Christmas 2012 Recap: and some hand stamped PJ's

So yes, we are well into January...and visions of pink and red are on the horizon with the holiday of love just around the corner...but I'm just a wee bit in denial that the Christmas season is indeed over (we finally took our tree down and put away our Christmas records *insert sad tear here*). But as I mentioned here, I do love me a new year and am ready to embark on some great new journeys! The future looks bright my friends!

And that future is starting strong (and busy!) with some super fun illustration jobs, preparation for ALT - did I mention I'm speaking?! - and so much more. But as my blog is also a bit of a journal I feel I can't move forward without documenting just a bit from our joyous Christmas day.

I'm sure I probably feel this way as it is the most recent event, but for some reason, this last Christmas really felt like the best one yet. Just something about it was simply perfect. Perhaps it is because it was one of the few years where we actually awoke in our own home and celebrated the morning with just our own little family. Or perhaps it was because of our perfect new little addition, baby M. Or perhaps it was because all I really wanted in the world was to spend one perfect day just with my dear family, completely focused on spending time with one another. Probably a bit of all the above. But whatever the reason...it was...well...perfect.

We spent Christmas Eve with Jon's parents and didn't get back to our place till late that night, so the boys actually slept in on Christmas morning, which was perfect. Jon made an amazing sausage and egg baked dish to keep our tummy's happy while settling down to open our gifts. I was on top of things this  past year and had been collecting gifts for the boys throughout the year and I even had a lot of it wrapped before Christmas Eve. A record for me. It was oh so nice to embark on December knowing that most of the shopping was done (and ended up being oh so necessary as RSV made it's ugly rounds throughout our household). I did however have a number of last minute things to do, such as hand stamp these long john's for the boys Christmas PJ's. I seriously made them on Christmas Eve morning, willing them to dry in time for me to wrap them so that they could open them later that evening. It somehow managed to work out perfectly. And I laughed when A squealed in delight when opening his after his brother...proclaiming "yes! they are different!". Good thing I made two different stamp motif's. Who knew it was so important?

This year was also really great because I feel like the boys really got into the spirit of giving this year. Not only did we pick out gifts for each other but I had the boys really get involved with selecting gifts for my brother's family (we had his name this year). This meant that they had to think of their cousings, go to a store, pick out gifts for them, buy them and go home with no toys for themselves. I was seriously worried about Little O on this one as he's incredibly in love with toys (he feels like they are his friends that he develops deep bonds with). But you know what? He was amazing. He was head over heals in love with this snugly puppy dog that he knew from the beginning was to be for his 2 year old cousin. So throughout the store he played with it, cuddled it and befriended it, but all with the plan of giving him away. And it worked! He loved the idea of him going to his cousins house. He actually understood that this was a special thing he was doing for his little cousin. It was a gift. Amazing (and serious mom sigh of relief here).

Above are the wrapped gifts that they gave to me and I love how excited they were to give. Such sweet boys. Jon let them pick anything they wanted to give me (within reason and budget of course) and A picked out some lip gloss and Little O picked out a brush. So sweet. And it turns outs, just exactly what I needed. I had them pick something for Jon as well so they chose an Angry Birds game for him to play on the IPad (which of course they wanted to play with as well). They also got a few toys for their baby sister.

And OK, I got just a wee bit excited to embark upon the collection of beautiful handmade dolls for baby M. Yes she won't appreciate it for a while yet but I love the idea of telling her the story of her first Christmas and the special doll that she received then. And in truth, she was my little Christmas doll. Our family's favorite gift from 2012.

2012 was a wonderful year for us and we are so excited to embark on a new year with our little family of five. So so many exciting things for our future and I feel incredibly blessed to share it with those that I love and with all of you!

Our Colored Duct Tape Craft DIY's now on Parent & Child blog!

Remember our fun line up of duct tape crafts for Scholastic's Parent & Child magazine? Well you can now access them online here. So fun! Really great line up of fun indoor crafts you can do with your kiddos while stuck indoors this winter. So hurry and go check it out!

Happy New Year!!

Happy Happy New Year Friends! I don't know about you but I'm ready to clean the slate and start this new year off on the right foot! Don't get me wrong, 2012 was great, full of wonderful opportunities and new additions (such as our very favorite, this little bug shown here) but I just love me some time to reevaluate, make some changes and get pumped to start up again. Don't you? And to do so we always choose a theme as a family for the year. I like to do this so that if some of my specific goals fall through the cracks, say oh about a couple weeks after I make them, then I always have a simple theme to fall back on...one that is easy to remember the entire year through...and one that will hopefully guide us through until the end of December.

I'm also big on alliteration. I find this helps me remember my theme even when it's July and starting fresh and goal making is not so much at the forefront of my mind.


Some past favorite themes have been:

• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Relax (remember this one?! still a fond favorite)
• Creation and Compassion (tried to focus on creating more and consuming less and then reaching beyond myself and showing compassion to those around me)
• Friends, Family & Fun! (this one might seem like a no brainer but for a workaholic, creative hermit like myself I needed the reminder that the most important things in life are bonds you form with those around me. I needed the push to put my relationships in life first. And to have FUN doing it! Turned out really great.).
• Last year was all about Thriving...thinking this year might be a bit along those lines as well. Can't wait to nail it down!

What about you? Any resolutions? And what do you do to try to keep up on them after the will power to make it out the door to the gym subsides?

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from all of us over here at Mer Mag! I hope you had a most lovely holiday and are gearing up for a great new year.

This year has been incredibly good to us and we feel blessed to have shared it with all of you. We have so much fun in store for 2013 (ALT! We are working on our first kids craft book!! - maybe a facelift for Mer Mag, etc.). But first we are happy to reflect on the joy and peace we feel this season. There is so much to be grateful for - new babies, happy times together, fun opportunities here at Mer Mag and much much more. We thank you for going on this journey with us and hope to share more times together with you in the new year.

Love, peace and joy to all of you.

xo
Mer

Christmas Village with Duct Tape and Tissue Boxes

Good morning friends. It's snowing outside of my window as I type and it's looking like it just might be a white Christmas indeed. Yippee! Which means, after the snowball fights and snowman building, it is the perfect time to come inside, sit snugly indoors and create with my Littles.

I don't know about you but this time of year often brings about a case of the sniffles. Which means we have have number of tissue boxes lying around the house. Well the Littles and I discovered just the thing to do with them. Make a little Christmas village, using glitter and duct tape of course! So that is just what we did.

To make the structure of the roof tops, we just cut up a few other tissue boxes (or any other discarded cereal box, etc.) and created the roof shapes atop the tissue boxes. We then proceeded to cover them with the duct tape and then had lots of fun decorating them!

We were so excited to find this gold and silver glitter tape, from Martha Stewart, at Michaels, and knew right away that it needed to be used in our little village. I love how it makes the shingles sparkle and come to life (and an extra bonus - it's really easy to cut).

I also played around with our hole punch a bit and was able to create polka dots with the gold duct tape by spreading out the tape onto parchment paper prior to punching. With a little finesse, they turned out great! (In fact we have updated our duct tape cutting methods altogether. If you lay it out on the parchment, you can get a really nice clean cut with scissors and create just about any shape your heart desires! Best thing about it: the Littles can be more involved in the cutting stage now! Yippee! I'll have to do a tutorial of this new cutting method on the blog soon).

And our little vintage wooden angel is just the perfect friend to inhabit our little village. Makes me want to create a few more wooden friends for her to carol to.

And how cute would it be to cut out the window and door shapes and then add a few battery operated tea lights or even a strand of white Christmas lights on the inside? I just might have to do this variation in the next day or so. Would be so magical indeed!

Duct Taping with Parent & Child Mag

Happy Monday friends! Have you seen the latest issue of Parent & Child magazine yet? It's full of some really great stuff. A few months ago they asked us to share with you some great duct tape crafts that you can do with your little ones (of all ages) and we are so excited to see it out.

Meta was my go-to for props and photography and she also had some great connections for little models. Like this twin brother and sister pair who modeled the belt and headband craft.

Are you not just in love with them?! They were really great to work with (in another lifetime I want to have twins :)).

And do you recognize this little cutie? She made an appearance in my Babiekins headband tutorial. Darling girl and a natural in front of the camera. She's seriously one of the best I've worked with.

And I have to say, this little cat purse just might be my favorite craft in the article (but it's so hard to pick just one!). Check out Parent & Child's latest issue, on stands now, for full instructions.

(Oh and Little O was excited to make the cut and finally see himself in a magazine as his older brother has had his own little dose of print fame. The above photo didn't make into the magazine but I think it's just oh so sweet.).

And as it is the season of giving, wouldn't these be the most perfect gifts for your kids to make and gift?! These are seriously some great, simple and affordable hand made gifts for you kids to get in on the spirit of giving! Something we all want to foster within our kiddos, right?!

Our DIY IKEA RIBBA Picture Ledge Tree

I wanted to do something different with our Christmas tree this year and after a recent trip to IKEA, I knew just what to do. Using IKEA's Ribba Picture Ledges Jon and my brother Kenton (who was in town for Thanksgiving) helped to make my vision come to life.

I was hoping to post on this much earlier but with baby girl in the hospital all week last week (with RSV - she's doing much better) things got put on the back burner a bit. But let me tell you we've loved having this tree up (the boys too! I was afraid the wouldn't think it was as cool as a real tree but they tell everyone about it wherever we go!) and it was just the perfect thing to calm our hearts when coming home.

To make this tree we purchased three 45.25" RIBBA ledges, two 21.75" ledges and one of the small ones for the very top. Because of course this would be temporary, I decided to use Command Strips to put it up. Worked like a charm. We laid out all of our shelves to decide just how large we wanted this. In the end we came up with the following measurments:

top shelf: 9"
2nd shelf: 15.5"
3rd shelf: 23"
4th shelf: 30.5"
5th shelf: 38"
6th shelf: 45.25"

The cuts were simple and quick to make. To install, we took a look at our wall and determined that we wanted 12" between each shelf. Then using our Command Strips we put our tree up. We used a total of 6 large strips for the lowest shelf, 4 for the next one up and so on, adjusting according to the size of the shelf and what we wanted it to hold.

We then got out our holiday trimmings and decorated our new tree! The boys love it! We just have to advise them not to play with their toys on the shelves too much (yeah right! There's a good reason why the styling is off a bit on the bottom shelf ;).

I also recently tried another variation by adding all of our books from our advent to the shelves (something I actually had in mind from the get-go). I'm super happy with the results but I will advise that if you are trying to go this route, I might secure the shelves to the wall with screws as the Command Strips might not be quite strong enough.

This project was so much quicker than I had even originally imagined so you definitely could still do it this holiday season. There are so many different ways to go with this and the decorating options are endless. I already have an entirely new deco scheme planned for next year! (or maybe I'll do it this year...you never know what mom's going to rearrange around here).

Our 2011 Christmas Cards

Hi Friends and happy Monday. I can't tell you how happy I am to start another week. Baby M is out of the hospital and just about over her RSV. Not a fun stint...but we are happy and mostly healthy now and glad to be out of the woods.

I wanted to share with you our Christmas cards from last year (top image is the front of the card, bottom image is the back). We did them so last minute that I didn't have time to share them last year. It's fun to remember these times and what a happy year that was. It's crazy to look at these two little rascals and think that there was ever a time when it was just the two of them. Baby M has already melded a place within all of our hearts and we can't wait to share this season with our sweet little girl. And I can't deny that I'm just a wee bit excited to delve into dolls, doll houses and the like. OK, I'm down right giddy about it.

So what about you? Are you super on top of getting your Christmas cards out early? I think we have a picture for our 2012 cards, now I just need to nail down the design (or order some from a company?). One of these years I'll make the card top priority and go all out...but for now, it's lucky we even get them out to family and friends by the 25th. Oh well, maybe next year...

A Simple DIY Thanksgiving Place Mat

I love Thanksgiving. Really I do. But I have to confess that I wasn't planning on doing much with it this year as I have been rather overwhelmed with work and the new baby. I actually like how Thanksgiving melts into Christmas as I feel like the spirit of thanks should be felt during the Christmas season so to me they naturally go together. I don't even mind the Christmas decorations everywhere and holiday music playing on the air mid November.


Well this got me thinking. I may feel this way but how are my kids going to appreciate gratitude if I don't do something to foster the spirit of giving thanks? So I decided to come up with this simple last minute place mat designed to give them a way to express their thanks on this special holiday.

You might notice that this resembles my gift to Jon I made a few years back. It's such a fun and simple idea I decided to apply it to the upcoming holiday. To make this I simply stitched together two sheets of brown packing paper. I then cut out a number of white paper flags in varying sizes. These were then straight stitched onto the mat.



And that's it! Give your guests some pens and let them express their thanks while you are finishing up those mashed potatoes and that pumpkin pie!

And you'll get a kick out of seeing what your kids come up with. Mario, among many other things, of course made the list for this little guy.  Love it.

And if you are looking for another last minute Thanksgiving craft, our turkey feather headbands are a great, easy craft to do as well!

Mario in the Middle: A 4-yr-old Birthday Party

October was a busy busy month for us. Not only did we have our third child, but Little O had his fourth birthday and of course there was Halloween. Because I knew this month would be just a little bit crazy I really wanted to make Little O's birthday both very simple and very special.

You see Little O has been thrown into the middle child slot...and he's feeling it. Because we've all been sick he's not been allowed to really interact with the baby much and is constantly being shooed away...and he's over it. I feel for the poor kid.

Which is why I'm glad that I stayed up until the crack of dawn to make this little Mario costume for Little O. And why I'm glad that I threw together this little birthday bash last minute. And why I'm seriously grateful for a gigantic polka-dot "mushroom" balloon that can transform an ordinary day into an extraordinary one.

We kept things simple by having the party at a local park complete with a playground (or "Mario Land") and a covered picnic area.

And we made things special by bringing simple white linens and dishes to dress things up a bit.

And of course we had to have chocolate mustaches. (Like my sister, I've never really gotten into the mustache craze -she has an entire pin board for ridiculous trends that are way overdone, it's pretty funny really- but I felt that this party was the perfect place for it. And I think even she might approve. I know Little O definitely did.)

We brought along some sodas in bottles (a huge treat for the boys as they typically don't get to drink soda in this way), threw together some star cookies (thanks Jon!!!) and bought a simple cake. We also put out some grapes, string cheese and crackers so it wasn't a total sugar fest.


And thanks to the dollar store we were able to outfit each goodie bag with a self-sticking mustache.

We chose the park for the easy already-something-for-the-kids-to-do-so-we-don't-have-to-plan-games aspect but ended up loving it for the the real life Super Mario game play aspect of it. I mean just look at that slide. Doesn't it just scream plumbing tube?


The kids had a great time and really interacted well together. I was so impressed with how they initiated their own game play. Sometimes I think we forget that you don't really need that much structure for a birthday party to go well. Just a decent area for kids to run and play in...and they'll come up with the rest!


And this little Pizano? He was in Super Mario heaven. And well...I'm not sure he's left it since.

Man I love this kid. Here's hoping he stays in this magical make-believe world of four forever.

A Little O Birthday Sneak Peek

We are all still a bit sick around here and so much is going on (including good stuff for Mer Mag and the blog!) so it's been a bit crazy trying to get up the posts I had planned for this week. One such post was a recap of this little man's 4th birthday party. Here's just sneak peak of our little O on his happy day. I bet you can guess what the theme was (and has been every day since!). We'll be sharing the entire reveal with you next week. (I know, you're starting to question me and my promises for Mer Mag posts. Guess you'll just have to check back in next week and see if I follow through!)

Hope your late fall is just as gorgeous as our is (just without all the sick bugs!).

xo
Mer

A Little Baty

I couldn't resist dressing up baby M this Halloween alongside her brothers. We decided that she also needed to be a creature of the night like her brothers so I made this simple "bat" costume (she was originally supposed to be a cat but I love hos this capelet looks like bat wings, so I had to go with that). I created the hood from the Oliver & S pattern and like the boys bunny hoods, I modified the ears. She of course slept the entire time her brothers were out trick-or-treating, but I'm happy we put together a costume of sorts none the less.

And now I'm off to see how I can help my east coast friends suffering from the aftermath of Sandy. My friend Mara shares a few ways we can pitch in and help out on her blog here. I'm still processing it all (as I'm sure everyone there is much much more) as I used to live in Red Hook where a lot of flooding occurred. Hope everyone stays safe and gets what they need.

I heart NYC.

Halloween 2012: The Happy Bat and The Moody Drac

Happy Halloween! These little creatures of the night just wanted to pop in and share with you their Halloween costumes before embarking upon a fun filled night of tricks and treats!



We have ourselves a fun and spunky little playful bat alongside a more somber and moody Dracula (and little girly bat whose costume we will be sharing with you tomorrow!).



Having lost his front two teeth, and consequently sporting his own set of natural fangs, A went traditional this year and chose to be Dracula. And then the theme just went from there. I just love how each of their personalities come out in these costumes. And can we just say this little Dracula is 6 going on 16? How is it possible he's growing so fast?



And wasn't this little bat just my baby?



Well with a new 1 month old baby in the house, we had to go simple this year. All I made was the vampire cloak, the bat hood and cape. Everything else was just a compilation of clothing we had already (except these most excellent vampire boots. I saw them and just had to get them).



And now to finish up baby M's little batty costume (she was going to be a cat but it ended up looking more like a bat, so we went with it) and get those little ones out and about the neighborhood.



Wishing you all a super fun, and slightly spooky, Halloween!!