Our Thankful Turkey

I’m a part of the local MOPS group (Moms of Preschoolers).  I think I mentioned before that I do a cooking demonstration each meeting for the other moms so that they can take home a recipe that’s simple but full of home-cooked goodness for their families.  I love it.  What I also love about MOPS is that at the end of every meeting we get instructions on some fun activity to do with our kiddos.  I’m always looking for ideas and love most things crafty so this is right up my alley too.

Which brings me to this turkey.  This has been my favorite idea so far this year.  I love how into this my family’s gotten and how it’s got us thinking about what we’re thankful for every day AND it has totally brightened up the kitchen.  So thanks, Jill, for sharing about Thankful Turkeys.  My birdies adore it.  And so do I.

So here’s how it works, at The Birdhouse at least.  At the end of October, I made our bare turkey.  Like so:

Basically, a piece of white poster board with a turkey cut out of construction paper glued on.  Nothing fancy.  Then I cut a million (or 4 times 25) feathers out of fall colored construction paper (one color for each bird in our house for each day in November).  I hung up the turkey and waited for the little ones to notice.

That took approximately 14 waking seconds.

They ask, “What’s that, Momma?”

And I get to tell them about how we celebrate all that we’re thankful for and all the blessings from God and just how awesome He is this month and one way we’re going to do that is write on a feather each day after dinner one thing we’re most thankful for that day and glue stick it to the turkey.  And who can’t get excited about getting to use a glue stick.

So my kids were totally on board.  And so was The Phoenix.

And here’s what our Thankful Turkey looked like a few days ago:

We’re beginning to run out of room for the feathers and we definitely can’t see the first layer anymore.  But, that’s okay, next year I’ll know to make an even bigger turkey.

I think my favorite day so far was recently when the four feathers that went up had written on them:  Hand Sanitizer, Kleenex, My Glue Stick and My Family.  And that’s exactly what we were thankful for that day.  Amen.