Scratch Art Craft

A few weeks ago I saw a time-lapse video tutorial for these 'Scratch Art cards'

They looked really quick and easy to put together, so I thought we'd give them a try.

I think I was also just curious to see if it really worked as well as they say.

I was surprised that it did end up working pretty well!

This does take a little bit of prep work, so you can make these ahead of time for your little ones to scratch off the black part, or let them be apart of the whole process.

Making a House a Home

About a week or so ago I was inspired by Compass, a technologically savvy real estate company based in NYC, from a new project they began entitled Starter Stories. 

The project is about bloggers sharing stories where they are/were starting out in a home, apartment, wherever, and how to make that place your own.

I wanted to participate, but didn't know where I would start or what I would share. I had lots of ideas floating around that were how-to's and DIY's, but one project from our past stuck out in my mind.

Since being married, my husband and I have moved 7 times so far.

Each place we have been in we have tried to make 'our own', but we weren't at most of those places long enough to do too much.

I'm so glad this project got me thinking though, because I started looking through old pictures and it brought back so many wonderful memories of our first home.

Here is a picture of our home on the left during building, and on the right was 5 years later when we put it up for sale.

We accomplished so many things in this home, and really made it our own, but one of our biggest accomplishments was this built-in entertainment center.

My husband and I had been married for about 9 months when we found this new community being developed.

DIY Captain America Shield

My son has become OBSESSED with superheros!  It's kind of sad, he went from toddler to BOY overnight.  

I'm still adjusting.  

Something fun that has come from this new obsession is we now get to play superheros, A LOT.  We switch back and forth between them, usually playing Thor, Iron Man, Captain America and Hulk.    

In order to play we've come up with different things we use.  My son got a little hammer/screwdriver toy set, maybe 2 years ago, so we use the hammer as Thor's hammer.  For Hulk he just runs around and 'Hulk smashes' things :), and for Iron Man he pretends to shoot 'blue lasers' (is what he calls them).  We had a birthday party to go to a couple of weeks ago, so I took my son to the toy section at Wal-mart.  

 He wanted to buy EVERYTHING!  Afterwards the one thing he kept talking about was this Captain America shield he had seen, and how badly he wanted it.  It was like $15, and it was just basically a frisbee with a little hand strap, so it gave me an idea!

We were out of milk, so I made a trip to Costco, (I could have gone to Wal-mart, but I knew if I went to Costco the milk would come in this box, and it is the perfect size).

We first cut out a circle...