One of my favorite creepy countdown boxes.
Nevada! You have to LOVE a state that joined the Union in the middle of the Civil War on Halloween!!!! As you can see, we Nevadans take Halloween very seriously. In fact, it’s a state HOLIDAY!!!!
Years ago at Pottery Barn Kids, I saw this really neat Halloween Countdown Calendar. Really, I should have bought it. It was a wooden haunted house with little doors and windows that opened so you could stuff treasures and/or candy inside to countdown the days until Halloween. I was being cheap at the time and decided to pass it by. BIG mistake, because all these years later, I am still dreaming of it.
I started searching the Net for something similar and really did not hit on anything that I really liked. Or sure, they had a few items on Etsy and I did look at this year’s Pottery Barn Calendar (but it was fabric and you just move a little a pumpkin or ghost or some such thing to a new pocket each day).
Now to make our own! Cinco and the Princess were immediately up for the challenge. They LOVE to find old junk and try to make it into a craft. Our first stop was Michael’s to see what we could get in the way of decorative items and or boxes to put our Halloween treats in. I looked up DIY Christmas advent calendars to get some ideas. Several were very elaborate and well beyond our skill levels. But, one suggested getting little wedding party favor boxes and stuffing those. I liked this idea and was going to act on it. But, then Queen Gram intervened.
Thank goodness we brought Queen Gram with us to the store because she found my new favorite toy a box maker! 
Okay, super crafters may already know about this. But, I just found out about it and I LOVE IT. We were able to make boxes in several sizes using some fun, decorative Halloween paper!
A few of my favorite boxes included:
Love the Creepy Google Eye and the Mummy coming out of the zeros!!!
Haunted House designed by Cinco!
Then we took the cardbox pallet from a case of water and decorated it to look like a haunted house.
With some cool embelishments, black paper and a white colored pencil we made our own nifty haunted house countdown calendar.
I , of course, filled the treat boxes.
Some with candy, some with toys, some with spooky junk. Now, we are just waiting for October to hurry up and get here!!!!!
And, of course, I am already thinking all about making another one for Christmas and maybe even a New Year’s Eve countdown! Oh what fun.
The Princess decorated the horizontal portion ans was obessed with the bone letters!
Our school’s theme is Timeless Journeys. So we attempted to make each section of the school represent a different time period. We move all the way from the cavemen to the boundless future ….
A broken pillar and one still intact. We also didn’t paint them—originally in Ancient Greece they would have been brightly colored. But, it’s a big school and we had to keep moving to get our decorating finished!
Next up is life in the Middle Ages.
Then it was time to skip ahead to the colonial period! I have to give credit to another amazing mom who made a very cool looking Mayflower.
This activity book worked out really well for us. It was more than just a coloring book, because heaven knows we DO NOT NEED ANOTHER COLORING BOOK. Instead, this offers mazes, puzzles, codes, and even a simple math problem or two. What I really loved about this little book is that worked for both the 4 and 7 year-old. It offers games and puzzles with three levels of difficulty, so both kids used the book!
“Play-doh” style Angry Bird kit was hit with both kids. It comes with three cans of “doh”, two molds, and some heavy cardboard panels. The kids were able to construct their own angry bird sets and had a blast trying to knock them down. Plus, I really liked the consistency of the Softee dough better than “play-doh”.
Cinco loved this book. Like the Star Wars Lego books, this one has pages where you have to find the right sticker and fit onto a certain page. There are also pages with scenes that your fill out with stickers. It has tons of character stickers, Darth Maul, Darth Vader, Luke, Leia, Han… It is very much like the Lego sticker books–so if you like them, you will like this.
The Booky Mom 