Tuesday, May 31, 2011

CUPCAKES ~ Red, White & Blue style


To celebrate Memorial Day, even though I had to work, I baked up some super awesome red, white and blue cupcakes. 


I used white cake mix and divided it into three portions, white, red and blue.  I put one spoonful of each batter into the paper liners and baked according to the package directions.


Sooooo Pretty!!


I took some to work to share.


What goodies did you make for the holiday?



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Friday, May 27, 2011

My Ice Cream Kings

Our book this week was called The Ice Cream King by Steve Metzger.  It's about a little boy who LOVES his ice cream and dreams about living in a world of such creamy delight.  In the end, he thinks the best thing about ice cream is sharing it with someone he loves.  We LOVE ice cream too and this was a super cute book with fun and bright illustrations by Julie Downing.


For our craft project, we made some puffy paint (you can find the recipe here) and used food coloring to make the paint pink, mint green, chocolate brown and left some white for vanilla.  I used a paper bag and cut out some triangles to use as cones, which we glued to construction paper and then used the puffy paint to make some super cute ice cream paintings.







(they also used some foam ice cream shaped stickers and made a collage with them).


We made some homemade ice cream in a bag (you can find the recipe here).  I would recommend using a little more sugar than what the recipe calls for, because our's was a wee bit bitter.  I'd also do this outside, because the boys went a little wild shaking their bags and I had water (melted ice) flying everywhere....but they had a BLAST making this....a fun little science experiment and something we will definitely try again this summer.


You will need ice, storage and sandwich ziploc bags, sugar, vanilla, milk and rock salt (our's was "Morton's ice cream salt" in a red box).








Later, Nicholas, Nathan, Zachary, Anthony and I (the girls were off doing other things) had some fun making our own SUNDAES.










Fun Times......we are SO Ready for SUMMER to begin - only one more week left of school!


*Disclosure: I received this book from Tiger Tales for review purposes and was not compensated in anyway.  The opinions and projects herein are my own.


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Thursday, May 26, 2011

Flower Power


We decorated some foam flowers with lots of beads, macaroni, sequins, foam ice cream stickers, buttons, felt cupcake stickers and other odds and ends.  I had 3 baggies full of hodge podge junk and we reduced those down to one, with this project.  Nathan had fun decorating his flowers (I had fun as well).  Sarah and Nicholas ended up doing a few too.  I originally had them hanging on our back patio doors and they looked cute there too, but I had to move them, because some of them were too thick and getting stuck in between the doors.  They are now hanging on the wall in the kitchen.










Monday, May 23, 2011

My First Video....



Hope this works.....{{{Fingers Crossed}}}

During Nathan's first teeball game Saturday, I decided to hit the video mode on the camera for a change. And wouldn't it figure that, that would be the time Nathan does something like say...I don't know - throw the bat. I didn't even realize that he did it, because it was hard for me to record and watch the game at the same time....is it like that for everyone, or just the blonde in me?

In the video you can hear me asking what did he do? Did he throw the bat or something...Nathan must have gotten yelled at by the first coach, because you'll see him stand up straight with his arms by his side like a solider.  He does that whenever he gets yelled at LOL!

And by the way, that's Nicholas that keeps talking to me in the video....He was talking about teeballs and tennis balls and I wasn't concerned about him talking until he started kicking the fence.

"stop kicking the fence, please."

"I said stop it."

"I'm not kicking the fence."

"I'm trying to record."

"record?"

"yes"

"oh"

"every time you kick the fence you make the camera shake."

"Run Nathan Run"

"Yipee he's on second."

"and he's on third."

"and he's on home"

"just look at that."

"Good Job Bud."


The kids have been laughing at Nick's commentary for days now - maybe he'll be a professional sports announcer someday hahahaha!







And here's a few of Nicholas too...