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.

Always Time for Oobleck

Now that we've spent a year homeschooling, I've got some idea of tweaks that I'd like to make to how we go about it. Although we still primarily unschool, we also tend to have a few particular areas of study going on at any time, or a vacation or other event to prepare for with some learning activities, or, to be honest, there are just plenty of projects on my list that I want to try out with the girls for whatever reason.

Combine that with my suspicion that the girls could handle more daily chores than they currently perform (and my problem that I have more daily chores to perform than I can currently handle), and I've been playing with creating a workable daily schedule. It currently looks something like this:

• Morning chores (to be done after breakfast-ish and breakfast table clean-up)

1. Give cats fresh food and clean water in a clean water dish.
2. Clean your bedroom, including making the bed.
3. Brush your teeth and hair.

• Morning project. If we need to get something done, I'll assign it, or if we have an outing planned I'll call that our morning project, but otherwise the kids can pick a project or I'll offer suggestions.
• Extra chores. I give out extra chores as punishments, or if there's just something else that the kids need to do in a particular morning, then that's how life works sometimes.
• Afternoon chore. The girls don't have regular afternoon chores, so I assign, or they pick, something else that needs to be done, from sweeping the back deck to scrubbing the toilet (a task that Willow, inexplicably, loves).
• Afternoon project.
• Extras. Extras consist of anything else the girls would like to work into the day (such as buying ice cream!) to a scheduled playdate, or last-minute errand, or whatever, really.

There's no real timetable to the day, although this does need some improvement. If I need the girls to do a chore that they don't want to do, or if Willow is engrossed in a book or the computer, then getting the work done can be a big struggle, the struggle part being what I was trying to avoid by laying out the schedule in the first place.

Anyway, that gigantic preamble was all just to lead to what I wanted to tell you about, which is that Willow recently chose to make oobleck for her afternoon project, and once again I was reminded both of how much I absolutely love oobleck--

 
 
 
 
--and always, ever more clearly every single minute, how much I absolutely love that little kid:

Tutorial: Shaving Cream Puff Paint

Because obviously we need yet another art supply!

To make shaving cream puff paint, mix together equal parts shaving cream--

--and white glue:

Whip it together quite quickly, so that the shaving cream doesn't lose its fluff.

Next, whip in an amount of powdered tempera to your liking:

Just a small amount gets the whole cup of paint quite gorgeous and cheerful:

Oh, and it makes a huge mess. Mental note to hose it all off later:

Prepare all your colors in separate cups--

--and then have at it!

It's a little hard to tell in a photograph how dimensional the paint is, but you can tell, at least, that the cloud blobs in Sydney's painting will dry just as cloudy and blobby as she made them, even if you can't see the waves and turns in her sky:

This paint does not keep, so when you're done painting you have the pleasure of dumping all the paint colors out onto a giant newsprint and playing at marbling them for a while:

What with starting up the summer garden and prepping for next week's International Fair (not to mention next weekend's first craft fair of the season!) and experimenting with getting the girls into the habit of doing a goodly amount of chores every day, it seems as if we've been doing an awful lot of work stuff this past week, so it felt good just to dig in and play for a while. Once the chores are habit and the big events are past (although they do just keep popping up, don't they?), I'm confident that our routine will settle itself into an easier ebb and flow of work and play.

And shaving cream puff paint. Can't leave that off the schedule.

Their Summer Sport

Sydney enjoys a vastly larger variety of extracurricular activities than Willow does, so when Willow said that she'd like to take gymnastics I was stoked, and immediately punched weekly lessons into the homeschool budget. Fortunately, "Routine Day" happened to be scheduled for the week of their second lesson, so I was able to pass through the magic window into the Actual Gym to film the girls showing off their approximately 1.5 hours of instruction thus far:

All the other parents were very good sports at clapping for my two tumble girls, I should add, since their own kids' routines had probably been in the works since at least the beginning of the year, if not longer (one of the kids could actually do that backward flip thing). Still, I do believe (quite humbly) that Will did herself credit during her performance.

As for my Syd monkey, however:

She is obviously another Olympic gold medalist in the making.

The best part of Routine Day, however?

MEDALS!!! On the second day of class!!!

The girls were THRILLED. Will wore hers non-stop all weekend, to Arkansas and back, and neither child so much as questioned why they happened to deserve medals at their second lesson, but if there were any doubts in their minds about whether or not gymnastics was super-fun (it's a little warm in the gym, after all), those doubts were completely and utterly quelled for all time.

Because, for Pete's sake, in gymnastics you get MEDALS.

Our Homemade Modeling Beeswax

On a hot day in the early summer, it isn't quite so much of a chore to warm up the modeling beeswax by hand (other times, we immerse it in warm water)--

--and then to model it into something fabulous--

 
 
 
 
--like a fire-breathing dragon--

--crowned with wildflowers, of course:

Check out my homemade modeling beeswax tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Baked Banana Oatmeal

We have a lot of oatmeal. Lot. Of. It. And we love oatmeal, eat it for some meal or other (not nearly always breakfast) just about every other day.

I don't actually have a lot of instant oatmeal, however, because instant oatmeal isn't the cheapest where I shop, and so not only do I have to insure a clean pot before I begin (which sux), but I also have to hang out for something like 20 minutes just to get that dang oatmeal cooked (double sux).

I tried mixing up a big batch of overnight oatmeal to save time the next day, but this was so not a success that it wasn't even funny. The texture was just not okay to the children, and to children texture? It's everything.

This, however, was such a crazy success that it's also not even funny:

Baked banana oatmeal (it's not actually that yellow--the light in my kitchen on a rainy day is yet another thing that sux) is so stinkin' good that it's one of the few recipes in my repertoire that gets not double, not tripled, but quadrupled when I bake it. The only thing that I change about the recipe is the sugar--the recipe's author doesn't put any sugar in, because he is apparently some kind of sugar-free superhero. I, on the other hand, dust the top of the raw oatmeal mixture generously with organic turbinado sugar just before I put it into the oven. Cooking on top of the bananas and into the oatmeal, it comes out perfectly sweet.

Eat it hot, cold, or room temperature, and seriously, quadruple the recipe, because it's just that good.

Where Have I Been?

I've been in Arkansas, feeling unspeakably, incredibly, couldn't-be-prouder proud of a certain beloved baby cousin:

Watch out, because he's just about one second away from taking the world by storm.