Summer has been a busy but fantastic time. As it nears an end we’ve been trying to cram in as much as we can before the weather gets cold and the typical fall activities take over.
I love fall. It’s one of my favorite seasons. And every year it ends up jam packed with events. We’ve made a point of NOT planning anything for October in particular because it inevitably, and usually at the last minute, there are tons of things to see and do. This year, even with trying to keep things scaled back, we’ve still managed to fill every weekend between now and November.
As tired as I am I know that the warm days are disappearing, and we all want to make the most of the opportunites we have left. So we’ve been camping and canoeing quite a bit. It has left us with bug bites and a mudroom full of camping gear, sleeping bags, and swim suits strung all over. And though the mess is hard to deal with, the memories are worth all of it.
We have one, maybe two, more camping trips planned with friends in late September and mid-October. Towhead has been a busy little girl, and she seems to love camping, especially when there are toads involved!
As fall approaches though, I’m beginning to check out my favorite craft sites for things we can do on weekends and rainy days when playing on the swing set is not longer an option in the evenings. I’ve been a fan of The Crafty Crow for awhile. There are so many project ideas! When my imagination is running thin (which it frequently does) I have a never ending source of ideas. And I love how the whole thing is themed – one of my favorite was all the projects you can do with toilet paper rolls. In the interests of reducing, reusing and recycling we keep all our rolls and quite a few boxes (cereal, cracker, etc). But after awhile they pile up!
Here’s one of the projects inspired by a listing on the site that now decorates the walls of CT’s room. It involves taking her paintings and showcasing them by creating stencils that we then arranged and framed. The original idea uses only one animal per frame, but CT had so many animals she wanted to create that we decided to group them by theme – earth, sea, and sky.
And here’s a robot we made from all those saved boxes. Another idea inspired by the Crafty Crow that was a lots of fun on a rainy summer day.
More than anything though I think the idea of a collective like this one creates a sense of community of imaginative ideas – something I support whole-heartedly. It has been the best source I have found thus far and I can never thank Lynnie at Way Up High in the Monkey Bread Tree for turning me onto it. I mention this primarily because The Crafty Crow is having a giveaway for fall kids’ clothes that is well worth checking out. I also have my eye on a project we may try out as a potential Christmas gift – if you like the Recycled Paper Beads you see here let me know and I’ll put you on our list! 
5 September 2009 at 2:15 am
How did she get that toad to stay on its back like that????? Cool! Incidentally, someone just showed us how to do that with sheep, but I didn’t have good results trying to reproduce their results.
8 September 2009 at 7:42 am
You very deliberately turn them over and then stroke their belly right down the middle. We saw another western toad just like it when we were at the same lake last weekend, and we were able to do the same thing again (except it peed all over us when we did! eeww!). They’re fairly calm, so it may just be that type of toad is just mellow by nature.