White Elephant: Crazy Wrapping

For Craig's office white elephant gift exchange, the theme was crazy wrapping. I had been wrapping gifts at home all day, so I decided to use the remnants to create his wrapping paper. I made a quilt, basically:






I tried different lacing methods:






And this is how the final gift looked:

Gingerbread Houses

Today, I decided to try making gingerbread houses. Aside from the resulting complete exhaustion, I think our first attempt went pretty well. Of course, I didn't plan ahead so we used the remaining Halloween candy and anything else we could find in the pantry to decorate our houses. Here they are:

Mine is mostly starbursts, mini starbursts, jolly rancher sticks, fruit roll ups, caramels, and coconut chips (on the roof). [Is it obvious that I grew up in a brick house?] Kai's is...well...everything I used plus most of her Halloween candy.

I used a recipe I found online for the gingerbread, modified for the fact that we only had fresh ginger (the equivalent is basically TONS of fresh ginger for powdered). I found a recipe online for the frosting too - egg whites, cream of tartar, and powdered sugar. 

I didn't use a pattern for the houses; I cut them out free form. Kai's fell in a couple times before I got it to stand. I think a pattern might be helpful, but our pieces got distorted a bit as Kai helped put them on the baking sheets. A pattern would not have solved that problem. 

Kai Project: Bottle Caps

We've been saving bottle caps for a long time now. I finally decided to try this project with Kai - stringing bottle caps on string. I wasn't up to the challenge of letting Kai handle a hammer and nail, so I made holes in the bottle caps while Kai organized them by color:

Kai worked diligently on her project (always improving small motor skills):

This is how my project turned out:

And my second one:

And Kai's (this picture taken at Kai's request "to send to Grandma Judy"):

Of course, I may have slightly destroyed the backside of our bamboo cutting board (oops!):

Notes:

We put a drop of Elmer's glue on the end of the string to keep it from fraying. This worked the best of our other attempts to create a "needle".

I suggest washing your bottle caps so that you and your child(ren) do not end up smelling like a soda/beer/cider factory exploded on you. 

Protect your work surface!

Kai Project: Puffy Paint

Today, we decided to try this project from Pinterest:

As usual, we edited the recipe a bit. We mixed:

4 cups flour

1 cup salt

1 cup baking soda

4 cups water

It was rather thick and difficult to mix:

After putting that mixture into our bottles (a slightly messy adventure as the mixture was too thick to go through our funnel), we added a packet of kool aid to each bottle. As we mixed, the citric acid in the kool aid had the expected reaction with the baking soda in our paint mixture (that's the reason I added baking soda to the recipe). Several of the bottles came close to bubbling over the top:

By mixing, we kept them from spilling over the top:

The end result is a lovely smelling, puffy paint:

My picture (I'm not terribly creative, but I wanted to try it):

Kai also tried using her fingers to mix the colors together to create additional colors:

Walking

You might remember my tumble down the stairs at the end of July (if not, you can read about it here). My sprained ankle did not heal as quickly as I expected, so I went back to the doctor for more xrays. He sent me to physical therapy for six weeks. While things improved, I still had pain in my foot. My physical therapist sent me back to the doctor with a recommendation that I get an MRI. The doctor took more xrays and sent me off for an MRI.

Looking at my MRI results, my doctor said, "Well...I don't blame you for not getting better." I'm sure he meant this to be reassuring, but I'm less sure how he thought it would be - the MRI should numerous microfactures and contusions to two bones in my foot and three bones in my ankle. In any event, he gave me two options: if I promised to keep the foot non-weight-bearing, he would give me an immobilizing boot; if I could not make such a promise, he would cast my foot. I promised to keep off the foot, a promise I broke the minute I got to my car and realized there was no way I could drive home.

For the next four weeks, I kept to my promise. For the first two weeks, I didn't drive at all, relying on Courtney and Bryce for transportation. I later discovered I could drive Craig's car, because it's bigger and allowed room for me to get my boot out of the way enough to drive with my left foot, but my driving was still somewhat limited.

Despite my crutches, we kept up with our busy lives. We took Kai to Apple Valley for cider and dinner. I've accompanied Craig through Target and Costco and various other shopping adventures. We've toured houses and apartments. And when Dave visited unexpectedly, we stopped at a mall in San Diego and Dave carried me up three flights of stairs:

I returned to the doctor this week with one shrunken calf and an inflexible ankle. He was surprised I had managed to be so compliant keeping weight off the foot. This may be the first time a doctor has called me "compliant" with anything. But perhaps it is worth the effort - I'm off the crutches in four weeks instead of six and I've skipped the walking boot altogether. I've got a brace and several more weeks of physical therapy to look forward to, but at least I'm walking again.

Kai Project: Fun with Fruit

Continuing with our food project theme, we made fruit skewers today.

We used a variety of fresh fruit and dried fruit. Apples were hard for her to push onto the chopstick, but the bananas were so soft they broke apart as she pushed them onto the stick. Fresh grapes, dried cherries, fresh oranges, and dried appricots were the easiest for her to work with. 

After we made fruit skewers, Kai smashed the bananas and I chopped the remaining fruit as small as I could. We added jello and made these "gummies" (Kai's name for fruit snacks).

Kai Project: Faces

Following the food project kick we've been on, we made faces for lunch. First, Kai made a pizza with a face:

For dessert, I sliced an orange, an apple, a banana, and found grapes for noses.

As you'll see, Kai made one happy face and one sad face:

Kai Projects: Rainbow Bread Butterfly

Today's food project selection was a butterfly made from a slice of bread, cream cheese, and fresh fruit. Substituting what we had on hand (and what Kai likes), we used rainbow bread from yesterday, peanut butter, and dried fruit.

After I trimmed the rainbow bread, Kai spread peanut butter:

The finished project:

Kai Projects: Flour paint

We started with simple flour and water:

After transferring the mixture into our bottles, we added food coloring:

Kai painted outside (for easier clean up):

She wanted "glitter" for her surprise for Grandpa, but I talked her into using baking soda and citric acid (if I haven't written about my purchase of 10 pounds of citric acid, I should). We put it in a spice container I saved for crafts:

The results have been entertaining. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to post a video from my phone. I'll have to see if I can add those later. 

Kai Projects: Rainbow bread

Kai has been fascinated with "food projects" lately. We look through Pinterest together to find things to try. Her first (and most frequent) selection is always felt cut into food shapes - I guess that pictures best. But I've been able to guide her toward edible projects for which we already have the ingredients on hand (important because I'm still on crutches).

To make rainbow bread, we first mixed food coloring with milk:

Kai "painted" the colored milk on bread:

And I toasted the bread in our toaster oven:

She loved it!

Unfortunately, I'm still somewhat disturbed by colored bread. I remember when they started selling tie-dyed white bread in the store when I was a kid. I think my mother's distress at this product carried with me. 

Kai Projects: Salt Painting

We saw this salt, glue, and food coloring project on Pinterest. Kai and I decided to try it. Using glue, we drew patterns on paper. We sprinkled salt on top of the glue. We initially tried using the food coloring directly on the salt, but it did not spread as much as expected. So we mixed food coloring with water and used a straw to drip it onto the salt.

Kai's:

Kai's attempt with a bit of help from Courtney:

Courtney's:

Mine:

Yes, I don't draw, I doodle. I learned from the best. 

Bath Bombs

Courtney and I made bath bombs last night. She bought some at LUSH - Kai, Courtney and I all enjoy them. The recipe here looked easy, so we tried a variation of that recipe. I ordered an enormous bag of citric acid from Amazon (10 pounds, we will either be making a ton of bath bombs or Kai and I will be doing some interesting "experiments").

When I gathered the ingredients last night, Bryce was skeptical of my intentions. When I got out the wonderful tare weight scale Craig got me, Bryce decided I was making "blue candy" and I decided he's been watching far too much "Breaking Bad." The rather interesting thing about using a scale was that I dumped the 1 pound box of baking soda into the bowl and discovered that the box actually had 17.5 ounces baking soda. I adjusted the recipe accordingly to keep the proportions the same.

We mixed 17.5 ounces baking soda, 8.75 ounces citric acid, 8.75 ounces of Episom salts and 8.75 ounces corn starch in a big bowl. As Courtney whisked the dry ingredients, I squirted scented baby oil in until we had a consistency we thought would work (this seemed easier than finding essential oils and other bath oils...but it also resulted in extremely oily bath bombs...we have plans for more experimentation on this part of the process). We used old plastic Easter eggs as molds, filling only the larger side and popping them out as we went. As you'll see in the picture, we added food coloring for about half of them.

I took a bath with two last night - the fizz didn't last long and the water became extremely oily. We will explore different oils and maybe adding water (I'm wary of water because whenever Kai and I use it in our "experiments" using this same reaction, we have trouble adding small enough amounts).

Because I'm not in love with this batch of bath bombs, I let Kai play with several in her bath today. The shape of the bath bombs sparked a great deal of imagination play. She cracked an "egg" (one of the white bath bombs) into the bowl where she was making pancake batter and chopped up a "tomato" nearby:

After she added the purple bath bomb to her batter she added a bit of water:

She had a great time playing with the bath bombs, but I told her next time we would have to do these experiments outside. She and the bathtub were so oily I had to put her in the shower when we finished. I think we could make different colored "bombs" and have fun outside outside with a squirt bottle of water, bowls, and the like.

Kai Projects: Fun with Jello

After my success with Kool-Aid, I decided to see what we could do with jello. I got some cheap salt shakers at Target and filled them with jello. The first day, we used the part of the jello packet that didn't fit in the salt shakers to make jello play dough. So far, this is my favorite of the jello projects.

This was the recipe I found on Pinterest:

1 cup flour
1 cup water
2 T salt
2 T cream of tartar
2 T oil
1 box jello

Mix together and cook on the stove over low/medium heat until a ball forms. Knead in extra flour until no longer sticky.

Because I only had partial boxes of jello, I made several smaller batches. This also gave us a variety of colors. I basically quartered the recipe and made five batches. In this picture you can see the three finished balls of play dough, the blue play dough cooling before we kneaded in extra flour, and Kai mixing the last batch of yellow play dough before I put it on the stove. You can also see my filled salt shakers behind a flour covered Kai:

This stuff is amazing - by far the best play dough we've made at home. It has a very nice texture and it smells lovely, not at all like the commercial stuff. Kai has played with it several times now (it is starting to get a bit mixed together, but it has maintained its other qualities):

This morning we tried our usual shaving cream paint with the jello. I don't think the colors are quite as bright as I would like. I used our sidewalk chalk method, mixing the jello with water before adding the shaving cream. I think this might work better if I skipped the water.

The other thing we did with jello was make "glue play dough" or gak / flubber. We've done this before with food coloring, but I thought it would be interesting to try with jello. Again we used our five colors:

For some reason, the yellow didn't set up properly (I wonder if it is because we used more yellow jello due to the lighter color and this interfered with the glue/borax reaction) and I ended up throwing it out. Kai began mixing this immediately:

When I pulled it out of the fridge this morning, the mixture was complete - it's purple with a few green and red highlights:

The consistency was odd this morning, though. I've left it out at room temperature to see if it will improve. This may be one project that needs to have food coloring.