Author: Raptor Mama

I had grand plans of writing an awesome blog post while Kate napped, but instead I have been sucked into this blog.  She has some awesome videos.  I think I’m going to try to make some layered scrapbook pages tonight.  🙂

Remember my travel backpack?  Well, after many false starts, I finally figured out a way to display the patches.

We have had these frames for years just sitting in our closet waiting for inspiration.  🙂  They came with a thick cardboard-type backing which I stapled some burlap to.  I really liked the texture it gave the project.

I was initially going to label all of the patches with the country and the rough date that I went there (month, year) but in the end I liked the way it looked better without.  Plus, I’m lazy.  🙂

I kept the patches roughly in order, all of the patches from one frame come before the next, but within each frame I moved them around however they looked best.  That last frame looks a bit bare, I guess we had better plan another trip!  🙂

So after our photo session with Libby, I decided to wallpaper my house with prints order a few canvases.  I decided to go with Canvas on Demand because they have lots of groupons and I’m cheap like that.  🙂  I was really pleased with the quality and turn around time.

The hardest part was choosing the pictures.  I wanted one of the 3 of us, but lets face it, Kate is *way* more photogenic than me.  🙂

This picture isn’t great, but it gives you an idea of the scale.  These canvases are 16×20.

I am so happy with the pictures and the canvases!  My goal now is to have family pictures taken every year.  If you are on the fence, it is so worth it.  It’s an investment, but one I am really glad that we made.

So Kate’s friend Abby talks about volcanos all the time.  We’ve had to “evacuate” the stuffed animals on more than one occasion.  🙂  I decided it was high time we made a kitchen volcano.  A bit of quick googling netted me a recipe, though you could just as easily use vinegar and baking soda by themselves.  We, of course, modified it as we went.

First up, we didn’t make the actual volcano.  Who really has 2 cups of salt on hand anyway?  We made our volcano out of repurposed shipping materials.  Did I mention we have Amazon Prime?  Yeah, we order everything.  I used one of those starbucks bottles as the base and molded some packing paper around it.

Next we mixed up the water, baking soda, food coloring and dish soap.  I poured it into the volcano with the help of a funnel.  It was at this point that we ran into problems.  I went to get the giant jug of vinegar and it wasn’t in the pantry.  I checked the laundry room because I sometimes add it to a load of diapers, but it wasn’t there either.  Hmm…  Now we were in a pickle because Kate and Abby were expecting a volcano.  I checked the pantry again.  Well, we had some rice wine vinegar, surely that would work.

Abby got all excited but then we had this somewhat disappointing reaction.

I mean, technically it worked but it wasn’t very impressive.  More of a slow ooze than a fiery volcano.  Kate quickly demanded another project, so we did some stickers.

At about this point, Michael came out for lunch (he works from home) and decided that he was going to take a crack at the volcano construction.  The girls were thrilled.  He made a volcano out of old playdoh and filled it with baking soda.

At this point, he also went and found the regular vinegar.  It was in the linin closet from the last time we cleaned the bathroom.  Whoops.

He found an old baby advil syringe and used it to inject some food colored vinegar directly into the baking soda.

This was met with more approval, partly due to the fact that you could get several “eruptions” out of it by adding another syringe full of vinegar.  Still, I think I might be picking up some mentos at the store next time I go.  We can drop them in some diet coke and have some real fun.  I might have to get some teeny tiny safety goggles first.  🙂

I’m having a hard time finishing up a felt alphabet set, so I’ve given myself an incentive.  If I can finish it by Friday morning, I’m buying myself this awesome camera bag that I’ve been lusting after.  I’m not sure if it’s possible for me to finish by then, but I’m sure motivated now.  🙂

 

Kate and Michael walked to HEB this morning to get some craft supplies and they picked up these glittery pompoms which Kate called “soft things.”  Kate immediately wanted to “counting bears” them (sort them by color) so she went over and got her cups.  After I woke up, I showed her how to sort them into a muffin tin with a spoon.  I’ve seen this on tons of blogs so I’m not even trying to claim credit.  🙂

It’s pretty self-explanatory so I won’t bore you with details.  I will say that it kept Kate happily occupied for quite some time.

After she masters transferring the pompoms with the spoon, I plan on getting her some ice tongs from Goodwill.  Maybe eventually we’ll move up to trainer chopsticks.  🙂

Eventually she decided to expedite the process.  🙂

 

 

We’ve been on a project streak around here and today bird feeders were up on the list.  For some reason, I felt like we needed pinecones to do this (holdover from my early childhood on the coast?) but there are no pinecones up here so we had to improvise.  Michael had the awesome idea to use corn cobs as the base.  We got corn as part of our CSA last week so it worked out perfectly.

Step one- eat some tasty corn!  We were shooting for an allergy free project (Kate’s friend Emily is allergic to dairy, egg and nuts) so we roasted the corn with a touch of vegetable oil instead of putting butter on it.  It was super yummy.  🙂

Step 2- gather the ingredients.  We subbed sunbutter for peanut butter.  Incidentally, I tried so hard to make this allergy free, only to find out that the birdseed had egg in it.  Le sigh.  I had no idea that birdseed could have egg in it.  I was checking it for nuts.  You win some, you lose some.  We decided to do this project while Emily was napping to be on the safe side.

Step 3- we added honey to some sunbutter to make it stickier.  I feel like there are probably a million tutorials for this online, but we just kind of made it up as we went along.  🙂

Step 4- smear the sunbutter/ honey mixture onto the corn cobs.  The girls were a little hesitant about getting their hands dirty, but I assured them that we would wash our hands when we were done.

I believe Abby’s exact quote was, “Um, Christina, my hands are yucky.”  Fair enough.  🙂

I went ahead and smoothed the sunbutter down with a knife.  I think if we try something like this again I’ll get them little spatulas.

Step 5- coat in birdseed.  The girls had pretty much lost interest at this point so I went ahead and rolled the corn cobs in the birdseed.  Michael put a screw in the top of each one and I tied a ribbon loop to it.  It turned out pretty cute even if the girls weren’t so into the process.

I hung the birdfeeder outside and we eagerly awaited some birds.  This morning when we woke up it was gone.  There was nothing but the screw and some ribbon left.  Either it got windier than I thought last night or something decided it looked mighty tasty and carried it off for a midnight snack.  Overall, this was a pretty fun project though it would be better suited to kids who like to get dirty.  🙂

Yeah, so I used another exclamation point, but come on!  It’s slime!  I found this on Pinterest and knew that I had to try it.  It’s a sciency activity with only 4 ingredients and it’s not messy.  Perfect.

First, I put the girls in their aprons.  I made Kate a new one this weekend.  🙂  Then I got out the ingredients: borax, glue, food coloring and water.

I didn’t notice until later that the recipe was actually at the bottom of that post so we had to kind of wing it.  Luckily it’s a pretty forgiving recipe.

First I disolved the borax in some water and then added a bit of food coloring.  The girls requested pink.  They loved watching the food coloring swirl in the water.

The we took turns squeezing glue into a bowl.  Honestly, I think squeezing the glue was their favorite part.  We added a bit of water to the glue and then poured in the dissolved borax.  Then we had slime!  Or as Kate liked to call it goo.  I guess I should have dyed it blue a la Fox in Socks.

As you can see, Emily was a bit unsure, but Kate was all over it.  Overall, I’d call this activity a huge success!  Kate was asking to make more goo after dinner.  🙂  Side note: make sure your littles don’t eat it.

 

First off, let me say that I just looked back and realized that most of my titles end in an exclamation point.  Wow.  Sorry about that.  🙂

So this weekend, I went through and replaced a bunch of our framed pictures with more recent ones.  I also decided to redo the photo collage in our dining room.  I’ve never been super happy with the arrangement in there so I decided to take all of the frames down and start over.  I also bought a few new frames to add to the mix.  Initially, I was hanging them all willy nilly and was getting very frustrated when the arrangement wasn’t turning out the way I wanted it to.  The problem was that the frames were all different sizes.  We have a travel photo collage in our hallway and I’ve just added to it as we’ve gone new places.  I think it’s a nice arrangement, but all of the frames are the same size so it is easy to arrange them.  This one was much more challenging so I decided to arrange the frames on the floor first.

This is so not my own idea by the way.  I’ve seen it a million times on the internet, but I can’t find a source at the moment.  Actually, I probably could but I’m lazy.  Don’t judge me.  OK, so I just went and looked, but google is not my friend today.  Sorry guys.  I thought that I had pinned it, but no such luck.

First up, I taped some butcher paper to the wall in roughly the area that I thought I would like to put the pictures.  We have an awesome mural on the wall that Michael painted and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t cover it up so I traced the flower on to the butcher paper.  It also gave me some prospective on where the pictures would be on the wall.

Then I took put the paper on the floor and started playing around with the arrangement of the photos.  Michael helped me out because he has a much better eye for these sorts of things than I do.  He also suggested some overlap between the mural and the photo collage.

Once I was happy with the arrangement, I traced around each frame with a pencil and taped the paper back up.  I thought about just marking the tops of the photos, but in the end traced all the way around them.

Then Michael and I used a level to mark where the tops of the frames should be.  He drew the lines a smidge lower to allow for the width of the frame.

He suggested that if we do this again, we use the level to hang the paper instead of having to redraw each line.  Always thinking that one.  🙂

Then I nailed right through the paper.  So much easier than what I was trying to do before.  When I was done, I just tore the paper off.  I was a bit worried that the nails would come out with the paper, but they stayed put.  Here’s the point when I was really glad that I had traced all the way around the frames.  I was able to use the paper as a map to show me which frame went where.

And here’s the completed collage the next day.  I am really happy with how it turned out, though looking at this photo I can see that some of the frames aren’t quite level.  Michael marked the lines with a sharpie and it was a bit thick.  Next time I’ll use a pencil.  I do wish I had taken the time to do this the first time because now I have pencil lines and nail holes all over that wall.  🙂

By the way, the big 8×10 in the middle was done by the amazingly talented Libby of LibbyAnn Photography.  If you’re thinking of splurging on some pictures, I totally recommend her.

We’ve been getting tons of cucumber with our CSAs so I decided to try to make some tzatziki.  It seemed easy enough, although the recipe had fairly vague directions.  Kate and I decided we were up to the challenge.

First we gathered our ingredients which involved a trip to HEB.  We were hoping to buy a dill plant, but we had to settle for some clippings.

Next up we had to hollow out the cucumber.  Kate got a bit bored with the prep work and wondered off to play in her ball pit.

I lured Kate back into the learning tower by offering to let her smell the dill.  She loves to smell stuff.  I think she would have shoved it up her nose if I had let her.

I let her try to crack some pepper in to the food processer and she thought it was awesome.  I think Kate’s definition of “to taste” is a little different from the rest of us.  🙂

I let her throw in the cucumbers and it was time to blend.  She left the room for this part because, although she is fearless about most things, loud noises scare her.

Kate gave it too thumbs up!  Side note: apparently dill is spicy.  Who knew.  I just kept throwing it in there assuming that since it didn’t have a strong smell it wouldn’t have a strong flavor.  Whoops.

I freely admit that I let her stick her fingers in the dip and lick it off because I thought it made a great picture.