Korker Bow Giveaway!

Hi bloggies!! I haven't been on here in so long, thanks to the ever-addictive Pinterest. Are any of you also falling to the habits of pinning?

My daughter and I started a bow business in April and since we can't legally post giveaways on FB, we need to use my blog to do so. Yeah, I know some giveaways seem to be too good to be true, and at times annoying to show up in your news feed. This is why, we will only promote our personal giveaways. :) That means I won't be cramming up your page with laptop giveaways, cruise giveaways, etc. Sound good? Have I lost any fans? *cheering* WOO HOO! Then, let's take a peak at our first official giveaway:

This giveaway begins on Monday and is targeted mainly for our FB fans. However, I would be a very giddy lady if some of you loyal readers joined in. We will have 2 more contests/giveaways after this one, all leading up to the Fourth of July festivities! Good luck!

Don't forget to "Like" our page, Bows By Bella.

30 before 30

This year is a big year for me. I'll be hitting a pretty big milestone....

turning the big 3-0!

I always imagined that this would be such a depressing time for me, but I have to admit... I'm pretty excited about saying goodbye to my 20's. It was definitly a decade of stupid decisions (ahem, I'm talking to you 5 tattoos, tongue ring and eyebrow ring scars), but also some pretty smart ones (saying "I Do," graduating from college with honors, buying a home, having another baby). As October draws near, I have decided to create my own bucket list of sorts. Yes, it is my list of 30 things I want to do before I turn 30.

Stealing an idea from another friend, I have posted all 30 goals onto my bathroom mirror. This way, they will be there, in my face, every single day reminding me of taking time for LIFE.  Once a goal is accomplished, then you move the post-it to the other side of the mirror. This serves as a nice way to see all you achieved on your goal date. For me.. it will be a comforting feeling going into the next decade of my life.

Some of the goals are personal goals for my health...
* going a month without sweets (broken down into 2 goals.. 7 days without and then a month)
* out-running my daughter... and dogs
* losing 25 pounds (broken down into 5 attainable goals)

 other goals are meant to bless others... 

 some are meant to be shared with those I love...

and then there are those that I just want to say I did in my 20s...

What are your goals this year?

Oceans and Currently

Last week we wrapped up our study on oceans, just as I was discovering a learning tool called "Lapbooks." Is anyone familiar with these? I find them fascinating and wonder how is it I have never heard of them before. I graduated with a BA, substituted in school districts, and completed work for a teaching certification.... and I have never heard of Lapbooks! We will begin our next unit on space, and I will most definitely be incorporating this learning tool.

Back to the ocean unit, my daughter finished her Beach Journal:

She included sentences like, "I bring my..., I wear..., I pack..., I build..., I eat..., I see..., and included illustrations for each page.

 She also completed her wall ocean, which included clippings from National Geographic magazines.

As a fun craft, we made a couple of other ocean-related things that I'm excited to show later. For now, here is my "currently" for the month of February (including a new "Random And Kind" section). 

Have a great week!

Valentine's Day craft

Valentine's Day for us has always been more of a holiday for the kids. I get rather annoyed that restaurants have a double waiting time and flowers are always a bit pricier JUST to take advantage of men who feel they need to "deliver." I am quite satisfied with the way my hubby "delivers" the rest of the year, and that is why you will see us buying more glue and glitter in the days before, rather than roses and chocolates.

Sticking to that belief, we found ourselves at Hob Lob, purchasing felt to create fun fortune cookies!  These are incredibly easy to make, and my 10-year-old did them all on her own.

First, you will want to cut out some medium-sized circles from felt. In the middle of your circles, glue a piece of pipe cleaner, like so:

You can type out sayings or fortunes in some cutesy font, but I wanted my daughter to practice her writing and spelling. (See... ANYTHING can turn into a lesson. haha)

Some of hers were cute and lovely, while others were.... well....

Yeah.

Next we placed our folded fortunes, along with small, wrapped chocolates into our cookies and folded them up like a taco. A bit of glue on the sides and top of the cookie held everything in place, but left enough room for someone to easily pull out their treats.

Easy peasy and under $5. Happy Valentine's Day!

Linking to : Living Life Intentionally

Oceanography Study - 4th Grade Fun!

Happy Friday, everyone! We started our first week of oceanography and the curriculum does a great job of keeping it a bit... uninspiring. We did the best we could to make this an exciting lesson.

First, I wanted to get the girls excited about learning about the ocean. We put on our swimsuits (after cranking up the heater), and laid out our towels and some party table covers for our "ocean."

My 10-year-old created a "Beach Journal" where she wrote what she wears to the beach, builds, eats, drinks, does, brings, etc. We also read together the only book I have that related to our topic:

Once the excitement was there, we started the chapter on oceanography. Each day, we encorporated a craft to keep it interesting. On one particular day we made an "Ocean in a Bowl."

We made blue jello, let it sit a bit in the fridge, then added some Nemo gummy fish. We stuck it back in the fridge to harden completely. My 10-year-old was thrilled by how it turned out! She showed it to all the neighborhood kids too.

We also hung up a blue, plastic, table cover on her wall. Using National Geographic magazines, she's cutting out pictures of fish and slowly adding it to her wall display. I'll post more pics next week as we finish our lesson on the ocean.

Having a great time with our ocean in the desert. Have a great weekend. :)

Linking to: 3 boys and a Dog, Living Life Intentionally

January Currently

If you love blog hopping as much as I do, you probably have noticed the new trend people are doing. It's those "Currently" lists I'm talking about. Have you seen them? I love reading up on what's going on with others and decided to post my very first list...

In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, or need one for your blog, this blogger posts a new template each month for you to use. Here is my January currently:

My owl (one little word) for the year is to be RELIABLE. Last year, I burnt out with all the volunteering I was doing with my church, school, and babysitting. I enjoy family time, especially since my husband is a firefighter. I was feeling guilty when I had to put them aside to do things I promised others I could do. Well, once I cut back, I started to become a very unreliable person in general.

I'm hoping 2012 will be different in that aspect. I'm not ready to take on a full plate, but I hope my closest of friends will realize that they can depend on me for favors and such. I would love to see your January Currently. :)

What We're Reading

Since I've been homeschooling my fourth grader, I have been inspired by other Moms on how to create lessons. I know many Moms out there ditch books all together and go with natural, everyday experience-type learning... but the Type A in me really needs structure, lists, schedules, and routine. I like to think my daughter does too because she has a sense of pride when she gets to check off something from a list. :)

Anyway, back to my inspiration. I've been reading a blog called Almost Unschoolers and have really made it a point to include (free) library books into my teachings. At a recent outing, I was thrilled at the books we found that matched perfectly with what we were learning!

Yes, even that Potty book was perfect. It motivated "B" to ditch the diaper for good and I can now, proudly say... SHE IS POTTY TRAINED!!!!!!!!!!! "B" loves the Potty book because the boy in there has "undies" just like her. At the end of the book, it shows many different kinds of underwear and "B" likes to point out which ones are mine, Daddys, sissies, Grandmas, and so on. She loves this book.

"R" finished up her "Noun Word Wall"  and on the final day, before she entered her final 10 nouns, we read this book...

With the new vocabulary, she was able to complete her word wall of winter nouns:

She had so much completing this that we are continuing on with "Texas" nouns this week. She's learning about Texas history for the next 6 weeks, so this will cover subjects in Language, Reading, and History.

These books are assisting her in learning new nouns for her word wall...

Do you all have any books you enjoy reading to your kids?



Nouns can be fun. ROFL fun!

Note: Since I will be talking about my kids more than usual, I will be calling the 10 year old "R" and the 2 year old "B." Blogging about their adventures will flow a lot smoother this way. :) So, to clarify I is in month 2 of being homeschooled, and B is on day 3 of potty-training. (jumping for joy on the inside)

R has used the Abeka curriculum since she was 4. It's quite structured as far as homeschooling choices go, but it's what she's use to. I have changed things up a bit though by trying to incorporate more hands-on learning, as Abeka is pretty much worksheets.

For the last 3 years, R's school has taught her about the different parts of speech, with every year getting a bit more detailed than the previous. Currently, she's learning the rules for common and proper nouns and I wanted to put aside the textbooks this week. I love, love, loooove Language Arts, so creating fun lessons has been exciting for both of us.

As she is reviewing nouns, we have been making a really fun Word Wall. Each day, we add ten new nouns to the theme word. This is a simple exercise that can be used for verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. This weeks theme is "winter."

The first two days, R quickly spit out all the easy nouns associated with winter. Day 3 and 4 were a bit more challenging as she really had to use her head. By the way, I didn't want to spend the money on butcher paper, so I'm using the back of an old desk calender to display charts and such. #twice-owned, #under$20, and still #frugalLiving. See... the old repurposed me is still there. :) This cost me NADA.

Today, we had made a trip to a bookstore to spend a gift card she received from her Grandma for Christmas. Imagine my excitement as I found a huge selection of Mad Libs! I loved playing with them when I was little and thought this would be a perfect way to practice her parts of speech. I showed her how to play them, afraid she would find them boring, but she started cracking up with the very first story. We ended up walking out of there with 5 versions!!!! Mad-Libs are $3.99 at this store, and even though our gift card made this FREE, it still would have been under $20 with our membership discount.

That night, we played Mad Libs for over an hour. On some stories, she was laughing so hard, tears began to fall. Little did she know, I was counting this as schoolwork and her problems with identifying adjectives are nearly over.

You can kind of see her wet eyelashes and red nose. This was after one particularly hilarious, ROFL, story.

Homeschooling can be LOL fun...

Linking up with:
Christina's Adventures, A Creative Princess

Happy New Year!

Hooray!!! I hope you all had a safe and happy new year! Did you notice I took a vacation? ;)

HA! Hardly a vacation and more like a "I'm so stressed out I'm going to SCREAM" hibernation. Oh, how I wish I was joking. Rather than bore you with the details, here is a quick rundown of what has happened to me (er, my blog) since I last posted in... September? October?

1) My two-year old toddler turned terrible. GAH. I don't even want to go there. And she is still NOT potty-trained.

2) My ten-year old was missing at school one afternoon and I made the decision to pull her out and homeschool. There were a lot of other factors other than safety, but that was the one that sent me over the edge.

3) The growth of Creative Memories. I have been so caught up in my scrapbooking, that I have put aside my home projects.

We're still tiling, painting, and changing out light fixtures.... but who wants to read a blog about changing a brass sconce into a satin nickel one??? Didn't think so. Rather than post about boring projects.. I just chose not to post period. :( I hope you can understand. I miss my blog though. This is my outlet and I miss the ladies who visited my site often, and we would root each other on. :( Are you all still there?!

I think this blog will have a new direction for 2012, since my life has taken quite a dramatic turn. If you don't mind about reading about my adventures in homeschooling... stick around. :) I've missed you!

Have a wonderful Tuesday!