April 2013
1 post
I
I do love trains so I was thrilled to receive an email from another AMS parent about this Athens secret (at least secret to me).
Lake Town & Shire Railroad (http://www.laketownandshire.net) is in the garden of a friendly couple on the eastside. Once a month, they open up their garden to eager kids and grown ups who want a chance to run the LotR themed trains through the garden.
We...
January 2013
1 post
Math + Play part 2
I am excited to announce another Math + Play Workshop this month. This one is a bit different from the past workshop. This is more focused on 3 - 5 year olds and it has an interactive component.
First, I’ll work with the parents talking about how to make the play your child is already doing “math-ier”. (Expect more technical terms like that one.) I’ll discuss...
December 2012
1 post
Math + Play
I am so excited to be leading a workshop on Math + Play this week at Treehouse. Before I forget, here are the details.
December 12, 7:00 - 8:30 Treehouse Kid + Craft on Broad St. We’ll provide some wine with your workshop. $15 register via their website
The gist of the workshop is this: I...
November 2012
1 post
I love Treehouse (in a whole new way)
If you’ve read even the tiniest bit of this blog, you know I love Treehouse. Let me tell you about something that made me fall in love even more.
Bonus love: How amazing is this picture? I grabbed it from their online store site, a visual and shopping delight designed by Hope Hilton.
When I first started thinking about The Candyland Project, I thought it would be great if we could...
October 2012
4 posts
I love flowers, feathers, kids, colors, and smart...
I love math, games, kids, and easy answers. And...
Two weeks ago on Facebook, I alluded to a brilliant idea I had. It seemed brilliant to me because it was easy. None of my ideas are ever easy. This one is. So easy, in fact, that with less than two weeks between the lightbulb going off and now, we’re off and running. Here are the details.
...
Project: Candyland - Paypal Donation Link
I love a changing mantel.
I used to have my standard mantel decorations that sat unchanged throughout the year. Then I began switching out all of it at Christmastime, then a couple of years later I started doing Halloween mantels…and then I began changing them every few months. It appeals to my love of decorating without doing a major overhaul (like the room switch I’m still recovering from).
Here’s a...
September 2012
1 post
Daisy's New Room. I love it.
As soon as I found out our first baby was going to be a girl, I was in a hurry to name her. I had a few different ideas about room color schemes in mind, but each was tied to a name. Gigi (Giselle Gerow) would have had an orange and pink room if Dave hadn’t choked when I suggested the name. Poppy Gerow, naturally, would have had red if Dave hadn’t seen way to many Seinfeld episodes,...
August 2012
1 post
Treehouse Give Away!
If you’ve read anything on this blog, you know of my love for Treehouse. Now there’s a giveaway…$50 gift certificate from Cakies. Enter here. http://mycakies.com/2012/08/sponsor-welcome-68/
PS
Doesn’t all of Hope’s web design look just lovely?
July 2012
1 post
I love...um, ice?
I tried to say I love summer, but I don’t. I flat out hate it. This summer of record heat has brought short tempers with the longer days - not a good combo. Cool activities are needed, but there’s only so much inside time one can handle in a day.
Cue the ice brick. I’m sure I saw this on pinterest or some blog I frequented pre-pinterest, but it’s been in the back of my...
June 2012
3 posts
I love fairy camp.
This is my second year doing fairy camp at Treehouse. I love meeting these cool little girls who are just excited to make things. Pretty things. Colorful things. Woodsy things.
We make a lot during fairy week. We started off making fairies, of course.
Each day the girls set up fairy land. I collect cool looking logs, stumps, and such. I also have a huge box of tree blocks I’ve made...
I heart Normal Variety. Really really heart them.
Have you been to Normal Variety yet? They had my heart at the protractor in the logo.
If that doesn’t capture your heart, just step inside. It’s chock full of beautiful things. A lovely mix of handmade, vintage, and just plain cool.
Kusodama ball and train flattened pendants.
All purpose spray in lovely glass spray bottles. You can bring back the empty bottle for a thrifty...
May 2012
1 post
I love a good funeral {and a preacher poet}.
Today we bid farewell to Stellaluna and Thunderlightning, two baby finches. They had only been with us for four days, but since they had hatched in Daisy’s classroom, she technically had known them a lot longer. Sadly, the little birds didn’t make it on their own.
I had to break it to Daisy after school today that Thunderlightning had died. At the time, Stellaluna was still here. She...
April 2012
3 posts
I love boxes. (And come see me at Treehouse...
I love boxes. I do. What’s better than a box? It can be anything you want it to be.
It can be Blackbeard’s pirate ship. The Queen Anne’s Revenge had a pink plank, right?
A box can turn into an entire arcade, complete with security PIN pads to verify fun pass validity. (And if you didn’t catch that reference, stop whatever you’re doing and go watch Caine’s...
I heart Silk Tie Dyeing
It speaks to the beauty of these eggs that my little porous brain can still picture them thirteen years later. My friend Kendra had brought in the most beautiful eggs to decorate Bissetts bar for Easter. They had pattern and swirls and vivid color. She had dyed them with silk ties. Every Easter since then, I’ve thought about doing it but never followed through until now.
It seemed like...
February 2012
2 posts
I heart water beads.
Oh me oh my, do I love them. Enough to drag my little fingers back to the keyboard to write about them on my long neglected blog.
Water beads… I’d seen them in floral sections of stores before and thought they were, well, just not for me. I couldn’t see using them in a vase. It seems like it would distract from the flowers.
But who needs a vase…or flowers. These things...
November 2011
1 post
1 tag
I heart washi tape.
Have you ever had some item that is meant to be used, but you love it so much you end up hoarding it because nothing is special enough to use it on? For me, washi tape is that item. I finally told myself that I wasn’t allowed buy anymore until I started actually using what I have. That cured me of hoarding it like gold bullion. (Yes, I have a stash of gold bullion as well.)
Washi tape is...
October 2011
1 post
September 2011
2 posts
So much love for Yellow River Game Ranch.
I love that as soon as you walk out the door at Yellow River Game Ranch, you are met by deer. Deer with ears like this. Elegant eared, skinny legged, ready to gobble peanuts from a baby’s hand, deer.
It makes you want to run around with sparkly shoes and feathers in each hand.
And when a chicken ducks out of a shot, you end up with a lovely surprise photo like this.
Feeding...
August 2011
6 posts
A toy lending library! Amo, amo, amo.
One of my first blog posts was about the INK Museum in Gainesville. Well, my love for that place has only grown since January. Thanks to Julianna, I found out about the coolest thing ever - they have a toy lending library. For $20 a year, you can check out up to 6 toys at a time. You don’t have to be a museum member to take advantage of this. And the toys, oh the toys…Wooden barns,...
I love potions (and the other million fabulous...
Between pinterest, Facebook, and a zillion play-based blogs, I feel like I have enough ideas zooming through my head to carry me through the next hundred years with kids. The thing is, most of the best ones involve a decent amount of time to gather and set up materials. Not so with potions.
Daisy - and now Clementine - love water play. Daisy could sit at the sink for hours pouring water from...
I love Fashion Camp!
Really, I love Treehouse Kid + Craft. To the nth degree. Everytime I think about doing an I Heart Treehouse post, I remember the next cool thing they’ve got coming and think, I should wait until after that happens. But something cool is always around the corner, so I’m just going to have to post about them individually.
Daisy got to go to Fashion Camp last week. Earlier in the summer, I had...
I'm pretty sure I love this cake.
I don’t usually like fruit in cakes. I’ve just come around to fruit in pies being a good thing. But I named my daughter Clementine, and with her first birthday coming up, I figured I owed it to ourselves to try out a clementine cake.
I was pulled in by this Nigella Lawson recipe because it was so bizarro. You boil clementines for two hours and then grind them up whole - skins, pith,...
I love our coffee table.
Really I’m just proud of myself for the work we did on this. With Clementine learning to crawl, we needed a coffee table that did not have eye-gougingly pointy corners. While debating whether or not we should apply the ugly foamy corners to our ikea coffee, a table leg crumpled. That answered that. After scouring Craigslist, I found this:
A very scratched up Pottery Barn activity table....
July 2011
1 post
I looooove FOLK ART camp. →
I’ve had a draft of a blog post about the joys of Folk Art Camp sitting in limbo for a week now. Turns out that if I wait long enough, Kristen Bach will write it for me. Yay!
treehousekidandcraft:
“we’re all folks, we’re all artists…..i guess that makes us folk artists”
folk art 2011
Last week’s camp was great, let me tell you! The kids learned about local and regional folk artists...
June 2011
3 posts
I love swappin'.
I am now totally hooked on swapping. I’ve been involved in three swaps over the past few months - each one different, each one fabulous.
The first was a spring time swap. The deal was that we had to make something by hand, preferably of natural materials, for a spring nature table. I’m sure it was no surprise that I made fairies.
We met at The Natural Baby Store and swapped our...
I Love Camp!
It’s almost time for me to teach another camp at the fabulous Treehouse Kid + Craft. This time around it’s Folk Art Camp. For tots! Wee children doing folk art - does it get better? {There’s also an older kid Folk Art Camp if enough kids are interested.}
I love the idea that folk art is made by people who have not been trained in art. What a great thing to emphasize for young...
May 2011
5 posts
I love the reset button.
You know those days that have you googling things like “could my 3 year old be bipolar”? (By the way, the answer invariably is, No, she’s a three year old.) That was yesterday. Clementine had had a great day until she was woken up yet again by the screams of a heartbroken three year old. So there we were at bedtime with two wide awake kids, one crying, one trying desperately to...
I Love a Perfect Day for a Hike
It wasn’t exactly the perfect day for a hike. It was 94 degrees after all. But I had Daisy all to myself, and she was excited about going to the nature center, and that made it the perfect day. First, though, we had to de-glam.
Put the boots back on…
…and go.
Daisy and I enjoyed a fabulous little afternoon together. We checked out a backpack from Sandy Creek Nature...
April 2011
8 posts
Spatial Fun
My doctoral work - if I actually do go back - is on the impact of spatial ability on math achievement. Wait, don’t go yet. There’s a toy involved. A really cool toy!
The first time I went in to Treehouse Kid + Craft I was blown away by this toy. Not only was it beautiful, it emphasized spatial awareness in an appeals-to-girls kind of way. Daisy loves forest animals. With this she...
1 tag
1 tag
SPEED BUMPS
I love ideas that are so obvious you wonder how they escaped you. I also love a tip-sans-guilt about kids and TV. I’m too susceptible to feeling guilty about Daisy and her screentime.
I read about TV Speed Bumps at Childhood 101. Speed bumps are something engaging put in the path between child and TV. Our routine is for Daisy to watch TV as she wakes up. In the early days of Clementine,...
March 2011
10 posts
