Hot Cocoa, Kid Craft and Date Idea

My boys LOVE the Polar Express. It is no secret. (Read our review here.)
Something else they love? Hot cocoa!
So imagine my delight when I saw the cutest little hot cocoa craft in the halls of Zeplin's school and decided to steal and tweak the idea. Delighted!

I started by looking up "coffee mug clip art".
These are the two mugs I chose:
 

 

I call this one "the Friends" mug- short and fat and looking all "Central Perk-ish"

and then I chose a taller, skinnier one BUT CANNOT FIND IT ON CLIP ART ANYMORE!

So anyway, this is not it, but we can pretend ;)

I then posted them both to clip art so that I could remove the steam

 in the first one and adjust their sixes so that they both

fit together nicely on one sheet of paper

I then printed out three copies of the page, using colored paper 

(saves ink)

My boys were having a play date, so I offered the three big kids (two of mine and their guest) to chose which color and which shape mug they would like best. All three big kids chose the taller mug :)

Both baby Thatcher and the two siblings of our guest each were given a shorter, stouter mug by default. hehe (I made certain to grab the last remaining color so that all of our mugs -and those of our guest's family- would be different)

I also looked up and printed off my favorite marshmallows:

I shrunk this down and copied it to make something like 100 mini marshmallows 

Once I had them all cut, I asked each boy to write his name on paper and count how many letters their names consisted of. 

Each boy then counted out that amount of marshmallows for his hot cocoa craft

...then they wrote their names, one letter per marshmallow

we glued these to the top

Next we added some sparkles and put the year on the mugs with glue and glitter

Lastly, I shredded a cotton ball and glued it behind the mug to give the effect of steam

 These are our completed mugs

After we completed our craft, we made some homemade hot cocoa using two recipes I found on Pintrest and in a cook book I own. They were both gross :( BUT THE BOYS HAD FUN ANTICIPATING AND TRYING THEM!

This was such a fun date and my boys were actually upset when I took these decorations down yesterday so that I could exchange the wall space for some Valentiney decor.  -I guess the cocoa really made a great impression on the boys!

enjoy!-