By His Grace Alone: Painting Extravaganza

What do you do if your "to do" list keeps growing and the days keep getting fewer?

Of course, you decide to decorate your own wrapping paper!!!! Why make it easy and buy Christmas wrapping paper?? I was kicking myself as I scrambled to wrap all our extended family presents in brown packing paper, because I knew that once I wrapped them I was not done. This year, I've cut back on making lots of Christmas presents for extended family and I am going through some crafting withdrawal. [I am sewing one special gift which I'll share on here after the intended recipient receives it. :)]

Thankfully, decorating the packages today with the boys turned out to be a really enjoyable activity (as long as I remembered that it was going to be messy no matter what!) I have to add that I rarely have my own creative ideas, but I love to borrow ideas from friends and from online. I got this idea from my friend Carla a couple years ago.

Here is what we did:

1) After wrapping the gifts in brown packing paper, I cut a potato in half. Then I drew a picture of a holly leaf and carved it out to make a stamp. We then used a paintbrush to cover the stamp in green.

2) Then I put Luke to work stamping the holly leaves in groups of two or three on the brown packages. Occasionally, I had to fill in the leaf if it didn't get covered adequately.

3) Then Ethan dipped the eraser end of a pencil into red paint and dabbed on some red berries.

4) Now we just need to add some raffia ribbon once it dries! I love how the boys did such a careful job.

Since we already had the paint out and a big mess made, we decided to let the painting continue and paint the salt dough ornaments we made yesterday at a home school Christmas party. Aaron stuck with it for a while painting 2 stars, a gingerbread man and a bell. (And as you see, he had fun spreading the red paint on his plate!) Then he played so cooperatively while we finished the rest. This was a gift!