: Life is hard. God is good. We need each other.
Cinnamon smells like Christmas to me. I first came across this fun and easy craft when I was teaching second grade years ago. I made the dough with my class, and they each brought home an ornament as a gift for their parents. For weeks, while the ornaments dried, our classroom smelled heavenly!
The best part, in my opinion, is that these ornaments maintain their smell for years. Years, I say!
And they are so easy to make! Just two required ingredients…cinnamon and applesauce.
I always have Mason jars around the house. Besides using them for canning, we use the half pint ones for juice glasses, the pint size for storing things like homemade caramel sauce and hot fudge, and all the way up to my beloved half gallon jars.
I haven’t done a lot of crafts with Mason jars, mainly because I need them to actually use. But when these shiny, painted jars caught my eye– I knew I could find a use for them as well. Win – Win.
I promised last week when I wrote about what you need for your homeschool room that I’d share this craft with you. We made them our very first day of homeschool ever. My boys were entering 6th and 4th grades when we started homeschooling. I wanted for our first day of school to be special and fun. We planned to go out to lunch with dad and get ice cream. And I wanted to do some fun activities at home, too, something to remember our first day by.
One of the selling points of homeschool was that the boys could do their work anywhere… in their bedroom, in the treehouse, on the couch. In order to make that easier, we made these easy lap desks with cushions so they’d always have a surface to write on. As an added bonus, the lap desk surface is a whiteboard.
Does your family sit around the dinner table and talk about what you’ve read or heard throughout the day? Just us? We frequently find ourselves discussing something that came across one of our social media feeds that day, whether a news bit or something funny.
Here’s what I’ve been reading:
Part of what The Sparrow’s Home was created for was to share resources, information, and inspiration. I thought it might be beneficial to further that conversation by sharing some things occasionally that I’ve been perusing.
I hope you check out some of these links. And I’d love it if you commented and let me know what you think of them. They range from household tips that I’m learning, to lifestyle tips, family, and spiritual growth.
Do you use castile soap?
I have found it to be a fantastic addition to my cleaning closet, and a real money saver, too.
Dr. Bronner’s Liquid Castile Soaps seem to be the most readily available brand, and it’s what I buy. Let me tell you a little about what it is first, then we’ll get in to how to use it.