A Free Shipping & Discount Code, & A Great Gift for Volunteers!

Bloggy Doggies on Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!
This has been a wonderful week “off” for me at home, although I spent the first two days working at the HeidiSongs office answering phones and emails, and trying to help my husband out in whatever way I could. After that, I spent the Tuesday night and most of Wednesday creating the handout for my presentation on classroom management that I will be giving at the California Kindergarten Conference and the Southern California Kindergarten Conference in January and February.  Thursday was a day for cooking and giving thanks, and now here we are on Friday!  Time sure flies when you are having fun!
Next week on Thursday, I am flying out to Little Rock, Arkansas for the SDE’s Kindergarten Conference there.  I am hoping to see a few of you there!  If you are a blog reader and will be there, please come up and introduce yourself!  I would love to meet you!

In honor of the big shopping weekend and Cyber Monday, I managed to talk my wonderful husband into a free shipping and discount code that is good this weekend ONLY!  We hardly EVER do this, so if there is anything you want, I highly suggest that you take advantage of it now! You can use both of them at once, and both are good through Monday 11-28 at Midnight.  Here they are:

Thanks11 - 10% off everything in store
Thanks12 - Free shipping

Meanwhile, I wanted to just quickly share with you this idea that I have for a “home made” Christmas gift that I give to my volunteers each year.  I wanted to share it with you now, while you still have time to collect the wine bottles necessary to make it, if you want to do it!  That’s because if you want to give this gift, the first thing you have to do is drink up!  Read on below if you are interested.  Other than that, I will leave you to your holiday shopping and preparations, and will continue with my regular blogging next week.  Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Wine Bottle Christmas Decoration

Wine Bottle Christmas Lights Decoration
Preparation:
1.  Empty out a bottle of wine in whatever way you choose. :)
The light colored or clear bottles seem to look the best when lit up.
2.  Soak off the labels, and save the cork.
3.  Dry out the bottle completely.
4.  Purchase a very short string of lights; it can be no more than 30 lights long or it will not fit inside the bottle.  (These can be hard to find, so look for these first before you purchase any other supplies.)
5.  Purchase some 1.5 inch wide ribbon.  You will need 3 feet per bottle per color, and you will need two different colors of ribbon per bottle.
6.  Purchase some 7/8” wide ribbon.  You will need 2 feet per bottle, and you will need just one color per bottle of this width of ribbon.
7.  Purchase some decorations to put on the bottle, such as greenery or any other type of holiday “picks” that you like from your favorite craft store.

To Make it:
1.  Stuff the lights down inside the bottle, leaving the plug outside the bottle.
2.  Tie the wide ribbons around the neck of the bottle and tie a bow.
3.  Tie the narrower ribbon under the other ribbons and tie a bow.
4.  Tuck the stems of the decorative greenery down in between the wide ribbon and the bottle.  Make sure that the ribbon is tied tight enough to hold the decorations down.
5.  Arrange everything so that it looks nice!
6.  Plug in your bottle into the nearest light socket and see how it looks.  If you are happy with it, then you are done!

Wine bottle Decoration Lit Up

I usually also attach a Starbucks gift card and a note thanking my volunteers for all of their hard work in my classroom.  I was able to buy all of the supplies for these wine bottle decorations for about $2.50 each when I used a coupon and got everything on sale last week.  (That didn’t include the price of the wine, of course!)  I once gave this gift to a friend of mine that I know doesn’t drink, so I gave her the supplies and the directions for how to make it, along with a bottle of sparkling cider so that she could put it together when she was done drinking it.