Throwing Dough

Ice Princess decided that she wanted to make some home made play dough. So she dug out a book that had a recipe and took out all the ingreediants. She grabbed her trusty primary colors set of measuring spoons and in no time she was pretending to make a pizza pie.

Mighty's Sky Dragon

I love watching Mighty Girl create. Her natural talents and abilities never cease to amaze me.

Face Painting

While Mighty Girl rested this morning Ice princess and I painted each other's faces.

She turned me into a clown.

Then I transformed her into a butterfly tiger.

Beautiful but deadly!

Yumm

Last night the girls decided to make chocolate covered bananas. Here is how it went.

Yes, even Zack wanted to help. He is a very good helper, can't you tell?

Then after placing them in the freezer. Ice Princess had her first bite, and claimed that they were disgusting. Oh well, they had fun making them.

More Life Learners

I missed our group meeting last week because of this cough and I missed posting about the week before for the same reason. So, I put together some photographs of our wonderful time at the park together.

Here Mighty Girl is at the top of the slide. She turning this ordinary slide into a water slide by pouring buckets of water down the slide for all the other kids. Everyone thought that was great fun.

Ice Princess is just hangin' around.

This is a lovely little fairy house that a few of the kids worked on, Ice Princess included. It was so detailed with it's grass roof, pebble walkway, and welcome mat. Look at the proud engineers. Bravo.

It was a fantastic day. I don't think we got home until 9:30 pm. Well, you know what they say, time flys when your having fun.

Treecko and Pebbles

Before we decided to bring more animals into our home I asked the girls if they were sure that they wanted to care for them. I asked them several times if they understood the work that owning lizards involved. They assured me that they did know and were happy to do anything it would take in order to own a lizard. But, I know not to buy pet for children unless I am willing to be the one who is ultimately responsible. A few months ago we came across someone on craigslist (a web site that is something like a local ebay) that wanted to get rid of his baby geckos. So we jumped on it. And so far the kids have been great maintaining their "babies". The geckos require daily care and the girls have shown that they love to take do all of these chores. Today happened to be they day that their cage needed to be cleaned. They were actually excited, and I dare say thrilled to do this. Here are some photos of the process. I think that we may have a male and female by the way, just in case anyone might feel the need to own one in the future.

It was fun see Treecko and Pebbles (the names of the geckos) wondering around their newly cleaned home.

Cookies with Ice Princess

So I suppose yesterday was very inspiring for Ice Princess because she woke up on a mission. She want to make a "big" batch of cookies. After gathering all the ingredients she was happily measuring and mixing. I started to notice how much "math" cooking really has. And even though when she used to be in school she claimed that she hated math, she was having so much fun with these fractions set before her. When she was finally done cooking all of her chocolate chip cookies she declared, "We have too many. I think I will sell some." So she ran into the bedroom and grabbed an old piece of poster board and a marker. She sat at the kitchen table and decided what to write. "Mom, how does two for a dollar sound?" She asked me, wiggling in her seat. "I think that sounds good, sweetie." After about ten minutes of precise writing she finished with her poster. She then gathered her small table and chair and headed out the door. She set everything up at the end of the driveway and waited for her "costumers". After about ten minutes she ran back in to grab a big glass of ice water because of the intense heat. Stopping just long enough to give me a quick kiss on the cheek. The after twenty minutes she jolted up the stairs to show me her first dollar that she had earned. She was so proud that her plan had worked. And at the end of the day she had made eight dollars. Way to go Ice Princess, follow your bliss.

Cooking with the Sun

"Can we really cook with sunshine?" Mighty Girl asked me with amazement. She had come across some website that was talking about solar energy (how I love the information highway). "Yes," I answered. And then I saw that gleam in her eye that I had seen so many times before. I could see the wheels turning. "I think that we can get plans to make our own solar cooker," I told her. With that said she handed me the computer. So I surfed many sites, and decided to use the pizza boxes since we had just ordered from Papa Johns the night before. I located all the the things that we needed. And they were off. This really started to inspire me. I found a couple "real" solar cookers for sale and was thrilled about the possibility of not using my oven at all. And then I found some other solar products that I would love to have for our home. Solar panels, solar water heater, solar attic fans, and so much more. I just relish in the idea that if we produced more energy then we use we can sell it back to the power company. Too bad that these things seem to be so expensive. Well, Christmas isn't that far away, is it?

With our first attempt we decided to make cookies.