RaptorMama

Good thing we remembered our water shoes today. 🙂

We don’t let Kate watch much TV at all.  We’ll have family movie night maybe twice a month, but that’s it.  It’s easy for us since our only TV is in our bedroom.  Letting Kate watch a movie is an intentional choice, and we have to sit with her since she’s in our room.  We like it that way.  We usually pop some popcorn and make an event of it.  Kate gives great snuggles during movie night.  🙂

That being said, we live in Texas and in the summer that’s roughly equivalent to living on the surface of the sun.  Time to broaden our horizons.  Enter the dollar theatre.

The girls and I met Will and Libby one afternoon for The Lorax.  Now, we did have to wake up 3 of the 4 kids (I’ll give you three guesses as to who wasn’t asleep) but it ended up being just fine.  The kids had a blast and it was air conditioned.  Win win.

Today we decided to have a little fun with some chemistry, namely baking soda and vinegar.

It’s pretty simple.  I filled a baking pan with baking soda.

I put some vinegar in a muffin tin and added some food coloring.  The girls requested red and blue.

I used an old medicine dropper to draw up the vinegar.  If you have older kids, they might be able to do it themselves, but I went ahead and did it for them to minimize mess and arguments.  Next time we finish a bottle of baby tylenol, I’m totally saving the little bulb syringe so they can do it themselves.

They thought it was super cool and they were great about taking turns.  I think we’ll be adding this into our project rotation.  🙂

Edited to Add:  I totally thought it was Monday as I was writing this.  Sorry it’s a day late!

I’ve fallen woefully behind on my Project Life. I haven’t printed pics sine sometime in March and the last time I did journaling cards or uploaded photos was April 30th. My mission today is to get caught up with all of my journaling cards/ photo uploads for the past month. 🙂

What good is a theatre without puppets?  I gave the girls some old ankle socks (clean!) and some glitter glue and they went to town.

I did make sure that the puppets all had eyes and a mouth, but other than that the girls did whatever they liked.

And by “whatever they liked” I mean they squeezed out an impressive amount of glitter glue.  Especially Kate.  🙂

Only bummer was that it was so humid that it took days for the paint to dry.  Note to self: next time do this when it’s dry out.  The girls had a blast though.  They’ve spent a decent chunk of the morning playing “puppet tag.”  🙂

We’ve had a busy couple of weeks around here!  We did find some time to turn an old box into a puppet theatre though.

Michael cut out holes for the window and for a little door in the back.  I added some curtains and Kate decorated it with some paint.

Have I mentioned that we can check out puppets from the library?  Oh yeah.

That’s one happy girl.  🙂

Today I made popsicles for the girls, just because. 

 

First, I cut out some hearts from an apple.

Then I put the hearts on the paddle from the character kit and stuck them to the side of the mold.

We added a bit of food coloring because I realized that our juice was pretty much the same color as the apple pieces.

Then we poured the juice into the molds and waited about 10 minutes.

Awesome summery treat.

I’ve been a stitching fool this week.  In fact, I finished another set of felt letters tonight.  Might be my last one for a bit; 2 sets in a month is a bit much.  I’ll try to take some pictures tomorrow in the daylight, but I’m not making any promises.  🙂

Michael and I are taking a little mini staycation on Monday and Tuesday.  I might even go crazy and make a few scrapbook pages.  🙂  It’s been too long since I done anything crafty purely for myself.   Hopefully I’ve stocked up some mojo.

Remember last year when we joined the CSA?  We loved it, but ended up quitting last winter because we felt like we were wasting a lot of food.  Well, I saw a living social deal yesterday and snapped it up.  We’re signing up again and I’m so excited.  I really missed it!

What’s going to be different this time around? Well, for one thing we got a food dehydrator.  I’m thinking that if we get enough okra to feed a family of 12 one week, we can make okra chips with some of it.  Now, I can see you over there rolling your eyes at the thought of okra chips, but Kate seriously loves them.  I’ve never made them, but we buy them at Sprouts all the time.

We’re also going to take advantage of their swap box.  So, a metric ton of jalapenos?  Think we’ll swap that out for something else since Kate isn’t a huge fan of the spicy.

Now, for those of you who don’t know what living social is…  You buy something (in this case you pay $26 for your first CSA box and the set up fee) and then they give you a referral link.  Now, if you can convince 3 people to buy it through your link you get it for free.  Exciting, no?  All this to say that if you were thinking about buying it anyway (and you should!) then use my link por favor.  🙂

Now that I’m done whoring myself out, let’s get back to our regularly scheduled post about the food dehydrator.  🙂  It’s pretty dang awesome.  Michael’s has been talking about getting one for a long time.  We decided it was time when we went to the strawberry farm.  Their strawberries are seriously among the best things I have ever eaten, but they go bad within a day or two because they are so ripe.

But sliced up and dried they have a much longer shelf life.  It’s super easy too, you literally slice them and lay them on the food dehydrator shelves.  Then you wait a day and you have yumminess.  Now, Kate *loves* dried fruit anyway so this was a big hit.  I love that there’s no added sugar (or added anything!).

We also tried drying some mushrooms and peppers.  They were a bit meh.  Our other huge hits were pineapple, banana and zucchini.  That’s right, zucchini.  I have no pics of these because they are gone pretty much as soon as they come out of the dehydrator.  🙂

And of course we made jerky.  Michael made some traditional jerky that it apparently quite good.  He also made me some salmon jerky which turned out awesome!  Now I know what you’re thinking, salmon jerky?!?  What?!?  But, it’s super tasty.  And a great high protein snack.

I’ll keep you posted on our CSA/ food dehydrating adventures.

What can I say, I’m a sucker for a photo opp.  Luckily, Kate’s a good sport.  🙂  We drove out to Sweet Berry Farm to pick some strawberries last week and had a great time.

If you’ve never had fresh picked strawberries, you should know that they are pretty much the best thing you’ve ever put in your mouth.  They are incredibly sweet and flavorful.

I had a bit of a hard time convincing Kate that she had to wait to eat them until we paid for them.  I don’t blame her a bit.  🙂

This is our third year in a row of coming out to pick strawberries, but it’s the first time we’ve come during the week.  There were a lot more ripe strawberries, I guess because there were so many fewer people out picking them.  Kate did a great job of picking them this year.  She really wanted some green ones, but she listened and just picked the red ones.

She’s such a ham.  She knows that I love pictures of her running towards the camera.  “I gave you a running picture, Mama!”  So adorable.

It rained on us a bit, but after taking cover for a snack we headed back out to the fields for a few more strawberries.  I had a hard time not filling up our box (and going back for several more) since they’re so good, but they really only last a day or two as they’re so ripe.

No trip would be complete without strawberry ice cream.  Kate and Will were very serious about their ice cream.  🙂