Lily says her favorite part of the Zoo Lights were the Sharks in the aquarium. Where there weren't any lights. For real. 
Lily and I sharing a snail shell awww...so cute!
Lily loves the Nativity Set
Lily decorates the tree
Floyd is not sure he likes the Nativity set- it's invading his space.
On Friday we brought out all of our Christmas Decorations and spent the day decorating. We needed a few things and actually braved Target- which didn't turn out to be so bad. Lily picked out a small sand filled toy- then decided at the last minute she wanted another Elephant instead. I put the little sand toy in the cart (without her seeing), thinking it would be a good one to put in her stocking. It was not meant to be however since the cashier (off all the things we got) couldn't get that one to scan. I was trying to distract Lily so she wouldn't see but it didn't work. She was super excited to get two toys that day! What luck! They were both only dollar or two each- but really- out of everything in the cart the one item I'm trying to be covert about is the one that won't scan. Sheesh. Anyway. Target wasn't too busy and we got what we needed. Now the countdown begins...
I hope you all are having a very Happy Thanksgiving- filled with lots of family, friends, and of course good food!
We love hanging out there because they have so much more than just books. We find all kinds of interesting movies, music, puppets and stories on CD as well. They have story times too but those are usually on the weekdays. She plays on the computer and they have a little play area too. We go every week and she always has fun going. I hope that by doing this she learns to love learning and reading as much as I do.
I love how she really wants to get involved in stuff like this. As long as it isn't mud- she wants to get down and dirty. She loves trucks and cars and trains and playing with sticks. She picks up leaves and digs in the sand. She loves helping me mix when we cook and loves to put rice or flour or oatmeal in a pan for her to squish/mix/dig/run cars through. She wants to know how things work and never ceases to amaze me!
Don't ask me why she doesn't have any pants. To her, clothes are always optional (at home at least).
This is the original design. I got some nice cardstock from a co-worker that I knew would be perfect. I needed the design to be pretty simple so I could make an entire set without breaking the bank. I looked at a couple of designs on some scrapbooking sites and came up with a simple snowflake design- not too Christmas-ey but still festive. 
This is the paper I chose. It is a handmade navy blue paper- very lightweight- with small gold tinsel throughout- that I got at a garage sale over the summer. So pretty. The pictures don't quite capture the navy color though.
My idea was to lightly stencil snowflakes randomly all over the paper- then use a snowflake stickeras a focal point on each panel (one large and two small). But when I finished the stenciling the snowflakes they seemed too contrastive (is that a word?). I tried to thin the paint but then the stenciling came out blurry. Then I had the idea of spraying some paint over the snowflakes. I used the spray top from Lily's hair detangler and some thinned out acrylic paint.
Here is the result. I think the paper came out amazing. I was very pleased with this spray experiment and I'll definitly use it again.
Then the assembly was relatively simple. After I cut the blue paper into the panels and mounted it on it's carstock- I put them together using some foam squares and circles to add some dimension.
Finally I tested the Stamp "Happy Holidays" in a couple of inks to see which one would work best. I ended up choosing gold. I wanted to do blue but for some reason my blue ink does not work well with the new Acrylic stamps(rather than the old rubber kind). I think the gold stamp helped to tie in the tinsel in the paper though.
Final Product. I originally was going to do some glitter at the edges like snow/wind blowing (you can kind of see it in the design picture) but I ended up making the card a little smaller and didn't have room for anything else. I think it would have actually been too busy with anything else since the Navy paper had a little more detail than I originally anticipated.
