Baking Bread

The girls have been begging me recently to make bread. We've made banana bread before, and pumpkin bread, but they wanted to make real bread with yeast and kneading. So finally over the weekend, we did it. 

It turned out delicious! And we had plenty to have as a side with quiche for dinner, and again to make homemade garlic bread with for our spaghetti and meatballs, and with our shrimp scampi. Yum!

Hair Extraordinaire

Girls with colored hair

are gypsy souls and free spirits.

Well, our weekend project was successful, and the girls LOVE it. 

Sweet Pea picked "Ultraviolet," and CC picked "Pink Warrior" with bangs of Ultraviolet. I am pretty sure it will last until next summer, so I might regret this! In fact, I originally planned on taking family portraits next weekend -- but those are on hold until the fall now.

Egg-stravaganza

Day 1 of spring break: egg dyeing.

We are an egg-loving family. We go through more than 2 dozen eggs every week. But I'm the only one who likes hard-boiled eggs (which I already buy in bulk from Costco). So we definitely didn't need any more hard-boiled eggs. Hence the epiphany I had this year: we dyed raw eggs!

It was brilliant. I wouldn't recommend this with toddlers, but since my kids are old enough to be careful, no eggs were broken in the making of these pictures.

We used three techniques: traditional dip-dyeing (with glitter added), the spinny machine from last year, and the tie-dyeing method with paper towels. Afterwards, Little Man's Breakout Beast helpfully blow-dried the eggs.

Little Man's are the four on the left; CC's are the middle four; and Sweet Pea's are the four on the right.

Now, the kids get to pick which of their egg creations we use when they ask for scrambled eggs, or an egg-and-cheese sandwich, or we use an egg in a recipe. (And, since it's Holy Week, there is a lot of baking going on! Stay tuned!)

A New Skill

I purchased each of the kids a craft to help keep them occupied at home. I was pleased that both Sweet Pea and CC were interested in trying out cross-stitch (because I did quite a bit of cross-stitching before the kids came along). MJ and I have been pretty impressed by their dedication ever since. They need help separating out the strands from the floss, but other than that, they've been pretty independent. I can't wait to see if they stick with it long enough to finish their canvases. Despite being for beginners, the patterns are still fairly complicated!

(For his craft, Little Man picked a storm trooper helmet that you could paint yourself ... and promptly painted the entire thing black.)

Harry Potter Art

The Harry Potter obsession continues! (We are on the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.) Last weekend, the kids spent quite a while outside, using sidewalk chalk to create scenes from the books with themselves as the characters. I love it!

Sweet Pea and CC dueled, a la Harry and Voldemort in Goblet of Fire:

Little Man fought off a dementor, like Harry in Prisoner of Azkaban:

The kids played a rowdy game of Quidditch (CC and Sweet Pea as seekers, Little Man as a chaser with the quaffle):

Sweet Pea rode CC the Centaur (with a unicorn horn?):

Acrylic Pouring

We did another awesome art project the other day: acrylic pouring! It's simple, yet it has awesome results. The kids each got to pick their own colors, and we mixed and poured according to the directions. The results were pretty amazing, and 48 hours later, the canvases were dry and ready to hang. 

This is abstract art worthy of saving!

Crayon Art

The kids are slowly outgrowing crayons, but we still have tons of them around the house. CC did a little research and found a fun crayon art project for big kids. Little Man wasn't interested -- he was busy watching football with MJ -- but CC and Sweet Pea got right to work.

It was the first time I'd let them do anything with a burning flame, but they were really careful. You just hold a crayon over the flame until it starts to drip, then let it drip on the paper. The final products were pretty cool. "I can't stop touching it, Mommy!" said Sweet Pea.

Tie-Dye Fun

The kids have been begging to try tie-dying, and I was able to grab a kit on flash sale on Amazon recently. So we gave it a shot this week, and it turned out surprisingly well!

We did it out in the garage (because this is not my first rodeo). The gloves that were included in the kit were laughably large, but effective.

I thought they'd all end up with muddled colors and blotches of brown, but these look somewhat legit. The kids immediately declared them to be their favorite shirts, and wore them for three days straight -- even as pajamas -- before I put my foot down and made them change.

Easter Eggs

Earlier this year, I was bombarded with ads for this device I'd never heard of before. It's for decorating Easter eggs. It spins the eggs around really fast, and you hold a marker to the outside so it creates fun stripes. I decided to take a chance on it -- and wow, what a fun activity it turned out to be!

We all took turns, and had a great time. Look how pretty these eggs turned out! We're definitely going to save this egg decorator and use it again in the future.

Painted Eggs

Before Coronapocalypse came crashing down on us, I ordered some cute, carved wooden Easter eggs for the kids to paint. This week we took them out and went to town. It was a fun way to spend an hour or so.

The kids are thrilled with how their eggs turned out. They even touched up a few areas after the first coat of paint dried, just to make sure everything was perfect. The eggs are looking festive, displayed on our side table. 

Art class: check.

Paper Architect

When my relatives visited last month, the kids were doing arts and crafts one afternoon while the adults chatted. Little Man colored a picture of a spider, cut it out, and bent each segment of the spider's legs so it would stand up by itself.

"That's really neat," said my Auntie Arline. "Does he do things like that a lot?"

"He's never done that before," I said. It was pretty cool, but I didn't think much of it at the time.

But ever since then, he's been creating more and more elaborate things out of paper. And last week, he blew me away.

Here's what he drew:

"What's that?" I asked him.

"A pirate ship!" he said.

Huh. I shrugged. I could recognize the skulls and crossbones, and the ship's wheel, but other than that, I couldn't see how it was a pirate ship.

Then he cut it all out -- one single piece - and started folding it. Before I knew it, he had a perfect 3D paper pirate ship. I was floored. The ship's wheel is centered in the front. The front of the ship is angled forward, like a real ship. There's a bottom panel folded over to make the floor, with a perfect skull and crossbones centered and oriented forward. The two masts are the same size and angle, stay parallel, and meet perfectly at the top. All the angles match so the entire ship is plumb and stands up by itself.

I mean ... there's no way I could freehand something like that. I am just marveling at how he could so easily envision the angles, the folds, the three dimensions.

Kool Aid Hair Dye

After last year's success dyeing the girls' hair with Kool Aid, we decided to do it again. But to make things a little easier, instead of the elaborate setup with cups, I thought we'd try laying down in the tub and letting their hair rest in a tray of Kool Aid.

Sweet Pea picked orange. CC picked grape.

In some ways, it was a success -- it was much less messy, and no risk of spills. But in the most important way, it was not a success -- their hair color didn't really stick. This was clearly user error: I only had them soak their hair in the Kool Aid for about 15 minutes. Next year we need to go back to 30 minutes (or longer).

But hey ... it was a fun experiment!

Easter Eggs

This year we dyed our Easter eggs using the shaving cream method -- except we did it with whipped cream instead! Even more delicious!

Sweet Pea mixed purple and turquoise; Little Man picked red, white and blue; and CC did green, yellow, and turquoise. 

After rolling them in the whipped cream, we let them rest for about 30 minutes so the colors could set. Then we rinsed them off and -- voila!

The kids mixed up their colors in the whipped cream very thoroughly, so the end result wasn't as "marbled" or as dramatic as it could have been. But the eggs still turned out beautifully, and everyone was very proud.