We had a beautiful low key day today. Simon was still under the weather so just Talia and I went to church. As always Talia attempts to undress herself as much as possible during the car ride to church. By the time I got there she had taken off her shoes and forced all 5 of her toes on her left foot through her stocking. I didn’t even think that was possible. I should have taken a photo because it looked so funny.  I just pulled her stocking back together as much as possible and put her shoe back on over top.

My mom had us over for lunch and then the kids got to hunt for eggs in her yard. Talia was really into the hunting. She can’t open the eggs herself but she says “ope – ey!, ope – ey!” Whenever she finds one.

I love you a lot sis! (and she is determining weather or not to screech)

a woman on a mission

he sticks out his tongue like that she he is concentrating hard.
He called his  shirt and tie his “easter dress”
we could not have asked for more beautiful weather. It was gorgeous day and plenty warm enough to be outside with out a jacket. We have not seen weather like that since last August so it’s welcome!

You would think that after last year I would be a pro at producing vibrant natural colors. Truth is I still have  a lot to learn. I had intended to do many many experiments with egg colors this year but due to illness this is it folks! Both Simon and I have been so so sick. We caught the flu flu,  you know the kind you are supposed to get the flu shot for. I had a high fever for 5 days – it was awful, I would have rather been in labor. I am still not back to 100% and now Simon is sick with it and it looks like he won’t be going to church or Easter dinner at my mom’s tomorrow. Poor kid.
Last week before it really hit me we dyed some eggs.

Simon helping me tear up onion skins for the dye baths.

Our eggs in their dye baths.  What didn’t work ; over dying a yellow egg (saffron) with cabbage to make green. The cabbage just over powered the yellow quickly.  Adding vinegar to the red onion skins made them too acidic and turned the eggs brown. Boiling cabbage with baking soda made it not work at all. I think the dyes need to be pretty acidic to make them stick but too acidic is no good. I should use PH test strips to get the PH correct.

Here are the ones that turned out the prettiest. Beet, cabbage, saffron, and yellow onion skin. Next year I will work out the kinks more with the red onion skin and work on a deep green further. I have been tipped off that it might have to do with using a reactive dye pot (cast iron or copper instead of stainless steel).

We added 5 more chicks to our flock and the kids are having a blast with them. 

Ivy and Olive came over last week to play with them.

Talia is REALLY into this. She quickly learned the work “chick” and the sign for “bird” and stands at the garage door (for the time being we are keeping them in the garage) and cries and signs “bird”  ”bird”  ”bird”

Olive was SO excited

He says “mom I won’t kiss them, just give them hugs”

Now they are starting to get real feathers. We took each one inside for a little bit.

And today since it was nice we took one outside but quickly abandoned that since it kept chirping that it was cold.

Happy Easter

I have been meaning to do this for awhile for the kids. In fat the bottles of tonic water have been sitting in my pantry for months, tonight we finally got around to it.

The invitation

All you need to do this is a couple of black lights (you can get long florescent plug in ones at Walmart for $10, or around Halloween they sell them at Target and all the main chain and costume stores), 2 bottles of tonic water that contains real quinine,  some shaving cream, and neon tempera paint (I purchased the folk art brand at Michael’s). Then you just fill up the bath, dump in the tonic water and mix a little tempera paint into the shaving cream. You can also use the tempera paint to make glow in the dark play-dough so it’s worth the $2 a bottle. Note that not all things marked “neon” or “florescent” or even “glow in the dark” will fluoresce under black lights. The Martha Stewart glow in the dark florescent tempera paint does and so does some of the folk art paint.

“can I paint my tummy mommy?”

someone couldn’t help herself tasting the paint. Mostly it’s shaving cream so it taste like soap so she would immediately spit it out and then rinse her mouth with bath water. But the tonic water is very biter so that wasn’t much of an improvement. I kept saying “no mouth! no mouth” but I think the impulse is too strong.

 the shaving cream mixed into the tonic water made a really interesting effect! 

he said he was painting a robot.

it turned into finger painting.

of course after you have a black bath you have to have a shower to get all the shaving cream and sticky (it’s sweetened) tonic water off you but the kids had a last so it was worth the effort

This morning I had the privilege of photographing a beautiful home birth.  Scarlet Ophelia Rollins was born at 5:47am. Her mother and birth team worked beautifully together to bring this little lady earth-side. Big Sister Bella made sure everyone knew that she was going to be the one to cut the cord. She is also a doula in training and proudly showed me her birth bag and all it’s contents – she was adorable. It was beautiful to see how well supported this mom was with all her sisters and friends surrounding her. Truly a beautiful birth!

laboring hard in the tub

exercise balls have multiple purposes!

the catch

Big sister cuts the cord.

beautiful beautiful eyes!

11/15/11

Went in to check on Talia and found both kids like this – this makes my heart melt!

12/28/11

This is what I did with the rock salt from our advent wreath…
I dyed it with food coloring and placed in a pan for Simon to play with. This kid loves sensory play so this was a huge hit with him.

The invitation

after playing with it for awhile he went and got some matchbox cars to add to it. He said what he made in the photo was a birthday cake.

12/9/11

For baby’s first Christmas ornament I have taken both of my kids to have their hands imprinted in clay.  I love these little ornaments and next year I promise to take a photo of them! For successive years I have let the kids paint an ornament. This is a fun little tradition, which I think eventually will make for a very cute tree.  This year our friends Ryver and Tooper went with us. As you can see Talia had a great time trying to eat the paint. Simon was just very serious about getting the job done.

One of the fun things that we did lately was get a light table. This was based on the recommendation of play-at-home mom that has done so many awesome blog post on great activities with a light table.  After seeing all their photos I knew we had to have one. And I found a cheap used one on craiglist (only$40! Score). Typically you will find light tables in children’s museums and they sell for hundreds of dollars. I found a commercial printing company that was going out of business  and was liquidating their furniture and supplies. This table was originally at counter height so we had to trim it down to toddler size and I painted it and put new legs with casters on it. Not it’s not only a light table but also serves as a game table, a train table and right now it’s hosting our plan city.  Shining light though translucent objects adds a whole new dimension to play and the kids are very intrigued by it.

Talia examining color.

These translucent poker chips look beautiful!

I bought a set of 3 dimensional shapes and Simon and Talia are having a good time playing blocks with them with the added benefit of learning all the names of the various shapes (sphere, pyramid, cylinder etc.) These shapes are designed so that you can actually fill them with water to show that you can calculate the volume with math. What an awesome real world way to learn geometry! when Simon is old enough to understand V= 1/2 b xh I will definitely be showing him that his calculation is correct by having him fill the shapes with water then poor the water out and measure it.

We of course had to get some water beads. These are beads that are sold in the floral section of craft stores like Muchales and Jo-Annes. Water beads are polymer crystals., similar to contact lenses, only they are spheres. They feel amazing! I mean there is something about them that makes you want to just swim in them. Definitly fun to put your hands and arms down in them, to swish, scoop, and pour them.

and some little ones have a hard time not swishing them right out of the bin! These do require adult supervision with the little ones as Talia (who is a very mouthy kid) will periodically try and pop one in her mouth.

another really fun activity is our “playing with color” activity on the light table. I picked up an acrylic lipstick holder at the container store and Simon loves to mix colors in it on the light table. Here I gave him liquid water colors and allowed him to drop them onto instant snow. Which is not actaully snow it’s another polymer that is super water absorbent. It’s makes a fun snow-like substance. You can get some at Discount school supply.

and this just looks like one of those photos from a bio-tech lab website or something.

I highly recommend a light table – it’s been a lot of fun for us so far!

Simon decided months and months ago that he was going to have a “dragon birthday” and that the cake would be a “pink chocolate raspberry cake” and he came up with all of that on his own! I went looking for a dragon cake pan because I am not a very good baker and I need to keep it simple and I came across  directions for assembling a dragon out of 2 rounds, and I thought “hey I could do that” And so I just used a box cake mix and I did! To make the raspberry I just juiced a bag of frozen strawberries (after microwaving it for one min.) Juicing just removes the seeds and you are left with a raspberry syrup.  I added that syrup to royal icing (but you could easily do butter cream). The resulting icing tasted great!

Talia was very excited about the gifts! She is really into cars. It’s super cute – she will scoot them along and make car noises. Simon didn’t do that until he was way older but I guess she has him to imitate.

We got Simon some additional pieces for the plan city we already own. He also got a cape and mask from his friend Ryver, which we had to fight him to get him to take off at bed. I have a feeling I’m going to have a hard time convincing him not to wear it to preschool tomorrow. He also got a real electric guitar but so far the only person who has played it has been Myles… (I think he’s a bit young).

I haven’t been organized enough to plan him an actual party so tonight we just celebrated with ourselves. He has his heart set on another swimming party but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen until March.

When he woke me up this morning at 6:30  he said “Mommy it’s morning and I’m already 4!”