Salt Dough Ornaments

Sarah has been doing such a great job with her reading.  I am regularly at the library checking books out since she is required to read for a minimum of 20 minutes each night.  During our last trip one of the books we borrowed was 'Arthur's Christmas Cookies'.  This is a really cute story about a monkey that wants to make sugar cookies as a present for his mother and father.  During the baking process he accidentally uses salt instead of sugar and ends up with salt dough cookies.  The silver lining is that he decides to decorate the salt dough 'cookies' and make them into ornaments that his mother and father can keep and enjoy for years to come.

  

So we had a salt dough themed afternoon of reading the story and then making our own ornaments. 

We used a basic recipe of.....

1/2 cup salt

1/2 cup water

1 cup flour

Mix the salt and flour together and slowly add the water.  Add more water as needed until the dough starts to form a ball while mixing.  Then remove from bowl and knead on a floured surface until the dough is smooth.  Roll and cut out designs as desired and bake for 10 to 15 min in 275 to 300 degree oven.

Note: this is the last picture you will see with Jillian's hair long.....while I was cleaning up Jillian was playing in the basement and decided to give herself a haircut!

I used a straw to punch out holes before baking so that we can use ribbon to hang them.

You can decorate these ornaments so many different ways!  You can use pen, marker, paint, glue and glitter.

Fraction Snack

This activity is from late November and I have already shared it with some family but I thought I would still post about it since I think it is such a great way to learn while having fun! 

I pulled out all the ingredients that we would throw into a trail mix (almonds, walnuts, raisins, craisins, popcorn, chocolate chips and this time I added marshmallows to the list) and took out our measuring cups (1 cup, 1/2 cup and 1/4 cup) then told the kids that they could put anything into their snack bowl using the different measuring cups as long as it totaled  2 cups.  This was a great way to introduce fractions.  I could see my 6 year olds brain turning as she figured out how much of each of her favorite ingredients she could put into her bowl.  She has since requested that we repeat 'Fraction Snack' so I think the kids enjoyed it too.

SweetandSimpleThings

You may wonder why I decided to call this blog SweetandSimpleThings.  Last fall I opened up an Etsy shop to sell small paper items such as cupcake toppers, gift tags, note cards etc.  I called the shop SweetandSimpleThings and thus decided to name this blog the same.  Here is the link to my shop....

http://www.sweetandsimplethings.etsy.com/

You will see that there is nothing for sale!  I opened it before knowing that we were going to be pregnant with our 4th.  I stopped working on the shop during the pregnancy due to lack of energy but now that our little Nathan is 3 months I'm starting to think about it again and will try to slowly start back up again.  Here is a small sample of the things that I create.

These are a few examples of Thank you tags.  I print the tags on heavy cardstock and then punch them out with a circle paper punch.  Then I punch a small hole in the top so that they can tied to favors and gift bags with ribbon.

Here are 2 examples of note cards.

And here are some examples of cupcake toppers.

Trees and Trains

You will see the date of my posts are not matching up with the actual time line of events.  I'm trying to play a little catch up during this busy month.

Sunday morning the kids were all ready to go to church with Daddy.  Unfortunately the van did not start (we think one of the kids must have been playing with one of the interior lights and wore down the battery over night).  Well, the kids came stomping back into the house with big pouts on their faces.  Luckily, I had a craft that I had been thinking about doing with them. 

To do the above craft we used a sharpener to get crayon shavings from bright coloured crayons (don't use green because it doesn't contrast enought against the green cardstock).  We melted the crayon between 2 sheets of wax paper.  Then cut out a Christmas tree from heavy cardstock and used paper hole punches to punch out the 'ornaments'.  Then we taped the wax paper to the back of the cardstock and hung it on a bright window.  Next time I would use more shavings than we did so that the coloured ornaments would look more dramatic.

Then Sarah was off to a birthday party but before she went she wanted to hold Nathan.  I love how this picture shows Sarah not sure what to do with a crying little brother.

I held Nathan a little bit to help him settle down and then tried again.  Sarah was just giddy holding her little brother.

When Sarah got back from the party we 'trimmed the tree'.  A tradition in our house is that Mommy gets to put the final angel on the tree once it's all decorated.

This year we had a new addition to the tree.  We bought a great Lionel Christmas Train last year after Christmas (on a great sale).  The kids can control it's speed and blow it's whistle and it even puffs out smoke!  

Then the oldest 3 got dressed into their pj's for their trip to the North Pole via the Polar Express Train.  I went last year but this year stayed home with Nathan.

Chris said the girls were full of excitement as they boarded the train for the 1 hour ride to the North Pole with an elf who hosts the ride.

They were given hot chocolate and cookies and then were visited by Santa and Mrs. Claus who gave them each a special Christmas bell.

Ellie the Elf made quite an impression on the kids.  Sarah and Jillian came home telling me they wanted to be elves and Matthew still asks me to pretend that I am Ellie. 

It was a super long day and the kids passed out on the way home with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads.

Christmas Tree 2010

We officially started the Christmas season with picking up our tree!  It was convienent to combine with a shopping trip to our much loved Stew Leonards.  Here is our beautiful Fraser Fir for Christmas 2010!

Christmas hasn't officially started in our house until our first batch of peppermint bark has been consumed.  We all love it!  In fact Sarah wants to forego her birthday cake in January for a batch of bark!  Many recipes add peppermint oil to the melted chocolate but I find that way too pepperminty. 

I melt 8oz of semisweet bakers chocolate in a double boiler and spread it out on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet.  Pop in the fridge until hardened.  Melt white chocolate chips in the double boiler and spread quickly onto the hardened dark chocolate.  If you spread too much the white chocolate will melt the dark and blend into a mess so be sure to work quickly.  Then sprinkle crushed candy cane on top of the white chocolate and pop into the fridge again.  Once hardened break into pieces and enjoy! 

 

First Christmas Cookies

During the Thanksgiving weekend we found a fabulous gingerbread recipe from the Williams Sonoma Kids Baking cookbook   (http://www.amazon.com/Williams-Sonoma-Baking-Abigail-Dodge/dp/0848727800) and set to work baking our first batch of gingerbread!  It was a huge success and occupied the kids for a substantial length of time - which is always good for mommy.  I liked the cookbook so much that I think it might be finding it's way into my stocking this Christmas.

Of course we could not just stop there we decided to make our own gingerbread house from scratch.  This is the first time we have ever attempted this and we were thrilled with the results.  It took a long time but was worth it!