Papier-Mache Part 2: Dinosaur Eggs!

The papier-mache dinosaur egg project was a huge success!  Lucas and I spent last weekend papier-mache’ing the little balloons with dinosaurs inside. We let them dry for a day or two and then popped the balloons and removed them completely from the egg, leaving the plastic dino inside.  We secured the hole used to pop the balloons during the second round of papier-mache.  Once the eggs were complete and solid, I laid out a lot of newspaper in our basement and spray painted the eggs an off-white colour. WOW, were the fumes bad! I had both windows open down there for good air ventilation because it was too cold to spray paint outside. That of course meant the basement was freezing, but it was worth it!

The kids got to paint their eggs on Tuesday.  I explained how to carefully handle their precious egg, and that there was a dinosaur inside waiting to hatch!  We talked about what they thought dinosaur eggs looked like and I told them to use their imagination and paint them however they think they would’ve looked since no one knows for sure.  This went over well and the kids had lots of colours to choose from as they painted.  Most eggs turned out to be brown since the kids also enjoy mixing colours together, haha, but it was an amazing project. Tomorrow we are hatching our eggs, and the kids will get to keep the dinosaur that’s inside.  We had so much fun guessing what would be in our eggs, too.  The kids painted pictures of dinosaurs at the easel to show me what they thought (hoped) was inside their egg.  Let me tell you, the Tyrannosaurus Rex is really popular.

So I recently switched operating systems, inspired by the early Valentine’s Day present that Lucas gave me over the weekend… a netbook!  Basically a netbook is just a super tiny laptop.  Weighing in at only 2 pounds, my new netbook is incredibly easy to tote around, and I have the ability to surf the net, check email and do word processing anywhere.  It is running a Linux distribution called Ubuntu instead of Windows, and I love it. Lucas has been running Ubuntu on his laptop for over a year now, and I was excited to make the switch.  I also decided to go with Ubuntu for my desktop computer operating system as well. Bye bye, Windows! ;)

I’m still working on my first crochet sweater (it’s coming along slowly!) and am making more Huugs.  I’m planning on making a mini keychain sized Huug this weekend.  Plus… I am nearly dying of excitement about the Valentine’s Day project I’m working on for Lucas.  This handmade gift is taking me awhile to complete, but the results are going to be worth it for sure.  I can’t wait to share it here after Valentine’s Day!  Happy crafting :)