Staycation Spring Break Craft

I will freely admit that I asked a friend to borrow her child for the week.

When you have an only, it’s a lot of pressure to perform 100% of the time. You become their best friend, caretaker, entertainer, and they become your shadow. It can be rather much when you have to do things like, work, for example. Rather than leave the Princess Cupcake in the aftercare program at school (where none of her besties are this week), I decided last minute that somehow I would juggle my job AND a Spring Break staycation with her. Well… her plus one of her buddies who’s mom also had to work.

Yesterday, we joined the record-breaking attendance crowd at the Dallas Zoo and had a fantastic day unplugged.

Today was another story. With 3 client phone calls scheduled, I had to be at my desk. In between calls, we took turns racing down the driveway on a plasma car and playing outside in yet another gorgeous Dallas day. During calls, I let them loose in the game slash craft room. Yep, dumped out a bunch of supplies and let them have at it with full faith that nothing would be glued permanently to the walls or forever colored chartreuse. Although during one rather lengthy call, I did find this fast craft video from my friend Holly Homer, showing how to make roses from paper plates. Here it is:

I showed it to the dynamic duo and they loved it. I got out my stash of miss-mashed leftover packages of paper plates and away they went. Keep in mind, they’re in Kindergarten so they needed a little bit of help, but not much. We opted to hot glue the petals to the base rather than staple them (The Cupcake is a master of the glue gun. Not really, but with supervision, she thinks she is…), and they wanted to add pipe cleaner stems and a fuzzy center to the flower with pom poms. The sparkly ones worked best.

Turned out super cute.

Actually, the Cupcake didn’t stop with two, she kept going even after my adopted second child for the week left.

The upside is that  I got rid of those last 3 reindeer paper plates — FINALLY.