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For a while now I’ve been scouring the internets looking for crafts to do with my two year old, but for one reason or another they almost all seemed to be too advanced for her development or else she just didn’t like it. Recently she’s had a bit of a growth spurt, not only has she gotten bigger, but she’s also moved past some of the quirks that stopped us from playing with certain things (play dough for example).

With the door to the crafting world open slightly wider we’ve started experimenting with some crafts, just in time for Christmas! These ornaments were something that Erin was able to help with during nearly all of the steps and she really seemed to enjoy it.

Gingerbread Salt Dough Ornaments
2 cups plain flour
1 cup salt
1/4 – 1 cup warm water
Cinnamon, allspice, ginger and nutmeg (as much as required to make a nice gingerbread smell)

Whole cloves (for buttons)
Gingerbread man cutter
Straw

1. Add all dry ingredients (except the cloves) together in a bowl making sure they’re well mixed together so that the copious amounts of spices are evenly spread through the flour and salt.
2. Add the water a little at a time, mixing it with the dry ingredients as you go.
3. Knead in the bowl until the mixture has come together until it forms a heavy dough.
4. Roll the dough out until it’s about a centimetre thick and then use the cutter to make your shapes.
5. Add two cloves to each man for shirt buttons and then use the straw to poke a hole for ribbon at the top of his head.
6. Lay them out on a tray and bake at 100C for about two hours.
7. Allow to cool and then thread some ribbon through the hole.

The gingerbread men will come out as a beige kind of colour, if you’d prefer to them to a darker shade of brown at a drop of red and a drop of green food colouring to the mix.

I don’t know how long these ornaments will last, but I don’t expect to be able to use them again next year. You could seal with varnish, but that would defeat the purpose of the spices in the dough. I’d love to see the results of your gingerbread salt dough projects!

I secretly fear that one day I’ll appear on an Oprah special about women who are such prolific hoarders that they can’t even sleep in their own bed for the junk.

As hard as I try my table still piles up with things (Just ask Lady Squiggle). Worse than that, most of it are things I just don’t seem to be able to part with, so I box it up and move it into the garage. There it sits and it sits, gathering dust, it’s occasionally rummaged through but most of it, most of it just lives in there. So why can’t I get rid of it?

Growing up poor does things to you, I think. When you don’t have much you hang on to the things you do have because, and let’s face it, you really don’t know when you’re going to need 47 egg cartons do you? What if you got rid of them and suddenly found you needed to insulate your own roof for the summer because your landlord was too cheap to spend the extra? Wouldn’t you feel stupid then?

The first step in my Making Christmas plan is to declutter…a bit. Each day, for the next seven I plan to attack my clutter zones using what I’ve learned from the Fly Lady program (but didn’t employ). Attack each clutter zone in 15 minute blocks before moving on to the next. If you never hear from me again you can safely assume that I’ve either, falling into a pile of junk and couldn’t get out or gone crazy from the effort.

How are the rest of you going on making your own Christmas?

Since Erin turned two corrected (even though we don’t correct now that she is two) we’ve been waiting for her Developmental Assessment Programme (DAP) appointment. This week if finally came.

Along with a questionnaire containing the questions you’d except about Erin’s development was a “Parent Interview” form which asked questions such as “Maternal Caregivers Ethnicity” though they didn’t about the paternal caregiver. It goes on to ask about marital status and highest level of education.

At first I was a little taken-a-back about those questions. In fact, I considered not answering them at all, but then I got to thinking, does someone’s ethnicity, marital status or level of education affect their child’s development?

This year, Christmas is at our house again. This has many advantages for us, for instance not having to rely on being picked up and dropped home, or worse, public transport on Christmas Day! But it also has a few downsides, the biggest is that Mother-In-Law is coming. She wasn’t invited and she didn’t ask. One day she just announced that “when she comes up for Christmas…”

Some of the other downsides are a little more controllable. Or they would be if I was a better house keeper and actually partook in the art of clean any more than sporadically. But, organizing for Christmas isn’t one of my super powers. That said, despite my tragic lack of planning skills last year, Christmas turned out pretty well. No one got food poisoning and Erin was happy. That counts as “pretty well”, right?

In an attempt to control the uncontrollable, this year I’ve decided to start a new series on my blog and invite you to join in. Over the next nearly two months I plan to post a series of “Making Christmas” style posts and would love for you to do the same. Tell us how you get ready for Christmas and don’t forget the pictures!

(Feel free to grab the 125×125 button below!)