Boredom (and its benefits)

At last.  I have been waiting these past several weeks for this to kick in with our children.  This belief that I have, "When there are three of you, there is no reason for you to be bored."  Or "make your own fun--with each other."  The issue for us is that this is not really a problem for eldest son or Imp, they can entertain themselves quite well with no need for outside input.  But eldest daughter craves a new project every 5 minutes (one thought up by one or both of her parents and that will require us to be present for her to be satisfied in it).  This is both exhausting and not feasible (for my sanity to say the least), so we've been letting her roam around the house asking for "something to do..."
Until at last she found it--her imagination--and now the games and fun things she is leading the other two in..it is so satisfying to see.  So satisfying.  No really, I actually took pictures.

 Here eldest daughter came up with and set up this Polly Pocket Store all on her own (though she may have been inspired by Fancy Nancy's Fabulous Fashion Boutique).  She set up several cardboard boxes to be her "scanner" and then placed polly pocket stuff around the room (items to be sold were placed in a different location from those to be borrowed--but everything had to be scanned. =))

We were all invited to come shop and play.  As you can see Imp (aka "The Hulk") was quick to join in.

 For some reason she was not thrilled about having her picture taken.

I got these two little dolls for a song. =)

Where all of our excess money goes these days!  Maybe someday we'll have enough for new curtains. ;)

This was too good not to include.  Imp (aka "The Bag Lady") tied her belt to the inflatable horse in order to pull away her haul.

Ah honey, honey...

Another one of our lessons, this time on bees, led us to these bee/honey shops in our town.  Local honey is really good here, and you can find several shops solely for the purpose of beekeeping.  The kids got to see several things that are a part of the process (from special clothing, and smoker, to a "hive?", to frames for the honeycombs) and they got to taste some honey in the process--all in all a great field trip.

The color difference in the honey is from the difference in "diet"--different nectar from different  plants/flowers.  I think the dark is from a scrub-like bush/tree that grows in the desert here.

 Eldest daughter brought her camera along to document our trip (it's the pink blur in the picture).

And she is the blur in this one =)

Arthropod Adventures

One way we've been keeping busy this summer is by doing a few summer lessons.  One unit of lessons was on Arthropods (and, yes, I had to do some research to recall/relearn exactly what that meant).  We had a great time--here are a few highlights from our studies:

Our first study was about ants.  We did an experiment, "Ants at a picnic," to see what food ants would enjoy eating the most.  The kids chose four different foods and put them on a plate (they pretty much ended up selecting the same things). We figured out that either ants really prefer honey (as we only had one ant actually come to the plate and that was what it was eating), or it was too hot for the ants to be bothered with our picnic.

See our little ant friend?

Imp's sassy shoes and an ant that we found on our nature walk--it was about the only insect we saw.

 But that doesn't mean our walk was a total bust, because we did get to see this fellow at our neighbor's house.  Obviously this parrot is not an arthropod, but he added to the adventure of our nature walk for sure.





Our neighbors suggested that I should get inside the huge cage to get a proper picture, um, err, thanks.

Oh my goodness gracious...

Now, I know I’ve been gone for a while—so sorry—but you are going to forgive me when I lay this one on you.  You see, here in the fiery furnace we stay inside and teach/chase/wrestle three SUPER energetic kids under the age of seven all the while wishing we could step outside without incinerating.  Slight hyperbole, but I promise only slight.  So, we spend a good deal of time trying to make being inside FUN, special, not wanting to climb the walls (literally).  One way we devised to cope with being cooped up is to have yummy cooking projects—especially cold ones.  Now, I’m not knocking my beloved Lulu’s (where at last we have decent ice cream), but we have found a reason to make our trips to the ice cream case waaaayyy less frequent.

I know you’re dying to hear this recipe, but first let me tell you two things that make it so perfect:

1.       You do not use an Ice Cream maker!

2.      This base can be made into any flavor you want…let me elucidate

Eldest daughter has a really nicely developed palate, she enjoys more grown-up foods like green olives and caramelized onion quiche, whereas eldest son would happily subsist on PBJ and yogurt and Imp picks at everything a little.  That being said, her favorite ice cream for a while has been Breyer’s Grasshopper pie (it’s mint chocolate chip with Oreo cookies together), and definitely not something we’ll find around here—until now.  Because I wanted her to have that ice cream, oh ok and I wanted to have some too—we searched and we tweaked and now we reveal…

THE BEST, EASIEST HOMEADE ICE CREAM (BASE) EVER!!!!!!

You will need a blender, a glass dish that can fit in your freezer (8x8 works fine, round deep dish pie dish works too), a spatula, and some sense of adventure

Ice cream base:

3 egg yolks (now don’t freak out—many “high-end” (Ben and Jerry’s, I’m talking about you) companies use raw egg yolks).  But if it makes you feel better you can temper the yolks over a double boiler until nice and warm with the next ingredient

14 oz. sweetened condensed milk

2 cups heavy cream (I eyeball it)

4 tsp vanilla (eyeball it again)

Put it in your blender and blend away until nice and incorporated and the cream is bubbly a little.  I’ve seen variations of this recipe where you whip the cream and then fold it together, but trust me this way is faster and results in less dishes—a win-win all-around!

Now pour this in your dish, cover it and place in the freezer for about 6 hrs or so.  I stir mine every hour the first two or three hours and then leave it.

The really fun part is how you dress this base up.

Grasshopper pie:  Crush 12 or so Oreos and break up a couple chunks of a good mint chocolate bar and stir them in before placing ice cream in the freezer

Dark chocolate with peanut butter swirl—eat your heart out Baskin Robbins!:  add 1/3 C. dark cocoa before blending and then, after two or three hours, stir in swirls of creamy peanut butter (about ½ C. or whatever floats your boat).  I just ate this one, and trust me it was so good I licked the bowl, several times.

I literally just discovered this magical recipe so I haven’t gotten farther than these two flavors, but I’ve got a million more swirling in my brain just waiting to try…maybe peaches next or cherry…you’re only limited by your imagination (and in my case my waistline).  Happy summer to you!

Where have the days gone?

They seem to whir by and get stuck together like the pages of a well-loved book in the sticky hands of a toddler...some days are torn a bit, some are scribbled on with colorful gusto, and some have something unidentifiable in the corner that should probably have gone in a tissue, but oh well, you know just keeping it real...
And then that book which was new begins to look like it's always been with you, toted around and drooled on, definitely not as new as it once was, but better for the reading.
So seem the past days of our first year.  We are worn a bit and no longer new new, we've definitely acquired some wear and tear and, ahem, character, but we are, on a whole, the better for it and hopefully we've made thus far for an interesting read.
Happy (belated) one year anniversary little blog of ours--I think we'll keep you.

Happy Birthday little Imp

Oh Imp, we love you.  You have the world caught up in your smile and bubbly laugh.  You say things like "eewniform" and "froed up" and "comftuby."  You squeeze our faces and kiss us.  You demand cold baths and then jeans and long-sleeved shirts (in 115 degree heat).  You love shoes, and have more clothes than the rest of us combined.  At age three you informed me that you needed to see a shirt in the light (as in natural light) to see if it was really pink.  You love to draw and paint.  You love to drink hot tea and eat sticky sweet dates rolled into balls--you are a lot of fun to take along when we visit local friends.  You can throw a tantrum with great feeling and force, and the next minute crawl into our arms and hug us with equal penitent sweetness.  Sometimes you play the baby, but often you want to be independent and do your own thing.  And today you are four.  I can hardly wrap my mind around it--I want so much to keep you as you are, and equally to see who you will become--our bundle of sweetness and sass, thank you for being our own.

Winter is gone

And this is what window gels look like after a few days of summer heat in our neck of the woods.  I cannot get past the irony of the desert sun melting away our futile attempt at keeping winter just a little longer...

The brown "slime" looking part used to actually be a branch of sorts--I like how in the bottom it's just sort of eaten a little white snow flake...

The kids did still have a lot of fun sticking their fingers in the melting gels.

And on a happier note, some of the gels were saved from this fate a month or so earlier by Imp.  That was when she decided to take them and stand on her bed and throw them up at the ceiling (these ceilings are like 12 feet high).  So now we have random gels stuck over her bed.  I discovered what she had done after I heard all three of them trying to "unstick" the gels from the ceiling by hitting them off with every stuffed animal we owned (which resulted in several animals dangling from the curtains near Imp's bed).  Husband dear and I had a time trying to sound firm without laughing about (or sounding overly impressed by) their general ingenuity in both getting the gels stuck and their efforts to "unstick" them.  I also took note of both their desire to help each other, and the fact that it took several minutes to actually get the culprit to confess.  Hmm, teamwork--this may not bode well for us in the future...