Pinterest

For the longest time (or however long Pinterest has been cool), I have stood my ground and refused to buy in to the hype.  Recently, I have somewhat caved :(  I made a variation of an advent calendar I saw on Pinterest:

The frame for my advent calendar is actually a cork board that I bought from Wal-Mart.  The ribbon (from Family Dollar) was glue-gunned on.  I cut the green and red cards out of card stock I had at home and glued the white papers on the back.  I made the activities up to match what we already had planned (like decorate the Christmas tree or go to the Christmas parade).  I also made sure to not plan activities that would stress us out - like trying to watch a Christmas movie on a school night.  Cayle has been loving the activities!  Tonight's activity was really fun - we drank sparkling apple cider with our dinner :)

Another Pinterest idea that I got sucked in on was this year's homemade ornament.  My plan is to make an ornament each year for the kids' godparents and grandparents (along with one for our family to keep).  I figured I'd troll Pinterest to see if I could find any easy homemade ornament ideas.  Here's what I came up with:

The cards were actually really easy to make.  The most difficult part of the process was finding the old Christmas cards needed to make the sides of the ornament - it's amazing how few real cards are sent anymore since everyone sends the photo cards (including us...).  So all I did was cut squares that were 3"x 3", find the midpoints, connect the dots, and bend the card.  Use double-sided tape to stick them together, then run twine through the top and bottom.  They're really kinda cool ornaments.

So now that I've tried out two ideas from Pinterest in the past week, it will probably be a while before I get my crafty pants on again :)