Giveaway at TATERTOTS & JELLO

I love photography, which is why I am so excited about the current giveaway at TATERTOTS & JELLO. It is about a product called LIGHTSCOPE which attaches to your camera and is a quick fix for lousy indoor lighting. Go see and good luck!!

ANIMALS

THIS WEEK: Mid to late spring is a great time to visit the zoo! There are usually a few newborns to admire and the weather is perfect for animal watching. This week, choose a zoo animal and start researching. What does it eat? How tall is it? What is the baby called? Learn some fun facts specific to that animal. When you have your info, make a project of that animal. maybe poster, powerpoint, video, little book, paperbag puppet, a roller box (see post later this week) Have fun with it, then later this week, or sometime soon, go visit that animal at the zoo!

For more about the roller box see this post.

ANGRY BIRDS PIZZA

I saw this the other day from Happy Healthy Life and couldn't put it out of my head until I tried to make it. My kids love that little angry red bird (a popular iphone app/game) and I thought it was too cute. The only difficulty I had was that this picture is a personal-sized pizza a I wanted to make a family-sized pizza. The difficulty was that the scale for the face was all wrong because on a large pizza, the pepperoni eyeballs were not large enought to get the right effect. SOLUTION that I did not think of in time for the oven, is to use Canadian Bacon for the eyeballs instead of pepperoni. Duh! Still my kids got a kick out of it. Also, I got the chance to improve my pizza dough making. I found this website a great source for making your own pizza dough, it even includes a short tutorial on how to knead pizza dough.

Also, the above angry bird is made with soy pepperoni and I used regular pepperoni (which admittedly is much less healthy), this did make my pizza more greasy, I also think I used too much cheese (I love cheese), next time I'll have to use a little less cheese and fewer pepperoni.


All in all a good effort and I am looking forward to trying it again with less cheese, fewer pepperoni and using Canadian Bacon for the eyes.

How to Make A Fort - the easy way

If your kids are in the fort building business than you know what it is like to have your couch cushions seemingly everywhere but ON the couch, right? My husband and I have sworn never to buy a couch with removable anything ever again. Having said that, those couches are not quite as comfy :0( . Well, I just saw something over at Saltwater Kids that was amazing. All it takes is your kitchen table, some inexpensive white roller shades and some Sharpies!! Check this out, cool right?!! The directions for the fort, from Country Living Magazine, where this idea originated are here. And while your over at Saltwater Kids check out all of her other fun fort-building ideas!

Pool Party Cake - Easter Clearance

I mentioned on my "ABC's" early learning side bar to the left about a use for plastic Easter eggs currently on clearance in many stores. I also want to mention that PEEPS freeze very well!! Sooooo, you might want to grab some of those while they are on clearance as well. We have been using our frozen PEEPS to make some of these at my house. The recipe actually calls for frozen Peeps so you don't even have to plan ahead.


These are great for snacks and lunches. I love that they are peanut free, so my kindergartner is allowed to have them for his mid-day snack. A lot of sugar I know, this is not his snack everyday I promise, I also make sure that his lunch is sugar-free that day.

But, wouldn't the cake at the top be an adorable cake for summer parties?! I might make this for my kids on their last day of school when we have our annual "Welcome SUMMER!" party. Get the recipe here.

ABC's

Don't throw away those plastic Easter eggs yet, or at least, buy some on clearance, I found a pack of the large sized plastic eggs at Target for just 25 cents. Use those eggs to help your children learn their ABC's and help children learn match upper case with lower case letters by writing the upper case letter on one half of the egg and write the lower case letter on the bottom half of the egg. Your kids will have fun trying to match up the eggs. Also, since my youngest is 21 months we will just be focusing on one letter this week. We will also use our egg to find things that start with that letter to put inside the egg.

PEDICURE Birthday Party

My ten-year-old celebrated her birthday party this weekend. What she really wanted to do was to take her two best school-friends to get pedicures and then have a slumber party. That sounded about as low-key as I could have asked for so I readily agreed, and why not get a pedicure for me too! Win-win, right?! They had a great time sitting in the over-sized massage chairs, sipping their Sprite's and feeling pampered. We let our guests decide where they wanted to get take out from and my husband swung by and picked up dinner awaiting the return of girls with the newly beautified toes. For cake, I had a small cake pan shaped like a foot (like the one seen here) and we thought it would be fun to let them each decorate their own foot cake complete with pretty "toe-nails".

This was my first time using the Wilton Icing Gel which gave us very vibrant, "nail polish" icing. I bought mine at Michael's using my 40% off coupon. Excellent! I liked the gel so much I will never go back to the regular food coloring. A little bit goes a long way too, so I think this small investment was worth every penny.



Then, we decided to make banners with the girls' names on them to decorate their bedrooms. The girls picked out their fabrics and traced a triangle template that I cut out of cereal box cardboard, and they also traced letters for their names. Each triangle was about 5" wide and 6" long. Now, a lot about banners have been all over the blogs and while I thought they were cute I didn't get what all the hub-bub was about. But seeing these in person I was very smitten with them. These banners are way cuter in person than in pictures. I am a bit addicted to banner-making now. I also like that I could just get 1/8th yard sized pieces of fabric which kept the cost down and allowed me to get many different fabrics for the girls to choose from. I used 1'' grosgrain ribbon that I folded in half over the top of each triangle, leaving about 1 1/2 inches in between each one. If you'd like to save money on ribbon, check out this idea for making your own, genius! I used 3M spray adhesive to attach my letters. A Silhouette Machine would have worked great for the letters as well, and they would have been so easy to just print out and iron on but I opted to have the girls trace and cut their letters.

The girls then watched the movie "Tangled", giggled for a bit and then went to sleep. (phew) In the morning, I made them M&M pancakes and gave them these cute goodie bags. Ta-daa! One birthday party completed.

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