book

Book ClubZ | Intro

INTRODUCTION

I’m excited about this new blog series! Reading is another favorite thing of mine and I love it when I can share that love with my family and/or friends. Each month, I’ll choose a book to read, then I’ll plan out a fun night for my family/friends, and then share that night with all of you! I hope that you will be able to use the ideas to have a great night with your book clubs!

Each month will include:

a book review with questions
themed dinner or treat ideas
themed activity ideas
some new products, inspired by the book

So this blog series will be on the 4th Saturdays of each month – starting in January! I hope you will join me in this new adventure filled with books and fun!

What do you think?

Join me in January for the book: Mary Poppins
and feel free to send in your ideas for what we should read next!

Ideas for a great book club night!

Fourth Saturdays

Monday Magic | Kid, You’ll Move Mountains Initiative

Every Christmas season, I like to find a service project that my family can participate in. Usually, its something small and crafty-oriented. But this year, I have something else in mind.

My nephew, William has been in the N.I.C.U. for over 2 months (we are hoping he gets to come home before Thanksgiving) and during my daily visits with him, I have been reading Dr. Seuss books to him. The book, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” has been especially poignant, as Will has had a bit of a hard time, but he’s a fighter. As we edge closer, to healing and getting him home, I have thought about this book many times and what an inspiration it is and I have came up with an idea that I just love. I have decided to purchase the book and get all the doctors and nurses that have worked with William to sign it (and add personal messages) and then when he gets to go home, the book will go home with him.

And then I got to thinking how amazing it would be if every NICU baby could take this book home with them. What a treasure it would be for the parents to have to remember all the doctors and nurses that were a part of the journey! What a treasure for the doctors/nurses to have a chance to say goodbye and share their experience! And what a treasure for the children to have as they grow up and see how special they are!So that’s what I want to do this year. I would like to start this initiative to buy as many of these books as I can to donate them to the Utah Valley Hospital N.I.C.U. in December! If it goes well, I’d love to keep this initiative going to help provide books for as long as I can. I feel that this is something that could make the N.I.C.U. a little better for all of the families that have to experience time there and just provide something extra special for them all.

Will you help me? I am using YouCaring.com to host this fundraiser and I would LOVE it if you could check it out and make a donation to help me with this project. I need help sharing it too, so if you would like to social media it up, that would be amazing! Thank you so very much for making this possible!

www.youcaring.com/movemountainsinitiative

I’m still working on finding the best place to purchase these books in bulk and will continue to research this out and do all that I can to make this succeed! If you have ideas or places I could look into, please let me know! Thank you!

Just a little magic to help start your week off right!
Fun ideas, inspiration, tutorials, or whatever I feel like!

Mondays

Jolly Holiday Surprise Adventure | The Surprise – Part 1

THE SURPRISE – Part 1

December 6, 2014

** I have been so excited about this trip that of course I had been packed for weeks. But the night before the trip, we attended my niece’s birthday party and then came home and had the kids go to bed early! And then final preparations were made by Joey and I, including getting the bags in the car and the “treasures” hidden and such. We were so excited that I don’t think we really got any sleep! Let the Adventure begin…

We woke the kids up at 6:00 am with a “Merry Christmas!” They were so confused but we told them to go get in the shower and get dressed. They were not too enthused about getting up so early on a Saturday morning. They got ready and sleepily arrived in the living room to this:

That actually woke them up pretty good! Presents under the tree! But we had them eat some breakfast, before we got started.

Every year it has been our December tradition to have a daily activity. For years we have used an advent calendar that I created out of a over-the-door shoe organizer. (It has 24 slots, perfect for our daily activities to go in the pockets). But this year, I got a great Black Friday deal at Deseret Book and purchased a new Shadowbox Advent Calendar that I have been eyeing for a couple of years:

So we had the kids sit down on the couch and we pulled out the note that was in the “6” Box. Our note said: “Grimoires of Grand Adventure” (Joey had been giving the kids some vocabulary words in the previous week, so they would understand some of our messages.)

We then instructed the kids to take the gifts out from under the tree and untie the bow. We made sure that they wouldn’t uncover the brown paper over the cover of the storybooks. I decided that I wanted to film each time we read a part of the books, so I filmed while Joey read to the kids and they followed along. Joey and I were both pretty emotional as we were actually starting off on this grand adventure that we had been planning for so long. The second page of the book instructed the kids to go on a treasure hunt.

Our video of the reading of this first part of our Storybook:

JJ and Beth excitingly took their books (which had pictures of where the treasures were) and headed out.

The kids gathered wrapped gifts, gold coins, and slips of paper with messages on them. They were having a great time collecting everything and when they got to the end of the hunt, they piled all of their treasures into the living room. Joey and I happily watched them as they opened the gifts of games, coloring books, activity books, crayons, treats, and more.

We then had them take the slips of paper to the table and try and put them in the right order. After a little while (and some help), they were able to do it:

Then we read the final page of Part 1 in the Storybook:

After reading the page, it took a bit of prompting to help the kids figure out what they needed to do. In the treasure hunt, one of the wrapped gifts included a special decoder that Joey had one of his friends make. (Joey had 4 made so we all have one so we can send each other coded messages and stuff. It’s so awesome!) To figure out how to use the decoder the kids had to use the message on the slips of paper above. The answer was 13. So they had to set their decoder to the number 13 and then they could decipher the message on the left side of the page.

Once they found the cipher they went right to work decoding the message!

And the message turned out to be:

Take the things you found and get in the car.

So we helped the kids get all their stuff into their backpacks and we put on our coats….

The Adventure Continues in another post…

jollyholidayheader I’m so excited to share my family’s magical Christmas adventure of 2014 with you!
To see all the postings in this series go HERE.

Jolly Holiday Surprise Adventure | The Storybook

THE STORYBOOK

So one of the fun things that Joey and I planned for our kids, is a special storybook. We decided we wanted to put together a storybook that little by little revealed the surprise trip for our kids! I have LOVED doing this project with Joey. He wrote the story and I illustrated the book – it was so fun doing this together! We just picked up the books today and I’m so excited with how they turned out!

So we will be waking the kids up early on Friday, December 6th and saying MERRY CHRISTMAS and have them open up the books. Each part of the book (3 parts), will be sealed so that they can only read the pages when we want them to read them. As they read each page of the story, they will be going on an adventure and doing what the pages say. The adventure will take us all the way to California and on the shuttle (on the way to the hotel), the last page will reveal that we are going to Disneyland!

**We will be covering the front and back with kraft paper, so the kids won’t see the cover until later, or it will totally spoil the surprise. 🙂

I’m excited to share this storybook with you! I’d love to hear what you think about it!

After reading this page, the kids will use the image to go on a scavenger hunt.
They will search all the places in the image and will discover “treasure.”
The treasure is things to take on the trip like activity books, crayons, snacks, etc

In the Scavenger Hunt, one of the things that the kids will find is a cipher that will help them decode this message that tells them basically to get in the car, we are going on an adventure.

Note: We call our van, “Appa,” from the show “Avatar: The Last Airbender”

The “Day” Pages are so the kids can write down a few of their favorite moments of each day we are there!

To our children; may your every Adventure be as grand as this one we take together;

and, most of all, to my Queen – thank you for the magic you bring to every joy of day of our lives.

Art and Design by Queen DeDe

Words by King Joey

What do you think? I’m so proud of this little book and I can’t wait for the kids to see it!

We got them printed from PaperKiwi and we are really impressed with the quality – plus we got them for 50% off which is just awesome!

jollyholidayheader I’m so excited to share my family’s magical Christmas adventure of 2014 with you!
To see all the postings in this series go HERE.

Family History TuesdayZ | Favorite Character

Journal prompt: Describe your favorite character

Each Tuesday, I am going to be offering prompts or ideas. If you don’t write in your journal regularly – I am going to encourage you to write just ONCE A WEEK and answer the question/idea that I give on Tuesdays. These ideas hopefully will spark a memory and you will be able to capture that in what you write/record so that it can be left for your children/grandchildren/family/friends. Give as much detail as you can when answering.

Will you do this for me? Will you do this for your families? You can write it down in a journal, you can type it up on a computer or journaling software, you can take a recorder and talk, you can videotape your answers, you can even scrap a page with the journaling. It doesn’t matter how you do this – it’s just important that you do it. The memories, the dates, the information is the only real thing we can leave to our families when we are gone.

Family History TuesdayZ | Favorite Book

Journal Prompt: Write about your very favorite book.