The Photographer's Wife Parenting, Disney, Travel, Reviews & Other Randomness

With Earth Day coming up soon on April 22nd, P&G has partnered with SheSpeaks bloggers for the Conserve-It-All program to help spread the word about the Everyday Effect. What is the Everyday Effect?

About P&G Everyday Effect

Many people think their everyday actions are ordinary, and that the things they do every day can’t make a difference to help the environment. P&G believes the most effective changes don’t necessarily start with grand acts and can start much closer to home, by changing the way we think about things like waste.

Seemingly ordinary actions – like washing your laundry in lower temperatures, doing the dishes with concentrated products or changing a diaper that uses thinner materials – can be a surprising help to the world we share… allowing us all to reduce waste.

Basically, we might not always be able to take BIG actions when it comes to helping the environment, but we can do small thing everyday that will add up over time to make a big effect. P&G challenges us to take a family approach and teach our kids the importance of everyday changes so that they too can help reduce waste and help the environment.

Trent may be a little too young to understand how our changes effect the environment, but that doesn’t mean he can’t participate. In fact, he’s the reason I came up with this little project!

You see, I drink coffee and LOVE my French Vanilla Creamer. Most days, I only have 1 cup of coffee, but I go through a 32 oz bottle of creamer each week (Momma likes her creamer!). Even though I already recycle these, I was determined to think of a good way to reuse them, perhaps making them into some sort of toy for Trent.

I decided to make 1 large empty creamer bottle into a rattle/shake toy using colorful bead necklaces.

First, I removed the label and cleaned out the bottle really well using hot water and soap. Then I opened up the bottle and simply put in several colorful bead necklaces we had from the parade last weekend. Then, I closed the bottle and that’s it. If you worry that your little one will open the container, you could super glue the lid shut.

You could also use marbles, craft pebbles, beads, buttons…anything that will make noise when being shaken. Not bad for a quick, free toy. It’s fun and colorful and make lots of noise when he shakes it!

I am happy that I was able to reuse one of the many containers I go through for something fun for Trent and now I want to try to find more ways to reuse items I would have normally recycled or trashed without giving it a second thought.

Have you made toys out of other non-toy items? I know boxes are a major hit with kids too!

Learn more about P&G:

Website:  http://www.pgeveryday.com
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/proctergamble
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/ProcterGamble 

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment below, share it or…

Subscribe by email | Like us on Facebook | Follow us on Pinterest | Subscribe on YouTube

This is a sponsored post for SheSpeaks/P&G. All opinions are my own and 100% honest.

With Easter being a little early this year, I busted out some of the Easter decorations (actually, I only have 3 items…kinda sad, but I’m working on it!). I feel like I’m completely skipping St. Patrick’s Day.

I also wanted to share how I made my favorite Easter item last year…an Easter Egg Wreath!

I ventured to Hobby Lobby with my 40% off coupon in hand and picked up the required items:

Styrofoam ring

Bags of pastel Easter eggs

Wired ribbon

Approximate total spent: $12

With glue gun in hand, I just started to glue each egg on individually. I made sure they were closed all of the way and then put a small line of glue down the center of the egg, making sure to cover both sides of the egg to better ensure they don’t come apart.

I just glued them on however way would create the least amount of white space being shown from the ring underneath. You could wrap some colored ribbon around the ring prior to gluing the eggs on if you want to see a color underneath as opposed to white.

Of course, I ran out of eggs midway through the wreath, so the project had to be postponed until after another trip to Hobby Lobby.

But just my luck, Hobby Lobby did not have any of these Easter eggs left on the shelf when I went a few days before Easter. So I went to Target and found a bag of eggs which ended up not being the correct size or color (super FAIL).

Luckily, Brett made a quick trip to Micheal’s and was able to find some that were very similar. I just removed a few of the original ones and inserted some of the new ones to make it look more even.

Complete!

I cut the ribbon to the length I wanted the wreath to hang on the door and wrapped it around the top of the wreath. I did a quick internet search on “how to make a bow”, and it turns out it is pretty easy. There are lots of different bow tutorials out there, but I basically just made several loops from largest to smallest, tied some wire around the center to hold them all together and then scattered and fluffed them up. This works well with wired ribbon, which helps it stay in the shape you put it.

Viola!

Of course, we added a touch of Disney.

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment below, share it or…

Subscribe by email | Like us on Facebook | Follow us on Pinterest | Subscribe on YouTube

We took down our Christmas decorations today. We usually wait until after the New Year, but we aren’t having a party this year and figured it would be best since New Year’s Day is on a Tuesday and trash pickup is tomorrow (even though as soon as we put the cut up tree on the side of the road, someone came by and scooped it up!). Honestly, it was pretty nice to clean up and get back to normal. Christmas was fantastic, but putting everything away sort of signals the start of something fresh and that the countdown to warmer weather is on!

But since it’s still December, I wanted to try to squeeze in one more Christmas themed post!

Every year at Christmas, the Christmas cards start piling in, and while I love getting each and every one of them, I always felt bad that I never had an official place to display them. They would just sit on the counter or get piled up in one spot.

This year, we decided to finally do something about it and crafted a Christmas card holder for our wall!

All it took was a strand of green beaded garland, some green tacks and a glittery snowflake ornament, Less than $5. BAM!

Use the tacks to hold up the garland. You may need to remove the corner beads to make the tack fit, depending on the type of tack you have. We found these green tacks to closely resemble the green beads on the garland.

Use the snowflake as the tree topper and use Frog Tape or double sided tape to stick it to the wall.

Use Frog Tape to stick the portrait style cards or photo cards to the garland/wall. The landscape style greeting cards can just be folded over top the garland.

And there you have it, just a few dollars and a few minutes for a nice Christmas decoration and place to display all the Christmas cards your friends and family painstakingly create and send you. By the time Christmas rolled around, our card tree was full and I was so glad that we did this!

The Photographer’s Wife fans, be sure to:

Subscribe by email | Like us on Facebook | Follow us on Pinterest | Follow us on Twitter

Do you enjoy reading The Photographer’s Wife? I hope you do! If so, please consider clicking each of the banners below to vote for me. All you have to do is click…nothing to sign up for…and you can click once every 24 hours! Thank you!

We like to celebrate everything around here, especially all of Trent’s firsts. So of course, that means we want to find ways to make Trent’s first Christmas special and memorable. We already have his first Disney Christmas ornament just waiting for his little photo.

We had a blast picking out Trent’s first tree and decorating it (and making this awesome video), and we wanted yet another way to commemorate his first Christmas, so we decided to keep Trent’s first Christmas tree forever…literally!! An ornament made from the trunk of our Christmas tree!

This was a simple project with just a few steps, and you can let someone else do the first step too if you want. We started out with a piece of the tree trunk that we had to cut off in order for the tree to fit in our house.

If you prefer, you can have someone at the tree lot cut the piece for you. Most tree lots will saw off a bottom piece of the tree anyway, since it gives a fresh cut to help the tree better soak up water once it’s in the tree stand. Just have them give you the piece they cut off!

We then used a mitre saw to cut off a clean, thin piece that will be the ornament.

Our piece was about a half inch thick.

Then, write whatever you want! We wrote “Trent’s 1st Christmas Tree 2012″ but you could also write:

“Our First Christmas Tree”

“Our First Tree – 2012″

or just the year in the center. We used a Sharpie marker, but it ran a little, so I would recommend using a paint pen.

Spray several coats of clear gloss spray paint onto the entire piece. It really will need several coats, as the tree will soak up the first few coats.

Drill a hole at the top, string a ribbon through and make a bow.

Hang it on your tree for years to come!

Check out our other craft projects HERE!

The Photographer’s Wife fans, be sure to:

Subscribe to our posts | Like us on Facebook | Follow us on Twitter

 

Do you enjoy reading The Photographer’s Wife? I hope you do! If so, please consider clicking each of the banners below to vote for me as a Top Mommy Blog and Top Baby Blog! All you have to do is click…nothing to sign up for…and you can click once every 24 hours!

Thank you!