Monday, June 28, 2010

Swinter

THIS was fun! Inspired by an episode of Phineas & Ferb, the girls asked if they could have "Swinter" in the back yard. Our version was a much lower scale than Phineas & Ferb, but no one can top those guys!
We just shaved some ice with our snow cone maker into a large bowl & headed to the back yard. At first, the girls didn't think they needed gloves, since it was 95 degrees outside, but they quickly figured out that ice is cold, even if it's hot outside! ;)
They had fun throwing it at each other.
And throwing it up in the air so it felt like it was snowing on them...
When we were done with the snow, we got in the pool. What a great way to end a perfect "Swinter" day!!

Friday, June 25, 2010

Summer Cooking Fun!

I haven't blogged forever. I thought this summer might be a fun time to do a few posts (we'll see!).

Many of us full-time moms start to go bonkers when school gets out. Our routine is blown! Taite, Paige & I are SUPER-routined. Other than signing Taite up for a handful of week-long activities this summer, I like to try to think of weekly activities we can do at home to keep us busy. One thing we did last summer that we're doing again this summer is a weekly cooking/food activity.

Here's what we've done so far:
1. Simple sugar cookies

Just bought the pre-made dough, but the girls got to roll out the dough and cut out shapes. We decorated with sprinkles. Nothing too elaborate, but we don't get a chance to do the cut-out cookies as often any more.

2. Zucchini Bread!

This was fun! Our neighbor had made some zucchini bread from zucchini in their garden. I'm not a big fan of zucchini, but I used to LOVE my mom's zucchini when I was a kid. Taite tasted Mitzi's bread & she loved it (I didn't tell her what she was eating at first!). She was thrown off by zucchini being in a sweet-tasting bread, but she wanted to try to make some ourselves. So, we got the recipe from Mitz & made some ourselves. The funniest part of this baking 'session' was when I asked Taite to turn on the mixer for me. I had just added a LOT of flour to the bowl. She turned it on too fast, and we had flour ALL over the place! We laughed a lot. In the end, the bread turned out well. She ate that bread every day for over a week!


3. VBS Fish Chex Mix

I signed up to take a snack for VBS this week. They asked me to send an appetizer! What? An appetizer for kids at VBS? I had no idea what to send. Mitz comes to the rescue again and suggested Chex Mix. The VBS curriculum was created by the Christian group "Go Fish", so I found a Chex Mix recipe that included goldfish. It was pretty easy - chex cereal, colored goldfish, pretzel goldfish, a little bit of melted butter, dry ranch mix & parmesan cheese. It turned out pretty good. Taite said the kids liked it!

4. Home-made Finger Paint

Super easy - not a food, but still a "mixing" activity. We found this one in an arts & crafts book we checked out from the library. Just mix flour & water and add some food coloring. We actually cooked the mixture in a skillet on med. for about 5-10 min. Added the food coloring after we cooked it. Let it cool & it made pretty cool finger paint.

Okay, long post. Sorry. I'll have to add weekly now (again, we'll see!) ;)