Indoor Snowballs

A Facebook friend of mine posted a picture of a bucket of snowballs she had bought for her family.  (If you Google search Bucket of Snowballs, you can see what I mean!)

I saw her picture and instantly knew that my family would have a lot of fun with something like that.  So of course I started thinking, “How can I make that?”  The snowballs kind of had me stumped though because I wanted something light that could be thrown at anyone at no risk of injury, but I’m not much of a sewer and I didn’t know how to sew spheres and didn’t have time to learn right then, so . . .  I kind of put that project in a dark recess of my brain to be recalled at some future time.

Then, one day, a few weeks before Christmas, I was in a dollar store (busy place just before Christmas!) and I saw some small plush baseballs.  My mind instantly recalled the recessed snowball project and I knew that these baseballs were perfect.  I emptied the shelf – all eight of them.  Then I went to the isle of containers and found a suitable snowball bucket.
Then there were only two things left to do:
– spend about five minutes total snipping the red stitching off the balls so they wouldn’t look like baseballs anymore
– painting the word Snowballs on my bucket.  I just free-handed it and painted it on with regular craft paint.

And this is what it ended up like . . .

Oh, I painted a few snowflakes on as well.
Doesn’t look like a baseball anymore – snowball all the way!!!
Vinyl lettering would have been perfect for labeling the bucket too.
I gave this to my family on Christmas Eve.  No one needed pajamas this year so we opened this instead.  I had taken Lee (my 14 year old) into my confidence and she wrapped all the snowballs individually for me.  So on Christmas Eve, dad got to unwrap the bucket and the rest of us opened snowballs (except Mac – she opened her new pair of pink Princess slippers!).  So we were all armed and he wasn’t!!!  Dad got bombarded with snowballs and of course a big snowball fight followed.  We even used the wadded up wrapping paper if we didn’t have a snowball nearby.
Here’s a Christmas morning photo – can you find the bucket?  Dad seems to get pelted a lot!!!We’re still having lots of fun with them – the novelty hasn’t worn off at all.  Snowballs are always flying by.  And I’m happy to report we haven’t had a single human injury – the bird did get knocked off someone’s shoulder once, but it fluttered to the ground with no problem!  I’m thinking that I’m gonna have to be on the lookout for more plush baseballs – I think we need another bucket in the family room!!!
Signature Overlay 1

 

 

Gangsters and Win-A-Lot Game

Craziest sight ever!!!  I walked out of my office to find these characters had taken up residence in the family room!
For some reason, some of my girls decided to dress up rather like gangsters from the 20’s, complete with fat bellies and moustaches.
(Hope you put all dad’s clothes back girls!)
One of our gangsters looks rather like a hippie!
The reason for all this?  My eighth grader was learning about the Stock Market and wasn’t quite getting how it worked.  So my older girls decided to help her out by playing a Stock Market game called “Win-A-Lot”.  It’s similar to “Stock Ticker” but I like it better.
My mom had her old NZ edition of this game which was very ancient.  I don’t even know if this game even exists anymore, but one Christmas my talented sister made us our very own version.
The game is pretty simple.  There are four commodities – Silver, Cotton, Pearls and Zinc – which you buy and sell each round, hopefully at a profit!
At the start of each round, you are each dealt one of these cards:
So the card you are dealt will determine your actions, and by watching what others players do, you can follow their leads too.  Obviously if I have a Zinc Up 4 card, I’m going to buy Zinc now and sell it later (and hope someone else doesn’t have the Zinc Down 4 card).
Notice in the top left corner there is a Bear card and a Bull card, which either make everything go up or down.
After everyone has done their transactions each turn, the cards are turned over and the little tokens on the board are moved up and down.  Then on to the next round.
The homemade money.
Here are the rules:
So at the end of the game, our gangsters have dressed down a little!
They’re holding up their fingers indicating which place they finished in.
So the eighth grader finished last, but at least she understands a little better how the stock market works!!!  Oh, and this is a good math game too – lots of buying and selling at different prices!
Now I feel like playing!  Any one up for a game?