Story Time at the Library - Bowen

We love our Story Time each week at the Library.  Of all the free things the kids and I have done over the past few years this one is by far the best.  The women that put it on each week put a lot of thought and energy into it.  They sing and dance around to 12-13 songs, read 2 books, and have a craft afterwards.  Their crafts are not easy ones either.  Lots of time is put into preparing them! I have made friends with one of the ladies there, Tania, and we agreed that a Halloween theme would be great to do!  For Australia this is kind of a rarity and it's not really celebrated.  The kids were all invited to dress in costume and the girls and I made goodie bags for them.  I was just going to make some cookies to bring at first, then they looked so nice that I wanted to put them in individual bags, but the bags were so large that it looked like it needed more stuff in them.  I added a chocolate bar, a row of Halloween stickers, a Halloween toy or balloon and the pumpkin sign needed for the Trick or Treat night.  I then made up quick and easy tops of the bags using Martha Stewart Halloween Paper, some stickers and staples. And Walla..........we have goodie bags!!

 Here they are all together.

 I love making up goodie bags and could have kept going and filled them up more, but didn't want to wrap up tons of money in them.

I made up two batches of sugar cookies because I knew there was no way I'd be able to bake them and be left alone to decorate them without letting the kids do their own batch.  It took me 3-4 hours to make up the doughs, icings, and loading the icings.  Then start to finish 3 hours for the kids' cookies.  It was fun and they really enjoyed it, but I was glad when I got it all cleaned up and could start on my own.

This is Lilah's cookie creations.  I helped her to roll out the dough after she selected her color and then she embellished them with other colors.

Here's Emmy's cookies. She said the orange cookie was her and did that one completely by herself.  Her favorite cookie was the bunny rabbit.  She rolled out her dough herself and selected her cutter and I helped her with decorating ideas and technical things.

And here's Mommy's cookies!  I must send a big thank you to Grandma Betsy for sending over the cookie cutters!  They made the whole process easy because they imprinted the styling lines on the cookie.  I made tons of pumpkin, ghost, spiders, and bats.

 I made ghosts in purple too but didn't get a picture of them.  I don't think I'll ever do them again in purple because they came out looking like Grimace from McDonald hhaha

 I still had some dough left and decided that I wanted to do a new design so I used the gingerbread man cutter but moved the arms and legs a bit to try and get the cookie out of the traditional shape.  I used a butter knife to indent where I wanted the icing to go before baking.

I think my Mummies turned out really cute!

 

 This is still a post about Story Time even though I have you thinking about cookies!  Here's Emmy in her Alice outfit that I made her.  I think it is absolutely adorable and I was extremely pleased with it throughout it's entire construction.  It was an older pattern from 1982.  It wasn't an "Alice" pattern so I had to modify and simplify it and make it more "Alice-like".  Lilah was in no mood to be photographed so if you look at the picture again you can just see Lilah's face in the bottom right corner.  She was wearing the Chicken Costume I made last year.  Everyone loved her outfit and commented on it.  I thought she was the cutest chicken ever!  Here's a link to the Chicken Costume Post from last year. You can click on it worry free ......it will open up in a new tab/page.

Here's a group shot of all the children at the Library.  The three ladies dressed up at the back are the ladies that put Story Time together each week.

  

 Lilah had taken off her Chicken Hat by this time and you can't blame her because it was so hot out.  In the picture she was too busy watching the other children and babies and wouldn't pay attention to smile for the camera.  Notice Emmy is cheesing it in both photo's hahahhaha.  Such a ham!!

 

At the end of the Story session the girls handed out our goodie bags to each child on their way out with their moms.  This was Emmy's favorite part of the morning and she asked me if she could do it about a million times!  They had a total blast and so did I!  Halloween is still my favorite holiday!!