There you have it. Pretty simple and quite effective.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
GET RID OF GNATS!!!
I loathe gnats! No kidding. They are so aggravating and getting a few in the house is really annoying! They won't stay out of your face, or your food! And if you happen to have some fruit around they really get crazy. In my search for something that would rid these tiny pests from their favorite place, my kitchen, I came across something that actually works pretty well. You probably have the couple of ingredients it takes to put this together right in your cabinet. Simply take a small bowl and pour some apple cider vinegar in the bottom of it. Add a couple of drops of dish liquid and give it a little stir. Set this simple concoction around in the room where you're seeing the gnats. I usually just set mine right on the kitchen counter. Apparently the vinegar attracts the gnats and the dish liquid prevents them from being able to get out and they die there. Change as often as necessary.
There you have it. Pretty simple and quite effective.
There you have it. Pretty simple and quite effective.
Monday, November 11, 2013
DUCK DYNASTY PARTY
Our church recently had a Fall Festival. Looking for something a little different than the norm this year, we picked a theme, Duck Dynasty. In a rural area like ours, where hunting and camo are common place, the hit show is popular among our church family. We had a few ideas but needed more so I set out on a search for some Duck Dynasty games, food ideas, decorations, and prizes. I went to the internet of course :-), but with little success. I ended up combining some of our own ideas with a few from my search and we had a great Ducky Dynasty themed event. I am hoping it will help to share these ideas so that anyone else hoping to host a party with this theme will have some ideas.
My two kiddos as Willie and Jase
DUCKY DYNASTY GAMES
Duck Call Making - turns out you can turn a straw into a pretty good duck call. all you need is straws and scissors. if you google making a duck call from a straw you can get step by step instructions on making them. (sorry, if i was a good blogger i would have the link for you wouldn't I?). we used those bigger milkshake straws and with just a point cut in one end and some practice blowing in it, we had lots of great duck sounds! warning: they get addictive and you get kinda tired of hearing them after a while :-)
Duck Hunt - a great family at our church took on this game and did a wonderful job. they stacked some hay bails and then put balloons that had a duck stenciled on them in front of the hay. the kids used a BB gun (yes, an actual BB gun, I told you we live in the country!! there were adults helping with every step so it was very safe!) to shoot the balloon. they used helium for the balloons and tied candy bags to the bottoms of the balloons to hold them in place, but I believe you could easily pin the balloons to the hay, too. as an alternative to the BB gun because I know that won't work everywhere, you could use darts to bust the balloons. As an alternative to the balloons you could stencil ducks onto something else (say milk jugs??) and shoot them with nerf type guns.
Go Fish - we went with the traditional game here. we put up a barrier, decorated it like a pond with some artificial trees and plants around it and put someone behind it with prizes. the pole was just a large stick with some string and a clothespin on the end to clip the prize "fish" to.
Lawn Mower Races - on one episode of Duck Dynasty they had a lawn mower race so we gathered together a couple of toy lawn mowers and made a "finish line" with some streamer and viola! instant race! the toy lawn mowers we had were the type that kids push and bubbles come out, but we didn't use the bubbles of course.
Frog Hunt - had a couple of ideas for this so i'll share them both. we were planning to hide frogs and have the kids hunt for them "egg hunt" style, but our festival was at night so that would have been difficult, even with flash lights. soooo, we created a pond using a sled. i put in some water, added some cocoa powder and maple flavoring to make it "murky" and added some toy frogs from the dollar store. they were different colors so that's how we did the prizes..find a pink frog = 1 candy, orange frog = 2 candies, etc... you could use something different to make the water dirty looking and murky but i just used what was on hand. caution here: i would use something without sugar so there is no "sticky" and have a couple of towels handy to dry hands.
Bustin' Beaver Dams - this game was a little tricky to get figured out but we knew we wanted to do it because it is one of Phil's favorite things to do on the show. i printed a beaver picture out and glued it to the front of a small box. we tilted some sticks and limbs around the box and then let the kids use "tnt" baseballs to bust the beaver dams. gave them 3 chances.
Football - because the Duck Dynasty clan has a family history in football we wanted to add that to our festival as well. we ended up with two football games, both centered around throwing the football. one was a board that had holes cut in it to throw the football through. the other one was a duck decoy hanging from a string and the kids threw a football to try and hit the duck. they enjoyed both.
Candy Guess - this is just a take on a popular "guess how many candies are in the jar" game. most fall festivals use candy corn but in line with our theme we went with nerds candies, since Phil likes to call people that sometimes :-) the nerds are small so we used a small jar and had over 1200 in there!!
Costume Contest - we encouraged anyone that wanted to, to dress up as their favorite Duck Dynasty character. we had 3 judges and gave out a prize for each age group's winner.
all the kids had lots of fun!!!!!
We gave out candy and prizes at the festival. We actually found some Duck Dynasty candy at our local Walmart but I was told at the local party supply store that there aren't any Duck Dynasty party supplies available right now (though I have seen some out for Christmas), we decorated with anything camo we could find and bought some Duck Dynasty gifts for the costume contest winners (calendar, cups, poster). We did not do anything different with our food and served the regular hotdog/hamburger fall festival food with plenty of sides and desserts. If you really want to go all out Duck Dynasty style you could serve fish, duck, frog legs, crayfish, etc... but the kids might not enjoy that :-)
There you have it! That's how we had a Duck Dynasty themed party and the kids really enjoyed it! Feel free to add your other ideas to the comments section below to help out others looking for ideas.
DUCKY DYNASTY GAMES
Duck Call Making - turns out you can turn a straw into a pretty good duck call. all you need is straws and scissors. if you google making a duck call from a straw you can get step by step instructions on making them. (sorry, if i was a good blogger i would have the link for you wouldn't I?). we used those bigger milkshake straws and with just a point cut in one end and some practice blowing in it, we had lots of great duck sounds! warning: they get addictive and you get kinda tired of hearing them after a while :-)
Duck Hunt - a great family at our church took on this game and did a wonderful job. they stacked some hay bails and then put balloons that had a duck stenciled on them in front of the hay. the kids used a BB gun (yes, an actual BB gun, I told you we live in the country!! there were adults helping with every step so it was very safe!) to shoot the balloon. they used helium for the balloons and tied candy bags to the bottoms of the balloons to hold them in place, but I believe you could easily pin the balloons to the hay, too. as an alternative to the BB gun because I know that won't work everywhere, you could use darts to bust the balloons. As an alternative to the balloons you could stencil ducks onto something else (say milk jugs??) and shoot them with nerf type guns.
Go Fish - we went with the traditional game here. we put up a barrier, decorated it like a pond with some artificial trees and plants around it and put someone behind it with prizes. the pole was just a large stick with some string and a clothespin on the end to clip the prize "fish" to.
Lawn Mower Races - on one episode of Duck Dynasty they had a lawn mower race so we gathered together a couple of toy lawn mowers and made a "finish line" with some streamer and viola! instant race! the toy lawn mowers we had were the type that kids push and bubbles come out, but we didn't use the bubbles of course.
Frog Hunt - had a couple of ideas for this so i'll share them both. we were planning to hide frogs and have the kids hunt for them "egg hunt" style, but our festival was at night so that would have been difficult, even with flash lights. soooo, we created a pond using a sled. i put in some water, added some cocoa powder and maple flavoring to make it "murky" and added some toy frogs from the dollar store. they were different colors so that's how we did the prizes..find a pink frog = 1 candy, orange frog = 2 candies, etc... you could use something different to make the water dirty looking and murky but i just used what was on hand. caution here: i would use something without sugar so there is no "sticky" and have a couple of towels handy to dry hands.
Bustin' Beaver Dams - this game was a little tricky to get figured out but we knew we wanted to do it because it is one of Phil's favorite things to do on the show. i printed a beaver picture out and glued it to the front of a small box. we tilted some sticks and limbs around the box and then let the kids use "tnt" baseballs to bust the beaver dams. gave them 3 chances.
Football - because the Duck Dynasty clan has a family history in football we wanted to add that to our festival as well. we ended up with two football games, both centered around throwing the football. one was a board that had holes cut in it to throw the football through. the other one was a duck decoy hanging from a string and the kids threw a football to try and hit the duck. they enjoyed both.
Candy Guess - this is just a take on a popular "guess how many candies are in the jar" game. most fall festivals use candy corn but in line with our theme we went with nerds candies, since Phil likes to call people that sometimes :-) the nerds are small so we used a small jar and had over 1200 in there!!
Costume Contest - we encouraged anyone that wanted to, to dress up as their favorite Duck Dynasty character. we had 3 judges and gave out a prize for each age group's winner.
We gave out candy and prizes at the festival. We actually found some Duck Dynasty candy at our local Walmart but I was told at the local party supply store that there aren't any Duck Dynasty party supplies available right now (though I have seen some out for Christmas), we decorated with anything camo we could find and bought some Duck Dynasty gifts for the costume contest winners (calendar, cups, poster). We did not do anything different with our food and served the regular hotdog/hamburger fall festival food with plenty of sides and desserts. If you really want to go all out Duck Dynasty style you could serve fish, duck, frog legs, crayfish, etc... but the kids might not enjoy that :-)
There you have it! That's how we had a Duck Dynasty themed party and the kids really enjoyed it! Feel free to add your other ideas to the comments section below to help out others looking for ideas.
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