The summer begins…

This is our first official day of summer.  Clara’s last day of preschool was last Wednesday, but we had Grandmoo here and then it was the weekend, so those days don’t count.  But today… today was the first day for me to fill.  As my girls (especially the little one) are not very fantastic about filling their own time, this time of year strikes fear into my heart.  This is especially true since I have cut the girl’s screen time down to one hour or less per day.  I decided that at least a little bit of a schedule is in order.  Here is our very flexible schedule for summer days:

• Breakfast
• Curious George (1/2 hour)
• Shower/get dressed
• Gardening/weeding/outside play time
• Morning activity
• Lunch
• Nap/Quiet time
• Afternoon activity (Could be just playing in the back yard
• Dinner
• Movie (1/2 hour)
• Bath
• Bedtime

So far today it has worked out quite well.  You’ll notice that I did not include times on our schedule so that I can manipulate things as I want.  For instance, our wake up time was officially a bright and early 5:30 and we were outside for gardening and play time by 8:00 this morning, so hopefully it won’t be that early every day.

Our morning activity today was a trip to Dollar Tree and swmimming lessons at the community center.  Woo hoo.  There will be more exciting things to come.  To prepare for this, the girls and I created this year’s summer fun list this weekend.  Remember last years?  Well, it turns out that pulling a random stick out of a jar was just too spontaneous for me.  So, this year we have a list.  That way we can discuss and there is no expectation that we will do whatever is pulled out of the jar.  But there are still tons of fun activities to choose from.

The girls painted a piece of cardboard from a cracker box with about a ton of glitter paint (have I mentioned our current love affair with glitter paint?) and then two days later, when it was dry, I used a Sharpie to write out the list we had brain stormed.  Will we get to all of them?  Probably not, but at least we have somewhere to start to fill in our schedule.

Garden Update

I’ve been away from blogging for a while now since the weather here has been so beautiful. I’ve been weeding, working on the garden, playing in the sun, watching the kids run through the sprinkler, and otherwise just not worrying about the computer. But, it is raining today. So here I am. First, I want to show you the rock path that I mentioned working on in my last post. I think it turned out pretty well.

That took quite a bit of time to get put back together. I have also been trying out a few home remedies for problems in the garden. I don’t have results for all of them yet, and I’ll post more when I do, but I did want to tell you about scalding weeds, which I did a bunch of in the last couple of weeks.
Here’s the spot that I scalded before:

Under all of that ridiculous grass and random weeds are a bunch of stepping stones that separate my garden beds so that I don’t step on any plants. I spent an afternoon boiling water in my new electric teakettle (which I have no idea how I lived without for this long–its so fast!) and walking it out the garden and then pouring it slowly on to the weeds around the stepping stones. Some of the grass needed a second application about three days later, but after only a few days all of it was brown and dead without having to put any week killer so close to my vegetable garden beds! Hooray! Here is the after picture with a bit of brown weed pulling:

As you can see, the garden beds are all planted.  In the top bed I have corn and pumpkins planted from seed.  In the middle are green beans, two kinds of zucchini, carrots, and broccoli.  The bottom bed includes more green beans, kale, lettuce, and cucumbers.

I’ll be back with a few more garden updates later in the month and I promise more crafty posts soon and the coming of this year’s summer art in a couple of weeks!

Sandpaper Art

We haven’t been doing a lot of specific art lately, as much as just putting out materials and letting both girls explore. The bar in our kitchen has been full of markers, stickers, paper, crayons, watercolors, and scissors (at least until Clara decided to cut Nancy’s hair, then the scissors disappeared). The girls like to sit there and create while I cook dinner. The latest addition to this array of art was a package of sandpaper that I got at Dollar Tree this week. Super fun! Crayons turn out really bright on it and a new medium makes sitting at the bar while I cook even more fun.

This one is a picture of me on the sand with sunshine and a rainbow… I’m living the dream, apparently!

Instant Chocolate Cake

Spring is here! Hooray! We’ve had incredible weather this week and while it is raining here right now, I don’t feel the weight of the grey like I had been since I’ve gotten so much vitamin D this week. We’ve been working hard on the back yard and have de-thatched the lawn, pulled a lot of weeds, and I’m in the midst of digging up and resetting a stone pathway that had become completely covered in dirt. In gardening news, we have asparagus and kale ready to eat and our pea plants are thriving (if not producing yet). The apple tree and blueberry bushes are blooming. I have yet to dig up the garden beds, though. The other projects are taking up all of my spare time.

In chicken news, we have eggs! The girls are laying six days a week and are almost keeping up with Nancy’s insatiable love of all things egg. Both of the chickens are somewhat naughty and have been going into parts of the yard that they are not allowed, including my flower beds where they have been sunbathing (and dirt bathing, too).

Clara has taken to collecting the eggs every day herself. The other day, she got an egg, and since it was dirty, she washed it and dried it in a towel. Then the towel became a nest and she played with the egg for a good twenty minutes and became super attached to her “special egg.” I bet you can guess what happenend. Her poor little egg fell and broke and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men and even Momma couldn’t put her “special egg” back together again. She was so upset.

What to do? We made a little chocolate cake out of her egg and then she was happy again. I googled a cake in a mug recipe and found the easiest cake recipe ever! Here it is if you want to try it.

Mix the following ingredients in a microwave proof mug:
1 egg
1/4 C. powdered sugar
2 Table. cocoa powder

Microwave for 50-60 seconds or until done.
Enjoy!

Microwave Puffy Paint

We had a very rainy spring break, thank you for asking.  It was almost ridiculous and one late afternoon amongst pouring rain, I broke out a fabulous activity that I found via Inner Child Fun, formerly Frugal Family Fun.

During naptime, I mixed up three different colors of paint and put them into squirt bottles.  They actually lasted overnight and might have lasted longer if Clara hadn’t been obsessed with painting and used them all up.  I don’t keep self-rising flour in my house, as it seems silly, so I adapted the recipe as follows:

1 C. all purpose flour

1 C. salt

1 1/2 tea. baking powder

1 C. water

Food coloring

I mixed all of the ingredients except the food coloring together in a bowl until smooth .  Then I put a few drops of food coloring into each of my three squirt bottles and split the flour mixture among them using a funnel to control the mess.  Then I shook them up to distribute the color.

 


After naps, we took all the paints and some white card stock over to the cousins’ house and we painted for the whole afternoon. I had the older kids draw their pictures first with pencil and then go over them with paint, while the little ones just squirted at will. This was a very interesting medium for them to use as they had to do at least think about negative space if they wanted pictures to show up–they couldn’t just fill everything in with paint.


The best part was the puffing, though! After the pictures were painted, we popped them in the microwave for thirty second or so (depending on how much paint was on the paper) and they puffed up and dried immediately! Super cool effect and immediate gratification. I think all in all, we made at least forty pictures over two days. This was a huge hit!