Besides beginning to work on taxes for friends and family, I tried two new recipies for cookies this week and Paul brought home some new games. The cookies are Molasses Pops (from a cookie cookbook I have) that are like a mild gingerbread cookie, but rolled into a ball and into sugar, like a snickerdoodle. The other are from pinterest- Apple Toffee Blondies and were quite tasty, they are for a memorial for a woman at church.
Paul brought home Agricola , Power Grid, Forbidden Island and Pandemic games. Forbidden Island and Pandemic we've played with Carter (rated age 10 and 13) and they are co-operative games where players work together to finish the game before time runs out due to circumstances throughout the game. Agricola is a little more complicated-There's a basic "family" version that Carter has played with us and Paul and I have played with the cards added in and it may be a bit too frustrating for Carter, but we're having fun with it.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Mid-week
Tuesday is normally my driving around day... H has preschool and in carpooling with my neighbor, I drop off C, my neighbor takes him and her daughter to the elementary school on Tuesdays while I pick up her twin girls, all 4 of us (V is with us) head to school, then I run errands with just one kid and then we pick them up, usually it's a full line with 3-3 year olds and an 18 month old who wants to run around and play with everything in the classroom and try to get hit by a car in the parking lot. This Tuesday, however, I borrowed a carseat, put the middle seat back in the van and.... put C, H & V in the car and headed to the neighbor's house. Dropped off C, picked up her twins, dropped off the 3-3 year olds at preschool, went home and did an hour of chores, then my friend dropped off her 3 & 4 year old (you see where this is going, don't you?) I took V & my friend's kids to Costco by the preschool, then took 18 month old, 3 year old & 4 year old to pick up 3-3 year olds at preschool. Luckily they felt sorry for me and sent the new assistant teacher out with me, who carried V out to the car while I played a game of Tetris of figuring out what order the children had to go into the car in order to be in the proper carseat, get over the middle seat, and buckle everyone in.
In case you ever need to know... Baby gets in first because she'll run (she's right behind the driver) then get in the twins on either end of the backseat. Buckle them in, put in the 4 year old, buckle her in, then shove her booster seat back so it's covering all the seatbelts in the backseat. Then put in Henri in the carseat middle, middle seat, the the other 3 year old who can ride in a booster next to him.
Dropped off the twins, gave the other 4 lunch, then drop off all 4 so I can go to Carter's Valentine's day party. When Carter asked me this morning where his lunch was, I threw in some stuff and told him to sit tight until the party, his teacher asked 3 kids to bring cookies and 1 to bring brownies and 1 to bring cupcakes. Yeah,the plates were pretty full, so we set aside the rice crispy treats that also came. Anyways, it is always fun to come to the parties because your kid thinks it is so awesome that you got to come. His friends were asking all sorts of questions and I was mostly at Carter's table to help the kids read their Valentine's if they got stuck. We're also trying potty training for Henri AGAIN because, apparently I'm a glutton for punishment. But he's only got one day of preschool this week and C's off school next week, so it seemed like as good a time as any.
Oh, yeah, then babysat a baby that night as well, lol. I thought Paul was going to have curling so we didn't make any plans, he didn't but it was fine, he headed to the game store and brought home 4 games that we played after the kids went to bed. The two we have played so far are: Forbidden Island and Pandemic. Both can be played with 2-4 players and are co-operative, which means you work together to try to win against the games, which have a large degree of randomness to them due to cards shuffling and there are 6 roles each person could be with special abilities. We've been having a lot of fun with them. Carter's played Forbidden Island with us, and we're hoping to play Pandemic soon with him. LOVE that he can read and is sharp as a tack with his problem solving. Many of our long-forgotten games are coming out of hiding now that we have another player in the house.
Wednesday is our other "not doing much" day, so I watched the twins in the morning and we made cheese crackers like before only thinner and I cut them out with a cutter rather than just square. 'Cause I'm fancy like that...
We also made a sample batch of laundry soap
That's right, yet another use for those milk cartons. I'm using the Duggar's front-load recipe... 1 cup hot water, 1/4 bar of Fels-Naptha soap, 1/2 c. washing soda, 1/4 c. Borax, cook the soap and water until dissolved (This takes awhile, be patient), then add the soda and borax. This is 1/4 of their recipe they make for 5 gallons of concentrate (in a bucket) for 10 gallons of soap. I only wanted to make 1/4. Since that would be 1.25 gallons and that's annoying, I'm putting it in my 1 gallon container. This is the concentrate. Let sit overnight, then add same amount of hot water and mix up, use 1/4 c per load. So today (Thurs) I'll pour 1/2 into my other gallon jug and add hot water to both of them and then try it out and give you a review. As much as people hate the Costco milk jugs, the milk is cheaper, they are more square, making the bottoms great for organizing projects, and storing in a packed fridge, AND the openings are larger, making them great for reusing them like this.
I'm hopeful after earlier this week discovering 1/2c washing soda plus 1/2 c. 3% hydrogen peroxide mixed in with my diapers is working better than the 2 scoops of Oxyclean I'd been using. They smell like they were out in the sunshine. Clean, not chemically. LOVE it. I need to experiment with using a little less of the mixture though, because hydrogen peroxide isn't super-cheap. BTW, if you want to try the "homemade Oxyclean" mix with 1 cup and you are supposed to let it sit for at least 20 minutes before washing. I was in a hurry and have a front loader, so I threw it in and let it go. I haven't used it on my regular laundry yet.
Today's project while I was watching the girls was to make a little something for my boring laundry room this would have also looked cute over the window, but this way you can enjoy it while you sit on the toilet, lol. The idea's off pinterest but I used paper instead of fabric. My instructions are: Buy letters at Hobby Lobby. They didn't have chipboard ones, so I got the very thin wood ones (think smooth MDF). Then I took a brown Stampin' up Craft ink (they no longer have craft stamp pads, but I think they have craft refills-it's just pigment ink instead of water based-you could use either or even paint, I just figured this would work best)and 1/4 of a SU! ink sponge and sponged/inked all the edges, esp on the front in case my paper ended up short. Then I put the letters on the BACK of the paper so that the BACK of the letter (with the staple side from where I took off the price tags towards me, not the paper). They were $2.49 each at Hobby Lobby BTW. I then used a sharp pencil (I used a CM photo pencil, it's softer lead so it wouldn't accidently tear my paper) to trace around the letters and use scissors and an Exacto knife and CM cutting pad to cut out the letters. I cut on the outside of the lines I had traced. I then sprayed my letters with spray adhesive and attached the paper. I used a sanding file/paper to sand the edges so that the paper would then be exactly the size of the wood letters. It is important to sand from front of the letter to back, not back and forth and go easy because otherwise you'll rip your paper. This makes the paper fit perfectly and also gives a nice little edge to go with the brown paint/ink.
I then used Modge Podge because the spray adhesive didn't make them stick completely and it also gives a nice, shininess to it as well as protects it should my washing machine spray everywhere or something. I made sure to paint a very light layer so my paper wouldn't curl (esp since I already had spray adhesive doing most of the work) and made sure to paint front to back and just a little on the edge to protect from the paper lifting up.
Then I tied some ribbons and fibers on. Then the tough part came. These letters did not come with hangers on them. BTW, if yours do not and you need to put hangers on, I'd do the hangers first, then the ribbon, since once you get the ribbons on,the knots will prevent the letters from sitting flat while you attach hangers. Another FYI, these letters were pretty well balanced, but some letters may not be perfectly balanced, so the middle of the letter is not necessarily where you want the hanger to be.
My first idea was to use pop can tabs, like this awesome idea from pinterest, the letters are pretty light so I figured a flat tack would work, unfortunately I don't have any on hand and all my nails/screws were too long. Then I thought I could use the best invention ever... Superglue. But then I realized I had some little picture loop things, imagine a very small version of this
I then took a 1/16 drill bit (I would have used the one smaller one I have, but I broke it last week, this worked alright though) and VERY carefully and slowly drilled into the top of my letters and then screwed these loops in. The awesome part about using these is that it was very easy to hang... make a straight line with a level, then line up the letters and make a dot where the loop goes and put a nail in the wall. Easy peasy.
In case you ever need to know... Baby gets in first because she'll run (she's right behind the driver) then get in the twins on either end of the backseat. Buckle them in, put in the 4 year old, buckle her in, then shove her booster seat back so it's covering all the seatbelts in the backseat. Then put in Henri in the carseat middle, middle seat, the the other 3 year old who can ride in a booster next to him.
Dropped off the twins, gave the other 4 lunch, then drop off all 4 so I can go to Carter's Valentine's day party. When Carter asked me this morning where his lunch was, I threw in some stuff and told him to sit tight until the party, his teacher asked 3 kids to bring cookies and 1 to bring brownies and 1 to bring cupcakes. Yeah,the plates were pretty full, so we set aside the rice crispy treats that also came. Anyways, it is always fun to come to the parties because your kid thinks it is so awesome that you got to come. His friends were asking all sorts of questions and I was mostly at Carter's table to help the kids read their Valentine's if they got stuck. We're also trying potty training for Henri AGAIN because, apparently I'm a glutton for punishment. But he's only got one day of preschool this week and C's off school next week, so it seemed like as good a time as any.
Oh, yeah, then babysat a baby that night as well, lol. I thought Paul was going to have curling so we didn't make any plans, he didn't but it was fine, he headed to the game store and brought home 4 games that we played after the kids went to bed. The two we have played so far are: Forbidden Island and Pandemic. Both can be played with 2-4 players and are co-operative, which means you work together to try to win against the games, which have a large degree of randomness to them due to cards shuffling and there are 6 roles each person could be with special abilities. We've been having a lot of fun with them. Carter's played Forbidden Island with us, and we're hoping to play Pandemic soon with him. LOVE that he can read and is sharp as a tack with his problem solving. Many of our long-forgotten games are coming out of hiding now that we have another player in the house.
We also made a sample batch of laundry soap
I'm hopeful after earlier this week discovering 1/2c washing soda plus 1/2 c. 3% hydrogen peroxide mixed in with my diapers is working better than the 2 scoops of Oxyclean I'd been using. They smell like they were out in the sunshine. Clean, not chemically. LOVE it. I need to experiment with using a little less of the mixture though, because hydrogen peroxide isn't super-cheap. BTW, if you want to try the "homemade Oxyclean" mix with 1 cup and you are supposed to let it sit for at least 20 minutes before washing. I was in a hurry and have a front loader, so I threw it in and let it go. I haven't used it on my regular laundry yet.
Today's project while I was watching the girls was to make a little something for my boring laundry room this would have also looked cute over the window, but this way you can enjoy it while you sit on the toilet, lol. The idea's off pinterest but I used paper instead of fabric. My instructions are: Buy letters at Hobby Lobby. They didn't have chipboard ones, so I got the very thin wood ones (think smooth MDF). Then I took a brown Stampin' up Craft ink (they no longer have craft stamp pads, but I think they have craft refills-it's just pigment ink instead of water based-you could use either or even paint, I just figured this would work best)and 1/4 of a SU! ink sponge and sponged/inked all the edges, esp on the front in case my paper ended up short. Then I put the letters on the BACK of the paper so that the BACK of the letter (with the staple side from where I took off the price tags towards me, not the paper). They were $2.49 each at Hobby Lobby BTW. I then used a sharp pencil (I used a CM photo pencil, it's softer lead so it wouldn't accidently tear my paper) to trace around the letters and use scissors and an Exacto knife and CM cutting pad to cut out the letters. I cut on the outside of the lines I had traced. I then sprayed my letters with spray adhesive and attached the paper. I used a sanding file/paper to sand the edges so that the paper would then be exactly the size of the wood letters. It is important to sand from front of the letter to back, not back and forth and go easy because otherwise you'll rip your paper. This makes the paper fit perfectly and also gives a nice little edge to go with the brown paint/ink.
I then used Modge Podge because the spray adhesive didn't make them stick completely and it also gives a nice, shininess to it as well as protects it should my washing machine spray everywhere or something. I made sure to paint a very light layer so my paper wouldn't curl (esp since I already had spray adhesive doing most of the work) and made sure to paint front to back and just a little on the edge to protect from the paper lifting up.
Then I tied some ribbons and fibers on. Then the tough part came. These letters did not come with hangers on them. BTW, if yours do not and you need to put hangers on, I'd do the hangers first, then the ribbon, since once you get the ribbons on,the knots will prevent the letters from sitting flat while you attach hangers. Another FYI, these letters were pretty well balanced, but some letters may not be perfectly balanced, so the middle of the letter is not necessarily where you want the hanger to be.
I then took a 1/16 drill bit (I would have used the one smaller one I have, but I broke it last week, this worked alright though) and VERY carefully and slowly drilled into the top of my letters and then screwed these loops in. The awesome part about using these is that it was very easy to hang... make a straight line with a level, then line up the letters and make a dot where the loop goes and put a nail in the wall. Easy peasy.
Monday, February 13, 2012
I love Mondays
We had nothing planned on Mondays last year, this year, and probably next year. I love, love, love this arrangement! Carter leaves at 8:00 for Spanish and us little kids catch up from the weekend, bake, etc. Today was Valentine's Day cookies with my buddy while the baby slept...
We're also dancing around. Henri's my music kid. Sunday he was in service with us the entire time and just sat and drew and dance and tried to sing all the songs.
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