The Goal is No Girls Injured: Prepping To Lead the Girl Scout Retired Girl Scout Folk Arts IP

 

I DO know what I'm doing. I didn't volunteer willy-nilly to teach seven teenagers how to pour lye into distilled water and molten wax into teacups without a firm base of knowledge.

But dang, there's nothing to make you question your skill set when doing a risky project than volunteering to do that project with seven teenagers! 

There are a couple of reasons why I'm engaging in SO much prep work before I lead this Girl Scout retired Folk Arts IPP that my Girl Scout troop planned. 

1) Left to my own manic devices, I'm not as safe as I ought to be. I run Dremel cut-off wheels centimeters from my radial artery, remove the tips of fingers with craft knives, and I definitely pour both lye into distilled water and molten wax into teacups bare-armed, bare-legged, and barefoot. 

2) Left to my own manic devices, I also veer from the script more often than not and muscle through several iterations of a project to get the desired result. Candle that I poured tunneling? Eh, melt it down, pour it again, and try a different wick. Soap didn't cure properly? Shovel it all in the crockpot to hot-process. 

That's fine for me, because I've got nothing but time and an endless capacity for frustration. But I want these teenagers' projects to work, and work well. They are going to learn the GLORIES of soapmaking, by God, and the ECSTASY that is a properly-wicked, burning-just-to-the-edges-but-no-farther tea cup candle!

So that was my weekend project!

First up, I had Matt (who tested negative for COVID after six days in isolation, so I set him free, which I *think* is okay to do? I guess I'll know when I take my own COVID rapid test in a couple of days!) make his very first batch of cold-process soap, with no information at his disposal other than my verbal instruction. This was great, because I could make note of the tricky parts of the process and the places where I'll need to give specific warnings to the kids (for Pete's sake, don't stick your head OVER the solution of lye and water!!! Why would you even do that?!? It's literally steaming, and I just told you that it's giving off toxic fumes!!!), and I could time about how long the recipe takes to trace. Twenty-five minutes, which is a bit of a yikes, but the kids are all great chit-chatters so I think it will be okay.

Making this batch ahead of time was also good because I can unmold it in front of the kids and show them how to tell if it's cured enough to cut, since they'll be doing that part at home.

On to the flower pressing! I toyed with the idea of having the kids make mini flower presses to carry in their backpacks, something that I, personally, would love the snot out of, but I dunno. Kids' attention spans aren't real long these days, so I kind of doubt that they'd all take to the six-week wait for their pressed flowers. Instead, I hit up the ReStore, found 12 unglazed ceramic tiles for three dollars, and decided to teach the kids how to press flowers in the microwave and send each of them (except for my own kids, who can share) away with their own set of tiles for microwave flower pressing at home. Even a modern teenager has enough attention span to spend one minute microwaving flowers!

And then we can make pretty things with them!

My kids and I loved making these pressed flower bookmarks, and I think my Girl Scout troop would, as well, but a multi-day, multi-step process isn't going to work. These are teenagers--they're going to dump whatever they come home from their Girl Scout troop meeting with on the floor of their bedrooms and not look at it again for three months. If I'm super lucky, they'll be willing to do maybe one more step after that, but definitely not fourteen more steps, some of which require yet more wait time.

So I figured out how to simplify the process!

The grated cheese is not related to the microwave flower pressing...

I'll have to write new tutorials for both the flower pressing and the pressed flower bookmarks, because I feel like I streamlined the process for each of them by quite a bit:

And now I'll have some samples to show the kids!

They will still need to seal them 24 hours after our meeting, but I think I can get away with pouring a tablespoon or so of matte medium into wee zip baggies for them to take home. That should keep the matte medium fresh enough to still be painted on when the bookmarks are discovered on bedroom floors in three months.

The poured candles in teacups was the trickiest project to figure out for kids. Kids will be bringing teacups in different sizes and shapes, and I want them to be able to pour candles that will burn correctly for whatever container they bring.

I got a tip from a candlemaking book once upon a time that the best way to test wick sizing in a non-standard container is to pour the candle into the container without a wick, let it cure, then drill a hole to insert a wick. If the size doesn't work, pull the wick out, re-drill the hole if necessary, and try another wick!

I'm glad that I tried this, because this wick that I tested is a hard nope:

I tried a larger wick size, got another hard nope, and finally decided that I'd never be able to burn a candle the width of a teacup with straight beeswax, so I poured a new candle with a beeswax and coconut oil combination:

Better, but ultimately still a nope! Grr!

Syd had the idea to just multi-wick it, which... success!

The above photo is from about half an hour into the candle's first burn. At an hour's burn time it had reached its maximum melt and made it almost completely to the edges of the cup all around. Normally, you'd want a container candle to burn all the way to the edge, but with the way that a teacup narrows to the bottom, I think this wick size and placement is perfect. I don't want the candle to burn too hot towards the bottom.

Add in a lecture on the biology of honeybees and the chemistry of triglyceride hydrolysis, and that's this Folk Arts meeting all prepped!

Now let's just hope that COVID rapid test comes out the way I want...

We Eat Oatmeal; I Make Soap

 

I have several different cold-process soap recipes that I want to try, but we don't really *need* several simultaneous batches of soap, nor do I really have the space to store several simultaneous batches of soap... so somehow I've convinced myself that it makes the most sense if I get to make a new batch of cold-process soap every time we finish a canister of oatmeal.

Seriously, though--that waxed cardboard oatmeal container is the perfect size and shape for a batch of soap!

This is eucalyptus olive oil soap, and it smells AMAZING.

Back when Will was earning the Girl Scout Homesteading badge (don't worry if it doesn't sound familiar to you--we made it up!), I checked out every single soapmaking book from every single library I have access to, and I fell in love with this one:

• The Best Natural Homemade Soaps

Olive oil is the base for all the soaps in this book, and the variety of recipes comes from playing around with different natural additives, many of which I already own. It turns out that I really like olive oil soaps, and I REALLY like soapmaking recipes that call for a fairly limited number of ingredients, especially not fourteen different oils! Olive oil soaps are also supposed to be pretty hard, and I like how long each bar of soap lasts. 

So far, I've made the basic olive oil soap twice--once just the way the recipe was written, and once with eucalyptus essential oil added. It was super easy to plug the soap recipe into this essential oil calculator and get the correct amount of eucalyptus oil to add, and I'm SUPER happy with how scented the soap is! It's all sliced and curing on the ledge behind my bathroom counter right now, and the whole bathroom smells delightfully refreshing. No clogged sinuses for me! Syd and I made the rosemary soap with similarly pleasing results, and today, thanks to cooking the last of our oatmeal for breakfast on Monday, I made the cinnamon soap in the 45 minutes between finishing hand-sending course descriptions to each of the colleges Will is applying to NOT through the Common App and getting the kids to help me clean the house:

SO much olive oil! The recipe also calls for cocoa butter, ground cinnamon, and a teeny bit of cinnamon leaf essential oil. Cinnamon leaf essential oil is a skin irritant, but you can use it at 1% in soap since it gets rinsed right off.

I wish I'd taken another photo after I stirred in the cinnamon--this will be my first dark brown soap!

I currently have a lot of bottles of essential oils with miniscule amounts in them, so I'm thinking that my next batch of soap will involve some serious essential oil calculator machinations and odd combinations--does cedar wood and lemongrass sound good to you? Or maybe rose absolute and jasmine?

First, though, we have to eat more oatmeal!

She Earned Another Made-Up Badge: The Girl Scout "Homesteading" Badge

 

When my Girl Scouts were younger, I'd hear the leaders of older Girl Scouts gripe about the small selection of badges available for Cadettes, Seniors, and Ambassadors. I didn't get it at the time, because goodness, there were more badges around than my Brownie and Junior could ever possibly earn, and a whole slew of retired badges and fun patches, to boot!

But now that I have a Senior and an Ambassador Girl Scout, I see that the problem isn't so much the smaller selection, because there are still more official badges than my kids could do during their time in Girl Scouts, but the variety. Kids are always going to be super excited about some stuff and not excited at all about other stuff, but if you take out the not-so-exciting badges from the official GSUSA line-up... well, those gripey leaders had a point.

So I've been happily, unabashedly letting my entire troop remix or just plain make up badges. GSUSA doesn't have a current older-level basic camping badge, so I bought a set of retired Camping IPs and we made up the requirements to earn it. GSUSA doesn't have a badge for encouraging kids to have an immersive experience with books, so when a subset of my troop was into Percy Jackson, we bought a made-up Percy Jackson badge and made up the requirements to earn it. GSUSA doesn't have a travel badge for Ambassadors, so I'm right now in the process of collecting some retired Traveler IPs and later this year... yep, we'll make up the requirements to earn it!

Will is interested in various homesteading skills at the moment. Some much older retired badges do cover some of those skills, but there was nothing that was affordable, not too precious to put on a busy Girl Scout vest, and covering the skill set that interested Will the most. However, we thought this made-up badge would work quite well as a Homesteading badge, so I bought it--and we made up the requirements to earn it!

And here they are!

1. Research the square-foot gardening concept. Create and grow a square-foot garden for one season. 

For this step, I gave Will several cinderblocks, bags of soil, and newspapers, and showed her how to make a quick-and-dirty raised bed garden. She raised herself a fine crop of strawberries in it!

Other possibilities for this step were creating and growing container gardens, or helping an adult build a cold frame and using it to grow out-of-season greens.

2. Learn how to make your own jam. 

What to do with that fine crop of strawberries? Make jam, of course!

For this step, I taught both kids how to make freezer jam and cooked, canned jam, and the additional trick of laying out washed, topped strawberries on a cookie sheet, freezing them, and then tumbling them into a larger freezer container. Since they're already frozen, they won't stick together in that larger container, and you can just scoop some out whenever you want smoothies or muffins.

It's that life hack that has become an unconscious standard practice!

3. Learn how to use the dehydrator. 

I'd thought that Will might like to learn how to dehydrate her own dried fruit and fruit leather, but instead she ended up helping me deal with a sudden bounty of herbs and greens. I'm going to be really happy this winter that I have so much raw kale in the freezer and all those jars of dehydrated kale and dehydrated oregano in the pantry. 

Other possibilities for this step were learning how to make pickles or sauerkraut, both of which are super easy to do, and my kids LOVE them. 

4. Carve something useful from wood.

Here's Will at our most recent troop camping trip working on her wooden spoon:

She used her pocket knife while at camp, but mostly she used this wood carving kit that is probably the best gift the Easter Bunny's ever brought the kids!

She carved herself a quite serviceable spoon, lightly polished with olive oil and beeswax and absolutely perfect for all of our rustic culinary adventures. 

Other possibilities for this step were learning how to knit or crochet and making a washcloth to prove it!

5. Learn how to make cold-process soap from scratch.

This was definitely our most time-consuming project! I came into it with a big head on my shoulders, having made cold-process soap a few times before, and having taught Syd to make it just a few years ago, but I definitely got knocked down ALL the pegs when our first TWO batches of soap didn't turn out!

What I finally learned after doing the Googling that I should have done in the beginning is that it was my decade-old lye's fault. And now I own a brand-new five-dollar giant bottle of lye, so I guess my goal is to use it up in soapmaking sometime BEFORE the next decade...

Well, we got a good start this summer!

Will made a lovely soap with olive oil, coconut oil, and powdered milk--

--and that lye, of course! Check out its pH, because you KNOW we never pass up a chance to test some shocking pH:

If you don't try to use sus lye, cold-process soap actually IS very simple. It's mostly stirring--

--until you reach trace--

--pouring it into an empty oatmeal canister to finish saponifying--

--removing it from the container when it's hardened and slicing it--

--and then leaving it to cure, every so often admiring how beautiful it is:

Isn't it gorgeous? It's actually inspired me to want to try some different recipes, but I've got to figure out what I'd put it in, because that was our only oatmeal container!

6. Bake bread from scratch.

Have you noticed yet that most of Will's activities are ones that are suspiciously very helpful to ME?!? Mwa-ha-ha! But yeah, I hate to cook, so I am always looking for ways to encourage someone else to cook instead of me. I taught Will to make this no-knead bread, which also happens to be the easiest, most delicious bread in existence, so now that she knows how to make it, I hope she makes it for us lots!

Other possibilities for this step were learning about rain barrels and helping her dad reinstall and maintain ours, or letting me teach her how to sharpen knives. I would appreciate having someone else around who can sharpen knives, but it's also nice to eat homemade bread that I didn't have to bake myself!

7. Level up your animal husbandry skills.

I left this option kind of open, mostly because there are, in my opinion, SO MANY animal husbandry tasks that need to be done around here! The pets are about as feral as the kids!

Will chose to focus on her chickens. She spent a lot of time making a nursery area to keep the pullets away from the big chickens (they defeated her gatekeeping system almost immediately, but so far the big chickens just seem to ignore the little ones), and then giving the whole flock more entertainment options for those days when she doesn't allow them to free-range. Got to be unpredictable so you foil the foxes!

And that's how Will spent part of her summer learning some very useful skills! Now she can start and grow a garden, preserve what she grows, bake herself delicious bread, make herself gourmet soap, and carve the spoon she can use to spread that homemade jam on that delicious bread.

OMG and now I'm realizing that I should totally go and have her do exactly that! If you can celebrate completing a badge by eating bread and jam, then you really HAVE made up the perfect badge!

How Much Foaming Soap Can One Reasonably Have, and Why Do I Keep Wanting to Do Hipster Things with Mason Jars?

I made a few new batches of DIY foaming soap, and I'm so pleased that I took that break from eating cookies, drinking eggnog spiced with rum, and working crossword puzzles that I had to photograph my glowing accomplishment!

Don't let's talk about the facts that 1) making said batches of soap took less than five minutes, and 2) I've nevertheless been putting the chore off since late November.

About the time of year that I baked the holiday season's first batch of sugar cookies... Coincidence, I'm sure.

These Mason jar foaming soap dispenser lids are still working great, and because I'm currently obsessed with consumer math I did the calculations to figure out I'm using approximately $1.29 worth of Dr. Bronner's soap in that pint Mason jar. I'd be spending $3.50 more to buy that same amount of Method foaming soap, times the three sinks in our house, so I suppose that's more than worth the less than five minutes that it takes to make a few new batches of homemade foaming soap every few weeks!

I mean, at least for me. Do y'all get excited about saving $10.50 on soap, or is that weird?

Speaking of things that I shouldn't get excited about, please tell me that I do NOT need the following products that I also want to make from Mason jars:

I mean, we use a spoon for honey, nobody's making more lemonade or cocktails than we can drink in one sitting (if you've never made this strawberry lemonade before, go make it and then reassure me that your family, too, emptied the blender within minutes), and I'm sure not INFUSING anything, but... Mason jars!

Honestly, though, considering we drink out of our Mason jars as well as use them for food storage, all our Mason jars already have jobs and don't even really need to be turned into syrup infusers or more foaming soap dispensers. What I REALLY need are attachments that will allow me to turn vintage soda bottles into useful stuff. Let me know if you see THAT unicorn out in the real world!

My Kid Made Soap All By Herself

I mean I was there, obviously, talking her through it, but from start to finish, my kid's hands were the only ones to touch this entire batch of cold-process soap.

Imagine. Eleven years old, and she can already make her own soap from scratch! Can you think of a more authentic homeschool credential?

To be fair, there was an actual academic reason to set the child up to make cold-process soap. Syd and I are studying the history of fashion together this year, and it's mentioned (although I'd loooove to see the primary source...) in our textbook that the Celts introduced the Romans in Britain to both soap and pants.

I'll be teaching Syd how to sew leggings after Christmas, but way back in September I taught her how to make soap. It's what a good little Celt knows how to do, you see.

We used an easy beginner's recipe, mostly coconut oil and olive oil in simple ratios, something that you'd have to work hard at to screw up.

When you're just pouring distilled water and measuring oils, you don't have to wear any protective garb:

But when you're ready to get the lye out, on go the goggles, the breathing mask,  AND the rubber gloves!

You can see that she's wearing long sleeves, as well, in this photo--

--although she's not in this one:

Her gloves went almost up to her elbows, so when she got overheated in our early-autumn kitchen and wanted to change, I let her. Probably a mistake, but she didn't receive any chemical burns, so there you go.  I wish I could find kid-sized lab coats for a reasonable price somewhere!

She stirred the lye to dissolve it into the distilled water (you always pour LYE into WATER, never water into lye!)--

--then took its temperature. It is hot, because yay for exothermic reactions!

I didn't photograph the oils for some reason, but imagine them warming on the stovetop, and Syd moving from checking the temperature of the lye water to checking the temperature of the oils, waiting for them to approximately match.

When they do, the fun begins! She poured the oil mixture into the lye water, then blended and blended and blended:

I had previously dug up some of last season's Girl Scout cookie boxes (I keep the empties as much as I can for projects, because it's important to Use Resources Wisely!), reassembled them, and taped them back up, so here Syd is pouring her soap into the Girl Scout cookie boxes,  standing up inside a larger box, to serve as her soap molds:

When the soap has cured enough that it's solid and able to be cut, Syd extracted them from their molds--

--and cut them to size!

I had a half-batch of soap to cut and trim, too:

That wavy knife makes everything cuter! The soap should cure for a few more weeks after it's cut, and even then, the longer it cures, the harder and longer-lasting it will be.

Soapmaking with children is an enrichment activity that can serve all kinds of studies. When the kids were little, they made simple glycerin soaps, and even laundry soaps, as a practical life activity, and an exercise in measurement and a practice in philanthropy:

• kid-made glycerin melt-and-pour soap
• kid-made laundry soap

That latter tute actually reminds me that we haven't made homemade laundry soap since moving into our new house! As you can tell in that post, my process was quite organized, and without that same scaffold in the new house to remind me, it just slipped my mind. 

Mental note to make time this winter break to make laundry soap!

If you're studying history, then hopefully you'll run into the Celts, because they're a fascinating people. We studied the Celts back in April of last year--most notably, by painting ourselves in wool and then having a giant battle with the Romans over the sheep that we'd been stealing--but here are a couple of other resources on my radar for studying the Celts:

• Celtic knot templates. These could be coloring pages, but you could also use them as templates for shrinky dinks or clay.
• BBC Celts. The BBC Schools website is great for any topic that affects Great Britain. They have plenty of information about the Celts, as well as several hands-on activities for enrichment.

And, of course, if you're making soap with kids, you'll surely want some more interesting soapmaking resources!

• Explode Ivory soap. This is a fun rainy day activity, and perhaps an interesting tie-in to a consumer science study.
• Felted wool soap. The kids and I have felted wool around rocks and wooden Easter eggs before, so I know that it's a great kid-friendly activity!
• Paint with bubbles. This is a way to get younger kids involved, but even my 11- and 13-year-old still love sensory activities like these.

Here are the books that Syd and I explored as part of our soapmaking study. Some are more on my level and some more on hers, and I have some bookmarked recipes still to try out in several of these!

• Homestead Blessings. This DVD is kind of amateurish and they don't use safety equipment (gasp!), but it's still helpful to see the process of soapmaking from start to finish. Just wear goggles, though.
• Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life. I like to learn more about whatever the kids are studying, so this history of our conception of "dirt" in our cultures was super interesting.
• The Natural Soap Chef. Here's one of the books that Syd looked through to find the recipe that she wanted to use. I still have a couple of recipes bookmarked in here!
• Handmade Soap Book. Here's another good one for recipes.
• You Wouldn't Want to Live Without Soap! The kids both love this series, and I'm often surprised about how frequently they have a title suited to something that we're studying.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Soap! (and a Giveaway of Soap!)

a write-up of the hand-crafted soaps of Soaps to Live by

and a giveaway!

Hop over right now and enter that giveaway, because I want you to have some nice soap as a present.

My Latest Over at Crafting a Green World: Wood Painting and Soap Carving

a round-up of non-toxic methods to paint and seal wooden toys

and a tutorial on setting up a soap carving activity for your kiddos

Practical Life: Using a Washboard

Okay, these days using a washboard probably isn't considered so much practical life as it is hands-on history, but if you've got anything in your wardrobe that prefers to be hand-washed, or washed on the delicates setting in the washing machine, then I assure you that a washboard is the way to get those clothes the cleanest while keeping them the soundest with the least expenditure of effort.

And so, when the baby's ballet togs begin to look dingy, I send her into the bath with leotards and tights, a bar of my hot-process soap, and the washboard:

I generally do a quick pre-wash and rinse of the dirtiest parts of the uniform myself--the feet and knees of the tights, the belly and butt of the leotards--using a bar of Fels Naptha and the washboard in the sink, before passing it all over to the kid, and in the past I would give each item a second rinse, as well, as she passed it to me, before wringing it out and hanging it over the shower curtain rod, but this last time Syd had rinsed everything so well that I didn't find any extra suds, so next time that's just one less job that I'll have to do for her!

I think that I could hand-wash each of Syd's ballet uniform pieces in a couple of minutes, flat, and the fact that Sydney takes an hour in the tub hand-washing them just means that she enjoys the job so much. In fact, I'm imagining that in the summer, when she can take the washboard outside with a bucket, a bar of soap, the garden hose, and the clothesline, I could probably trick permit her to wash all our white T-shirts and handkerchiefs and what-have-you's independently out there and hang them right up to dry.

Don't you love it when the play that is a child's work is actual, you know, WORK? I sure do!

Homemade Laundry Soap Made from Homemade Soap

Willow's afternoon chore recently not only desperately needed doing, but was also sneakily educational, what with all that recipe reading and following and measurement taking, etc.:

I've posted the recipe and tutorial for my homemade laundry soap before over at Crafting a Green World, but this time I used only a little bit of grated Fels Naptha left over from the last time Will and I made this recipe, and for the remainder of grated bar soap that the recipe calls for I hand-grated some of my own hot-process bar soap:

I still have my doubts that a body soap bar will work as well as a laundry soap bar, but the price was right and I certainly have it in stock, and it does look and smell much sweeter than Fels Naptha in my pretty little Mason jar with the fabric on top:

Combine this with the fact that I finally discovered that Matt had been using at least double the proper amount of soap in the washing machine (on the rare occasions that he starts a load of laundry), and I do believe that we're once again all set for laundry soap for a good long while.

Hot-Process Soap Success

I let my first batch of hot-process soap cure for a couple of weeks, just to be on the safe side since it was my first batch. We've all had a chance to try it out at the sink and in the shower by now, however, and the decision is unanimous....

We love it!!!

 
It's quite a bit softer than I thought it would be--I don't know if that's because it could stand to be cured for a while longer, or because of my recipe. Even going through the soap at a bar a week, though, each homemade bar is still cheaper than the cheapest soap at the store, and the ingredients are completely natural, AND it smells delightfully of cinnamon and geranium essential oils, with just a touch of lavender.

In other news, Matt has been gone for most of the week as part of the jury for a high-profile local trial, the murder of an IU assistant professor. It was hard, and upsetting, and stressful, both for Matt to be there and for me to be at home and not know when he's coming home, and to hear people on both sides trash-talking what the jury would supposedly do and think. The jury deliberated for twelve hours, they did their job well and returned a fair verdict, and then they went home to their worried families. Thank goodness it's over.

Soap for Daddy

It's ridiculous, but soapmaking has been on my must-do list since...September? First, I wanted to find a new cold-process recipe, being heartily dissatisfied with my old one, so I requested a bunch of soapmaking books from the library, then waited for them to be held for me, then picked them up and read them all, then didn't like any of the recipes in them, either, so then returned them and requested more books.

So then I found a recipe on a soapmaking DVD that I liked, but had to return it before I got around to copying it down, so then had to request it again, then copy it down.

Then had to track down the ingredients. Waited until a Wal-mart trip (ugh!) to find the cheapest coconut oil, only to discover that they don't sell coconut oil at Wal-mart, so waited until the next discount day at the local indie grocery store to find the next cheapest coconut oil.

Waited until a trip to a different place to find castor oil.

Waited until a trip to Indy to find the super-cheapest olive oil.

Did a bunch of other stuff.

Used some of the coconut oil for granola, so had to wait until the next discount day at the local indie grocery store to buy more.

In the meantime, my poor Matt ran completely out of bar soap. The girlies and I use liquid Dr. Bronner's, but Matt is a man, and apparently a man needs bar soap (?).

Cold-process (and hot-process, just because I want to) bar soap is on its way, I assure you, but in the meantime, I set out all the supplies for the girls to make "soap for Daddy."

Vegetable glycerin melt-and-pour soap is so super-easy, and a quick and satisfying craft project, as there's pretty much no way to mess it up. I dragged out all the essential oils, and let the girls sniff and sniff and sniff and each choose two to mix into one soap for Daddy:

Sydney choose geranium essential oil and cinnamon essential oil, and Willow chose geranium and pine. It's funny, because a few weeks ago I permitted Willow to choose an essential oil from the grocery store, and after much sniffing and sniffing and sniffing, geranium was the oil that she chose--she apparently has excellent taste, because it's been a popular oil around here!

As with everything, the waiting is the hardest part:

Fortunately, we had to take Willow to ice show rehearsal, so after spending a hour there, and then another hour at the gym, by the time we headed home, the soap was...

Perfection! Matt apparently thinks so, too, or else he's just VERY grateful to have bar soap again, because he was just as excited to receive his soap that night as the girls were to give it to him.

And as the eyewitness on the ground, I can tell you that the soap has been well-used every morning since.