity is perfect for practicing early math while developing fine motor skills.

Before I was a mom, I was a developmental psychology major. In my studies, I was intrigued by sensory and fine motor development then. Now that I am a mom, I love setting up activities for my own kids that give them hands on fun and learning opportunities without spending a ton of money to do it.

This fine motor counting activity is perfect for preschoolers.They can work on their fine motor skills while practicing counting. You might have all the materials at home to do this, making it fuss free and frugal. If not, I have included some affiliate links you can use to get your supplies.

Supplies:
Rainbow Bands
Large Craft Sticks
Sharpies

Directions:
Write numbers on large craft sticks with sharpies.
Use the largest craft sticks you can find to make the activity challenging.
Offer your child small rubber bands, like the rainbow loom style of bands and encourage your child to count the number of bands that need to go on each craft stick and slide that number of bands on to each craft stick.

If you are looking for more fine motor activities for kids, check out these posts:
Unicorn Fine Motor Bin
Play Doh Pre Writing

Cat in the Hat Pattern Making Sensory Bin

This year in honor of Dr.  Seuss's birthday we made this easy and fun Cat in the Hat Pattern Making sensory bin. This is a fun way to put your puffle to good use and work on pattern making skills which later help kids grasp math concepts.

This post contains affiliate links. 

We love sensory bins, bags and play! Both of my kids still get excited when they see I have a new bin ready to explore. This one was a huge hit because they had been itching to get their hands into pluffle. This is such a fun squishy foam! It is a must have for sensory play!

Supplies:

Pluffel

Assorted red and white items.We used cotton balls, feathers, legos, mini clothespins and glittery Christmas scatter

Measuring spoons, tongs and other fun items to pick up the items in the bin with.

A large tray or a plastic storage bin.

Directions:

Pour pluffle on to a tray or into a storage bin.

Make sure you take a moment to squeeze, form and otherwise take in the pluffle; it is a great sensory play option and adults will enjoy the texture too.

Next, offer your child an assortment of red and white items.

We used tiny clothespins, legos in red and white, feathers, cotton balls, and Christmas scatter that was glittery and red.

Encourage your child to recreate the stripes of the Cat in the Hat's hat.

This is a great opportunity to use fine motor skills with the spoons and tongs. Encourage your child to try placing the items with those tools as well as their fingers.

When play time is over, you can snap a lid on the bin, or put it all back in the pluffle container for future play sessions. Pluffle never dries out!

You can find all of my sensory ideas here.

Favorites include:
Rainbow Rice BinVeggie Garden Sensory Bin

4 Ways To Get Your Crafting Business Taken Seriously

Crafting is more than just a fun, therapeutic and rewarding pastime. It can also be a highly

lucrative business that can either become a profitable side hustle or even liberate you from your day job. Selling your own handmade crafts harkens back to a

simpler time when people made an honest living from their hands. And in this increasingly

tech-savvy and fast paced world, there’s a great deal of appeal in that both for skilled

crafters and the people who buy their wares. 

Image by Pixabay via Pexels

But building a business of your own from scratch can be extremely challenging… especially if you’re
running it in your free time out of your spare room / studio. It’s very common to suffer from impostor
syndrome and feel that everything you do marks you out as an amateur. You know that you need to
adopt the mindset of a business person… but you’re not quite sure how. 

Get to know your audience

Before you know how to sell in the kinds of volumes that are meaningful to you, you need to get to know
your audience. What do they want? What do they expect? How do they want to feel? And how can your
products fill that gap for them? Are they looking for something beautiful to display in their home?
Something practical that will stand the test of time? Or something cute, fun and novel? 

The great thing about crafts is the sense of community it provides. So the best place to start marketing
is in your own online community where people know you, respect your talent and see the value in your
work. From your interactions online can help you get a fairly strong idea of what kind of people buy the

things you make. 

Start building a brand

Building a brand is a bigger challenge than you may think. It’s not simply a case of finding a graphic
designer and creating a logo. It’s about establishing a set of standards and qualities that you want your
branding to stand for, and that your customers can rely on. And that takes time and thought. As Amazon
founder Jeff Bezos once said “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”. 

Invest in a business presence

Whatever your branding, you likely want to be perceived as the kind of small, independent homespun business that cares about its customers. But that said, you also want to be taken seriously as a professional. And that means establishing a professional presence. To achieve this, purchasing a domain name from a provider like NameSilo can be beneficial. Plus, they accept a variety of payment methods, such as Amex, to ensure a seamless transaction process. A unique and memorable web domain enhances your professional image. Establishing yourself online is the newest and most effective way to ensure your business comes across as professional and capable of providing a good service to its customers. When starting out as a small business it can be expensive however to hire someone to build a site for you, utilizing great free online tools such as Wordpress can be the perfect alternative to get a webpage up to discuss your business and engage customers. There are lots of great free resources out there to get started on doing this yourself, one notable example being the createwpsite YouTube channel, which can assist in putting your site together.

Establish yourself online with content marketing

Finally, content marketing is a great way to establish the quality of your products as well as the
experience and insights of the person who makes them. When people invest in their products, they
invest in you, as well. Creating blog posts, vlogs, “how to” tutorials and other forms of content online
not only helps to establish you as an expert, they also increase customer’s personal investment in you. 

8 Charming Champagne Cocktails

Valentine's Day is near, and if that isn't an occasion for celebrating with a little bubbly, then I don't know what is!

This post contains partner content or affiliate links.


This year, I have 8 charming champagne cocktails to consider creating for my sweetie on Valentine's Day, but I have a feeling that any time we have cause for celebration I will reference this list!

Strawberry Champagne Margarita
Champagne Smash
Champagne Jello Shots
Strawberry Champagne Cocktail
Raspberry Champagne Cocktails
Mock Champagne Punch
Fizzy Julep
Champagne Floats


If Champagne isn't your favorite, you might like my Goodnight Kiss Cocktail recipe.

Which of these champagne cocktails sounds the best to you? Tell me who you would sip these with!?

Fun Tech DIY To Do With Kids

Children have a thirst for knowledge and love to experiment. Sometimes it can be challenging to find
projects that you can do from home that can help encourage this. DIY technology projects can be so
much fun, and usually, you can find the items in the house, or source them pretty quickly online. So
here are a few fun DIY projects that you can do with the kids. 

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Earmuffs

You might have seen these in a store already, but you can create your own music earmuffs at home.
The critical thing to remember is that you won’t be able to put your earbuds in your ear. Instead, they’ll sit
behind a layer of fabric. Kind of like can headphones - but warmer. Simply cut a small space in the
center of ear earmuff, slide the earbud inside and stitch it back up again.

 If you are feeling extra adventurous, you can use larger headphones, and replace the fabric entierly. If
you don’t love the idea of musical earmuffs, try putting on-ear headphones Into a woolly hat instead. 

Echo

You can create your own Amazon Acho by using a Raspberry Pi. Amazon has a range of walk throughs
and coding sources to help you manage it. And once you have tackled that, you can move on to turning
it into a Twitter Bot, a Minecraft Game server, or even just private storage. 

FireStick

If you have a firestick or Apple Tv, you might be surprised to know just how much you can do with
them - aside from watching TV. TroyPoint has a few really fun DIY projects that are really simple to
tackle. 

USB Drive

Sure we mostly use cloud storage or HDD now, but the simple USB drive has a lot going for it. Even
more, when you take the time to create your own case. You can opt to do something with dried flowers
and epoxy or perhaps building something with LEGO. You can get super adventurous and use an oven
bake clay to create a dinosaur or a happy potter wand. Bake for a few minutes in the oven and voila!

Jewelry

Geek-chic and ‘nerd’ jewelry is a big deal. Even more to the people who are genuinely in that culture.
You can create some incredibly unique pieces of jewelry like earrings or necklaces with old
motherboards. Of course, other circuit boards will do the trick, but motherboards are more prominent,
and you’ll be spoiled for choice on the textures. 

You’ll need to saw the board into the shapes that you want, and it is recommended that you wear
gloves and eye protection while doing this. Smoothing down the edges doesn’t take long with some
epoxy. 

You can pick up old defunct computers at car boots and online, rather than consider sacrificing old
motherboards that you have in the home (that can be used to build your own computers)

Simple and fun ideas to help encourage your children to get creative with technology and DIY.

Brown Sugar Overnight Oats

Breakfast has never been easier or tastier than it is with this simple Brown Sugar Overnight Oats recipe.

Some of the best things in life are simple; this recipe embraces that and plays on the goodness of pantry staples. I love that you can literally toss this together in under a moment for a no frills, but tons of flavor start to the day.

This post contains affiliate links.

Ingredients
1 cup of old fashioned oats
1 cup of 1% milk
1/8 teaspoon of vanilla
1 tablespoon of brown sugar

Instructions
Combine all ingredients in a food storage container. Allow to sit in the fridge for at least 3 hours. Overnight is ideal.
Serve cold, or heated in the morning for a nutritious and delicious breakfast.

This recipe will last for 3 days covered in the fridge.

I love this cold and often opt for it over dessert. It is that good! I consider it my happy food these days. If you have a favorite overnight oat recipe I hope you will leave a comment and share it with me.

Find some of my favorite recipes here:
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Why Sweden Is The Perfect Place For Your Next Holiday

Pixabay - CC0 Licence

For a relatively quiet country in the chilly North of Europe, Sweden has quietly assembled a large
collection of fans over the years from those who love the country’s contributions to such diverse
categories as music, furniture and sport. It’s also a country that is on many people’s travel bucket lists,
and it’s that last point that we want to talk about today. If you’re looking for somewhere ideal to take your
next family holiday, then below you’ll find plenty of good reasons to get packing and head to the
Scandinavian paradise that everyone is talking about.

1. It’s a super-healthy country!

If you’ve ever wanted to be inspired to live a healthier lifestyle, then holidaying in Sweden is enough to
convince anyone of the benefits. Not only are Swedish residents some of the happiest in the world,
they’re also among the most active - and they make it look like a whole lot of fun, too. Whether you’re
taking long, beautiful walks in Skåne or heading to the northern Lule river to get the best use from your
Tailored Tackle ice fishing rod and other items, there’s a great opportunity to get the family out in the
fresh air, enjoying life together.

2. It’s full of beautiful scenery!

If you head to Sweden on holiday, it’s advised that you take plenty of photographic equipment with you -
or at least make sure your phone has a decent camera. There’s such beautiful and diverse scenery in
the country that you’ll want to record as much of it as possible. Whether from the rustic fishing villages
of the Gothenburg archipelago or the old-town charms of Stockholm’s Gamla Stan, there’s something
beautiful everywhere you look.

3. Swedish people take food and drink very seriously!

If you enjoy taking time out for a quick snack or a hot meal, then you’ll fit right in in Sweden. There is a
tradition of warming, wholesome dishes such as köttbullar med gräddsås - a national institution - while
both mid-morning and mid-afternoon are seen nationwide as fika time. At these times of day, it’s
considered traditional to stop for a cup of coffee and something sweet to eat; and in any of the cafes
dotted around the towns and cities, you’ll be welcome to join in.

4. It’s a great place to visit with kids!

Some European holidays are best enjoyed as a couple, or a solo traveller, due to the large amounts of
walking and “grown-up” attractions that make up much of the itinerary. Sweden, for its part, has plenty
to appeal to the younger tourist. Skansen, a much-revered open-air museum in Stockholm, offers an
interactive look at the traditions of Swedish family life, as well as the city’s popular zoo. Amusement
parks are also never far away - among the best you’ll find Gröna Lund, near Stockholm, and Liseberg in
the Gothenburg region to be very popular with both young and old.

If you’re looking for the ideal holiday for the whole family, you’d be hard-pushed to beat Sweden. It’s got
something for everyone, and is sure to put a smile on your face!

Play Doh Pre-Writing Activity

This play doh pre-writing activity is a fun way for preschoolers to work on letter recognition and writing while using their developing fine motor skills.

As we prepared for kindergarten, I wanted to make the process of learning the letters fun for Harper. We turned to our local discount store to find supplies. I came up with a really cute and easy way for her to practice her letters and see them printed too.

I am a participant in the amazon affiliate program. If you make a purchase I will earn a small advertising fee.

Supplies:

• A bag of letter beads; I found mine at Dollar Tree.
• Play Doh
• A Pencil or Play Doh Tool for Writing

Directions:

Invite your child to flatten a can of play doh .
Ask your child to pick on letter bead from the bag of beads.
Encourage your child to write the letter in play doh using a pencil or play doh tool.
Instruct your child to find more beads in the same letter and place them around the letter they wrote in the play doh.
Repeat with more letters.

This was a fun hands on way to practice letter recognition, letter formation and fine motor skills. It was the perfect way to mix play time with learning.

You can find all of my play doh recipes and ideas here.

Favorites include:

Play Doh Pie Counting

Play Doh Ornaments