Christmas: 2012

This year my 5 year old was very eager to get a christmas tree and get started with the decorations. He wanted a tall tree and everyday he would give several reminders to my husband to bring home a tree.  So as always we got a tree.  This year both my kids did most of the decorating.  They seem to enjoy that part.   Here's our tree with all the decorations.

My son is in Kindergarten.  So at school they did a lot of christmas related projects.  They were very colorful and cute.  I decided to showcase them near our fireplace mantle.

My daughter made these cute snowmen using old socks and some cotton filler.  She learnt at school too.

She also made these string of christmas lights using glitter felt, that she saw in some kids magazine.

Here are some more christmas related decorations.  Santa was busy packing and delivering the gifts just in time.

Here's to a merry christmas!!!

Read more...

Christmas Cheer!!

Here are some reindeer I made for the Christmas decorations this year. I started with a template I downloaded and printed out in different color backgrounds. Then all I had to do was cut them, glue an eye, tie a jingle bell around the neck and finally punched a hole and tied a ribbon on top to hang from ceiling. Voila!!! You have this colorful Christmas decoration.

Trying to spread some Christmas cheer from my end!!! Makes me happy whenever I look at them. Smile on ....

Read more...

Easter Egg Hunt ....

My hunt for Easter eggs started on Saturday, April 3rd. We are lucky we have a Walgreens close to our home for procrastinators like me. I found these cute Easter baskets, some pastel colored plastic eggs and bite size candy all in one quick stop. It cannot get any easier than this. I filled the eggs with miniature Snickers and Hershey's candy and hid them in our backyard.

Fast forward to Sunday, and here you can see the results of my kids' Easter egg hunt.

Read more...

Happy Ugadi : 2010

Ugadi marks the first day of the Telugu New Year. This year it was on the 16th of March. Every year I try to at least make the ugadi pacchadi (chutney) which includes 5 different flavors. The 5 flavors include, sour, sweet, bitter, spicy and tangy. So we use raw mango for sour, Jaggery (bellam) for sweet, neem flowers for bitter, chili for spicy and tamarind for tangy. This year I managed to get all the ingredients except for the neem flowers, which I usually substitute with neem powder which is easily available in Indian grocery stores. But not this year. This year they sold out all their neem powder, can you believe that?!! I know. So I made mine with four flavors, instead of five.

Anyways the reason I was told we make this special chutney was it represents the different situations we face in real life. Like sweet is supposed to represent happiness, bitter for sadness, spicy for anger. I do not remember what sour and tangy represented. I shall try to find out.

So here's to another fabulous and fun year. Cheers!!!

Read more...

Christmas Wth A Change

This year there are two things that are different on our Christmas tree. One is the kind of lights that we used and the other is the ornaments.

This year we used the new LED lights which we purchased from Costco. These lights have quite a few advantages over the conventional lights. For one they use much less power, which is great. Secondly they are a parallel circuit and not a series circuit. That makes a big difference, because if one of the lights is broken, the rest still work, which is awesome. Also they are far more vibrant.




For ornaments this year we exclusively used shatterproof ones. I got mine from Target. I got the Blue/Silver combination and I absolutely loved the colors. The reason we wanted shatterproof ones was because we have a 2 year old toddler who is running around. This option made it a very safe choice.


Change is GOOD!!!

Read more...

Halloween, 2009

Every year we make sure we get at least a couple of pumpkins and I carve them. This year we got just one big one. As usual I procrastinate and I started carving this around 6:00 p.m. on Halloween. I wanted to be done before it got dark and children started coming for trick or treating. Luckily I finished in 15 minutes. Not bad eh? Not bad at all..... I used one of those pumpkin carving tools - serrated knife. It is so handy. The pumpkin looked pretty good. I ended up using one of those battery operated tea lights inside the pumpkin. That worked out great and is such a safe alternative to real tea light candles.

Also this year I ended up making a Halloween costume for my 2 year old son. I started out with a 20"x24" blue cardstock.

I cut two rectangles out as you can see. Next I printed out the word "CRAYON" in green and cut it out and glued it on one of the rectangles which becomes the front of the costume. Next I used a hole punch to punch out holes for the shoulder straps. I used green strings from an old gift bag for shoulder straps.

Then I cut out a semicircle and made the hat for crayon top by stapling the ends together. Again hole punched the sides of the hat for the ties. Yes I used the brown strings from another shopping bag.

It worked out perfectly. It hardly took any time and was so easy to make. My son looked so adorable in his costume and everybody seemed to love it. This costume can easily be changed to either different color or different words like "PENCIL" etc. It's very versatile and easy.

Read more...

Halloween : 2008

Read more...

Diwali, The Festival Of lights : 2008

Read more...