Happy Birthday to my babies!

So this post is a month late but I wanted to share with you an idea.  The kid's birthdays were coming up (5 and 3yrs) and I wanted to do something simple, no gifts, no lootbags filled with candy and crappy toys made by underpaid workers in China. (Did I just write that?  Yes, STUFF is bothering me lately.  We have too much of it and it is stressing me out.)  Anyway, I thought that if the party goers could do a craft that they could then take home and use then it would be like a loot bag without candy, without the bag and with a toy they made themself.  So this is what I came up with.  The kids had fun doing it and it was easy for me to put together.

 

For these do-it-yourself tops, I cut a piece of dowl into 1.5" pieces, drilled holes into a stack of wooden circles I had left over from another project and then had the kids sharpen one end of the dowl.  They then put the dowl through the hole and decorated with markers.  Watercolours would look lovely too.  My son figured out to to decorate his so that when the top was spinning, his artwork would make stripes of colour.  Fun, easy and hopefully a fun toy for the kids to keep.