Milk + Food Coloring = Fun!

This activity (thanks Our Best Bites!) is so quick and easy I had to share it with y'all!

You'll need a plate, some milk, food coloring, a tooth pick and a little dish soap.

Pour a very small amount of milk onto the plate, just enough to cover the bottom. Add drops of food coloring around the dish (I found that just one or two small drops worked better than four or five)

I messed with the yellow to see if it worked... oops

Take your toothpick and coat the end of it in the dish soap (put it in a little bowl). Take said toothpick and poke the circles of food coloring and see what happens!

Little ones can learn about color mixing and bigger little ones can start to look into the reasons WHY this experiment works. I probably should too...

And as an aside; if your kiddo loves this activity as much as I do I would recommend buying some cheapo milk because it is not very cost effective to be using the family's organic milk! lol

Not Up For Much

I am behind on the daily photos and on general blogging, I have posts in the works but am not up for it. My 14 year old brother lives in Christchurch, New Zealand where a 6.3 magnitude earthquake just hit following a 7.1 last September and aftershocks for the last 6 months. He is OK, the rest of our family down there is OK but I have spent the last two days dialing calling card numbers and on hold with airlines (along with the rest of NZ it seemed!) and family members trying to get him out of there so I am very behind on everything else. I got him on a flight that Air New Zealand so wonderfully set up; they are flying 747s from Christchurch to Auckland and only charging $50 one way, so he's off to the big city for a week or so for a break.

And now I can breathe a little easier. Though just last night we got some pretty sad baby making news, that is going to make things a little difficult. Oh well. Off to pull our life and house back together!

53 Days!

Until we leave for Australia. 3 weeks in the southern hemisphere!

That is all.

Return to your blogging

Q-tip Painting

Every month P's school sends home a print out of what they are covering that month. This month they are working on B,V,Q and K. Hearts, the number 10 and the colors pink and purple. I took a look at the sheet this morning while he was outside in his sandpit and threw together a Quick Q craft (inspired by No Time for Flash Cards of course) to further enforce what he is learning at school. I also chose Q because they are easy to write, he can do an O and a small line so Q is easy peasy!

You'll need a handful of Q-tips, some paint, something to put the paint on and a big Q outline. Man Q's are hard to draw! I ended up going with two circles, one inside of the other and a rectangle where a Q's stick is, then I went over with a marker and erased the pencil. Who knew a Q would be so difficult!?!

And we were off! Way more fun than paintbrushes!

This craft also lent itself beautifully to a few lessons on color mixing; what happens when you mix yellow and red, red and blue and blue and yellow. Of course, mixing red and yellow was his favorite!

When we were done with our Qs he wanted to paint some more; we ended up practicing some letters. For some reason, Q-tips are way more fun (and educational) than pencils or pens! He really got into it

We both had a blast with this one. As you can see:

Clean up was much easier than with those pesky paintbrushes you have to wash and then they get all crunchy... not that I approve of throwing out hundreds of Q-tips a week or anything! lol we will definitely be doing this again!

Project 365 - Week of 2.6.2011

Lots of hungry hippos...

... and little green men.

Cookies and milk on a cold day!

Lots o' ice. Don't see that often here!

But then some beautiful weather

until the pipes burst. Again. Took us months to get a part last time

and this thing. From Halloween. Keeps.popping.up.everywhere. Someone is playing a cruel joke on me. Gives me a fright every time. I'm not really afraid of spiders...

P's very first valentine's Day party. His teacher did a great job! Loved going through this and his goody bag from a birthday on the weekend

More wonderful weather today. Hit the park in the morning and blew bubbles in the afternoon. Kind of lol

Make Ahead Whole Wheat Pizza Dough - It's Pizza Night!

Make it once and have pizza dough ready for the rest of the month!

Our pizza dough recipe has changed since I initially blogged about it, this one tastes and freezes better so I figured I had better update!

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

1 1/2 C warm (115F) water

2 packets (.25oz each) dry active yeast - 2 1/4t = 1 packet

1/4C olive oil

2T sugar - I prefer 1T

2t coarse salt

2C all purpose flour

2C whole wheat flour

To prepare

~ Place water in a large bowl, dissolve sugar and then sprinkle with yeast. Let stand 5-10 minutes

~ In bowl with yeast, add and whisk oil and salt. 

~ Stir in flours with a wooden spoon until a sticky dough forms.

~ Cover bowl with a tea towel, or not, and let stand in a warm spot until dough has doubled in size - about an hour

~ Turn dough onto a floured surface, flour hands and knead until smooth, about 15 seconds

To cook

~ Preheat oven to 450F

~ Divide dough in half - will make two LARGE pizzas

~ Roll and stretch each ball to desired size and thickness, place on preheated pizza stone

~ Bake 6-7 minutes

~ Add toppings and bake for another 12-16 minutes depending on how crispy you like your pizza!

To freeze

~ Double the above recipe and divide into 4 balls, I can sometimes get 5 if I let it rise longer

~ Place each ball on a cookie sheet making sure they're not touching

~ Put cookie sheet in freezer until dough is frozen, remove from the cookie sheet and pop into a covered container. Or not (which is what I do, freezer burn smeezer burn)

To cook from frozen

~ Remove ball of dough from the freezer Friday morning, put on a plate and cover with a tea towel or similar

~ It will be ready for rolling and cooking come 4-5pm and you're ready to go!

YUM!

Canless Chicken and Rice Casserole

I came up with this meal by accident when I was kind of following a recipe for Turkey Tetrazzini. But not really. I made my modified version the other night, P ate two servings, asked for it for lunch the next day and today asked to take it for lunch tomorrow! J and I love it too of course; we used to enjoy those chicken and rice casseroles, ya know, the ones you make with canned cream of ______ soups but then I read the ingredients of the can and was immediately turned off (MSG for example), that and cans are lined with BPA. Yuck. So we're really excited to have a good casserole recipe that we CAN eat!

Canless Chicken and Rice Casserole

2C dry brown rice - cooked (will make a lot more than 2C, use it all!)
1T unsalted butter
2-3T all-purpose flour - used rice flour since we're GF right now
1 1/2- 1 3/4 cups of milk
2 cups chicken broth
3 cups coarsely chopped cooked turkey (or chicken)
1 cup peas + steamed + frozen broccoli too! As much as you want!
2/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan 1/3 cup shredded Swiss cheese - I don't measure though... and used cheddar
Salt and Pepper

~ In a large, heavy saucepan, melt 1/4 cup of butter. Stir in the flour, and cook the mixture over low heat, stirring, for 3 minutes. 

~  Into the saucepan with the butter and flour, slowly whisk in the milk and broth. Bring to a simmer and cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, for about 5 to 8 minutes.

~ Add frozen vegetables and simmer until cooked

~ Add any leftover steamed veggies you're using, grated cheese, turkey/chicken and brown rice

~ Mix it all up, cook until heated through and eat!

And the absolute best part? if you do it this way you only need one big pot for it all! Well, and the rice cooker if you want to count that too. I love having less dishes to pre-wash!

Paint Dropper Fail

I thought I was soooo clever coming up with this idea all on my own. We were going to use the paper to make a wreath for Valentine's Day. And then it was a big flop. Well, the end result was a fail; P did however have an absolute blast learning how to use the paint droppers and squirting water everywhere!

We started with: liquid food coloring that is just sitting in the pantry - better use it for something I thought! paint droppers, some fairly thick paper and a few bowls of water.

Oh, and the plastic tablecloth from P's 3rd birthday party. While it is plastic (naughty me!), it was $1 and we have reused it three times now for art projects!

And P was off! It took him a minute to figure out how to squeeze and release the bulb of the paint dropper - the look of concentration on his face was so cute!

And the problem? The FAIL part? The water just sits in top of the paper! Makes for a very long drying time and you can't move the paper without puddles of colored water sloshing around onto the floor. The paper is all too waxy or something, the colored water can't penetrate it!

So we tried different white paper, cardboard, tissue paper... brown paper... all with the same results. There has to be a trick to this? I told the hubby about our issues when he got home and he mentioned paper made specifically for watercolors? Going to have to give that a go! 

For now I guess we will have to come up with a different Valentine's gift idea for Mimi

Project 365 - Week of 1.29.2011

We had lovely weather last weekend. P enjoyed some much needed time outside!

Tried out a new hot breakfast recipe - Toasted Quinoa Porridge! Banana and raspberries for him, banana and brown sugar for me. I dug it, P did not.

 Made and played with play dough

Went on a treasure hunt and made a yummy (gluten free) snack!

 

Had a real 'snow' day! Hey, who said you needed snow to sled? frost grass works wonderfully too!

Worked on an art project with Daddy!

And spent a sleepy Sunday morning snuggled up on the big bed in our 'nest'

Snowday Shape Search!

OK, so it wasn't snowing today but it was colder than usual (25F outside right now, cold for Southern Texas!) and we DID need something to do this afternoon. This activity WOULD be good for those who have real snow days though!

You could use any kind of theme; animals, letters, numbers, shapes, toys... we went with shapes because they're easiest to cut out! Inspired by this post I started by cutting out 10 different shapes, I used a piece of bright pink paper P's school sent home, you get extra points for recycling! 

Then I drew up a 'map' and added tape to match and attach the shapes to the map as we found them (how DO you spell parallelagram? lol)... parallelogram apparently.

The search is on!

P really seemed to enjoy the 'treasure hunt' and asked to do it again! The next time I made a map with picture clues showing where to find the next shape. It was much easier for him, he spent most of the first game asking me where to look next so the easy to understand clues helped a lot with his independence. (notice the last clue)

And the last clue! But where is the heart? In mummy's sock? Her pocket?

In her shirt pocket! Along with a Yummy Earth lollipop! Lucky boy. That's some awesome treasure if I do say so myself! He was so excited to find that lollipop it was ridiculous. He squealed 'thank you!' and jumped up and down for me to open it yelling 'I'm a pirate!'

Definitely doing this again. I need to come up with some new treasure hunt ideas!