No School

Today was a no school day for all of us due to Presidents Day. So, after the kids played outside in Indiana's uncharacteristic for February 43 degrees weather, we decided to do a chemistry experiment. This experiment helps towards the Disney countdown gifts but the kids didn't know it. They will be to make pressed pennies when we are at Disney. And who wouldn't want shiny pennies instead of dull, old pennies?

First we started with a pile of dirty pennies that were in our penny jar.

Then we followed the directions on this website to clean the pennies: http://www.sciencebob.com/experiments/pennychem.php

What is needed:
Old, Dirty pennies
1/4 cup vinegar
1 tsp Salt
Non-metal bowl
Towel

Instructions:
Pour vinegar and salt into bowl, stir. Put 10-15 pennies in bowl and count to 10 slowly. Remove pennies, rinse with water, and put on towel to dry. Repeat until all pennies are clean.

My 9 yr old daughter put the pennies in the bowl and counted to 10 while I rinsed pennies and placed them on the towel.

This is the end product.

The kids loved that with just a little vinegar and salt we could make them shiny.

Only 245 days left until our Disney Vacation!!

Disney Advent Countdown

I started this Blog to chronicle my families 2012 trip to Walt Disney World. My mother and I have been many times and this will be my kids 5th time, so I struggled as to how to make this trip different from the others. I came up with a Disney countdown. Each month March-September I will be giving the kids (and possibly mom and I) a Disney vacation gift. During the month of October 1st-October 22nd (we leave the 23rd) I will be giving a daily gift. These gifts can be anything from a pack of gum, to a t-shirt, to a gift card. I plan on starting this on March 23rd, which will be 7 months from our leave date. I will blog each gift along with our subsequent vacation. Some of the gifts take a lot of preparation, but some are just buying something small. I have a file on my computer with each of my ideas and how I plan to accomplish them. I will try to give as much info as I can on where I got the items for each gift and the total cost to make/buy 4 of them.

Up first are the bags that I designed to hold our gifts. These were plain white bags from the Dollar Tree at 2/$1. The mickey heads I got from here: http://www.4shared.com/all-images/c-uKoPwt/Character_Mickey_Heads.html There are many to choose from but some of them I couldn't edit in the program on my computer (Picasa) so I ended up using the basic Minnie for girls and the basic Mickey for boys. Using Picasa I added our names and the year in a Walt Disney font that I already had. I printed all of them in a 4x6 size on Post-It brand Matte photo paper that I also already had. I cut around the head and peeled the back off and stuck it on the bag. I will reuse these bags throughout the Disney countdown. Total for this is $2.

Now my plan is to acquire cheap little things for the gifts along the way as to not spend a large amount on things right before I leave for vacation AND to give the kids something to look forward to each month.  I am trying to keep as much as I can a secret from the children. I have already told them that they will not find out what resort we are staying at until 10/22 and what restaurants we are eating at (which is very important to them) until 10/21. Those will be those days "gifts." I will blog with each months gift and pictures to go along with it.