The best $1.24 I spend all month

Cornstarch + water = at least a half an hour of peace and quiet.

Any trip to the grocery store down the baking isle with a kid would usually illicit requests for various boxes of brownie mix or chocolate chips, but my oldest kid is way more into looking on the very tippy top shelf for the Cornstarch. Come home from the grocery store, put the baby in bed, and don't just mix up a little of the cornstarch goo like they show you in school. Mix up the whole darn box. Add just a little water at a time and reserve some cornstarch just in case you add too much water. You want just enough to have a thick gluey consistency. Its actually fun to play with at different levels of wetness. Is it a liquid? Is it a solid? Is it my favorite thing to come out of the grocery store since the free cookies by the bakery? While my big kid is squeezing, punching, hiding toys, and making a tiny mess, I am cleaning out the refrigerator and doing like Rachel Ray says to and chopping my veggies before I store them and organizing my pantry and making a healthy snack for us to eat after I sweep up the dried up corn starch from the floor. Love it. To entertain big J a little longer, he loves to watch "cornstarch monsters" on Time Warp on You Tube. We sort of tried it one day. We took a bowlful of the goo and put it on a large square foot messager and tried to get it to "dance". It kind of wiggled around, but that was about it. I still get begged for a giant speaker to make the monsters every time we see the Time Warp clip. Right, next Christmas, I promise...

Read more...

The Slircus-Our slimy circus

My dad would freak if he saw how nice we were being to snails this weekend. He used to chuck those things over the fence into the irrigation ditch behind his garden or find all kinds of different poisons to send them to their foamy demise. We were as nice as a couple of kids could be to some snails. We had a Slircus, a slimy circus (aka a snircus, a circus for snails). We collected snails, built them circus-y things to do and climb on, and set aside a morning to watch them and hopefully not put anything disgusting into the little one's mouth. Most of our fun was in waking up and finding snails in our pijamas. Snails only come out in the early morning before it dries out and gets hot, so we had to be quiet around our apartment complex around people's windows and yards collecting our circus performers. Asher would spot one and yell, "Nail! Nail!" Our neighborhood kids think our apartment complex is friggin' Six Flags most of the time anyways, so our Slircus makes a little noise one Saturday morning? They'll live.



We put them in their cages with some high protein energy food (leaves) so they could build their strength for all of the work they'd be doing in their circus acts. We had a circus-y looking top for them to spin on, we made a tight rope, got some paint out and some paper plates they could paint on, and have a merry go round ride if they wanted, and other various things for them to crawl on. There was great joy in watching them spin around (a little too fast on the top, but they seem to have amazing grip), poking their eyes in, watching their incredible tight rope skills, and making friends with our little Slircus performers.


But things took a macabre turn when the little one started stomping on them whenever he could get them on their own. He's not heavy enough to really squash them, so I had to put them out of their misery, and I'm just too sensitive to animals to handle this. I wanted to cry. Then when we wanted to have them "paint" I plopped one down into some red paint, it started to bubble up, Jonas gets all excited saying its starting to spit with glee, probably at the prospect of the joy of painting, more than dying a slow and painful death, which was likely what I was subjecting him to. But I know that snails aren't supposed to percolate- I grew up with three older brothers, I've seen all kinds of insect torture. Once they caught a giant fly, super glued it to a lego, put it in the microwave to watch its wings flutter, then threw it over the balcony of the apartment. I washed off the snail, he was fine when I checked on him over an hour later. (my Dad is shaking his head right now) This was a fun way to spend a Saturday morning, and aside from the snail stomping, a nice closeup lesson with nature.

Read more...

Applique the Awesome way

Moms with girls get to do cute applique crafts all the live long day. I won't sit back and let them have all of the fun. Jonas was playing a game on Boowa and Kwala (which I highly recommend for the pre-reading set) and found Mike riding a bike with Spike. Mike had a green shirt on it with an "M" on it. Jonas said he HAD to have a blue one with a J on it. Sadly, most of the best ideas we come up with around here really come from the kids. I'd like to take credit for being a super active and creative mom, but I don't. If it were up to me, I'd be on the couch right now watching DVR'd Gossip Girl. So this is how we figured out how to make a super cool initial shirt.


Materials: From my local fabric store I purchased a t-shirt, solid colored fabric, which I washed, matching thread, Wonder-Under transfer web by Pellon, and Stitch and Tear (ask at the cutting counter for these items, they can help you find it).

1. I made my letters in Adobe Illustrator. You can make yours in Microsoft Word, choose your favorite font, size 500 or more. Print out 2 in greyscale or another light font, use a marker and straight edge to get the double "stroke". Cut the letters out.

2. Put rough side of Wonder-Under against the wrong side of your fabric squares about the size of your letters. Press with a dry, hot iron for 5-10 seconds. Pin the letters to the fabric. Cut around the letters carefully.


3. Gently peel off the paper backing from the letters, being careful not to fray the fabric of the letters themselves. One layer at a time, center your letter on the t-shirt, web side down, cover with a damp towel or press cloth and iron firmly for 15 seconds or so. Repeat on all sections until all fabric is fused. Repeat with second layer. Remove towel and iron again to remove moisture.

4. When you applique on knits, like a t-shirt, you need a stabilizer, like Stitch and Tear. Cut your Stitch and Tear in a square larger than your letter, pin it to the inside of your t-shirt, where you will be sewing. This will keep your shirt from moving around too much or bunching up in your sewing machine.

5. Using a satin stitch or a close together and short zigzag stitch on your sewing machine, sew around your letters using a careful and straight stitch. (Mine aren't perfect either) Clip your strings carefully.

6. Turn the shirt inside out, clip your strings, tear away your Stitch and Tear, inside and outside your seams (it doesn't wash well).


7. Try to have kid as cute as mine.

Read more...

Paper Airplane Extravaganza

"Mom-I wannoo make paper airplanes" -translation: "Mom, would you spend the next hour trying to figure out how to make me paper airplanes and make a lot of them until your fingers bleed from papercuts?"

I found site with 10 different airplanes that had decent instructions to help me make planes beyond the ugly ones that come apart in mid air that I am used to making. The "spinster" is the coolest one and works the best (which my dad swears he invented), and the "moth" is a good one too. By the end, I started to "mod" my planes like an expert- cutting notches, angling wings up and down. I'm still no pro, and their dad would probably be better at this- but hey, whatever.

Because my oldest isn't like other kids, he decided we'd play "hidden planes find them" and while I emptied the dishwasher, he hid them and I had to sneak up on them and say "PLANE!", then throw it. He then made up songs about each of his airplanes for the next hour. I suggested he decorate them, he responded "I don't decorate my planes." Oh well.


This is the reason why we make things when the baby is taking a nap.

Read more...