I Need Busy Bags or Quiet Bins

Our second baby is due in 8-10 weeks and as I will be nursing I need something for Melodi to do while I take some quiet time with baby.  I think the best way to accomplish this is to make a LARGE collection of Busy Bags or Quiet Bins.  I'm going to start with some Busy Bags and reserve Quiet Bins for when Melodi gives up her nap, but still needs some quiet time to herself.

There is a collection of ideas that I have found on Pinterest for Busy Bags.  I figure that I will need about 4 a day for 5 days during the week, so I need to come up with 20 bags.  I think that some of these may be books, magnet sets, and chunky wooden puzzles kept "put away" for nursing time.  Of course I would like for most of them to be educational or developmental in nature, and NOT messy.

It is going to be a work in progress as I have quite a few pins to sort through.  Luckily I have 2 months to get these together, but I also have a pile of other projects.  Maybe I'll have the planning done and be ready to do the shopping when my mother-in-law is out next month to help me with final baby prep.

Current Idea List

1. Paper, colored pencils/crayons (add stickers when a little older)
2. Lacing cards
3. Pipe cleaners, pony beads
4. Matching Color Shades (a little to young still, so do a Color Matching Wheel)
5. Felt board
1. build your own cupcake
2. tree
3. house
4. doll and clothes
6. Letter magnets (refrigerator, these are better than the premade bright colored ones)
7. Number magnets (refrigerator)
8. Fishing (felt fish with washers inside, pencil fishing pole)
9. Sensory Texture Boards
10. Matching Cards (store bought since we have a couple, or homemade)
11. Button Matching Game (I like the one a little ways down this page better)
12. Quiet Books (also useful for church, meetings, etc)
13. File Folder Games (switch out seasonally)
1. The Easter Story
2. Daniel in the Lions Den (telling time, too young still)
3. Shapes
4. Flowers
5. Counting (octopus, watermelon)
6. Colors
14. Lacing Cards (make with laminated cardstock shapes and a hole punch)
15. Popsicle Stick Puzzles
16. Color Sorting
1. colored pasta into cups
2. craft pompoms onto color cards
17. Flashcards
1. color
2. alphabet
3. animals/sounds
18. Lacing Beads

Some of these will make for good car travel bags for our road trip this summer and future PCS moves.

Reading Levels

Recently my husband asked me about the reading level of some of the books that we read to Melodi.    She LOVES reading and would spend all day bringing us books to read to her if we let her.  I had no clue what the reading level was of any of our books as it is not posted on the back of them as I remember it being when I was growing up (okay, late(?) elementary when I knew where to look).

The Dr. Seuss books were taken care of once I saw this on Pinterest, talk about great timing since we had just talked about it.  Leann of Montessori Tidbits had just posted this list on her blog.  She breaks it out Late Kindergarten, Beginning/Middle/Late First Grade, and Early/Middle Second Grade, based on her interpretation of the Accelerated Reader grade level equivalent.

We also have a large collection of the Little Golden Books so I did a Google search for "little golden books reading level" and found this.  It is not exactly what I was looking for but I should be able to convert it to a list like Leann's easy enough.

In my search I also found the 1000 Good Books List by the Classical Christian Education Support Loop.  This list is broken into grade levels of 1-3, 4-6, 7-9, and 10-12.  It's a large list and I haven't spent enough time exploring it to give a fair assessment, although I will be returning to it in order to find more books to add to our library.

Here we go with a list of the Little Golden Books reading levels.

Baby-PreK

• The Poky Little Puppy
• Sleeping Beauty
• Little Mommy
• The Little Red Hen
• A Day at the Seashore
• Pinocchio
• The Fire Engine Book
• The Shy Little Kitten
• Triceratops for Lunch
• The Saggy Baggy Elephant
• Nurse Nancy
• Good Night, Little Bear
• Noah's Ark
• The Happy Man and His Dump Truck
• Richard Scarry's Busiest Firefighters Ever
• Old MacDonald Had a Farm
• A Blessing from Above
• The Color Kittens
• The Bunny Book
• Thomas and Friends: May the Best Engine Win
• The Little Christmas Elf

Not done yet.  Thinking this is going to be more work that I really want to take on.  The list that I am looking at on JacketFlap is not really what I want as it includes non-Little Golden Books making it difficult to sift through at times.  There are also 1,176 books in the Baby-PreK level, and in the Ages 4-8 level there are 2,884.  So, this plan is going out the window.  Another reason to throw this one out is that I'm not sure I totally agree with some of levels given to the books on the Baby-PreK list that I've gone through so far.  There are far too many words in "The Poky Little Puppy," "Sleeping Beauty" and "Saggy Baggy Elephant" for it to be considered Baby and I don't think that a 3-4 year old would be reading them on her own.

Back to the drawing board for this project.  I may use the same technique that Montessori Tidbits did and just do it myself using the Accelerated Reader grade level equivalent and the books that I have.  Look for more on this in the future, it may end up being a page instead of a post so that I can add to it as we accumulate more books.

Photo Editing Trials

One way to ensure that a crafters work is never used by someone else as their own is to add a watermark to it.  (I've even heard about people stealing pictures of children off blogs to pass them as their own.)  As I am working towards becoming a blog worth following I decided that I should start adding some sort of watermark to my work.  When I got my new camera (Canon Rebel EOS) I asked my brother for some editing software recommendations, the only one I remember is GIMP, so I downloaded that and realized that it's far to complicated for my quick projects.  So, I ended up googling "free online photo editing" and found FotoFlexer, you don't even need an account to use it.  I've only done basic stuff and need to read up more on photo editing in general.  You probably noticed the debut of a watermark starting with my most recent post Card Making Machine.  It's a really simple watermark as it is only text, maybe I'll get around to something with a graphic in it someday.

Steph's Simple Photo Editing using FotoFlexer
First, you will sign in, if you have an account but an account is not required to use this program.  I haven't explored the benefits of creating an account.
Then, you will upload a photo, or start here if you don't have an account.
The first tab you will work with is the Basic Tab.  Here I select Auto Fix, and then crop the image by selecting Crop, drawing a box, and hitting "Crop Selected Area."

Then we move on to the Decorate tab.  This is where I add text as my watermark.  When you select the "Text" button you will have three things pop up.  The first is a text box where you can enter your text, the second is where your text will appear in a moveable, shapeable text box, and the third is a Text Options box where you will select formatting options.

 

Finally you will save your picture, once it will appear like you are saving it to FotoFlexer but a standard save menu will appear after saving it here allowing you to save it to your computer.  Do not change the name of the file between the first and second saves, it will not work correctly.

Here is the final product from the above editing.  I used the Kleenex box for packaging my Christmas and birthday gifts to my bestie, as it was the best box I had laying around for the job.

Card Making Machine

This weekend has been busy with card making.  I made up a set of thank you notes for Melodi's birthday earlier in the week and finished them up this weekend, they are at the bottom of the Melodi's Second Birthday Party post.  A couple of birthday cards were also on my to do list, one for my grandma and one for my bestie Liz.  Finally, I finished up my Christmas thank yous, but that was only because the last package arrived and I had some extras from December/January left laying around (I really did get the rest of them out earlier than 2 months after Christmas).

Birthday Card for Grandma
This is an original design of mine.  I used the Cricut cartridge Straight from the Nest for the bird and used the CCR for to cut all layers.  Any sentiment could be used, I used the same "happy birthday" as on the next card, stamped in brown on the inside.  I used the brown card from the DCWV Solid Box of Cards, a Bazzill brown from my scraps, the cream and green both came from the DCWV Latte matstack, and the red goes a long way back as it was in my scraps from my WSU graduation announcements.  The green ribbon is from an Offray microspool.

Birthday Card for Bestie
I found this pinned for a hello card and when I was looking through my Papercrafts: Cards board for a quick and easy card it is the one that won.  Once again the card is form the DCWV Solid Box of Cards.  The pink and green ribbons are from Offray microspools and the yellow is from an Offray Spoolo' Ribbon.  The flowers are form the $1 bin at Michaels.

Christmas Thank You Set

This was a pin that used a ladybug and the sentiment "thank you."  The cards are from the $1 bin at Michaels.  The green paper is from a cardstock stack of basic colors, embossed using my Cuttlebug.  I don't remember where the red ribbon came from, but there are two different sizes there.  The patterned paper came from my scrap stash as I used it for photo ornaments and layouts for Christmas 2010.  When I started writing them I decided that I needed to score a line in so that the card front could flip up easily, so I scored the line and glued down the top.

Did you notice the new watermarks on my photos?  I did them in FotoFlexer.  More on that in my next post.

Pinspired Project: Index Card Calendar Journal

There are a couple of calendar journals floating around Pinterest right now.  The first I saw was made out of vintage postcards (as the dividers), index cards, and a fruit box to hold it all in and featured on Design*Sponge.  While I didn't pin this particular one because it wasn't really my style I found one pinned from Wit & Whistle that used a recipe card box filled with index cards and chipboard(?) dividers.  I pinned this one with the note "diy calendar journal. maybe for the new baby?"  Since Melodi's birthday was coming up I decided to get the supplies and start one for her to see how it goes.

I had seen the project but hadn't decided to do it when Hobby Lobby had stamps on sale and I came across a "Months Of The Year" set by Stampabilities that had each of the months and numbers 0-9 in a tin, so I picked it up thinking I would use it for something, someday.  We were out one evening so I popped into the Office Max and picked up a pack of 500 white index cards, 100(?) colored index cards (you know, the pastel ones), and a plastic blue index card holder.  I got 4x6 cards because I knew I would end up writing a lot.  So, I had everything I needed for under $20 (even less if you take out the stamps since those will be used for other stuff) and a week before Melodi's birthday.

I took one evening to get February done (speaking of which I need to think about March sooner than later).  First I sorted out the colored cards for dividers (blue for January, pink for February, green for March... you get the idea) and folded February's to "contain" the date cards for the month.

Then I counted out the cards for February (29 to account for leap years!) and stamped the numbers 1-29 with a pale pink chalk ink in the upper right corner. 

 

Finally, into the box it all the cards (400 white, 12 colored, folded divider template) went to wait for Melodi's birthday.

So, Melodi's birthday was about a week ago and I have written on the index cards each day since.  I am glad I chose the larger index cards because I am writing two lines a day.  It was time consuming to find the card I needed to write on so I put a little post-it note on the date card that needed to be written on next.  Eventually I will get around to getting and decorating a Paper Mache Recipe Box for each kid, maybe in "their" assigned color.

Between a couple days in the hospital in May to have the new baby and a month visit back home late this summer I have to come up with a plan to keep up with this calendar journal without hauling it all with me.  Currently my idea is to put the needed index cards in a ziploc bag, but as I write this I am thinking that an envelope for each child with all the envelopes in a ziploc might be better.

Eventually I hope to journal a line that the kids give me for their journal and when they get old enough they can write out their own sentences each day.  Unless of course I decide to be greedy with the project and do it all myself.