June 17, 2010
We successfully raised 5 caterpillars into 5 beautiful butterflies. The whole process was fun to watch and was quite educational for the whole family! I was a bit creeped out from time to time with the transformation process, but it was so fun to watch. We had them a total of 18 days. When they caterpillars arrived, they were tiny! They grew quite large and all turned into Painted Lady Butterflies.
We were able to watch one of them emerge from its cocoon as a butterfly. What an awesome thing!
Then we released them into the summer sky. I even got one to sit on my finger for a minute before flying away. From the beginning, we told the girls that we were going to let them go, so they enjoyed the process rather than getting upset about letting a “pet” go.
I’m thinking we will get another batch of them!
So now show me something magical about your Thursday! What puts a smile on your face?
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June 15, 2010
I have had lots of traffic here looking for Father’s Day gift ideas or poem to use for good ol’ dad. Here’s a link to the poems I gathered and the gift we made.
I thought it may inspire some who didn’t even know they were looking for an idea. Click the link below for more ideas.
Father’s Day Poem Gifts
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June 14, 2010
I found this skirt the other day. I was too big for Katelyn, but I figured I could just make it smaller and she could have it as a skirt. Later that evening, my friend came over for a visit and we brainstormed a cuter idea for this “fruit stripe gum” skirt. I’m quite pleased with the results!
Here’s the before…I so didn’t think that ribbon coordinated!
After:
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June 9, 2010
Okay, I’m trying something a bit new today. I have been enjoying linking up to other blogs lately and seeing what everyone else is up to. I get such great ideas as I get out and about more. I wanted to try the same thing here for everyone to link through me. For at least the first few weeks, it will be an anything goes type of link party. Show me anything that added magic to your life. Is it a new pair of shoes? Or maybe a great book you read or bracelet you made? Did you just finish a sewing project or reorganize your linen closet? Let me see what puts a little sparkle in your eye and a little hop in your step!
While you’re at it, go ahead and click to add yourself to my Google friends thingy. I look like a loser with my sister there. She didn’t have a choice about joining, she’s the little sister. So come on guys! Show me some love!
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June 9, 2010
I joined a blog party! After checking out my party, hop on over and see some others!
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June 9, 2010
We spend lots of time at the pool during the summer. The girls turn into fish and then into prunes! They also need a few breaks from the pool to rehydrate, reapply sunscreen, etc. I was trying to figure out a way to keep them busy and entertained without begging for food each trip out of the pool. That’s when I decided to do pool “paper” dolls. I got the idea from the foam letters we had stuck to the wall in the bathtub. The clothes stick on the dolls when they are wet. These are also great for the tub. Our girls love paper dolls and are happily entertained with these. We couldn’t have a paper doll at the pool without a mermaid tail!
To make the dolls, I bought a stack of craft foam without the sticky back. The pack I got was had about 10 different colors and was about 50 sheets for $5. I cut out a paper doll shape for the body for each of them and then basic shapes for the clothing. I let the girls use Sharpies to draw details on the dolls and clothes. It was a fun project that will have lots of use over the summer. We have lots more foam left to make more outfits.
When I told some friends about this project, some wanted ideas for boys too. With all girls, I have a hard time coming up with boy ideas! So thoughts were cars, dinosaurs, etc. You could cut basic car shapes and trucks as well as different colored wheels, windows, etc, maybe?
If anyone has an idea for boy foam pool toys, please share it!
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June 1, 2010
I swear I thought I posted pictures of Katelyn’s new desk, but I guess I was wrong. I found this desk at the Salvation Army and got them to give me a discount on it. The following day I went in search of a cute chair to go with it. I peeked into the back room at Goodwill and saw this cutie sitting there waiting for me. I convinced a worker that I really needed it and they drug it out for me and priced it at $4. Score!
Desk before:
Chair before:
Katelyn wanted the desk red, but we compromised with painting the chair red instead. I just love how it turned out.
After:
Now I just need to get the rest of her room finished. I have plans for the little table next to her bed, different window treatments and I need to finish painting the details on the walls. She’s been patiently waiting for an owl in that tree.
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May 31, 2010
Yesterday I found some milk glass bud vases at the bargain center. I left them there when I first saw them and I convinced Jon to go back later so I could get them. I’m glad I went back. I got all 4 for $5. I think these will look perfect in my new kitchen. Right now they are making their home on the mantle until I have a better place for them. After I got them all cleaned up (they were in pretty funky condition!), I grabbed some flowers from our yard and put them to good use.
Now I’m going to be on the lookout for some more. I usually like odd numbers of things and so having 4 of these vases isn’t cutting it for me. I would like another one with a wider base at the bottom and a few that are shorter to round out the collection. When I mentioned this to Jon he wanted to know why I didn’t just buy some off eBay or Amazon.com and I had to explain the thrill of the hunt to him. He just doesn’t get it…
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May 29, 2010
I don’t think I shared Katelyn’s birthday party cake from Aug. She had a “Hula by the Pool-a” birthday party. So the theme was hula dancers and she wanted a pool cake. She drew a sketch of what she wanted and it was my job to turn that into a cake! Here’s the final result:
Madison’s birthday was in May and she wanted Snoopy. We took the girls to Chuck E Cheese-its (as Madison happens to call it) and had fun with them there. We came home and had cake and ice cream. Since school got out a couple of weeks before her birthday, I did a party for her class too. It’s hard to find Snoopy stuff for parties. I called all over town and nobody had plates or anything. I ended up ordering some off of Amazon along with these rings:
I put them on top of the cupcakes I took to school. They were a hit with the preschool crowd. Then for her birthday cake, she wanted chocolate icing. I was having a hard time figuring out how to do Snoopy with chocolate. I ended up doing chocolate between the layers and on the side of the cake. The top was vanilla. I added some pink where they met on top of the cake. She was thrilled with the cake…even the lopsided writing. 
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May 29, 2010
We have had a pair of mockingbirds yell at us each time we leave the house and they started to dive bomb the cat as he walked up the driveway. I figured there must be a nest out there somewhere. So I started hunting for it. I found it one of the bushes in front of the house. Our yard slopes at the end of the bush so I wasn’t tall enough to see inside the nest. While I was peeking around the area, the birds didn’t like that I was there. Then I noticed a different chirping noise near me at the top of the bush. That’s when I noticed the baby bird sitting there. He must have been getting ready to leave the nest. You could still see the downy feathers on his head. I tried to get some pictures, but the angle wasn’t good for that and I don’t do well taking pictures with the camera over my head! So this is the best I could get.
I checked on him again today and I didn’t see him. Mama and Daddy were yelling at me though so I know he was close!
In the mail today we got Madison’s caterpillars. We are trying out the butterfly garden. Hopefully in a few weeks we will be releasing our painted lady butterflies outside. We have several butterfly bushes in the yard already, so hopefully they will stay close for a bit. The girls are really excited about the butterflies.
One more bit of nature from the yard…the other morning the girls woke us up to report there was a turtle walking through the side yard. Sure enough, there was! We don’t get many random turtles around here. I should have let them out to feed it some lettuce or something, but it was before I had a cup of coffee or visited the potty that morning, so I wasn’t fully awake to think it through. He was moving out pretty fast, I hope he reached his destination safely.
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May 27, 2010
Today I tried out a new recipe. I’m a sucker for Dr Pepper and I’m trying to quit drinking so much of it. I am trying to find something that is refreshing, tasty and not so bad for me. That’s why I thought about trying this blueberry soda idea. I used Alton Brown’s recipe:
Ingredients
4 Cups of fresh blueberries, rinsed and drained (I used frozen…they were on sale for cheap and already in my freezer and I don’t always follow the rules so well)
2 Cups of Water
7 oz of sugar (I used 1 Cup…don’t know why he had to put that in ounces, but I didn’t feel like dragging the postal scale out of the desk to measure sugar!)
1 lime, juiced (I used a couple or 3 tablespoons of lime juice from the fridge)
Carbonated Water
Directions
- Place the blueberries and the water into a medium saucepan, set over medium-high heat and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes.
- Remove the saucepan from the heat and pour the mixture into a colander lined with cheesecloth that is set in a large bowl. (if you don’t have cheesecloth, you can cut up a clean, old sheet from your fabric stash…just sayin’)
- Allow to cool for 15 minutes.
- Gather up the edges of the cheesecloth and squeeze out as much of the liquid as possible. Discard the skin and pulp.
- Return the blueberry juice to the saucepan along with the sugar and lime juice.
- Place over medium high heat and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Bring to a boil and cook for 2 minutes.
- Remove from the heat and transfer to a heatproof glass container and place in the refrigerator, uncovered, until completely cooled.
To Serve: Combine 1/4 cup of the liquid with 8-ounces of carbonated water and serve over ice.
It’s refreshing and different. It’s not Dr Pepper, but it’s also fun to try new things! Aren’t blueberries good for your memory? I can’t remember. Seriously!
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May 26, 2010
Last night Emily pulled the “Make Self Portrait Dolls” from the summer fun jar. I had a vague idea about how I wanted us to go about making these, but I figured I had some time to think about it. Guess I was wrong. It’s the second activity chosen.
These dolls were quite the trial and error project. I think they got tired of drawing by the end! We started off with them drawing a self portrait. Madison used some creative license with her portrait.
First I had visions of stitching their creations onto the fabric to make the dolls. Then I decided that was too time consuming for a toy they would probably toss aside after a day or so. If they end up loving these, we can try that next time.
So then I decided to try to do a crayon transfer from the paper to the fabric. That didn’t go so well either. The crayon transferred, but it was too light to see no matter how dark the original crayon marks were. Crayola makes fabric crayons, but I don’t have any and I wasn’t willing to drag a sick child through Walmart to find some.
At this point I decided to begin researching online about another way to do a crayon transfer. Turns out regular Crayola crayons don’t do well. I guess that’s why they make the fabric kind. Some people said they have had luck with using generic crayons. I found some generic ones my mother-in-law bought the girls and tried those. They didn’t work any better than the first try.
Moving on to the next idea. You can color on sandpaper and iron that to the fabric. So I went out to the garage to snoop through Jon’s sandpaper supply. He had a new sheet of drywall sandpaper, but it wasn’t big enough for all three girls to use. Then he had small sheets of a very rough sandpaper. I colored a corner of one of them and tested it out. It worked well, so I passed out the sandpaper with instructions to draw another picture. The rough grit didn’t work well with the details the girls wanted to do in a small area. So we decided that idea didn’t work well for this project, but I think it would do well for other projects. I gathered up the sandpaper and put it back in a pile on the shelves in the garage. Wait until Jon needs sandpaper again and finds crayon drawings on them!
So after some more brainstorming, we tried to use freezer paper. That stuff does great for so many projects and it did better than using the regular paper, but wasn’t what we wanted either.
Then I decided I needed to stop wasting time trying to figure out how to do a crayon transfer. I just let them color directly onto the fabric. Then I placed a sheet of paper over it and used the iron to melt the crayon and set it right onto the fabric. Who needs to use a transfer?
After they finished coloring them, I let them go through my scrap fabric and choose something for the back of the doll. I stitched around the edges and turned them right side out. After stuffing them a bit, I sewed the bottom shut.
Now they have little self portrait softies.
Here are the backs of the dolls.
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May 24, 2010
Today is what I consider the first official day of summer vacation. I didn’t want to spend everyday trying to figure out stuff to keep the kiddos from being bored. So we compiled a list of stuff we thought would be fun to do over the summer. In addition to the usual stuff like going to the pool, we now have a jar of fun ideas. I planned to get a cute jar with a lid to put the paper in, but since I had a leftover teacher gift with the letter “S” on it, I decided the S could stand for summer and used it instead. To make the jar, I simply cut strips of scrapbook paper and wrote a fun idea on each strip. I curled the strip and tossed it into the jar. Now each night, the girls will rotate choosing one strip and we will do that activity the next day. That give me a bit of time to plan the day and gather supplies. Every now and then we will have to alter plans if it’s a rainy day and the activity is outside, but most ideas are doable in all types of weather.
Now we are ready for summer! I also have strict instructions from a friend of mine to call her each night after we pull the strip to see if her and her girls want to join us for the fun.
Tomorrow’s activity is bubble blowing in the backyard. We will make some bubbles, use some store bought kind and experiment with different objects as bubble wands. Should be fun!
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May 22, 2010
Yesterday I was writing an article about abnormal bleeding during pregnancy. Katelyn, who is 6, was sitting next to me and saw drawings of a baby in the womb. She looked at the picture and started asking questions. I’m used to this from her and she’s aware of how babies get out of the mommy’s tummy and all, so I wasn’t sure where this new line of questioning was going to go. I had suspicions, but I was way off. I would have never guessed this question.
“When the baby comes out of the mommy, how do the parents know if the baby wants to celebrate Hanukkah or Christmas?”
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May 18, 2010
This year for end of the year teacher gifts, I made monogrammed vases. I got the idea after making a vase for a birthday gift. I ended up making 8 of these things! We only have these two left and I just remembered to take a picture of them. I cut the letter out of clear contact paper to use as a stencil. Then, I used Armour Etch to etch the letter. I was happy with the results and I hope the teachers are too!
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