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Looking for some fun crafts for the family? Kids are home, and we’re all looking for things to do that don’t involve electronics. Getting outside is a welcome change from being stuck indoors.
Gardening and the tasks involved with gardening can be a great way to get your family outside and engaged in some great crafts. Here are a few ideas to help get the creative juices flowing and spend some time with your family.
There’s a good chance you have seen message rocks around. They most often bear uplifting messages that, when left in random places, can cheer a person’s day. Often found along walking paths and in social gathering spaces, they are a great way to communicate and bring a smile to others’ faces.
The Kindness Rocks Project began as a kind gesture by Megan Murphy, and it has become a nationwide movement. It’s a great way to teach your children social and emotional learning critical to a child’s development, and it can help prepare children to be caring members of society. You can make little messages to share with neighbors during this difficult time. Or why not take this idea and use rocks to label plant pots and vegetable rows in your garden?
At the garden shop, you may have seen cute painted river rocks with sayings on them. What’s even better? Garden stones you paint yourself. You just need some flattened river rocks, paint, brushes or paint markers, and some creative flow.
Use can create markers that help identify plants or the area where seeds have been sown but have not yet sprouted. What’s great about this idea is that you can write anything on them — whether inspirational words or the names of the things you have planted.
You can also use popsicle sticks, old clothes pins and even recyclables such as bottles to make plant markers. Why not use old broken pots? It’s a great way for making good use of materials that would otherwise go to waste. Sometimes we get quite attached to our pots. Many of us have received them as gifts from friends or have had them passed down from family members. When a faithful pot breaks, you can keep it as part of your garden forever by using it to create art or signs for the garden. But be careful of broken edges that are sharp, and make sure they aren’t in an area where someone could step on them.
The fun doesn’t stop with making signs. You can also make adorable garden critters out of recycled materials. Again, you can use rocks to create garden animal art, but you can also use recycled materials such as 1-liter soda bottles and milk cartons to make amazing little planters that kids and parents alike will have a great time decorating.
To make planters with plastic bottles or milk cartons, carefully use scissors to cut the containers into an animal shape. One way is to use the rounded part of the bottle for the body, keeping the pour spout as the nose. Cut a hole in the side large enough to place a plant. The bottle will lie on its side. You can use twine to wrap around the bottle to make it look like animal fur and add a couple of cute little button eyes above the pour spout. Secure the twine and eyes with hot glue to hold them in place.
When you fill it with potting soil and a trailing plant that will spill over the side, you have created an adorable garden critter. Be sure to poke holes in the bottom of the bottle to allow water drainage and prevent roots from rotting. You can also recycle plastic water bottles to create other designs.
Small terra cotta pots are inexpensive and another great art resource for the kids. You can paint the outside of the pots, creating a design that is attractive and fun. Help your children draw and then let them paint on the pot. It’s a wonderful way to bring some fun into gardening and make a keepsake for life. Best yet, you can put plants in them and either move them indoors or out.
For very little money, you can purchase a few colors of paint and brushes. Use rocks, old wood or recyclables as your medium. Some quality time with your kids and family can bring so much joy to your garden to be enjoyed now and for a long time, making lasting memories for a lifetime.

Submitted Photo
B & G Food Enterprises LLC donated Taco Bell food Tuesday to all Ochsner St. Mary employees to thank them for all they do for the community. Pictured are Betty Christopher and Danette Kelso from Dietary, Heather Arceneaux from Administration and Audrey Jones from the Medical/Surgical Department.

The two St. Mary COVID-19 fatalities reported Saturday were a resident at the Legacy nursing fatality in Franklin and another west St. Mary resident, Coroner Eric Melancon said Sunday.

A total of six Legacy of Franklin residents have died. Thirty-one residents have tested positive, including the six who died, two who are hospitalized and 23 residents now at the facility, Melancon said.

"Happy to say there are still no cases at Legacy of MC, Patterson Healthcare or Maison Jardin," Melancon said in a text message.

Six new COVID-19 cases among St. Mary people were reported between noon Saturday and noon Sunday as statewide figures hinted at a slower spread of the disease, according to Louisiana Office of Public Health numbers.

Sunday's reported cases bring the parish's total to 149. A total of 607 St. Mary people have been tested.

Three new COVID-19 cases were reported in St. Martin for a total of 190 positives after 686 tests. The parish death toll remained at 12.

Assumption's three new positives raised the parish's total to 146 after 189 tests. One Assumption person has died of COVID-19 during the pandemic.

Statewide, 348 positives were reported Sunday, less than a third of the daily totals that were being reported last week. Twenty-nine deaths were reported, also down sharply from the daily totals last week.

A total of 23,928 Louisiana people have tested positive, and 1,296 people have died.

The number people being treated in hospitals for COVID-19-related illness rose by 13 to 1,761. The number of people on ventilators was up two to 349.

Harvard University epidemiologists are warning that eradicating COVID-19 from the United States may take a lot longer than anyone wants to hear. As Louisiana broke above the milestone of over 1,000 coronavirus deaths this week, Science magazine published the findings of Harvard researchers who summarized that Americans could see recurring COVID outbreaks as far out as the year 2024.
“The total incidence of COVID-19 illness over the next five years will depend critically upon whether or not it enters into regular circulation after the initial pandemic wave,” the report hypothesized, “which in turn depends primarily upon the duration of immunity that SARS-CoV-2 infection imparts.” (The full report can be found online at: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/14/science.abb5793....)
But researchers warned that relaxing social distancing now could backfire. They proposed some form of social distancing may be required for two years.
“Less effective one-time distancing efforts may result in a prolonged single-peak epidemic,” the epidemiology team stated, “with the extent of strain on the healthcare system and the required duration of distancing depending on the effectiveness. Intermittent distancing may be required into 2022 unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available. The authors are aware that prolonged distancing, even if intermittent, is likely to have profoundly negative economic, social, and educational consequences. Our goal in modeling such policies is not to endorse them but to identify likely trajectories of the epidemic under alternative approach-es, identify complementary interventions such as expanding ICU capacity and identifying treatments to reduce ICU demand, and to spur innovative ideas to expand the list of options to bring the pandemic under long-term control.”
Louisiana Congressman and Republican Whip Steve Scalise, who spent three months in critical care and surgeries after a would-be assassin shot him in 2017, said the Catch-22 is balanc-ing safety with saving the economy.
“Through social distancing, we’ve seen we can reduce the spread of the disease but we also know you can’t keep the economy closed for six months or to 2024. There won’t be an economy left,” Scalise told reporters at Thursday’s daily press briefing in Baton Rouge. He was invited to attend by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards.
“Do we want to see 25% unemployment?” Scalise asked. “That’s not where we want to go so we’ve got to be smarter about it. It’s not a question of whether the disease is going away. Just like the flu comes back every season, we expect it [COVID-19] is going to boomerang back in the fall sometime. So you’ve got to take those precautions now.”
Edwards added, “We have not had discussions with vice president Mike Pence or the president or any conversations about the Harvard study. But I’m sure that as these studies come out, they will inform the CDC [Center for Disease Control] in terms of the guidance they give us.”
Louisiana’s Department of Health conducted its own study to model infection rates based on three scenarios not using drug therapies: a “no lockdown restriction” baseline, which purported to spike last week; one using “social distancing” alone; and finally a lockdown “shelter in place” scenario that spans into summer. Naturally, the projection curves of infections and hospitalizations flatten and are much less severe as more people stay home and out of circulation. Dr. Alex Billioux, Louisiana’s assistant secretary of health, said the clampdown has worked to choke the spread of coronavirus even though Louisiana ranks fourth in the nation in the number of deaths per capita.
Edwards, using LDH’s projections and work-ing with Don Pierson, secretary of Louisiana Economic Development, Thursday announced the creation of “Resilient Louisiana Commission,” a state commission charged with ramping up policies for how and when to restart the state’s economy. The 18-member panel includes Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser and will be co-chaired by Pierson and health care leader Terrie Sterling, a Baton Rouge consultant and retired Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System executive.
In particular, scenarios for crowd control are being studied, looking beyond summer to football season just four months away.
Scalise told reporters the sports economy is paramount especially in Louisiana. “You can imagine the NFL, the NBA, and sports organizations are all having conversations about how can you have large gatherings? That’s their business model,” he said. “They’ve got very smart people, as we speak, working on really good ways to come back while safely allowing people to go back into a sports arena to watch the Saints play, to watch LSU play. We’re all talking to each other. Everybody’s got really good ideas on how to do it but the real remedy is to get the economy opened back up as soon as we possibly can in a safe way.”