More Than a Little

I have seen this project floating around in the blogosphere for a while, and I finally got around to picking up some rice last week so we could work on it.  Initially, I was grumbling to myself about purchasing ten pounds of rice (it came to around $6.50) that we weren’t even going to eat, but we spent at least three and a half hours on this on Friday and I know that she’s looking forward to spending many more hours playing with it.

Evie was pretty excited to get started. In my head, when I was going to do this project, I was going to be in charge of coloring the rice and then presenting the whole thing to her when it was done. DON’T DO THIS! I have no idea why I didn’t think about it being a fun activity at first but it was a lot of fun for both of us. As a matter of fact, Evie says that this is one of the most fun activities that we have ever done. So… it’s worth coloring a batch of rice even if you don’t want to do the full ten pounds and live with the inevitable ongoing cleanup. The rice can be used for art projects (glue them down to make a pretty picture) or put them into a tightly sealed bottle to make a shaker–add tiny items to the mix to make an I Spy game–or any number of things.  We put it all in a tub for her to play with. She’s got a fairy/Little People/SpongeBob village going on in there right now. :)

Supply List
rice
food coloring
rubbing alcohol (possibly optional)
ziploc baggies or lidded containers

1. Dump some rice into a baggie or container.  We used baggies.

2. Add some food coloring, as desired, and an optional splash of rubbing alcohol (a teaspoon or so.) It depends on how much rice you use and the color you’re going for on how much you’re going to need. You can always open the bag back up (CAREFULLY) and add some more until it’s the right color.  Some people say that the alcohol is completely optional, and others say that it helps set the color.   I found that a little bit over the drops of food coloring made it distribute more easily.

3. Squish and shake the baggies until the color is distributed somewhat evenly. Some variation in color looks nice so I didn’t worry about getting it all perfect. Evie loved doing this. Make sure the bag is closed before you start shaking, as I found out to my woe. I had blue rice on the table, floor and in my shirt there for a while. :) My small helper found that pretty awesome.

4. You can either spread the rice out on baking sheets or paper towels and allow to air-dry for hours, giving it a shake every now and then, or you can put it in a 200 degree oven for a while.  If the rice is in a thin layer, it won’t take too long for it to dry out (fifteen minutes, maybe). If you are tempted to put one color in a loaf pan because that’s the only thing that will fit on a shelf with the giant baking pans that you have… it probably isn’t really worth the trouble. The loaf pans with their thick layers of wet rice took forever to dry.

I don’t know if the alcohol actually does set the color better or not, but I did find that I could use the smell, or lack thereof, to determine if the rice was dry or not. The smell evaporates with the liquid, so if I got it out of the oven to check and it still smelled like a doctor’s office, then I knew it wasn’t ready yet.  It’s difficult to feel by touch because of the warmth of the rice, but you can also tell if it’s dry by stirring it with a fork. Wet rice has a certain resistance to being stirred. I also found that it was more important that I stirred the rice halfway through than the length of time I actually baked it.

My child has a tendency to get a little…junky with her toys. I had to clean out a bunch of ribbon and a glass and a large hairbrush and a few other random items that her rice box “needed” before I could take a picture. :)

The rice is a lot of fun to Evie but I’m not so sure that SpongeBob is too happy about it. He looks stressed.

Anyway, it was a fun project, and Evie loved telling everyone about it. Oh, and we put a handful of plain rice in the box too, because–as Evie said–white is a color too. ;)

It really is amazing how much more often I cook, or that I cook quality meals, when I make the time to write out a formal meal plan.  It is also amazing how much I deviate from that meal plan during the week–but as long as I am deviating by cooking something else and not just eating out, I’m still cool with that. :)

Monday: orange chicken, sandwiches. (My husband and I ate different things.)

Tuesday: beef burritos

Wednesday: nachos, using leftover burrito meat and some cheese! I don’t do this very often at all because it’s not exactly health food, so we enjoy it when we have it and try to forget about it when we don’t.

Thursday: flexible. I have ingredients for pizza or pasta, but I might not need to cook*.

Friday: chicken pot pie

* I’m thinking about going to visit my parents one day this week, probably Thursday, so it’s likely that I won’t actually cook that day.  If I think I’ll be gone at dinner, I try to pull something together from the pantry for that night so if I don’t do it, I won’t end up with a bunch of ingredients going to waste.

I got an email from Groupon this afternoon, letting me know that they were going to start sending out deals for Lexington soon. I am currently subscribed to the Louisville list, and while I don’t live in either one of those cities, I’m closer to Lexington in a geographical and emotional sort of way. ;) It’s almost equal in distance, just a little closer to Lexington, but more than that… it’s just where we go when we take an urge to go shopping.  We live in a fairly small town now–not even a mall, so most of the time when we really want to shop, we head to Lexington.  So, it’d have to be a pretty great deal for me to take advantage of a Louisville groupon.

Anyway, if you’re not familiar with Groupon, it’s a group coupon (hence the name) site that has a daily deal for a particular city. If enough people sign up for the deal, the deal is activated and you save money. For example, there was recently one for a $50 gift certificate to Gap for $25. I have also been tempted by a few random half-price kid-friendly museum/activity offers.  You can check the site to see what sort of deals they offer.  It’s pretty random, I think, but you have the potential to save some money if you follow them.

So.. if you’re interested, sign up here. I am pretty excited that there will be more local deals for me to get in on.

In addition to the deals in your particular city, you can also take part in some national deals. Sometimes, the city’s offer is for an online company, or one that will ship to you, or maybe you want to send a present to someone in another city.  Luckily, there’s a blog for that too.  It’s worth skimming through the list to see if there’s something that suits your fancy, surely. Check it out at Groupon Roundup.

Evie and I went on a massive Walmart trip today and used a freakish number of coupons.  Although Evie asked me if I had coupons for pumpkins, I sadly did not. I did, however, buy two of them anyway. It was one of the reasons that we were going in the first place.

My husband, M, and I have this nasty little habit of buying pumpkins and then procrastinating on carving them, so I had pumpkin carving on the agenda for tonight. Just as well because Evelyn wouldn’t have had it any other way. So, as soon as dinner was over, we broke out the steak knife and the pumpkin carving tools.  Since Evie is just three (and already upset that she wouldn’t be the one to wield the knife) we decided against any of the elaborate pumpkins that we have done in years past.

Like the first year we carved pumpkins together, on our first Halloween as a married couple.

M’s turned out so well that anyone could see the resemblance. Mine.. not so much, but I am going to blame  that on the photo I used as a template and not on my skill as a carver.

Five years later, we gave self-portraits another stab. I think mine is a tad more convincing in this batch, don’t you think?

Alright, who agreed with me? Agreers will be taken out and whipped directly following this post.

That is a sentence I have never used before.

Anyway, we didn’t want to get into the whole fancy pumpkin thing this year, due to the impatience of small girls.  I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out anyway.

One of them was drawn by Evie and implemented by M. The other was both designed and carved by M.

Can you guess which is which?

Yes, the happy one was designed by my budding artist. I love his little crooked mouth. And don’t you think the angry pumpkin sort of favors M in some way?  Another self-portrait in the media of pumpkins!

And, if you were wondering what I was doing when all this pumpkin carving was going on…. I was cleaning out the centers, of course.

Because moms always seem to get all the yucky jobs. :)

(That’s okay. We also get to skim the best candy from the trick-or-treat loot.)

Happy Halloween!

It’s been a while since I’ve written out an official meal plan, and you can really tell it. I never know what’s for dinner and it’s usually whatever I can throw together from whatever is in the pantry or stockpile. So–it’s time to get more organized again.

Monday -Kielbasa, Potato and Cabbage Stew

Tuesday – King Ranch Chicken Casserole (new recipe. I’d link you but I can’t remember where I found it, and there are lots of different versions out there, apparently.)

Wednesday – slow cooker chicken and noodles

Thursday – beef burritos, rice

Friday – homemade pizza

p.s. I put very little thought into what day I write down for each meal.  Mainly, I just come up with five meals that I will have the ingredients for on hand, and then decide what I want on each day. What little thought I do put into it revolves around the fact that my husband gets home 45 minutes earlier on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so sometimes we do something different that day.  I sometimes go shopping on Tuesday evenings, for example, so I don’t want to be cooking something that takes forever or I’ll be too tired to shop. :)

Just a quick little note to say happy birthday to my most faithful reader… my daddy!  :)

Love you!

Back in January, I posted about a site with free furniture plans called Knock Off Wood. (She’s since moved everything to Ana-White.com).  I’m clearly not going to be the most prolific woodworker ever, but I have followed through with my intentions to build something from one of those plans and thought it’d be a good time to post about it.  Actually, building wasn’t the hard part–painting was.  I spent countless hours painting this thing–many more hours than it took to build, if you can believe it. It, uh, takes a lot longer to do that different colored room thing than it looks like it would, especially with the trim. Near the end, I was sitting there with the paintbrush thinking, I wouldn’t paint another bookcase like this for any amount of money. … and yet, I did it for love, for free. :) The look on Evie’s face when she saw it more than made up for the amount of work I put into it though. :)

I’m (more than a little) happy with how it turned out, though!

My plan was to use this bookcase as a…well, bookcase. Evie’s plan is to use the dollhouse as a dollhouse. This is the first day that she’s had it in her room. Guess who won? :) Maybe when she gets bored with it, I can steal a few rooms for books and pretties.

A few notes on the Barbie action in the house. I tried to subtly point out that horses do not usually go IN the house, but Evie not-so-subtly pointed out that PIPPI’S horse is in the house, so that blonde Barbie therefore became Pippi. I put the couple in the yellow room, but to get them to stand up, I fear that girl is touching her friend inappropriately. I’m sorry for ruining what should be a G-rated photo. I gave Evie all of my Barbies from when I was little, and therefore, she has a huge collection of them… but unfortunately, most of them look as if they just stepped out of 1985. The Rockers were having a little reunion there in the pink room. The reindeer? It is apparently a kitchen table. Oh, to be three again!

Anyway, we’re also halfway done with building Evie a twin-sized bed, also with plans from that site (though that project was put on the back burner while we left the country for a while this summer and then started remodeling our bathroom).  I’ll post about it when it gets done, too.  :)

Oh, and I almost forgot. This is inspired by Pottery Barn’s dollhouse bookcase. It sells for $399.  I don’t have an exact estimate of how much this cost me, but if I recall correctly, I had about fifty or sixty dollars in materials. :)  Frugal and crafty. What’s not to love? :)

We’ve always had a hard time getting Evie (now three) to take her medicine when she needs to. She came down with a cold or something yesterday evening, and we heard lots of cries of “It’s yucky! It’s yucky!” last night before more or less making her swallow it. Even then, she would take minuscule little sips from the little cup and somehow make the whole process take hours. Or maybe it just seemed like it at the time.

Today, a stroke of brilliance, if I do say so myself.

1. Measure medicine(s).

2. Add a wee bit of orange juice to any unpalatable liquids. I suppose you could substitute any other kind of juice that your kid likes, but orange juice is a special treat in my house.  (The one on the left that was given the OJ treatment was a homeopathic multi-symptom cold medicine that Walgreens gave away last month. Thanks, Walgreens!  Not much is recommended for children Evie’s age anymore but this is for ages 2+ and it really seems to help her.)

3. Cut a couple inches of straw to fit into the cup. Bendiness is optional.

4. Hand your child a miniature beverage with a miniature straw.

5. Slurp slurp all gone!

Okay, I can’t guarantee that it’ll work for your kid, but mine L-O-V-E-D it. I think it gave her both an appealing package and enough control over the medication event that she didn’t resent taking it. I thought the Tylenol would be too thick for the straw but it worked out great.

Better late than never, right? We have been back a week and a half now, and life has finally settled back into its normal routine. Last week was a little rough, because we were all still jetlagged and waking up at six in the morning. Plus, I felt a little aimless and lost, kind of like you feel after the presents are opened at Christmas. I’ve been planning this trip for SO. LONG. Now that I’m home I’m not entirely sure what to do with myself. :) I’m glad to report that I am feeling much more myself this week.

This is my desktop background right now. Isn’t M a cute Viking? We took a day trip to Sigtuna, which is one of my favorite places. It’s a manageable drive outside of the city and yet it’s a small town. I have always said that’s where I’d want to live if we moved to Sweden. We wouldn’t, of course, but it’s a nice daydream. Anyway! We went on a Viking boat. It was touristy and silly but a lot of fun. M was the official steering dude. Is there a word for a Viking boat steering dude?

We ate almost every single meal (outside of breakfast) outside. Lovely! I am not a fan of eating outside at home because it’s far too hot here, and the humidity is terrible and the bugs are even worse. It’s great in Sweden. In the summer, anyway. :) These are my in-laws, along with Evie and my niece, Whitley, who was with us.

There really aren’t that many pictures of Evie and me. I try to stay out of pictures as much as possible. :) Still, it’s nice to occasionally see that I was there, too. Anyway, this was just before we went on a boat tour, I think.

Nice scenery picture from the boat tour. We were meandering through Stockholm. The boat tour was pricey but very enjoyable, even for the natives.

We went to Skansen, which is a zoo and open-air museum. Evie’s favorite part was the section with rides, of course. She got to ride her very first ride by herself, and she LOVED it. :) We have about sixty different pictures of her lookiing exactly like this. :)

While we were there, M won four kilos of Toblerone chocolate in a carnival game of chance. No one was more shocked than him.. except maybe Evie.

I can’t resist a second photo of the Toblerone. You’ll also be glad to know that inside, there were a bunch of individually wrapped bars, easy for distribution. We sent some home with my niece, left a bunch with my in-laws and M took most of the ones we brought home to work. Like we really needed four kilos of chocolate laying around the house.

This one was taken while we were out shopping. I had been dreading this day because I knew Evie would HATE all the walking and shopping, but she ended up staying with her Farfar and Farmor for the first time. :) She had a great time, we had a great time. I wasn’t sure how it would go, or even if they would WANT to keep her by themselves, but they did and it was really nice, from the sounds of it. I think they all enjoyed it, and I know it was good for them in a bonding sort of way.

Here we all are at the royal castle, Drottningholm. This is taken from the back… I chose this one because I wanted to tell a story and make sure you all know that inside, I am still twelve years old. So anyway, we are walking around to the backside and my father-in-law is pointing out the guard stationed at the back, keeping out the tourists, and he tells me, “We’re not allowed to see the royal private parts.” And I didn’t so much as quirk my lips because I didn’t want him to think he had said anything WRONG, linguistically, but inside I was dying. No, I imagine that the royal family doesn’t give acess to their private parts to just anyone. I think we’d have all heard about that in some sleazy tabloid otherwise. :)

We have three days left here in Stockholm and we’re trying to figure out what exactly we want to do with them. We’ve done a lot of shopping, we’ve done some touristing, but we have sort of decided against going to see Vasa tomorrow due to lack of supreme interest. Everyone has seen it except Whitley and no one really wants to see it again, and Whitley isn’t like falling over herself to see it herself, so… it seems kind of silly to trek out there. It’s a boat, guys. It sank, and then major amounts of money was pent to pick it back up. It is actually cool; I’m not trying to minimize it, but it’s also pretty much something you can just hear the story and see the pictures, if one is fifteen and not personally interested in Swedish history. Anyway, Vasa has been scrapped and we did spend a bunch of time in Gamla Stan today, so.. not sure what we’re gonna do tomorrow.

Evie spent the day with Farfar and Farmor today for the first time, which was kind of cool. We went out shopping (and walking!) in the city and then made our way over to M’s sister’s house. Evie would have H.A.T.E.D. today’s trip so it was good timing. I was sort of dreading the whole day, actually, until they asked if she would want to stay with them this morning. We bought a lot of junk. Even Whitley got into the spirit of things and purchased a few items. She’s mainly been walking around trying to figure out something to buy, and then falling over in despair at the prices. :)

Yesterday was all about Skansen, which was fun. Skansen is a zoo/open air museum (as they seem fond of pointing out). Evie had fun but she got way too tired. M abandoned us when we left there, heading off to spend a little time with his BFF.

Sometime on Monday, we took enough pictures that they no longer show up on this computer when I try to transfer them. Never saw anything like it, but the computer recognizes the camera but refuses to list the remaining photos. So… I have a great excuse for not posting pictures… at least of the last two days. :) Pictures when we get home, probably more than you really care about seeing.