This is How We Pack?

Before you head off for a weekend trip, don't you:

set the chalkboard blocks out to air-dry after one last coat:

and then spray paint the shopping cart:

We do, apparently--at least those are the last-minute chores that we found ourselves hurrying to finish before we set off for a weekend in Cleveland. It was a weekend full of Bazaar Bizarre, the Great Lakes Science Center, banana splits, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and barbecue. We came home in time for parades, gymnastic, mowing the lawn, riding bicycles, and Geomags, and now Matt's fixing the girls grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner before their early bedtime (no late-night fireworks show for us this year!), after which he and I will collapse in bed with Baked Lays, Harry Potter, hard lemonade, and ideally our own early bedtime.

Yawn.

Our Newest Reader

The reader and her family are all very, very proud.

Tutorial: White Chocolate Fondue Sculptures

The big kid's been having an amazing time being interested in cooking lately. I showed her how to Google for recipes and how to bookmark them, and then how to Google for food blogs, and I'm really wishing that I had started her on all that on her own computer, because I now have a lot of recipes bookmarked!

Along with all the delicious, complicated things that we've been cooking together, I've also been making it a point to show the big kid many very, very simple things that she can cook entirely by herself: grilled cheese sandwiches, refrigerated biscuits, fried eggs, etc. The big kid has made peanut butter cookies almost all by herself from a recipe that she found online all by herself, but so far the easiest, most independent kid-friendly desserts that we've done lately have involved our fondue pot.

We have an electric fondue pot (it's possibly the wedding gift that we've gotten the most use out of!), which is why this particular recipe is so kid-friendly. I don't think that the kind that uses the candle underneath would be too far off an almost-seven-year-old's skill level, however.

To make these white chocolate fondue sculptures, first have your kiddo dump a bag of white chocolate chips into a fondue pot and, if it's an electric one, turn the heat just to warm. White chocolate is slightly finicky, in that it will seize up if you introduce any moisture into it while it's melted--we pretty much only used crackery foods with our white chocolate fondue sculptures, however, and nobody drooled into the pot, so we were all good. A more foolproof (but not as tasty, in my opinion) substitution would be candy melts. They come in a billion colors, too, so you could make your sculptures even more fun!

Stir the white chocolate chips as they're melting, because sometimes even if they're hot enough to melt, they'll retain their shape until stirred.

In my humble opinion, the tastiest thing to do with a pot of melted chocolate is to coat three-fourths of a big pretzel stick in it:

Let it sit on waxed paper until solid--

--and then you can store it in any air-tight container until it's all munched up.

What I had wanted to show the kids, however, was how to do edible sculptures with white chocolate. Using a spoon, have your kiddo drizzle melted white chocolate onto wax paper in any shape that she desires. She can stick pretzels into the white chocolate for additional sculptural bits, and sprinkle on sprinkles to color her creation:

These creations will need to be frozen to set hard enough to hold their structure, but if your sculpture base is not white chocolate, but is instead pretzel or a mini-tartlet shell, then it will hold its structure just fine without being frozen to set.

As I'd hoped, the kiddos were able to work on this particular food project completely independently--

--with me just stepping in once they'd tired of it to finish off the white chocolate (oh, white chocolate-coated pretzel sticks, I heart you!).

I think somebody else hearted her edible art:

Actually, since the entire container lasted less than 24 hours, I'd say that we all hearted it pretty well.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Just a Few More Photos of Bean Bags and My Babies

I should probably stop taking my camera outside just to play catch, but these bean bag photos are becoming a bit of an obsession. The girls discovered that if they combine their 0-9 bean bag set and their rainbow bean bag set, I'll have just that many more pop flies to toss at them before they have to gather them and toss them back:

Children exhibiting hand-eye coordination!

And yet neither of them seem to show any interest in team sports...

Our D.I.Y. Chalkboard Blocks

Syd helped me (more or less) make this set of chalkboard blocks from her gigantic building block collection, so I'm especially pleased to see how much she's enjoyed playing with them every day since.

They are, of course, incredibly simple to use.

You play with them:

You interrupt your pony ocean adventure to pose for the Momma:

And when you're done you wipe them off with a damp dish towel--

--so that they're ready for their next incarnation as pony flower garden, or pony hay maze, or pony candy land, or whatever further pony expedition you've thought up next.

My chalkboard building block tutorial is over at Crafting a Green World, and if it wasn't raining today, I'd be painting more right now! As it is, I'm seriously considering taking over the living room floor for the noble cause of multiple chalkboard building block constructions.

Masterpieces of Art in Historical Context

Or rather, color print-outs of artwork cut out, glued in the right(-ish) spot on our big basement timeline, and then painted over again with glitter Mod Podge:

After a brief foray into a library copy of the computer game Masterpiece Mansion, Willow decided that she wanted to learn more art history. All of our print-outs have so far come from The Worldwide Art Gallery, although this will also be a great subject to have in mind the next time that we attend one of those used book clearance sales that happen here pretty frequently--can't you imagine how perfect a five-cent used art history textbook would be for this project?

I still have much to do to figure out other points in an art history unit study, especially since Will has also asked to learn about Ancient Egypt, and we're still doing projects about China, dinosaurs, ballet, Independence Day, cooking, and geometry, but just from our brief study so far, Willow has already achieved the hallmark of cocktail party conversation material, in that she now has a favorite artist.

Hieronymus Bosch. Oh, dear.

Throwing the Rainbow

Oh, my goodness, bean bags have been quite the plaything around here of late. After close to an entire lifetime of being fairly uninterested in tossing and catching games, the girls are both now just about obsessed. Syd likes straight catch, but Will is in love with the "pop fly game," in which I toss a bean bag high, high, high up for her. However, she has her own particular take on the skill, preferring to crouch like an animal as I toss it, then spring up for the (hopeful) grab.

Since I like to include a couple of play shots with the still life shots in my etsy listings, I combined a game of pop flies with a photo shoot for the rainbow bean bag set now up in my pumpkinbear etsy shop. Yeah, "catching" a good shot of a good pop fly catch...

Tricky, a bit. Fortunately, I try to keep my focus at least as much on the child-centered process as I do on the child-centered product (not saying I'm perfect at that, every day, every hour, but I try), so a tricky photo shoot that involves a little girl thrilled to be leaping up to catch tossed bean bags for an hour at a time is an okay photo shoot in my book.

Here are the other photos in the rainbow bean bag listing, some more sedate, one not so much:

How lucky we are that so much of our work is just as pleasant as this.