Helpful Mom

As if we moms don’t have enough clutter to deal with on a daily basis, then comes the holidays with all it’s decorations, gifts, and cards.  Here are a few ideas I came across for wrangling all those cards.

1. Hang a Card Garland. To create a festive garland, laminate the cards, then punch a small hole in the top conrers of each and link them together with ribbon.  This makes a unique and inexpensive decoration and adds a personal touch to the holiday trimmings.

2. Give them a place at the table. After the holidays you can make place mats with photo cards sent by family and friends.  Arrange the pictures on poster board, add borders and text cut from other holiday cards, and laminate the finished product.  Your family can enjoy the photo cards year round.

3.  Start a Blessings Basket. This one is my favorite idea.  Place the photo cards in a basket in the kitchen, then choose one card each night at dinner.  When you say grace, ask a special blessing for the person or family whose card was chosen.

4.  Make an ornament. Cut the card front into even strips.  Stack strips and poke a hole through both ends.  Using a needle, pull sturdy thread through one hole, knot at the base.  Thread through other hole, leaving enough string to make a loop for hanging.  Push the stack of strips down into an arc, knot thread at the base.  Fan out strips to form a ball.

5.  Spice up Recipes. No you’re not going to eat them!  Cut the fronts off your cards and use them to make festive recipe cards by writing a favorite holiday recipe on the back of each one.

6.  Lend a hand. Cut out your child’s handprint from card fronts.  On the back of each hand write a kind act your family can do for others.  Attach to a garland and hang.  Each day, pick a hand, then perform that deed.

Funny I hear from lots of moms how many loads of laundry they do every week and how it’s never ending and I can’t help wondering what they are washing.  Now I don’t say that to be offensive, I genuinely am curious to know what everyone is washing.  See we typically do 3-4 loads a week, so I don’t always understand the chore.  Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t enjoy laundry anymore than the next person it just isn’t unending for us.

Perhaps it’s the way we do laundry that makes a difference and it may be a matter of personal preferences.  I have one friend who changes her sheets like every other day and another that washing all their comforters every week!  We don’t do any of that.  I do laundry on Sundays, after getting the girls up and dressed and started on breakfast, I start our whites while waiting for my turn in the shower.  Our sheets get changed once a week, I strip the bed in the morning and they are washed and dried by bedtime that night.  Before leaving for church I take out the sheets and put those in the dryer separately from the rest of the whites since the undies and socks get all wrapped up in the sheets and don’t end up getting dry.  And that way as soon as we get home I can put the rest of the whites in the dryer and fill the washer with the main load of colors before starting lunch and reading the sunday flyers.  Then before naptime I empty the whites into the basket and shove all the colors in the dryer and start (typically) the last load of colors which is made up of pants and towels.

We have installed a thick dowel rod in the laundry room so as soon as I pull shirts or pants out of the dryer they get hung up immediately.  Joel has white hangers, and I have teal so we can easily tell whose clothes are whose.  My one rule about clothes when purchasing them is that they must be permapress.  I do NOT do ironing.  Actually the only reason I even have an iron and board in the house is for guests who visit who may want one.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve ironed anything.  If something makes it into the house that needs ironing it either gets returned or passed on to goodwill that’s how serious I am about this.  I have better things to do with my time.

When I get up from naptime I hang up the load of colors and separate out the pants to dry and then go make dinner.  After that I hang up the pants and load the towels in the dryer.  And I have learned recently that you shouldn’t use dryer sheets on your towels because it coats the fibers decreasing the absorbency of the towels.  Who knew?

That’s basically it.  At the end of the night I have Joel carry the basket upstairs to our room and while I wait for him to come up to bed I sort what didn’t need hanging and put it away.  We haven’t yet put dressers in our girls room and currently have one long one in our room that I put their socks and undies in so I can literally put everything away in about 10-15 minutes.  I didn’t realize how easy I had made laundry in our home til my mom was helping me during my recovery from surgery a few years ago.  See she was sorting the laundry and she was folding everything, including our undies!  I showed her that we each just have a drawer and we just throw them in the drawer, no need to fold.  So when sorting I just throw everything into piles for each person and then put those things in their drawers.  Same thing for wash clothes in the bathroom, they are all in a drawer in the vanity no need for folding.  Towels get folded and hung on the rods the same day.  The girls still don’t like baths so they typically only take a bath once or twice a week so they only each use one towel a week.  And I shower more often at the gym than I do at home so I have two towels a week, one in my gym bag and one at home.

And for those pesky socks.  Since the girls are close in age and size I have strategically chosen socks with different colors toes and heels for them so I can tell whose is whose with just a glance.  Katrina currently has purple heels and Mikayla has pink(I found them at Target). And they only have white, all their socks are exactly the same, just the different colored heels to tell the sizes apart so it makes matching them up really easy.  Although I have been rethinking the matching the socks thing lately, if they are all the same why match them up anyways?  Another idea I read for telling their clothes apart is to put a dot on the label of your oldest childs clothes.  Then when you pass it along you add a dot for the next child and so on.  So Katrina would have one dot on her labels, and Mikayla would have two dots.

As for stains, oy the stains.  If or should I say when there is a stain or potential one I immediately spray it.  And I keep old toothbrushes around to rub the stain remover in good.  And if your kids like mine has gotten gum in their clothes or hair, Goo Gone is awesome.  You just squirt it on and rub it in and poof gum lets loose!  It works great on peanut butter, and those store stickers that you can’t peel off too.

Oh it’s a great chore to have preschoolers help with.  Begin when they are about 2-3yrs old by having them help round up all the dirty laundry.  We are blessed with a laundry chute and my girls love to throw things down it.  And they can help you sort the whites from the colors.  And when the laundries done they can help sort socks and undies, towels and wash clothes, which helps them with their sorting and classification skills.  You can apply this to emptying the dishwasher too with cups and silverware.

Anyways that’s my two cents on laundry.  I’m no expert, and it’s certainly not the most exciting thing to read about, but we all do it, and some more than others.  So hopefully I gave you a few ideas on how to cut out some of the extra loads or work.  Maybe you’ll even grow to like it…

So my day did not go as planned, I’m sure I’m not the only one that happened to today.  See my mom was supposed to take my girls for the day so they could do fun Christmas things and I could have time to do those undone projects.  But instead it snowed, and snowed, and snowed.  My mom couldn’t make it to the expressway so I being sick still had to keep my housebound family happy and give up my dreams of clean places and projects done.

This being the first real snow storm my girls can remember they didn’t understand that if we couldn’t make it to Grandma’s then we can’t make it anywhere else either.  Joel actually couldn’t get into our driveway because our road had 8 inches of snow on it because it had not been plowed all day!!  So in an effort to keep ourselves from going crazy I tried to think up special things to do with the girls even though all I wanted to do is sit and watch cartoons with them all day.  First we pulled out a bubble machine to play with, when I couldn’t get that to work I decided I’d give the girls an early Christmas present.  I had found this really cute Little Mermaid table and chair, and tea cart set on Craigslist for $5 over the summer and had been trying to keep it hid all these months.  So we bundled up and trudged through the snow to pull out their surprise.  They were both so excited and spent an hour downstairs in their playroom while I rested on the couch.

Christmas cookies

After a while I summoned the courage to make Christmas cookies with the girls.  I had picked up a Betty Crocker gingerbread cookie mix yesterday thinking over Christmas week we’d make them sometime for fun.  Well now was as good a time as any.

Baking with preschoolers can be quite fun because they find every step very exciting and want to help and know what you are doing and why.  To successfully cook with kids you have to steel yourself with patience, it WILL take longer than if you do it yourself, and it will be messy.  I think there were equal parts sprinkles on the floor and cookies.  That said here are a few tips, let them have input, what shapes to make.  Don’t worry if they don’t understand the idea of cutting the cookies out really close together, you can always reroll the dough.  Let them decorate their own cookies without you correcting them constantly.  I put out all the Christmas shapes in multiple so they girls didn’t fight over the star or snowman, etc.  They each had their own chair to stand on and they had to take turns cutting out cookies.

Once the cookies cooled completely I gave each girl a plate to decorate their cookies on.  Put frosting in a

Christmas cookies

ziploc bag, seal it, squeezing the air out and snip one corner of the bag off will create a reduced mess when frosting.  We just did squiggles and sprinkled with colored sprinkles, they may not be fancy but we had fun making them and That is the point.   And an easy idea so that you don’t feel like you are wasting all those sprinkles(Katrina used an entire bottle on two cookies!) is to set aside some uncooked dough.  You can then make balls of cookie dough and roll them in the excess sprinkles and bake them for about 8 minutes, they are simple and they kids can help make those too and they look like tree ornaments round and sparkly.  Once we are all done, shoo the kids out of the kitchen with a cookie so you can restore order to your kitchen.

We had a great time and it made our day fly by.  Eventually our neighbor with a plow came by and cleared our driveway and they helped push Joel’s car off the road into our driveway just in time for the plow to come by.  New York, gotta love it ;P

• Advent Chain-Cut 1 inch strips of red and green construction paper and write a verse that relates to the birth of Jesus on each.  Glue or staple each into a circle, making a chain.  Each day in December, let your child carefully tear off one link and read the verse.  (This can also be done to countdown til a Birthday or other big day your kid keeps asking when it’s coming ;P)
• Help your kids make their own gift wrap with butcher paper, sponge stamps, and poster paint.  Instead of the usual Santas or snowmen, buy or make Nativity-themed stamps such as stars, mangers, angels, doves, and crowns.  Discuss the importance of each symbol.
• Instead of the usual gingerbread house at Christmastime, in one family the children would make a gingerbread stable.  They would create a special place for baby Jesus to help remind the kids of the real reason we celebrate Christmas.

While we were at the Garden Factory last week I decided we should begin a tradition a friend had told me her family had done for them as kids.  Each year they would purchase an ornament for each of the kids that would go on the tree but then would be theirs once they got married.  I loved this idea because I can remember our first Christmas after we got married.  We got married in November and Joel hadn’t found a job yet so we had no money and no decorations for a tree, so I love the idea of buying ornaments for them over the years to help get them started and they would have some meaning behind them, rather than the beautifully matching ones we have now but there is no meaning behind them other than the fact that they coordinate with our living room decor.  And it doesn’t have to be expensive either, the ones the girls picked were $1 and $2 each.

Well as Christmas comes upon us we struggle with how to keep Christmas centered on Christ while our kids are excited about the gifts, decorations, baking cookies, parties, etc.  So in an effort to help you do this I’m including some ideas I’ve read in various magazines.  You don’t have to do them all, just pick and choose what may work for you.

• “A walk through the Moyers’ home in December reveals a variety of Nativity sets, both large and small, but not one contains a baby Jesus figure.  Four year old Lydia Moyer can tell you why.  “Jesus is born on Christmas.”

Not until the morning of Dec 25 do the baby figures appear in their beds of straw.  Lydia jumps out of bed and races downstairs to rush from one manger to another.  As the preschooler hugs baby Jesus, welcoming Him to their home, her mother smiles.  What better way to begin the day, focused on God’s gift to the world?”

• “Imitate the Wise men.  Buy only three presents for each child in remembrance of the Magi’s gifts to the Christ child.  These presents don’t need to be expensive in order to be meaningful.  To keep Christmas Day focused on Jesus, some families postpone their gift exchange to Epiphany on Jan 6. By tradition, Epiphany recalls the arrival of the wise men to worship Jesus and so reveal Him to the world as Lord and King.”

• “Share Christmas joy. Spread Jesus’ love by helping others and by lifting the spirits of those who might not see a reason to celebrate.  Together as a family, visit a nursing home, serve meals at a mission or church, or pack and deliver Christmas baskets for food pantries.  Make sure your children know you do this not to earn favor with God but to love Him by loving others.”

Other simple ideas are to bake Jesus a birthday cake or go check out a live Nativity scene with your children.

If you are looking for some family fun this Christmas look no further than the Garden Factory in Gates, NY.  This is a yard and garden store much like a Gro-Moore farm during the spring, summer, and fall months, but come Christmas time it’s transformed into a family center.

Last week my girls wanted to go to the zoo!  It was less than 20 out so in an attempt to do something different I suggested going to a couple of Christmas stores to see the decorations.  Some simple FREE fun that didn’t involve much effort, I just looked up the locations of a couple stores dedicated to Christmas decorations.  I laid out the ground rules before going in to each store so there would be no begging or things broken.  Look with your eyes, not with your hands, and we are NOT buying anything so don’t ask, and stay with mom or else you will have to ride in a cart.

That said we had a great time.  They marveled at the trees and various angels, Santas, deer, and bears that were lit up, moving, or singing.  Katrina couldn’t help but hug the purple decorated tree we came across, since purple is her favorite color.  But our absolute favorite store was the Garden Factory.  I had seen ads for it last winter but never made it so was curious to check it out this year.  I knew that somewhere they have a huge model train set but we took our time exploring the entire store before finding it, I hadn’t mentioned it in case we couldn’t find it.  There were whole rooms with nothing but poinsettias and Christmas wreaths, decorations and lights.  The girls delighted in the large selection of wind chimes and the stuffed birds that play the authentic bird calls.  We checked out all the decorations and garden statues and then we found it… The room with loads of beautifully decorated Christmas trees, huge garden fountains, and a HUGE train setup.  Not just one train but more like 5 or 6 sets all set up together in one huge display.  I find these model train sets fascinating because of the attention to detail is amazing.  They have whole little towns set up with tiny people, cars, animals, you name it they have it.  And the girls could watch the trains go round forever.  It was nicely set up for kids too because all the way around it’s boxed in with fencing, but then they would have steps up to a platform where the kids can stand up and get a good view of the trains going around.

And beyond that is all set up for their Holiday Family Fun activities which includes: a child sized train for rides, bounce house, turbo tub, speed slide, mini ferris wheel, firetruck playfort, and make your own ornaments for kids.  Now this is not free and is only open on weekends but it sure looked fun and I’m hoping to fit it in before Christmas sometime.  It’s for ages 2-10 and most of the rides cost 2 tickets, which are either $0.50 each or 25 for $10.  It began the weekend of Thanksgiving and continues through Christmas.  The remaining weekends are Dec 13 & 14, and Dec 20 & 21 from 11am-4pm.  The model train will be set up through Dec 27, closed Dec 25.  And on those weekends from 12-4pm Santa will be there for pictures and taking wishes.  And while you are there it’s a great place to pick up a precut tree while your kids are playing.

The Garden Factory is located at 2126 Buffalo Rd, Rochester, NY 14624

Undo toys from boxes and packaging to help easy frustration in preschoolers who just want to get their hands on the new toy.  If you have opened a new toy recently you know what I’m talking about, all the ties, wires, plastic things, and the tape, oh the tape!  And if it needs batteries put those in too.  There’s nothing like a 3 year old who can’t wait to get their hands on that toy to make you blow your cool on what should be a happy day.

When our girls were younger we would give them the box first and then after a while when that began to wear off, then we would give them the actual toy.  And as one and two year olds we only gave them one gift.  That young they are getting new toys all the time as they develop so we didn’t feel it necessary to pile on the gifts.  Plus if you give them lots of gifts at once there will end up being toys that just get shoved aside and never get played with.

One article I read suggested that when your kids are under 2, you can hide some of their toys a month ahead of time.  Then you can wrap them up as gifts.  I know I used to have two baskets of toys for the living room and I’d rotate them monthly, so there was only one in the living room at any one time.  And when I brought out the new basket it was like all new toys had appeared.

Ask for gift certificates towards museum or gym memberships, or movie tickets, etc so you won’t be bringing lots of toys in taking up valuable space.  They can also be enjoyed by everyone in the family yearround.

You can share the fun of your Strongs Museum membership with your friends.  As a year end thank you for your membership support, you are invited to bring up to TWO guests FREE of charge each time you visit the museum from Dec 1-24.  Escape the hustle and bustle of the holiday season and share the Strong experience with friends and family!

*Members must present membership card and photo ID, and accompany guests during each visit.  Free Admission does not apply to Dancing Wings.

It’s that time of year…time to pick out the family Christmas tree.  Our family has gone to a tree farm for years and cut down our own tree.  When we moved from Penfield to Henrietta we had to find a new place to pick a tree since the place in Webster we had gone to for years was now 45 minutes away, a long way to drive with a tree tied to the top of our little Geo.  So we had to search and we finally settled on one that is not very far from our home at all.  It’s Remelt’s Tree Farm on East River Rd in Rush.  They offer precut or cut your own trees in a variety of types of trees.  What’s nice is they charge a flat fee depending on the type not on size.  Since we have vaulted ceilings in our living room we usually were getting a 10 ft. tree for $25-30!  They have hayrides out to the fields and saws to cut your tree, they’ll come pick you and your tree up and bring it out front where they will bale it for free and help you get it on your car if necessary.  On certain weekends there are also free Trolley rides, operated by the New York Museum of Transportation.

This year we’re considering trying out Stokoe Farms, where we go for their pumpkin patch.  They are opening this weekend on Friday from 9am-5pm.  They too have hayrides and free baling, but in addition they are offering a straw fort, live Nativity scene, bonfire, and their Country Christmas Shop and Reindeer Reststop Restaurant.  Open fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 9am-5pm, Nov 28th-Dec 21.

On opening day Santa Skydives in to check on his reindeer!  It’s Friday Nov 28th at 1pm(raindate Nov 29th).  Santa will also be there Dec 6th and 13th.  Located at South Rd in Scottsville.