Weekly Review: A Week at Home

This past week was kind of a vacation for me;  I didn't have to go to work. It gave us more time to work on our new schedule.  I use the term schedule loosely as it is more of a guided routine. The girls are getting more used to it, but we are far from it going smoothly.  When we get it all worked out I will be sure to post more about it.  For some reason, figuring out a working schedule has been an issue for me since having Eli, so I am happy to find something that works without me giving up so much that things feel chaotic.  Maybe they still look it to visitors, but it is so much better to me!

We finished up talking about the letter D this week (about time right).  We pretended to be doctors (D is for Doctor)!

We also got to our Bible story about Miriam and baby Moses. We wove heart baskets and played a game of Hide the Baby.

We made (and ate) cookies! I am not good at roll out cookies; they never look how they should.  But the recipe I used was really yummy and soft.  I detest crunchy cookies!

We played Dixit.....a lot! The girls are really into this game, and Nathan is happy to have found a game they like that isn't little kidish.  He keeps insisting that if he gets them to play games they will have no problem finding nerdy husbands (his goal). He says "They will be cute and like playing games; a nerds dream." I just shake my head.

But the best thing for the girls this week was the snow! It snowed Thursday, cancelling art class, but it stuck for the kids to play in.  They had to go out as soon as they possibly could. Never mind the chilling wind that blew the snow in your face. They wanted out and right away! I had a hard time getting them back in too! Even Eli who couldn't even walk in the deep snow wanted to stay outside! Once we got in, we used some snow to make Snow Ice Cream!

We also made some snowflakes (lots of snowflakes) to send to Connecticut, but due to poor road conditions haven't they haven't made it to the post office.  They are packaged and ready to go tomorrow!

We did venture out Friday afternoon (just far enough to get to Nathan's work). They were having a Christmas party for all the kids! The kids were running around like maniacs while people were still at computers trying to work! My kids were terrified of Santa (big surprise, who wouldn't be), but they were happy to get gifts.  They were pretty happy to play with kids the same age too!

After a week of begging Bria to pull out her other loose tooth, it fell out Saturday.  While she was eating a french fry no less.  She ate apples and other hard things all week, and it stayed put! Maybe now we have a break from losing teeth!

Can't say how much I will be one the next couple of weeks; we will definitely get back to our normal posts after the new year! Enjoy the holidays!

Snow Ice Cream

Yesterday we had our first decent snow of the winter (we had a little earlier on, but no accumulation).

We decided to make some snow ice cream with it.  Normally I just use some milk, sugar, and vanilla for snow ice cream, but I saw this recipe on Wannabe Southern Cook and wanted to try it.

It is a really easy recipe, just three ingredients.

8 C clean snow
1 can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk
1 tsp vanilla

Mix it all together and eat!

It melts faster then regular ice cream does, and honestly this recipe was a little sweet for me.  Next time I will just add more snow!   The kids all seemed to enjoy it though.  The girls wanted chocolate on theirs, and Eli was happy with it plain.

If you have snow (clean snow), I would definitely recommend making some ice cream!

Hide the Baby (Moses) and Paper Baskets

Our Bible story this week was about Miriam and baby Moses.  The girls are familiar with the story of Moses in the basket (for a while there they would call any baby they saw in any sort of basket-like thing Moses).  Normally this story puts an emphasis on Moses and how god was able to protect him. Obviously an important point, but I wanted the girls to think a bit about Miriam and how she might have felt....annoyed, scared, worried, frustrated. We don't really know, but some of those are things the girls feel when dealing with Eli!

So after reading and discussing the story we played a little game called hide the baby.  First we tried using our Sock Monkey Game.

Basically one of the girls hid the baby, and we each chose a card to try and figure out what room the baby was in.

The cards say things like "in a room with a lamp" or "in a room with a desk."  Whoever hid the baby says yes or no, and you can put the card in the appropriate pile for reference later.  Some of the cards say "go look!" Whoever gets one of these gets to get up and look in the room of their choice until the timer runs out (I think it is a one minute timer).

 When the girls hid the baby, it was really pretty easy to find. When I hid the baby they had a hard time. We went through all the cards, and they still couldn't find it! They narrowed it down to the correct room though.  We went to the room and played the hot and cold game until they found it. So you could probably do the entire game using hot and cold if you wanted to.

After the girls got tired of the game we decided to try and make some paper heart baskets.  So we started with 2 sheets of construction paper and folded it in half.

Then we cut that in half to make long pieces of paper.

2 halves of the paper.  You can imagine they would be long rectangles.

Take one of each color and lay the in the shape of a heart with the folded side at the point of the heart (otherwise it won't make a basket).

I drew a pencil line across the pink where it met the purple, so I knew how far I could cut.

Lay both your rectangles together and cut strips starting at the folded side and going up to your line.  You can draw the lines on before you cut, so they are easy.  I did not do it, and we had some problems later.  Maybe even lines would have helped some. You can round the top now or once it is finished!

Now for the weaving part, because the strip is folded you will have to weave around and through the other strips.  The point is to make a basket, so the inside needs to be hollow.  It is confusing for me to read, but when you start looking at it in your hands it makes sense.  The fold creates two sides, so the other piece must go through the center.  I promise it will make sense when you try it!

Somehow we had two edge strips that would not fit! I have no idea how, was it because I didn't exactly measure my strips? I don't know, but I decided to cut them off.  With the girls baskets I waited until this point and had them cut the extra strip off while rounding off the top section.

You can see it makes a basket!

This was actually frustrating for the girls because they kept getting stuck on how to weave each piece. So I made them little flat hearts they could weave easier.  Same idea, but it is flat, so you just weave over and under. I glued the top of the hearts to the paper to keep everything together.

They were pretty proud when they finished their flat hearts! And Bria even stuck one of her tiny babies in her heart basket!