Lent Is Here!

Here are the two projects we’re doing with Curly to celebrate Lent this year (celebrate?  Is that the right verb?  Maybe, “observe”?)

A Lenten Countdown: I spent a week trying to think of inspired ideas for this poster countdown.  Last year, I had little purple butterflies covering all the cupboards and one was removed every day during Lent.  It was cute, but they kept falling off and we’d forget so I had to keep counting down to figure out how many should be left on the wall.  This year, I thought and thought and thought, and went with a very basic poster colored with markers.  It was actually very peaceful to sit and color for a bit.  Curly woke up from her nap when I was halfway through the leaves so she colored a few at the bottom.  (She is getting MUCH better at coloring IN the lines).

Each leaf has a plastic caterpillar that will be removed each day and put in a cocoon.  On Easter, all the caterpillars will become beautiful butterflies that will fly above the table.  A few years ago, I found these adorable sun-catcher butterflies at Hobby Lobby that clip apart so the wings separate from the caterpillar.  It took hours to paint all the sun-catchers, but Scott did that anyway, so I totally love them.  (My sister Becca painted a few, too.  Thanks Bec!)

Crown of Thorns:  Salt dough formed into a crown.  Curly stuck a TON of toothpicks into the dough.  Whenever we do something nice, we’ll take a toothpick out until it’s Easter and the crown is empty…hopefully.