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Great Baking Soda Tips!

With three littles around the house, I like to use safer cleaners, so I tend to use vinegar and rubbing alcohol to clean as much as possible. I've also used baking soda for a few things around the house. Mostly scrubbing the oven and balancing the ph of the laundry once I use vinegar. But I found a GREAT list today of some pretty good uses for baking soda! My favorite? The giraffe. With three little kids, I definitely have my fair share of "surface wash only" stuffed animals laying around! Some have even taken up permanent hibernation in our laundry room because I couldn't get them clean. So, yay! So glad to find another way to clean them!!

http://theartsyfamily.com/2011/07/27/cleangiraff/

           

Construction Theme Birthday Party Ideas

Last year for C's 3rd birthday party, we did trucks and tools and since those are still his favorite things we're going to do the same theme this year. We didn't get to do as much as we had wanted last year so I'm hoping to get to have a little more fun with the theme this year.

I thought I'd share some of the ideas I have with you in case you would also like to do a construction themed party.

• Fun construction hats
• Little trucks for goody bags
• Reshaped truck & tool Crayons for goody bags. Here's the how (best directions I've seen so far). Here are some molds to use.
• Themed cookies or brownies cut out with these
• Dump truck cake (I'm planning on doing cupcakes since I'm not good at icing cakes.)
• Chocolate cupcakes iced with "mud" (chocolate icing with finely crushed oreos mixed in)
• Invitations & party decorations designed with these scrapbook kits (turned out awesome last year!!)
• Under Construction by Laura Banasiak & Suzy Q Scraps
• It's A Boy Thing by Crazy 4 Monograms
• Bonus: you will already have a matching scrapbook kits to scrap the pictures from the party. You can also use it to make cute borders around the pictures you put in frames. Don't forget matching thank you notes! I use Paint.net which is a free alternative to photoshop to make all these things. I LOVE custom stuff!!
• Have truck & tool puzzles for kids to play with (we'll have younger kids coming to this party).
• Paper bags lunch bags (for a dirt look) for the goody bags. I folded them down, punched two wholes in the folded part, strung a coordinating ribbon through, and tied a tag made from the scrapbook kits into the ribbon.

Some other fun stuff:

• Another tool candy mold
• Big tool candy mold
• Pretzel tool candy mold
• Tool Mini Chocolate/Mints mold
• Construction worker rubber duckies