[The Gratitude Project] Snow!

 Today I am thankful for snow!  Glorious snow! 

I swear it has been years since we've had enough snow in the yard to do some serious playing.  Snowmen are the best thing ever.  And I'm thankful for big brothers that make snowmen like this possible.

[The Gratitude Project] Helping Hands

 

What started out today as gratitude for the delightful birds in our backyard, turned in to so much more.  I've been wanting to make some bird feed garlands for the trees for a while now.  My daughter was playing with a friend this morning and things started to detereorate.  Her friend had to go home.  My daughter came to me in tears.  So I decided that this morning would be the perfect time to pull out this project.  We had a great time stringing all of these goodies for the birds.  We pulled some string from off the shelf and popped some popcorn.  We also found some dried fruit in the cupboard and some fresh cranberries.  Shell peanuts added that extra bit of bling to our garland. 

I love the birds in our yard.  But I love these little hands more than words can say.

Having a project that we could work on together helped dry the tears and quickly turned them into smiles and laughter.

Bike Basket

A tisket a tasket...we need a bike basket! 

My daughter has been wanting a basket for her bike ever since she learned how to ride a two-wheeler last summer.  I figured that since she inherited the "less than pristine" bike from her older sister without complaint, a new bike basket might just be the thing to spruce it up a bit.  The need for a basket has become especially evident based on the reoccurring daily event that goes something like this...

The mailman puts the mail in the mailbox.  My daughter sees the mailman out the front window and yells that she is going to get the mail.  Instead of walking out the side door and down the lane to the mailbox, she runs to the garage and hops on her bike.  She then pedals all the way from the garage around the front of the house, around the corner and into the cul-de-sac where our mailbox is located on the side of our house.  She balances precariously on her bike while she opens the mailbox.  On tippy toes, she grabs the mail out of the box.  Then she proceeds to drop a piece of mail.  Every time.  At this point she bends down to pick up the forsaken mail while straddling her bike.  She succeeds in picking up the fallen letter but in the process drops something else.  And it continues.  Eventually she drops the entire stack of mail.  Out of exasperation she abandons the bike, picks up all of the crumpled scruffy mail and walks it into the house.  All to repeat the process the very next day.

So.  Bike basket.  It's essential.  

 

I priced out the baskets at all the big super stores.  Expensive.  Ugly.  Covered in princesses.  Not what we were looking for.  So, I resorted to making my own.  I found a basket at Hobby Lobby and got to work.  The basket I chose was a flat wall basket.  You know, the kind that could hang on a wall or a door with a lovely arrangement of flowers inside of it?  A flat sided basket is just what you need when working around handlebars.  With a coupon, it cost under four dollars.  And guess what?  I totally forgot to take a picture before I began altering it.  Bad bad blogger!  I figured it couldn't be that hard to find a picture of a similar basket on the wide wide web.  Turns out that it is hard.  This was the only picture I could find. 

My basket was a natural wicker color and had a large handle kind of like the one above.  Sort of.  I looked closely at the handle and determined that it was not integral to the integrity of the basket.  It had been added later and the ends had just been woven in.  So, I took some cutters and cut that handle right off!  Then I pulled out any loose ends that were woven into the body of the basket.  After I removed the handle I gave it a good coat of primer and then I spray painted it white.  I liked the simplicity of the white basket, but my daughter was all about embellishing.  She chose pompoms.  She wanted hot pink.  I looked high and low for hot pink pompom trim to no avail.  Finally we decided to use a white pompom trim and some loose hot pink pompoms.  We hot glued the white trim on first along the rim of the basket and then added the pink pompoms on top.  Cute. 

We used some cable ties to attach the basket to the bike and covered them with some hot pink grosgrain ribbon.  She LOVES it. 

"Look Mom, no feet!"  And no shoes.  This might explain why we are going through socks so quickly. 

Tomorrow I might actually get my mail all in one tight little bundle.  We shall see.