Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Up, up and away!


If only these were real... I would love to take a ride in a hot air balloon. I am always fascinated by the pictures I see of a sky full of hot air balloons. Just go to Google and type in hot air balloon images and you will get more colour than you can imagine.

My kids have just gone back to school after having 2 weeks off for Spring Break. For the first week, they stayed home. And it rained. And rained. And then hailed, snowed and rained some more. We had little 20 or 30 minute pockets of no rain where I would shoo them outside for fresh air. But other than that, we were inside.

So, in order that we didn't just watch movie after movie (oh, don't get me wrong, there were plenty of movies that got viewed that first week!! But that's not ALL we did for the first week of Spring Break!) we did rainy day (week) activities. And the biggest project was our hot air balloons. On the first day, we did one layer of paper mache. The 2nd day, we did another layer. That 2nd night, after the balloons had spent all day drying by the vent, the kids got to pop their balloons and hear it peel away from the inside of the soon-t0-be hot air balloon. On the third day, we painted and decorated the balloons. For every step along the way, there were 4 of us at the table working. But for the last step, of adding jewels and a basket, etc, I had to work with the kids one on one. I put the embellishments on with a hot glue gun, so just one got to be there at a time.






Here are the finished hot air balloons. I love how they turned out, and now the kids will get to enjoy them in their bedrooms.





2 comments:

Cindy @ Creating at Home said...

What a fun Mom you are!!

Andy said...

great spring break project Sarah! i can't believe what crappy weather it was! We got brave and booked a camping trip for the last weekend of spring break. We lucked out and got GORGEOUS weather!