Do you fall into an Easter Egg rut every year? Even with the wide variety of kits available to create unique Easter Egg Crafts it seems that we do the same thing year after year after year.

This year Abigail at Free Stuff 4 Kids has some excellent ideas for Easter Egg Crafts - if anything she gives us some good inspiraton.

Happy Coloring!

My kids love their electronics. If they were given a choice it would be video games 24/7. For a parent, this is extremely irritating. Imagine a house that is topsy turvy, stuff everywhere, and four kids glued to a monitor somewhere, oblivious to the mess that surrounds them. Sound familiar?

I have tried all kinds of rules, time limits, coupons, you name it. And they all do work, as long as I am ready to monitor it and be the “electronics police”. Somedays, I just don’t want this job.

We always have had a no electronics on the weekdays policy which works well, but then the weekends turn into a techno free for all. This past weekend was extremely busy for us and I did not want to fill the few hours of down time with video games and tv. It is always so hard to pull the kids away when their time is up.

So I did something shocking - I said no to electronics for the weekend. And a funny thing happened - my kids played the old fashioned way! They made up stories, they took out the art supplies and created beautiful art projects, they read books, and generally got along with each other.

The house became even more disorganized - there were newspapers spread across the family room floor as the children glued and painted and tried not to get any on the carpet. But it was so much better than being plugged in, that I really didn’t mind.

I will definitely do this more often!

Valentine’s Day is this week and parents everywhere are scrambling to one up the homemade Valentine’s Day cards their kids made last year.

Don’t you just love when teachers say they much prefer homemade Valentine’s cards to store bought ones? Actually I like receiving homemade cards, too - making them is the part that I have a difficult time with.

In years past we have alternated between some really creative valentine’s and the store bought variety. This year we opted to make homemade cards but with a twist - I removed myself from the project entirely. And honestly, it was the most fun our family has had making Valentine’s cards, ever.

The cards we made this year were easy enough for my four year old to make on her own.

Materials needed:

• paper doilies
• construction paper hearts that will fit on the doilies
• glue sticks
• Valentine’s stickers
• Markers

Do I even need to write the instructions?

Have your child glue a heart onto a doily, decorate it with stickers, and write to and from info with markers. Done.

Parent’s involvement - I traced enough hearts on the construction paper and cut them out for my four year old. The older kids cut their own out. And I helped my four year old write the to/from info, although she did a pretty good job on her own.

So, how’s that for a parenting tip? A hand’s off, stress-free homemade Valentine’s card project that the kids loved. We probably won’t win any awards for creativity but we had fun!

Photo by OkaggiAs we begin the new year and start to dismantle the remnants of 2007, one thing we must deal with are the stacks of holiday cards. As a parent, I love the pictures that come with the cards. So my first parenting tip is to cut and paste and create a few scrapbook pages to round out the year.But what to do with the rest of the cards - you know, the “old fashioned” kind? I mean the ones with no pictures.This parenting tip is easy. Just cut the the back fold off the card. Usually, the sender does not write on the blank back of the front flap.

I save these fronts for the next December. Then I hand them over to the kids. The kids cut, paste, and decorate these half cards, to make new cards for their teachers and friends. The possibilities are endless. Some of the cutouts are used for ornaments, decorations, and placecards at the table.

This parenting tip works well for birthday cards too. I have a file of cutoff birthday cards. These make cute tags for gifts and birthday cards for friends.

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