At the beginning of the year, I encouraged our readers to “make with me“. In that post I shared a few of the many benefits that you may get from picking up a hobby, and I gave you a few simple suggestions for how to turn your hobby into a regular habit (that’s good for you!).
If you follow our Instagram feed or have been a long-time reader, it’s no surprise that my primary hobby is knitting. I always have a project (or ten) in the works. While I don’t need the encouragement to knit more, I’m taking this resolution as a nudge to share more of my projects, in their many phases, on the blog. And if you’d like to find me on Ravelry, my username is winterfoliage.
Want to see more hiking and camping posts? Click here. You can find all of our Colorado-based adventures here. And you can find all of our escapes within Rocky Mountain National Park here.
If you’ve been following along on Instagram, we spent a quick 36 hours in Rocky Mountain National Park last weekend. On Saturday we took an ambitious hike – click through to see more photos and details.
Happy Monday! I had originally planned on sharing my gear essentials for rainy days, but I realized it’s REI dividend season, which means 20% off one full-priced item and 20% off one REI garage sale item until April 9th! We aren’t sponsored or affiliated with REI in any way, but we do love supporting the store and using the great gear we buy there. With that in mind, I thought it was a good time to run through all my essential pieces of REI gear incase you were looking for something to spend that dividend on.
If you’re not one of REI’s 17 million members, you should seriously consider it. It’s a one time fee of $20 that will repay itself time and time again. Below are links to my favorite items and what I use them for. Of course, I own so many more items than this, but below are my ultimates, pieces I use pretty much every week and never leave home for an international trip without. Let’s start from the feet up..
Hey, hey! I recently completed a couple epic road trips and had the chance to finish a few audiobooks and podcasts. I’m not listing all the awesome audiobooks or podcasts here, but rather my top picks for the Best Audiobooks & Podcasts for Road Trips from my most recent romp. Sometimes I find lists of ‘best blah blah blah’ to be overwhelming, so I decided to keep it short. All of the following are winners, so without any more chitchat, here are my current favorites :
We are big fans of curating Easter baskets that are fun and educational. For example, last year the boys went bonkers for their bug-themed baskets.
This year we are deep into all things letters and numbers. Admittedly, these theme doesn’t sound that exciting, but as you’ll see below, there are a few basket-worthy items that would serve the dual purpose of being fun/enjoyable while being educational.
jenga-type game, but with numbered blocks! I know that the boys will love these for a variety of reasons. They just learned Jenga and will be excited to play. We can use the numbers and dice for a variation on the game – for example, deciding which block to remove by rolling the dice. The boys can also using the blocks to work on putting the numbers in order, doing simple math, etc.
alphabet & number magnets : I went with this pack because it had two sets of lower-case letters, one set of upper-case, and two sets of numbers. Plenty of material for spelling and doing math problems at the fridge.
7 ate 9 : a super cute mystery based on that groaner of a joke that cracks my kids up.
Today I feel… an Alphabet of Feelings : It’s the perfect 1-2 punch of going through the alphabet while putting words to the wide variety of emotions they may feel.
At the beginning of the year, I encouraged our readers to “make with me“. In that post I shared a few of the many benefits that you may get from picking up a hobby, and I gave you a few simple suggestions for how to turn your hobby into a regular habit (that’s good for you!).
If you follow our Instagram feed or have been a long-time reader, it’s no surprise that my primary hobby is knitting. I always have a project (or ten) in the works. While I don’t need the encouragement to knit more, I’m taking this resolution as a nudge to share more of my projects, in their many phases, on the blog. And if you’d like to find me on Ravelry, my username is winterfoliage.
Happy Monday! I’m about to take off on an eighteen hour road trip. I wanted to write a post about my favorite audiobooks and podcasts, but I realized, this trip is the perfect opportunity to listen to them all and then report back, so here are five tips on how to save money during a road trip instead. The route below is the drive I took that inspired the post, but scroll all the way down to see where I’m headed this time.
Hey there! In late spring, I went on a three-week road trip around the south-eastern United States. My companion and I hit up eight cities over the course of over 1,500 miles. I shared a few city guides already, but today I wanted to let you in on five easy ways to save a few bucks on your next road trip. There are plenty more ways to save, but here are the obvious and easy to get you started:
Want to know something neat? Each time you click through to Amazon from our website, we are kicked back a few cents from each purchase with no extra cost to you. If you ever feel like going wild on Amazon, click through from our site and you’ll be supporting us at the same time! Thanks, yo.
I have been interested in Taoism ever since I read The Tao of Pooh last year. That was my first introduction and I must say, I’m happy I read that before the tougher to decipher Tao Te Ching. I actually just finished The Tao of Pooh again in January and it was even quicker and easier to consume than I remembered. I highly recommend picking it up if you are feeling in a rut or if your life seems like it’s not panning out the way it should.
Have you ever used potato stamps before? The idea is super simple : carve a shape into the smooth side of a cut potato, dip it in paint, and print it on paper!
Today we created a simple project inspired by Swimmy, a book written and illustrated by Leo Lionni.
Swimmy & Lionni
Lionni is said to be the first children’s illustrator to use collage as his main medium. In this book, the illustrations are printed. And, on many of the pages, you can see that the same stamps are used over and over again, as in these examples with the fish.
Swimmy’s story is relatively simple. He stands out from his school of fish, but sadly one day they are all eaten (except him!). He ventures out into the ocean and sees many wonderful sites. Eventually he finds another school of fish, and this time he teaches his new family a way to work together and protect themselves.
If you’ve never read it before, we’ve included a video of the story above. But really, there’s nothing better than reading aloud to your kids, and it’s nice to have the book on hand to discuss the artwork and how to use a couple of stamps to make a complex image, so we suggest picking up a copy from your favorite bookstore or the library.
You’ll see that we focused our work on the pages of Swimmy and his school of fish. But there are many beautiful illustrations in the book that you could recreate (my other favorite is the seaweed printed using doilies).
Potato Stamp 411
I prefer keeping projects simple, because I often believe that that helps little kiddos create beautiful artwork without too many complications, confusing steps, or accidental blunders (like mixing all of the colors and just getting brown!). In an effort to keep this project simple, we used just two stamps and two colors, EXCEPT at the last moment when we added a black Swimmy to our pieces.
start the project by cutting out two stamps : a fish and a wave. This obviously requires an adult to use the knife.
set up two printing areas : I like to use a clean sponge with paint poured on top. You can pat the stamp onto the paint area to get a thin and even layer of paint on the stamp.
start stamping!
The nice thing about using Swimmy as inspiration for these projects is that the kiddos can stamp a school of fish going in any direction. As you can see in the original work, fish are swimming up, down, and all around.
And as you can see from our pile of work above, stamping takes a bit of practice. At first the boys wanted to stamp and slide the potatoes. Similar to how they would slide a paintbrush across the paper. It took a little bit of help and some practice to get them comfortable with stamping and lifting the stamp straight up.
This is a great project for making a book “come alive” for the kids. Imitating art found in books is a great way to expose kids to different techniques. It encourages them to start questioning how different pieces of art are made and gives them the tools to start making their own original pieces!
Being grateful for what isn’t is a simple mindfulness exercise I created to cultivate gratitude even in the shittiest situations. Sometimes it feels absolutely impossible to be grateful and that’s okay! I totally get it. That’s why, during those instances I choose to be grateful for what isn’t. Here is why it is important to be grateful for what isn’t:
How we focus our attention and how we intentionally direct the flow of energy and information through our neural circuits can directly alter the brain’s activity and its structure.
Even fleeting thoughts and feelings can leave lasting marks on your brain. Think of wax dripping down the side of a candle, each drip follows the path of the last one making the trails thicker and longer.
Each thought makes an impact, shift the flow of energy and emotion to create new pathways. If you’re continuing to feed into the negative you’re deepening those trails. If you’re shifting the thought process you’re working on building new pathways, new trails, new thought patterns.
We are building mindfulness by noticing the negative narration in our heads. We are giving ourselves the power to try to change the voiceover every single day.
Each time you decide to be Grateful For What Isn’t, you are shifting your brain’s ability to see situations as neutral or positive instead of negative.
Without going into too much neuroscience, neurons that fire together, wire together. Meaning by increasing the excitability of active neurons, you are strengthening existing synapses (connections) and building new ones while also weakening past neural networks that don’t serve you, i.e. constantly looking for negative outcomes. (Buy this book if you want to know more) – or shoot me an email and I’ll chat with you about the neuroscience I’m referencing for the basis of these exercises.
You probably get the hang of it, but here’s how to be grateful for what isn’t: You find yourself in a crappy situation.You can’t find anything to be grateful for so you decide to be grateful for what isn’t.
Example: Your flight is delayed by ten hours. Here are a list of grateful for what isn’t possibilities:
I am grateful I’m not traveling with kids.
I am grateful I don’t have health aliments to complicate things.
I am grateful I don’t have to catch another connecting flight at my next stop.
I am grateful my plane is delayed to be repaired instead of flying in disrepair.
If you’d like to take a listen, here’s a link to the meditation ‘Grateful for what isn’t. By adopting this mental exercise, we’ll begin to transform our mind. We’ll shift from seeing things as negative to neutral. We’ll flex those brain muscles intentionally until one day they take the initiative and start flexin’ for good on their own.
