Craftiness in a completely non-skilled way!

So, I have some friends who are having babies. It's very exciting. I like babies. So, I was reading a thing somewhere about something you could do for those ladies, and it seemed easy and fun and involved the eating of small candy-coated chocolates, so I was in!

So, the theory is that you make a "countdown jar" kind of like a really extended Advent calendar. To do this, you need to know the lady's due date (which we all know is just an estimate and no guarantee of an actual baby being born ON that day, which gives you some wiggle-room in case you do your math wrong or mess up when you're counting, you can just say you put in as many as you THINK there are going to be days left in the pregnancy, thus covering any flubs with a sort of "I think THIS is the day the baby will be born" thing).  I then went to The Internet and plugged that information into one of those countdown ticker things, and it told me how many days. I wasn't going to like... count on a calendar or anything. That's crazy!

Then I asked The Internet to tell me how many M&Ms were in a package, and I got the answer that there were 60-80 in each 7 oz package. (SPOILER ALERT: That's totally not true). Based on that number, I decided to get 4 colors of candies and make a multi-colored jar. You can do pink & blue if you want, but I went with giraffe colors, because this is baby #2 for my friend, and baby #1 has a lot of jungle-ish themed stuff.

But first I went to Walmart and bought a little jar. For $1.97.

Then I went to Party City to get solid colors of M&Ms. You can totally do this with the full rainbow that comes in regular packages and save yourself some money & a trip to a separate store, but I didn't do that. I got 2 shades of yellow, one beigeish color and dark brown. It looks black, but it's not. Trust me.

Then I did some math where I took the number of days left in the pregnancy of my friend, divided it by the number of colors I had and came up with 40.75 candies of each color. I rounded to 41.

Ta da! That's 1/4 of the candies needed for this project pictured above. Below is the rest of the candies left over. Needless to say, I was grateful that I know some other babies getting themselves born this spring, so I made some extra jars. And some for the dads-to-be as well. Because it turns out there are closer to 200 in each bag... yeah... extras for everyone!

Then I got these too stinkin' adorable stickers (also from Walmart, on my 2nd trip to pick up extra jars). I just put the stickers straight on the jar... no Mod Podge or anything. Just stickers on a jar. That's my level of crafty involvement people!

And there you have it! One "countdown until you have a baby" jar! I must stay, I'm really proud that I managed NOT to eat like a million extra M&Ms.  When counting, I was able to stick to just one of each color! I celebrated by taking the few extras left over and making sure they went to a good home.