going with it - with a 5 year old

The twins come home today! I know a 5 year old who is very excited. Its so cute. Yesterday her, my mom, and aunt (the proud grandmother) started decorating the house for the big welcome home. Finally, when I was able I joined the party. I had promised Miss L that she and I could make a banner to hang across the fireplace mantle. Now she's pretty good with her art, I must say. But even I had visions in my head of how I wanted it to be. Would I be able to let my perfectionism go out the window and truly let the Big Sister help? I had no idea. But I knew I needed to. This was a moment she would always remember. So here we went...

I really wish I had someone taking pictures of this whole process. Its just hard to photograph when you are the one doing it. But I traced circles for L, she cut them, they didn't look like circles when she was done. They looked like rocks. In fact, I'm pretty sure those were her words. And there we have lesson number 1 in letting go. Well if we didn't have perfect circles to work with for the outer portion, why'd we need them for the inner portion? We used any shape that came out, which made this a lot easier for me = no being precise. Hey, I like letting it go! L glued the patterned paper and letters. Lesson 2 in letting things go - things won't be centered. Well if the letters aren't centered, it didn't matter where the holes from the hole puncher fell did it? GREAT! Then I punched those. Yay, I got to use my Crop-A-Dile for the first time! We put eyelets in. L called them eyelids a couple of times and then eyelashes. This totally cracked me up!!! And of course she wanted to try. Well I'm here to tell you that that thing is hard to squeeze so that one wasn't perfect either, but guess what? Neither were mine! How do you get them to do without cracking on the front? I need help with that I guess. Then she left me. She ate and took a bath. I was left with the ribbon and stringing. I ran out of one ribbon after one name. Yep, that seemed about par for the course on this project. So you'll notice one name has gold ribbon and the other blue. I tried to tie it all together by giving them both the same color on the ends. I will say, if you didn't know in my head how it was supposed to look, it looks pretty darn good. We're pretty proud. I still think when the mom wants to take it off the fireplace she can hang it above their individual cribs if she wanted. 

And when we were all finished I got asked if there was time to do another art project. Gotta love 'em!

** I should say that this was a compilation of ideas from my earlier banner for my niece
and this post from the lovely paper blog.

and we definitely  so we'll share...

you can also go ahead and get some great some great tips over at