What Have You Been Up To? I'm joining my FIRST link party!!!!

Vicky over at Traditions, Laughter and Happily Ever After is having a great linky party called: Summer  Plans: What Have You Been Up To? She found me on Facebook and invited me to join her party. I'm super excited because this is my very first time joining a link party (so I hope I do everything right and follow all the directions - you know it's really funny that I say that because it seems that A LOT of new teacher/mommy bloggers are worried about following the rules - I guess that's the teacher in all of us!) Anyways... here's what I've been up to!

As you get to know me better you will come to learn that I am ALWAYS busy... there are very few times that I sit and do nothing, especially during the summer. I have a 3 year old daughter and the thought of keeping her inside doing nothing is just not to pleasing to me, SO I am constantly looking for fun things to do with her. We love to bake and do fun projects together.

Here are the crafts/baking projects we have done this summer:

This is the University of Tampa cake I made for a family friend... she's heading there in a few weeks and asked for this cake for her High School graduation party!

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These are the clipboards I made for my fellow Kindergarten teachers for the end of the year... I'm sad I didn't make one for myself, BUT I have plenty of extra supplies so I think I will be making myself one this summer for the fall! I mean who doesn't love a personalized clipboard?

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On a rainy day we need to find fun things to do inside... my daughter got this ceramic butterfly kit as a gift and I let her have fun. I'm learning from my 3 year old that things don't have to be perfect or a certain color to be beautiful! I let her paint these butterflies any way she wanted!

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Another fun rainy day activity we did was playing with Newspapers... this was the only picture I could snap of her because, while I enjoyed making things with the newspapers she enjoyed crumbling and tearing them apart! It was very entertaining and we were busy for at least an hour making hats, shoes, boats, and even a small hat for her doll.

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We were heading out to a family event and I love to bake so I thought, why not spend some quality time with my little one while I baked.... we made cookies! Typically I like to make the dough from scratch but lets be honest, that part isn't much fun for a 3 year old. So I bought some sugar cookie dough from the refrigerated section of our local grocery store and we rolled it out and used lots of fun cookie cutters. After they were cooked and cooled I let my little chef decorate them however she wanted - check out her hand! You know you had fun if you are all messy! The best part was that the family was so supportive and ate the cookies and told my little chef how yummy they were!

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I was running out of fun crafts to do so I started to blog hopping and oh my did I find lots of FUN things!! I stumbled upon The Artful Parent and found this fun project to make melted bead sun catchers! Ok so ours didn't come out as pretty as the ones at Artful Parent - but my daughter had fun making it and she LOVES seeing it in our front window!

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To keep us nice and cool on hot days we like to make ice pops! I have all these cute ice pop molds BUT this time around I bought a huge pack of small cups and lots of popsicle sticks (all from my dollar store). We made healthy fruit ice pops - and the best part, my daughter thinks she's eating yummy treats and in reality they are healthy yummy treats! I love it! And she LOVES them!!

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We did all of those activities within about two weeks - that's how we started our summer break! It was awesome and my daughter loved every minute of it! We also visited the library and signed up for the summer reading club.

We then headed off to Florida to visit my Grandma and my Great Uncle... as well as some other family members. Motivated by all the blogs about organizing I spent the week helping my Grandma organize all her old photos and sort through her shoe collection (I'd say she has at least 1,000 decorative shoes if not more)... Of course it couldn't all be work while in Florida (although I LOVED looking through all the old photos of my dad and his brothers growing up, my grandma and grandpa first meeting, my grandpa in the Army... old photos are history and they are amazing to me!)

In the midst of cleaning and organizing we managed to fit in going to the pool almost every day! As well as visiting Lion Country Safari (this is a tradition in our family since we were little we always go there! We used to visit the orange grove also, but they closed the one by my grandma's house :( so sad!) We also headed south to the Miami Seaquarium which was a lot of fun. I don't have a lot of pictures on my camera (most of them are on my brother's camera) but here is a little snapshot of what we did at the Seaquarium:

We saw the killer whale - dolphin show which was really cool. We also so the Dolphin show. We missed the Flipper show, but somewhere I have a picture from the arena. Supposedly the arena was used to fill most of the Flipper show!! I thought that was pretty cool. My daughter got to feed seals and sea lions (top right picture) she actually held the small feeder fish (which were frozen) and dropped them into the tank. I'm shocked and proud that she did it! It was pretty neat!

We've been busy busy busy and the fun hasn't stopped! We have a family reunion coming up and are hoping to go back down to Florida one more time this summer. Of course I'll be baking away with my daughter and looking for fun crafts/projects to do with her... Anyone have any suggestions?

I'm looking forward to reading about "What you've been up to!"