Minneapolis Examiner.com Children's Crafts Examiner review

Haha the title is a bit of a farce... I am the Minneapolis Children's Crafts Examiner so it can't be much of a review. Atleast not an unbiased one. However I love it and I think my articles are great. If I didn't I wouldn't publish them. (Trust me I have several that are awaiting rescue on my hard drive) Some days there just doesn't seem to be much to write about but do a little searching and you can always find something. My favorite thing to do right now? Browse the internet for craft ideas. I write about crafts the ideas have to come from somewhere right? Well many of them do truly come from my own head but seeing as I can't come up with 4 or more original ideas a week I also focus on children's crafts in the community. Did you know that National chain hardware stores Lowe's and Home Depot offer free kids crafts? Well neither did I till another parent told me. This word of mouth in the parenting world is invaluable and that is my goal on Examiner.com to be an invaluable source and tool to all local parents on children's crafts and art projects. Did you know that Martha Stewart actually has some kids art projects on her website? I always associated her with high time and alot of work when it came to her craft projects. Now I would say I still have that opinion on some of her crafts posted online, but there were some really cute ones too. Some are similar to the ones that I come up with on my own. My most recent kids art project that I "created" is a fingerprint, finger paint tree for spring. Say that ten times fast! I came up with the idea completely on my own (if Martha Stewart has one I haven't seen it - the woman's got like a million crafts) My kids art project was based of another project that I saw on the kaboose website. Great site if you haven't ever been. The project they showed was a finger print bumble bee hive with bees around it. I didn't like the hive much and everything was similar in color but I LOVED the fingerprint idea. So I started thinking the bees are really cute what else could I make out of my kids fingerprints? Birds? maybe but it would need more than just birds on a page... A tree, little fingers are just the right size to make tree leaves and I have always been a fan of any artwork that came home from preschool with fingerprints and handprints on it, and so my fingerprint finger paint spring trees were born. This is the way I think, kind of random and going off on tangents regularly and it seems to work well when it comes to kids crafts. The entire thought process from start to finish including writing probably took me about an hour once I got going. Not bad. It used to take me 3-4 times that long when I started writing. Still does if I don't know my topic well. So yay for Examiner.com and yay for the bit of income it is providing me with. So far it pays my monthly water bill each month and maybe if it really takes off and I can truly be a valuable source to parents in the Minneapolis St. Paul communities it will pay more of my bills. Until then I will continue to write and be happy that I can be home with my children. For me there is no greater gift than to be home with them.