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Thank you for stopping by! Here you will find a variety of things as I post whatever happens to be going on in our home - recipes, crafts, homeschool, birthday parties, travels, meals in muffin tins and more! I'd love to know what you think so please feel free to leave comments!

Friday, June 17, 2011

Flip Flop Boxes

I decided to do a summer themed sensory tub for the kids for June but I was having a rough time deciding what to put in it. So, I just had to make a trip to Pat Catan's (for those unfamiliar, it's a arts & craft store, something like Michael's). I found a few things of interest including some paper mache flip flop boxes. They were so super cute that I just had to have a pair. Unfortunately, they were all right footed, so I figured I'd buy two anyhow and just make some mismatched flip flops.

Before

After

They're a little sloppy because the entire time I was trying to paint the details, the kids seemed to be taking turns moving, shaking, pushing, leaning on or jiggling the table. Oh well. It's just for the sensory tub, so they are the only ones who will be seeing them regularly.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Rainy Day Summer Fun

Since the weather was cold, rainy and stormy today, we stayed inside and entertained ourselves with some summer themed activities. First, we watched Lilo & Stitch. While the movie itself isn't summer themed, it takes place in Hawaii which immediately invokes thoughts of summer activities - swimming at the the beach, luaus, surfing, alien monsters grooving to Elvis... ok, so not the last thing, but definitely the others. 

Then we did something that was totally new for Micah - we painted. A couple weeks ago, I saw a craft kit for kids that had seashells that you put on sea creature shapes and then decorated. I decided to make my own version since we already have all the stuff we would need. The first thing I did was do an image search for various coloring pages of the various sea creatures I wanted - a fish, sea star, turtle, crab & seahorse. I sized them to about 3.5 inches, printed them and cut them out to use as a template. Actually, I couldn't find a crab that I liked, so I drew my own. Then I traced my creatures onto different colors of craft foam sheets and cut them out. Finally, I gathered everything else: paints, brushes and seashells that we collected on our trip to Florida last year. 

Next came the fun part - the painting. Like I said before, this is something Micah has never done before, so I wasn't sure what to expect - a mess for sure, but how bad... LOL

Micah didn't quite get the idea of one color at a time and he mixed a lot of his paints before he got them on the sea creature cut outs. 

He really got into it though. Both figuratively and literally. We had a lot of paint to wipe off the boy when he was done. He thought it was hilarious and I thought it was pretty funny too.

Laural put a lot of thought into how she wanted to paint each figure. I would post more pics of Laural but since the kids just stripped down to their underwear to paint, I will just post one of the more modest ones.

Painting is done! Micah's are on the left and Laural's on the right. We decided to wait until tomorrow to glue the shells on since some of the paint was pretty thick (especially on Micah's) to give it lots of time to dry.

Finally, to end our day, we went outside to watch the fireflies. We signed up to be "citizen scientists" at https://www.mos.org/fireflywatch/ to observe fireflies in our backyard. This was our second week of observation. The kids really look forward to it! When I told them we would be going out to watch the fireflies, Micah shouted, "Oh yay! I wuv firefwies!" I love his sweet 3 year old enthusiasm! And the cute way he says his Ls like Ws. So, we broke out some more dollar store glow sticks (blue again because according to the Museum of Science website, fireflies don't see blue light) and headed outside to observe. It was quiet (except for the kids arguing about who got to sit or stand where) and we saw loads of fireflies! Such fun! And I never noticed that there were 3 distinct colors of the little buggers until we started watching them. You learn something new all the time, huh?

Monday, June 13, 2011

Muffin Tin Monday - Flag Day

Since tomorrow is Flag Day, I made our muffin tin meal themed around Celebrating Old Glory.

We had: Red, White & Blue Berries, Star Bread (with some blue dots), Ham Fireworks, Red Pepper Stripes. Cheese Star (with red & blue accents) & Vanilla Yogurt with Red & Blue Sprinkles. I also added a couple of sparkler candles but they weren't very sparkly. Both kids were still thrilled with their meals.

Laural chooses her next morsel.

Micah goes right for his favorite - yogurt.

Don't forget to check out Muffin Tin Mom for other tins being served up this week!

Friday, June 10, 2011

Can I Go Back to How I Was Before?

Have you ever stopped for a moment and realized that certain aspects of your life are totally different from how you imagined they would be? Or how you want them to be? I think that certain changes sneak up over time and before you know it, things you loved in your younger days are things you hate in your more seasoned years. And the thing is, that you may not really like the way things have changed. Ok, so maybe this is just something that has happened with me. Regardless, here's my story. 

When I was a kid, even a teen and a little beyond high school, I was very much an outdoor person. I spent hours outside - from playing in the creek (or crick as we used to call it) to playing in the pool to just simply sitting in a big chair out near the wood line reading a book or watching the sun set behind the trees across the field. I loved being outside. Maybe it was because we didn't have computers waaaay back then to take up our time cruising around facebook. Maybe it was because we still had an antenna for television and got only 2 channels - on a good day. Maybe it was because I needed some sort of escape from my 3 younger brothers (yes, three younger brothers - c'mon mom & dad - you couldn't give me a sister? On second thought, that would probably have been worse...). Whatever the underlying reason, I spent a lot of time outside.

Now, not so much.

And the more that I think about it, the more I realize that I'm not happy with that. So, I thought for a little while. It didn't take me long, really, to figure out why. First, I got married. No, my husband or getting married weren't the actual reasons I stopped enjoying the out of doors. Where we lived after the wedding was a big factor though.

First, a little more background. I grew up in a fairly rural setting. We had neighbors, but they weren't super close. If you looked over at the neighbor's house, you had to have pretty good eyesight to see what they might be up to. Across the street from our house was a big - BIG - cornfield. Behind our house was "the hill." It wasn't really a hill. That's what we ended up calling it though. It was, in fact, a rather deep and wide ravine carved out by the winding creek (crick) that I mentioned earlier. Whenever we talked about taking the short hike down to the creek (crick) we said we were "going over the hill." On the other side of "the hill" (the ravine) was woods and beyond that was a wide open meadow. Beyond the meadow was more forest that had trails running through it that were actually part of an archery practice course that local bow hunters would use occasionally to hone their shooting skills. I spent a good deal of time "over the hill" and wandering the woods and the trails in the area.

So, back to our first marital home. It was in town. A somewhat busy but not too terribly huge town. We lived rather close to the downtown area. To our left was a house so close that you couldn't really walk between ours and theirs. To the right, another house, this one barely wide enough for a car to park there. Across the street (the street being maybe 10 feet from the front door) was another house and beside that another house that was only a driveway's width away. Our back yard was small - 20 feet by 36 feet approximately - and just beyond the fence at the back of the yard was yet another house with another close to it. When I went out into our back yard - besides feeling like I had no privacy - it was just unpleasant. Traffic noise, people noise, road dust, exhaust fumes, and a complete lack of shade made the yard a bright, hot, annoying place. There was nothing relaxing about it. We had 8 foot privacy fence around it so it often felt as though I was caged in to this little enclosure and since all the homes surrounding and including ours were 2 story, an 8 foot fence really didn't help me feel like we had any real privacy when we went outside. We had a bench on the front covered porch area and there was a small hedge, but when you are sitting just 2 feet away from where people are walking past on the sidewalk, well that's not so very private either. After a while, I quit going outside. Especially once we had central air conditioning installed.

Once we left our first home and came to our current place of residence, my reasons for shunning outside time changed. Where we live now it quite nice. There are a couple of industrial buildings nearby but the noise from them is minimal and they keep 9 to 5 hours. So our evenings are quiet enough. We live on a main road and at the bottom of a hill so we regularly get the sound of tractor trailers cruising past with their jake brake rumbling, but it isn't so bad. What keeps me from venturing outside now is --- bugs! Besides the industrial buildings and the main road, we also have a swamp land and creek fairly close to our home. This means tons of bugs - especially spiders which are my personal nemeses. We also get tons of mosquitoes which apparently have not been let in on the little secret of how insect repellents are supposed to work. Last year, while outside with the children, I got bit on my ring finger by some tiny little insect - pale white and wedge shaped. The pain and swelling I had were horrible and lasted for days - from a teeny, tiny little bug that you almost need a magnifying glass to see! Well, that was enough for me AND I certainly did not want my children to get bitten by one of these things, so inside we stayed!

This year, however, I really, really, really want to change. I want to be an outside mama. I want my kids to play in the dirt, catch fireflies & butterflies and sit on the lawn and make funny whistling sounds with a nice broad blade of fresh green grass. But can I change myself back to the way I was before I became a bit jaded by the unpleasant aspects of being outside? The answer is - I hope so. I don't know. I'm trying! I've done a few things to make it easier for me get myself outside. I built the Enchanted Garden for the kids and I've planted a vegetable garden. I've rearranged a few things in the yard to make them a bit more accessible and in the past week, I've spent at least a couple hours each day this past week either planting or tending to the gardens or sitting in my camp chair watching the kids play in the sand box or their garden or with their ring toss game & glow sticks. I'm making progress. I admit though, I totally freak out at least once every time we are outside when my all boy three year old says "Look Mommy!" while holding up a spider. Oh. Dear. God. Help me. I usually start yelling, "Put it down! Put it down! Put it down!" And he does, but still... My skin is crawling just thinking about it. *Shudder* But the point is, I am doing it. We are doing it. Slowly and with a little stress on my part, but we are slowly becoming a more outdoor oriented family. At least for the summer. We won't even get into how much I hate the cold weather. 

Oh, and by the way, one of those stupid little pale bugs bit me again. Just yesterday. On the ankle. It hurts. But we still went outside today.

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