Guest Post: Manda from Once Upon My Life

I'm so excited to introduce you to one of my lovely sponsors, Manda from Once Upon My Life. I am always so inspired by Manda's beautiful pictures and the fun things she does with her family (and, I love her boys' names!). This is such a fun idea and I know you'll love it!

Don't forget to come back later this afternoon. I will be having an A-mazing giveaway from several of my lovely sponsors. You will not want to miss it!
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Hi! I'm Manda and I blog at Once Upon My Life. I also have a little shop, Mooies, where I sell sweet vintage clothes for your sweet little ones. I'm the mama to three handsome little men, Lincoln {5}, Malacai {3} and Levi {1}. I am so thrilled to be guest posting here on Morgan's incredible blog. I love the creative things that Morgan does with her children and thought I would share a creative/crafty idea with you today - "birthday paintings". The idea is to have my boys do a painting every year on their birthdays - and I hope to continue this through their eighteenth birthdays. I thought this would be a fun way to encourage them to be creative and I get some great artwork to hang on my wall!

Here's a glimpse of what it looks like doing our birthday paintings:



Getting ready. {It was a bit windy the day we painted, thus the rocks holding everything down}. I stocked up on acrylic paint from Michaels when it was on sale. I let the boys choose the colors they want to use.



My little artists - Lincoln and Malacai hard at work. {Also - I have no idea why they are painting in their good shirts...it never occurred to me to change them when we got home from church. Thankfully they were very neat painters this year.}



Levi doing his very first painting. It's a bit trickier on their first & second birthday - they need a lot of help to make sure that paint actually makes it on the canvas.



Lincoln proudly displays his 5th birthday painting {I love the little purple guy in the middle of his painting!}. I always make sure to write their name, date they actually did the painting, and what year the painting is for.



The collection of birthday paintings so far. Can you imagine what 54 will look like?!


Some thoughts:

-My boys do not share birthdays or even birthday months, but as you can see from the photos - this year, they all did their paintings on the same day. Some years I do better at having them do a painting on or close to their birthdays - some years I'm off by a few months - I don't stress about it.
-I have the boys do their paintings on a 6x6 canvas, but doing this on any size canvas would look great. Smaller ones would be cute. Or using a combination of sizes would look really good too. If you're worried about not having enough wall space for yearly paintings, another idea could be to use some quality paper, paint and frame it, and then every year just slide the new painting into the frame.
-My husband actually makes our canvases. If you or your spouse is handy this could save some money on buying the canvases.
-This year, I did a colored coat of paint on the canvas before the boys did their paintings, and I love how this looks.

Thanks so much for hosting me today! I'd love to hear from you - stop in at my blog and say hi. Also, Mama Loves Papa readers get a discount at my shop this month - use code MAMALOVESPAPA20 - to get 20% off your order. Have a lovely day!