Advent activites (catch-up)

I am WAY behind on posting about all the fun things we have been up to. So get ready for a couple really long blog posts today.

First let's back up all the way to last Wednesday. We woke up to about 2 inches of snow on the ground and around here, schools close for that. So we unexpectedly had a snow day on our hands (you can see snow pictures in the previous post). The boys are going through a horrible stage where they can't get along for more than 15 minutes at a time so I knew I had to keep them busy or else it would be a LONG snow day at home. I turned to the one thing that always seems to have the answers in times like this.....Pintrest!!

There I found a few experiments that we had all ingredients for and once I told the boys what we would be doing......they were EXCITED!

First experiment was to blow bubbles outside to see if they freeze and that didn't work for us so much. So we tried the next one....blowing up a balloon with baking soda and vinegar. 

We had tons of fun with this one. We tried a few different amounts of each ingredients to see which would blow the balloon up the biggest. We found out that the last one we did (the purple balloon) was the key to getting it blown up big. We filled the balloon all the way up to the top with baking soda and once it was added to about 3 - 4 cups of vinegar it started getting really really big. We wondered if it would explode but it didn't, thankfully!

Our advent activity for that night (day 7) was to make our own bows and we decided to do that during the day instead of at night. It's a good thing because it took a while to make all of those bows. I didn't get any pictures of the boys during the process but the steps were this.....the boys colored pictures and scribbled on some construction paper and scrapbook paper, then I cut them into 1 inch strips and twisted the strips into a number 8 type form. Then you simply stack 5-7 number eight forms on top of each other and staple together. It was very very easy but just a bit time consuming to do so many. Here are the finished bows:

 Not sure why this one is posting upside down but you get the idea.

That night we talked about Jesus being our Lamb of God and read John 1:29.

The next day (day 8) our advent activity was to make homemade playdoh snow (homemade white playdoh with glitter). Well let me tell you the first recipe for homemade playdoh  I had was not a good one. It said to heat 2 TBSP of veg. oil in a pan and add 1 cup of water to it. Well that resulted in a HUGE mess. Hot oil and water don't mix, instead it splatters hot oil ALL.OVER your kitchen. Thankfully my reaction (which was top of my lung screaming) caused the boys to quickly duck under the counter by their stools and only I got hit with the hot oil. I was fine though just a little bummed that my "fun activity" wasn't going as planned. So back to my go to help, pintrest. That is when I found a recipe for homemade playdoh and it was colored using kool-aid. It turned out much better but with a bit of a mess on our hands....literally. It was super sticky until you added enough flour and kneaded it enough. The boys thought it was great fun to get it everywhere and since I already had oil all over the kitchen, I just let them have fun no matter how big the mess was.

Friday was crazy hair day at the boys' school. Any child could pay $1 (which goes to the school) and wear their hair crazy. Well this was something this hairstyling mom couldn't pass up. It was my chance to load the boys hair down (or should I say up) with tons of product and style it in a fun way they we loved.
Here is what we ended up with (but don't be deceived by the smiles...they were anything but smiles when I was trying to blow dry their hair straight up with tons of product in it...it hurt their little heads:

It managed to stay all day long which was no surprise to me but it was a pleasant surprise to them. Rascal's teacher nicknamed him "spike" and Scooter said everyone in his class just had to touch his hair.
Once we got home from school, I got them in the shower to get all that product out of their hair. We were heading to the zoo for zoo lights that night and I wasn't taking them looking like they did for crazy hair day. :)
We had an absolute ball at zoo lights but I will post about it (and our other advent activities) in another post later.