Brownie Batter Bake-off

You knew we'd do it again. The bake-off has become our go-to way to do up desserts around here.

Following in the steps of the cookie bake-off and the carrot cupcake bake-off, I mixed up a batch of extra fudgy brownies using my library copy of The Good Neighbor Cookbook, then divided it into three bowls and laid out every single thing in the pantry:

I figured that I had a sure winner with my peanut butter, lingonberry jam, and wheat germ brownies, but they--and I can't believe that I'm about to say this!--had too much peanut butter. Who knew there could be such a thing?

In my opinion, the best mix-ins were the tart lingonberry jam, the little dried date pieces, carob chips, and wheat germ. It doesn't matter, though--even the brownies with marshmallows, peanut butter, raisins, cream cheese, candied ginger, almonds and poppy seeds got this same reaction:

Delicious.

We used:

At Hunter's Honey Farm

It's that time of the year when our homeschool group seems to have the best field trips! After a few chilly, rainy weeks, it was perfect weather at Hunter's Honey Farm for our field trip there:

Outdoor field trips on beautiful days are the best, wouldn't you agree?

The hive tour was set up so cleverly. One beehive stood on a table in a grassy area, underneath a tent with mesh walls. All the families stood just outside the tent peering in, and the beekeeper stood inside the tent with the hive. He lectured us on the finer points of bees, then took the hive apart frame by frame, found all the interesting things on that frame (pollen! cells with honey! empty cells! the queen!), and walked it around the inside perimeter of the tent so that everyone could see:

He took care to make sure that every single child saw every single fascinating thing:

Inside, we took another tour of the processing area. Mmmm, raw, unwashed honey!

The girls felt pretty fine, indeed, to already be expert crafters of rolled beeswax candles:

But I do believe that the most THRILLING thing for each of them was when they each got to fill their very own honey bear:

Each girl has a honey bear of her own!

Each honey bear is quite sticky by now, as you can imagine.

Let's see...I took home:

• one jar of raw honey (full of protein, and good for your immune system!)
• one half-gallon jug of wildflower honey, because the girls sure as heck aren't going to let me share their honey bears
• one one-pound chunk of beeswax, soon to coat the outsides of autumn leaves, in just the first of its MANY uses around here
• one small section of honeycomb, just this afternoon dissected and then devoured by the children

That may have possibly been this week's grocery budget, but hey--everyone loves honey on toast, no matter how many meals they eat it in a row!

The Great Room Switch: Painting the Study

When Will was a toddler and we first bought this house, we moved all her toys into the second of the house's three bedrooms, really just an enlarged pass-through from the hallway into our own bedroom. It's big enough for a full-sized bed if you keep it low so that it doesn't block the window (although having that window sill above the bed has been the reason for one child's visit to the emergency room so far), has a couple of good walls to build shelves on to hold the girls' ridiculous amount of toys, and it's just a doorway away from our bedroom, so that when little girls make a peep, the Momma and the Dadda are just a doorway away.

Just a doorway. No door. Ahem.

Add to THAT the issue that the girls are early birds and turn on the lights in their room before the sun comes up, AND that they don't want to share a bed anymore, and you have the storm that caused me to hatch the plan that I sometimes see as brilliant and sometimes see as hare-brained:

We're switching the girls' bedroom with the third small bedroom that lives in the front of the house, a room otherwise know as our Study/Studio.

Can you think of two rooms that are MORE full of a truckload of crap to have to exchange? Nope, you can't.

Friends, this move has been ridiculous. Absurd. Worthy of a nervous breakdown. First, we moved all the girls' stuff down to the playroom, where you can no longer even walk due to the accumulation of that on top of the playroom nonsense. I went through a bunch of our stuff. We had a garage sale. I went through a bunch more of our stuff. We took a load to Goodwill. I went through a bunch MORE of our stuff, and we put some stuff out by the side of the road with a sign that read "FREE."

We still have a bunch of stuff.

When we first moved into this house, we were in a big hurry, and so we didn't change anything or make anything look nice. We also had this toddler, so there wasn't really much time to do a good job on whatever we did try to do, like painting or gardening. And then we had another kid just a few months later--you should have seen the lousy paint job that I slopped on their bedroom walls, with them rolling around my feet making messes and getting into trouble.

This time around, one of the things that I'm most looking forward to is the chance to make each room look...nice. Do a little planning. Use a little forethought.

And then I went ahead and painted our new study silver anyway:

And I let the girls help:

No, it's not turquoise like the studios of all the famous crafty ladies, and it doesn't make the room in this already very dark-ish house any brighter, but that's what track lighting is for, and I love how the walls are shiny--it's like living in a treasure chest, or a magpie's brain.

The former gigantic toy shelves are getting all set up with homeschool supplies, and I wrenched my back moving our brand-new IKEA table, and the fabric looks all neat and tidy so far, and you would not BELIEVE the number of fights that Matt and I have had so far about super-important details, like the locations of power strips...

This study is going to be so excellent.

Painting the Salt Dough Maps of Egypt

The Nile is blue, and runs to the Delta and then into the Mediterranean (which they finally remembered!):

Willow decided that the Nile is in flood during the time of her map, so that's more blue:

Sydney is representing the rest of Egypt as one great, sandy beach:

Will has a reputation for grousing a bit whenever I want her to begin a new project (or brush her teeth, or leave the house, or do anything, really), primarily because she never wants to stop whatever it is that she's currently engrossed in. However, she also has a reputation for then becoming completely engrossed in that new project, and thus enjoying it, too, immensely.

Therefore, although there was a fit of gripes when I asked her to come over and paint her map, since Syd was already painting hers and so all the paints were already out and Usborne Quicklinks would still be there when she'd finished--a fit of gripes, I tell you--Willow's map has not just land and water painted, but also the Nile flood plain, representations of the areas ruled by the Red Crown and the White Crown of Egypt, the white limestone covering the pyramids, and the gold capstones:

And no, we're still not finished! Currently, the girls are having a fabulous time putting together a set of little lapbook minit books about Ancient Egypt, and they don't know it yet, but my papyrus order just arrived, so there are many more good times ahead, indeed.

Rainbow Play Dough Love Fest

Goes something like this: "Hey, girls, I made something like ten pounds of rainbow play dough. Want to go to the park and play with ALL of it?"

Boy, did they!

I sell play dough by the pound, including this rainbow play dough set, in my pumpkinbear etsy shop. Whenever anybody orders some, I make another ten pounds for my girls.

Salt Dough Maps of Egypt

First, you have to mix up the salt dough, with as much singing and spilling and inefficient measuring and getting flour and salt everywhere as you can manage:

Our local, most favorite pizza shop, Pizza X, gave us two small pizza boxes free for the asking, and pizza boxes are PERFECT for salt dough maps. They're cardboard, so they can withstand the low oven temperatures for drying the salt dough, they're sturdy, so they can withstand the wet dough itself, you can paint them, they have a lid, they're stackable, and you can use the extra surface of that inside lid for those miniature lapbook books that are all the craze right now.

I printed and cut out a map of Egypt on 8.5"x11" paper--it was just a tad small for the pizza box, so we were able to add the context of the surrounding area. If we ever wanted to use a bigger map in a bigger pizza box, I'd print the map on an overhead transparency and let the girls trace it directly onto the bottom of the box. As it is, the girls glued their cut-out map directly to the bottom of the box, painted the surrounding areas (we're going to do that again when we paint the salt dough, on account of both girls appear to have forgotten the Mediterranean Sea!), and then pressed the salt dough down onto the cut-out map:

Don't worry--there was also ample time set aside for the making of long-legged ballerinas from the extra salt dough:


And then they dance:


The girls used maps to place the Nile River and Nile River Delta:

You can put a lot of relief detail  into the salt dough, and Willow sculpted in the elevation change from the Upper Nile to the Lower Nile, and also added in a couple of pyramids and a Sphinx: 

If you want to do flags and labels, you can stick toothpicks into the right parts as you're sculpting the salt dough. They'll dry firmly in place, and you can make and glue on the paper labels later. I considered this, and also considered having the girls model tiny pyramids and monuments from FIMO to glue on later...but, eh. The salt dough was engaging enough as-is, and the girls learned a LOT about the Nile from it. Later we might put together a giant paper map of Ancient Egypt (Megamaps will let you print maps that are over six feet long!) and label that more elaborately with all the pyramids and such, Kushites and what-have-you).

Next, we oven-dry the salt dough, and then we paint!

The Ballerina, and Her Bun, and Thoughts on Organization

It's a new year of ballet, and the ballerina finds herself quite eager and prepared:

As the girls grow older, it's been such a relief to be able to gradually give up the exhausting chaos of their tiny years (they're 22 months apart, remember? I yawn just thinking about those days...) and, with their help, actually develop a system and an organization for some things that make our lives so much less stressful.

Take the pink ballet uniform, for instance:

The leotard and tights (the same as last year, thank goodness for stretchy fabrics!), get checked over when Syd gets home from class, hand-washed if they need it, and then put back in Sydney's ballet bag. The ballet shoes (brand-new from the dance store, leather shoes are NOT very forgiving) can go straight into the bag. Generally, Sydney isn't permitted to wear her ballet shoes outside--photos are a special occasion.

Sydney isn't permitted to wear her ballet uniform to play in--it was very expensive, and she has plenty of other leotards, some of them nearly identical, to fuel her at-home ballet daydreams--and so being permitted to run around outside in full uniform, near a fountain, no less(!), was pretty fun:

Being basically the butchest mom on the planet, the ballerina bun has been one of my biggest fears for a long time. I bit the bullet this year, however, and to my surprise...that damn bun is easier to make than a braid!

I've since decided to skip the netting, since I don't bother to slick the rest of Sydney's hair back with gel and spray, but even so the bun is sturdy and simple and attractive, and I've even begun using it to pull the girls' hair up when I want it out of their faces during the week. Who knew?

It's only since I've seen how easy even getting ready for ballet can be with a child who is organized, capable, and responsible for her own gear that I've begun to feel less bad about sending the girls to Montessori when they were littler with tangled hair, dirty faces, no socks, and lunch eaten in the car on the way there. How on earth did those other parents send neat and tidy small children out into the world every single day, on time and with a hot, healthy lunch in their tummies?

Really, however, my greatest revelations ought to concern how to apply this study in organization to all the other remaining areas of overwhelming chaos in our lives. A gymnastics bag, for instance--we'd know where the gymnastics leotards were even before it was time to get ready to go, and Willow might actually be able to find her gymnastics shorts for a change! And if each girl only wore her gymnastics leotard for gymnastics, then perhaps we'd be spared the desperate search among the play leotards each week to find one that fit for class...

And surely there is some sort of simple way to fix a child's hair so that the dratted ponytail doesn't dig into her skull during forward rolls?