Dinosaur for President: Bronotosaurus

Join us for our mock election and poster party, Tuesday, October 23rd!

Brontosaurus wants to be your president.
He's got a better sense of perspective.  (He sees more because he's so tall!)\
He gives great piggieback rides!
He won't accidentally eat you.

If elected he promises:
He will look out for the little guy.

Dinosaur for President: T-Rex

Join us for our mock election and poster party, Tuesday October 23rd!

T-Rex wants to be your president!
He's a "go-getter"
He's got hunter-smarts
He's super cool!

Elect me for your president and I will promise:
I will spend less time eating and have more time for listening to you and your issues.

Mommy Project: Knitting: Piggie Hat

I finally got around to finishing N's piggie hat!  The pattern was partly my own, I adapted the ears, snout and tail from a pattern out of the book Oh-So-Sweet Baby Knits, at it's pattern for a toy piggie.

Piggie hat - as viewed from the back!

View from the side.

View from the front.






















N's smile of approval, check!

Toddler Recipe: Chocolate Octopi

Chocolate Octopi
Another great day of baking...

Found this recipe in the Usborne book What Shall I Cook?.  It's pretty simple, and depending upon what kind of shortening you use (I used softened butter instead of margarine), and how thoroughly you melt or soften, you don't actually have to refrigerate/freeze the dough.

The recipe yields about 10 octopi.  With a bit of help from little hands we mixed the ingredients for the dough (butter, sugar, flour, cocoa powder, and an egg).  Then we wrapped up the dough in plastic wrap, put it in the refrigerator while I cleaned up the measuring cups, bowls, and spoons.

After the clean up, I took the dough out of the refrigerator and divided the dough into two portions, one for myself (and my youngest, Nols), and the other for W.  I divided my dough into five balls of dough.  And I showed W the size of the dough balls and set W to work.  It was a good size guideline for her to follow, in shaping the dough.

For Noli's octopi, I did the majority of the dough dividing and shaping of the body and legs before she finally took interest and jumped in to use the butter knife to add texture to the octopi.  I let her do a bit of "texturing" then I quickly escorted the octopi into the oven before then were sliced to calamari.  And of course the decorating went off without a hitch.  We used some leftover icing I had to stick on Skittles for eyes and other candy features.  Both girls enjoyed taking turns in measuring stuff for the dough making, W enjoyed actually shaping the dough, and both girls enjoyed the decorating, I deemed it a success.  I only wish that I had the time and energy to do a talk about the Octopus environment, and life cycle.  I guess that will have to wait until tomorrow...

Dividing and shaping the dough balls.




























Flattening the dough balls into ovals.





























Slicing up the legs.   

 

Into the oven.






















Decorating with candy eyes (Skittles by request) and icing (or peanutbutter), for glue.






















One finished octopus...





























Our Consortium (official term for group of octopi) of  Choco-Octopi.

Toddler Recipe: Chocolate Covered Banana Slices

It was a good day for making treats.  I found this idea on www.yumsugar.com, chocolate covered bananas rolled in stuff.  It turned out to be a great activity and the end-product was a hit as well.

I sliced up three bananas. 
I had on had four bags of "stuff" for rolling the chocolate dipped slices in:

• lady fingers
• malt balls
• fruity O's
• cashew nuts

Then, "Hammer-time!" I had the girls take turns smashing up the "stuff" with a mallet, or rather the smooth-non-spikey side of a meat tenderizing mallet. (What toddler recipe could be complete without a mallet? Really?) And then I poured the crushed contents into four deep containers.

I melted a cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips with a tablespoon of oil to make the chocolate dip.  Once the dip had cooled down enough, I let the girls have at the chocolate dip and rolling ingredients.  Chilled the slices in the freezer for an hour and voila!



Dip, dip, dip...























Rolling, rolling, rolling...  

Maybe some eating too....





















Final product!

Spring Daze: Of Wheels and Water

Lazy Weekend! 

 












We took advantage of the warm weather and brought W's balance-bike with us to the local sledding hill.  She had a blast rolling down the hill again and again.


 













Took a swing around on a vintage kiddie ride.














Fed some baby ducklings. 
 

 And three days late, we bought W her very first pedal bike - and voila!  W pretty much figured out pedaling for herself!  One childhood milestone down - yay!

Here's a blast from two year's passed.  We've had W riding the Strider balance-bike for about two years now.  We had her pushing the bike and when she was finally showing signs of coasting for longer and longer distances, we started looking into pedal bikes.  The main catch was W's diminutive size - hardly any of the toddler bicycles had a small enough frame and short enough crank to fit her geometry needs.

We had actually bought her another pedal bike about a month earlier.  It was a Mantis Maya with 12" wheels.  But we found that W was on her very tippy toes even with the seat at the lowest setting.  In addition, when the seat was at the low setting, the crank was so long that her foot had to be above the height of the seat at the top of the pedal stroke.  Of course that made for a very awkward set up for someone learning how to ride a bike for the first time.

We decided to look yet again for another bike - and ran across okay reviews for a smaller bike, that took 10" wheels.  A huffy 10" girls bike, we found the best price for it at Toys R Us.

Biology: First Flight of our Painted Ladies

Last Thursday, we released our newly minted butterflies into the big wide world!














The moment that we've all be waiting for...















On the down side, two of the four butterflies failed to take flight: the permanently crumpled one rested in the grass along side the butterfly whose wing had a crippling twist.  We left these two in the grass to whatever fate awaited them, as they were creatures if the wild.  We told the girls that the two butterflies would prefer the sunshine and soft grass over confines of a cage, but that they most likely destined to become Robin food within the hour...
 













The other two butterflies, once released, flew up immediately out of sight and our hopes for them soared as well. 

Art Skills: Drawing from a book

Got W a new how to Usbourne book:  What Shall I Draw?  And W took to it immediately - and drew herself a lovely little piggie!















Here's the piggie in detail...

Biology: Metamorphosis! From Chrysalides to Painted Ladies

What a drama filled week it has already been for our for newly winged friends.  We started out with four pupa.

Monday morning - voila!  Our first butterfly. Then late Monday, we had another come mostly out of its Chrysalis. 

But Alas, tragedy - the second butterfly got stuck to a bunch of the caterpillar silk that had been attached to its Chrysalis by some of the other caterpillars.  Unfortunately, I had forgotten that the directions had stayed to clear away the silk before transferring the Chrysalides to the butterfly enclosure. 

After giving the butterfly a day and a half to figure out what it was doing, Erik finally decide to intervene with a pair of safety pins and was able to release the butterfly from the silk.  Unfortunately, by then its wings had already hardened without ever having been unfurled.  (The silks had bound his wings in.)  And so we found him this morning, having spent the night at the bottom of the cage, still twitching, but still crumpled up, unable to move wings or most of her/his legs (the ones which were tucked silk in the wings).

The last two remaining butterflies came out over night, last night.  One of them spent a good part of the day with its abdomen still stuck inside the Chrysalis.  Fortunately, it faired a bit better than pour crumpled butterfly.  It had it's wings unfurled.  However Erik did have to rescue it, again with the safety pins, and there is a pronounced twist to its wings - so it will have to compensate when flying.


We plan on releasing all three butterflies as soon as the weather permits.  Meanwhile, I jerry-rigged up small sugar-water filled glad-ware container with a construction paper flower, in hopes that the butterflies would sustain themselves on our meager offerings until conditions were favorable for flight.














One empty Chrysalis and three still occupied...




























Erik, using safety pins to help free the last stuck butterfly from it's chrysalis.
















The last two butterflies to emerge.

Grape Hyacinths on my mind...

Grape Hyacinths seem to go crazy around these parts - much to the delight of W who has been talking about making a grape-beaded bracelet for ages.  Still haven't gotten around to the beaded bracelet, but this
will have to do for now.














Field of grape hyacinths...














Pipe cleaners + grape hyacinths = bracelet.

Tea Party

N has really been getting into pouring things and W and Dada have been reading Alice (In Wonderland and now Through the Looking Glass)...  What better way to wind down the evening than have mini tuna fish salad sandwiches, mini avocado and cream cheese sandwiches and some homemade vanilla maroons?  And don't forget of course - the tea (iced for the warm weather) - Wild Berry Zinger this time.



Dressed for the party...



Musn't forget the cookies.






Taking great care to pour and spoon neatly - like big ladies!  Our tea parties have come a long way since pouring all over the table and pouring back and forth between the sugar bowl, the creamer, various cups and the teapot itself.  That is not to say that silly stuff doesn't still happen - but we managed to keep it down to a few slivers of celery being added to a few of the tea cups.  The key was to keep the party relatively short, and to remove the temptation of the sugar bowl and creamer once the interest in drinking the tea had tapered off...

Biology: Our first Chrysalis!

We had been noticing that one of our Painted Lady caterpillars had been hanging upside down from the ceiling of their container for about a day.  It was hanging in the classical "j" shaped posture.  and this morning W checked on the caterpillars and sure enough, this was the first one to pupate.  Sooooo exciting!  We expect the rest will follow in the next couple of days.  They should emerge from their chevaliers within a week plus of pipetting.

Chemistry: Distillation at Home

Our first homemade still - trial-run getting ready for our co-op lesson on the water cycle, our water purification system, and the different phases of water.  It isn't very efficient, but it has produced some water. 






Later on we tried another method, reported online to have greater yields (reminiscent of a solar still only with a round-lidded pot).  Use an inverted rounded lid to cover the pot (containing the initial aqueous solution). Boil the water and suspend the receiving container in a colander in the same pot (so as to keep the receiving container cooler than the boil below).  Add ice to the top of the pot and voila!  You have a nice much more efficient at-home still.  Not as pretty as the contraption with straws, but much more reliable, unless one wants to invest in actual chemistry equipment (which would be super-awesome but expensive, and better used for more advanced chemistry lessons on distillation). 

Mama Projects: Adventures in Knitting

W's Violet Swirl Ribbed hat.  Okay, so the swirl didn't quite pan out...it's more of a scribble hat.  But it's my very first knit flower really turned out - loved it!  The center stamen was W's idea.