Doll Giveaway and a fun announcement!

Aren't they adorable? I mean really?! I am so happy with how these little dolls have turned out. And now just in time for the Autumn Equinox I'm having a great big giveaway to celebrate the arrival of Fall! I'll be giving away one of these adorable Waldorf inspired Mushroom dolls! Perfect for playing with or displaying on your nature table! 

I had so much fun coming up with these two designs. I'm not sure which is my favorite. The little mushroom dolls are modeled after some of my favorite kinds of mushrooms which grow in abundance here in the woods surrounding our house, the Amanita muscaria. 

The Acorn dolls have little wool hats, embroidered to resemble the acorns that they are so fond of. Their little tunics are decorated with fall colored Oak leaves and a wool felt acorn. Both kinds of dolls have fully posable arms thanks to a soft wool covered wire armature inside them. They were entirely handmade by me using all natural materials in the Waldorf tradition.

Now for my fun announcement! I've listed two of the Mushroom Children and two of the Acorn Children dolls in my etsy shop!

And now for the giveaway! To enter all you have to do is be a follower of my blog. Either via Google's friend connect or by email using the feedburner widget. Both are found over on the right hand column just under the "about me" section. Alternatively, you can also Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Please be sure to leave a comment here letting me know how you follow my blog (and what email address you use if it's via feedburner) Please make sure I have a way to contact you if your name is drawn as the winner! I'll draw a name from the comments (Only one per person please!) using a random number generator on Sunday September 22, 2013 which is the official first day of Fall! Oh and I'll happily ship anywhere in the world so this giveaway is open to all of my friends everywhere! ♥♥♥

P.S. Feel free to pin the top image and let all of your friends know about the giveaway too!


linking up here and with Linda here and with Nicole here and with Joey here

Our Easter Garden

A few days ago I stumbled across a blog called Embracing the Now. The writer, Erin, had a sweet idea for making an Easter Garden.  I thought it would be a fun thing to do to give the kids a visual while we read and talked about the events that led up to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus this week. I had everything on hand that we needed so we got started after we had church on Sunday morning.

Jesus and the Angel standing by the empty tomb.

{*We have church at home usually. Rodrigo leads us in prayer and worship and we take turns reading a selection from the bible that we have chosen together earlier in the week to share with the family. We discuss it with the children, asking them questions to make sure they understand what we have read and allowing them to ask any questions they might have. We also try to have family devotions after dinner every night, but some nights I serve dinner too late, or life just seems to "happen"! But we do try! This week our after dinner devotions have a distinctly seasonal bent to them, as we discuss Jesus's arrival in Jerusalem on a donkey and the people laying branches in his path and singing psalms in his praise, then his dealings with the Pharisees, his parables, his late night vigil in the garden of Gethsemane, his arrest by the roman soldiers, his trial, crucifixion and death and last but definitely not least his glorious resurrection. Which is the basis of everything we believe as Christians!}

The boys loved Embracing the Now's peg people Jesus and the Roman soldiers. So we copied them! (Why mess with a good idea?!) They helped make them and within an hour we had most of the important players for the week! (I ran out of peg people so I'll need to go pick up some more peg people so they can have a couple of Pharisees and Pontius Pilate and any others we come to think we might need.)

Jesus with 2 of his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Jesus's arrest in the garden by the Roman soldiers.

The angel telling the two Marys of the empty tomb and our resurrected Lord.

Complete (so far) Easter Peg People Cast of Characters. 

The adorable reason one of Roman soldiers has a bent sword! 

At 16 months she is still too  little to understand the meaning behind the story, but she loves the new "babies" and the little garden to play in with them! Several times a day I hear the gleeful cry of "Babies!" and turn to find her like this... :-)

Books should be free!

Our family loves audio books! We listen to them while we do chores, in the car, the boys listen to them while playing with legos or coloring. Rodrigo likes to listen to them while working sometimes... if we are not reading, we are often found listening to books!

  
 
 


Most of our audio books we pick up at the local library. But yesterday I found this website through a fellow blogger and was so excited about it I just had to share! It is called Books Should Be Free.  They have have hundreds (possibly thousands) of 100% free audio books from the public domain. I have found them very easy to download directly into my itunes, but you can download the mp3 files directly to your computer if you don't use itunes! This is a great resource. I can't wait to listen to so many of the books, old favorites from my childhood... stories that I want to boys to hear... the possibilities! The hard part is choosing what to listen to first!

(*All of the pictures used in this post are from Books should be free website*)

Another of my very favorite websites for free audio books for kids (especially the younger ones) is Kiddie Records Weekly. Kiddie Records has hundreds of free mp3 files that can be downloaded. This is from their website:

 "Kiddie Records Weekly began in 2005 as a one year project devoted to celebrating the golden age of children's records. This period roughly spanned from the mid forties through the early fifties and produced a wealth of all-time classics. Many of these recordings were extravagant Hollywood productions and featured big time celebrities and composers.


Over time these forgotten treasures slipped off the radar and it has become our mission to give them a new lease on life by sharing them with today's generation of online listeners. Each week throughout the year we added a new recording and before we knew it, our one year project turned into a labor of love now in it's sixth year!"

My little boys love listening to these old record stories and songs! There are many stories found on this site that I listened to as a little girl on my record player. Such fun memories! There are lots of classic Loony Toons and Disney stories throughout the site as well as tons of dramatized bible stories. I'm sure if you take a few minutes to look around you'll find something your children would love to listen to!