Hullabaloo Stories Design Blog

Happy St. Patrick’s Day friends. I hope your day is touched by a bit of Irish luck today. St. Patrick’s Day is a really fun holiday with children because you get to dress up, be silly and there are so many projects you can do with them, like Leprechaun traps, rainbow waffles and dye everything green! You can also go on scavenger hunts to find rainbow items in your house or look for clovers, Leprechaun’s and so much more. Being Irish myself, this holiday is a great day to talk to my kids about their Irish heritage. I wanted to share a few St. Patrick’s Day things in this post.

First for even more ideas check out the collection I have started on my St. Patrick’s Day Pinterest Board

Next, I made these printables so long ago that I nearly forgot to post them. So check out all the separate files here in our 4Shared Folder.

The last thing I want to share is our project, I got this idea from this Pin and then somewhat made it my own. Instead of using old book pages, I used Irish proverbs, which the pages I used are in the printables folder. Then, I added a couple of blank green pages, printed some small shamrocks, and topped each page off with a little doily from Martha Stewart’s Craft line. Similar to these Martha Stewart Crafts Tags Die-Cut Lace). They turned out really cute. Then, I simply added them onto a ribbon to hang. They should last our family several years. The other craft we made was something really fun for my daughter. I pre-printed a shamrock on some card stock and then put the glue all over the page, then let her place all the little flowers all over the page. She did a great job and it was a nice evening project that didn’t get us too messy.

Here is the dried flowers we got at our local craft “project” store

So there it is….our projects for a lucky day! Happy St. Patrick’s Day and may the luck of the Irish be with you today!!!

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

We had such a fun day today. This morning, I took my daughter to a friend’s Kindergarten class to deliver a set of laminated Dr. Seuss bookmarks for each of her students to celebrate Read Across America week. We stayed for about an hour and read two books (There’s a Wocket in My Pocket! and Fox in Socks). We also worked on two rhyming worksheets and visited with all the kids in the class.

Our daughter was so excited about getting to go to "big kids" school she didn’t want to leave when it came time to go. The bookmarks thrilled the students and they had such a fun day. I think the poster all my teachers had in their rooms must be true “All I really need to know, I learned in Kindergarten”, because Kindergarten is so cool.

When we got home, we read a few more books with our son so he could share in the awesomeness that is Dr. Seuss.

A fun post for today…it’s “Leap Day” so let’s leap into reading for this year. Inspired by Dr. Seuss’ quotes, check out our printable bookmarks in fun Dr. Seuss patterns. Click on the link below to see all the books marks we have created (the quote should be printed on the backside to create a two-sided bookmark and, if possible, we recommend you laminate the bookmarks)

Download these bookmarks in celebration of Read Across America Week

Like or share to download this file.

Check back on Friday for a fun post after we deliver these bookmarks to one lucky local elementary school with a lot of ideas about how to encourage a love for reading in your children.

Source: 30 Dr. Seuss Quotes to Live By

I am a very biased mommy but I loved this book. I now realize what my customers go through when trying to narrow down their photos. I finally took the stance that each month I wanted to capture what the most important thing in her life was, not just my favorite photos. It was tough but I love this book and we read it all the time. Now that she’s two I guess I better get a new book started.

Perhaps its because my best friend and I had a personalized book when we were kids or because these two little boys are just about the cutest little friends every, but these books were so fun to make. I made two books but switched around the wording for each boy so his book had his name first.

This book was really fun to make. Not only was it about my daughter and some of her favorite friends but the photo shoot involved was a blast.

A wonderful photographer (and friend of mine) came up to Virginia from North Carolina to do this photo shoot, Morgan Henderson of Morgan Henderson Photography. The kids had so much fun playing and they all looked so cute. What a fun way to have some memories and great pictures. Most of the parents used the photos as their child’s two year photos since two year olds and photo studios don’t mix too well.

Do you have photos of your child’s play group. If you are interested in multiple books with the same design discounts are available.

A good friend of mine, Alyssa asked me to make this book for her friend’s son. It was his first birthday party and she wanted something fun and unique for him. (Lucky she knew all about Hullabaloo!). I had so much fun with this book since she asked me to be really creative and play with the back grounds and shadows. I really had a lot of creative license with this one and had to ask her twice for additional photos.

I was able to find some really cool papers to fill in the backgrounds and absolutely loved the end result, I had a hard time packing it up and sending it away. I hope Van enjoys reading all about his first year just as much as I enjoyed making it.

Happy Birthday Van!

In late September Hullabaloo Stories hosted a giveaway on Baby Cheapskate, a blog we as parents read quite often.

Kara was our lucky winner and over the course of October and November we talked about what type of book would work best for her son. She knew she wanted this to be one of his Christmas presents. She mentioned in one of her e-mails to me that he had a lot of “favorite things” this reminded me of Julie Andrews song in “The Sound of Music”, I always loved that song, and used that idea to create Kenyon’s Favorite things.