Kiwi Crate and A Bun In the Oven

One of the activities we continue to LOVE month after month is our Kiwi Crate subscription.  Kiwi Crate is a kid's craft club.  Each month a box comes to our door with two (minimum) projects for us to do together.  I'll admit I was skeptical about this at first.  I mean, I love crafts more than anyone.  Our homeschool room has an entire cabinet dedicated to art supplies and I'm forever scouring Pinterest for fun kindergarten art projects.  Why would I need Kiwi Crate?

Because it's different.

1.  Every single item we need to complete the projects is included in the box, and the supplies are super high quality.

2.  Emma genuinely loves the activities.  Every once in a while I think one is going to be a dud, but almost without fail, she is sincerely interested and has a blast.

3.  The projects are specifically designed for kids to be as independent as possible.  Emma is super proud of doing it herself with very little help from me.

4.  When our box comes, it motivates us to have a "date" and spend some quality time together.

5.  The boxes are educational too, and we always learn something new!

So our December box came weeks ago and I tucked it aside amidst the bustle and hustle.  That is super uncharacteristic.  Usually we dive in the minute it arrives on our doorstep.  Emma and I had a quiet night at home a few nights ago, so we busted a big Kiwi move.  The theme was "winter" and one of the projects was this polar bear game of catch.  It also has a little velcro ball that sticks to the paws.

We've played LOTS of games of catch over the past few days.

She even thought this one up all by herself.  :-)

Talk about the greatest dog E-V-E-R.

You've surely known dogs who could play fetch, but have you known many that play catch??  Haha.

Speaking of the greatest dog ever....

She is such a part of every minute of life around here.  There is always somebody loving on her.  Emma crashed and watched an entire episode of a show curled up like this right after Christmas.  Perfect down time.  Penny is always up for snuggling!

In other news.....

I was under the gun for a quick and simple dinner last night and had almost nothing on hand to work with.  We were still trying to get Christmas put away and Hannah was headed out the door with friends.  I had a pound of sausage in the fridge, so I decided to make sausage gravy, but I didn't have any refrigerator biscuits, so I looked up a recipe to make some.

I've never done baking powder biscuits before because I'm too lazy to roll and cut.

Sad, but true.

This recipe excited me because you just DROP the dough....you don't even have to grease the baking sheets!  Easy peasy!  And so much cheaper than Grand's!

These are quick, simple, and REALLY tasty.  I'll definitely be making them again!

I doubled the recipe for our crowd, and it made 24 nice sized biscuits.  Perfect with a slathering of sausage gravy and a side of scrambled eggs.  ;-)

Baking Powder Drop Biscuits

2 cups flour

2 T sugar

4 t baking powder

1/2 t cream of tartar

1/2 t salt

1/2 cup shortening (I had some on hand, but many people in the reviews said they used butter and it turned out just fine.)

1 egg

2/3 cup milk

Preheat oven to 450.

Sift dry ingredients into a bowl.

Use a pastry cutter to cut in shortening until it resembles course crumbs.

Whisk egg and milk together and add gradually to flour mixture, stirring as you pour.

Stir until dough is moistened and well mixed.

Drop by spoonfuls onto ungreased baking sheets and bake for 10-12 minutes until golden.

Good for hungry kids.

Or hungry polar bears.  :-)

Making

There is always some level of "making" going on here.

Always.

I try to be generally productive MOST of the time, but the craving to make something (usually a big mess!) is always tugging at me, and a few times a week I set aside everything that SHOULD be done in favor of a little time to MAKE something. 

Good for the soul, I say!

So I'm showing off a few recent creations.

The week of Halloween, Emma's class carved this pumpkin.  The teacher did all the actual carving, but the kids voted on which shapes she should use, and then they graphed all their answers.  Pumpkin math.  Anyway, I commented on him when I picked Emma up from school because he was on display outside the classroom with this little sign.  Emma informed me that she HATED him because he had a bad name.

Sharp Tooth.  His name was Sharp Tooth.

Emma wanted to name him "Cinderella", but she was the only one who voted for that name.

With eleven boys and only three girls in her class, I'm not sure how she thought "Cinderella" would win, but she was a bit of a sore loser about the whole thing.

At the kindergarten Halloween class party they painted mini pumpkins.

With non-washable paint.

I seemed to be the only Mom in the room who was concerned about them getting paint all over their costumes.  None of the other parents indicated that a little paint on a costume would impede the ability to trick or treat, in the DARK, on a holiday that's supposed to be, you know......fun.

But I still maintain that washable paint would have been a more prudent choice.  :-)

And no.  We didn't bring our mini-pumpkin home.  No amount of Halloween cheer could possibly persuade me to put a wet, painted pumpkin in my van to roll around on the way home.

I'm a real joy on Halloween. ;-)

But if we WOULD have brought ours home, this guy could have craved him right up for us!

(And we could have named it "Cinderella"!)

A good four days after Halloween was over I still had a little pile of craft supplies sitting on my kitchen counter.  I gathered a few things with grand intentions of making these in early October, but they never got done.  I figured I was the only one who knew (or cared!) that we were off schedule a bit, so we went ahead and worked on some post-Halloween decor.  A package of black plates from the dollar store yielded a woven spider web....

....and some black cats.

(And I still have enough plates left over to serve appetizers at our next party!)

This next one was a cute idea I found on Pinterest.  We made a pointillism tree using Q-tips.  This wasn't one of our more fun art sessions.  I was a little controlling.  :-(

I try to work on that and let her be free and creative, but sometimes my desire to have things look a certain way ends up getting the best of me.  I felt bad when I went to bed this night because I regretted reminding her a million times to keep all her dots inside the circle.  I asked her the next morning if she had FUN making this tree with me and she said no, not really.

So, THAT night, I set out all the paints (no Q-tips) and told her she could paint ANYTHING she wanted, ANY way she wanted to.  I wanted her to have FUN with me.  She told me she wanted to paint a "secret" and wouldn't let me see it until it was finished.  This is how it turned out.....

HA!  Goofball.  I think sometimes she likes learning to do things a certain way after all.  It eased my guilt a bit.  Pretty sweet girl.

Last week Daddy came home from work early one day and we decided to have a Play-Doh contest.

I started the whole thing by making this pumpkin, then challenging the rest of the family to beat me.

(Because I feel the need to be competitive when it comes to modeling clay.)

Daddy's entry was a snake who just ate a mouse.

Max's entry was a blue horse.  The horse won.  Naturally.

No vegetable, no matter how finely crafted, can compete with horses in this house.  :-)

This is what Emma did to Daddy's snake.  Gross.

And a few minutes later he looked like this.  Gracious!  A little hostility!

Then again, I rather agree that the only good snake is a really, really DEAD snake!

This was a cute little "H" craft that Emma brought home from school a long time ago and it has been hanging on the microwave door.  I can't seem to move it to the art bucket.  It's just too cute.

Too bad I can't figure out how to get this next one rotated.  Emma and I read a few books about bats because she studied nocturnal animals at school.  One day, all on her own, she drew this bat, then proceeded to go get one of the books so she could label it!  I was super proud of her writing!  So, here's a sideways bat with fur, ear, claw, and wing!

I was in the craft store one day with a coupon that was about to expire, and they didn't have what I needed.  I wandered around looking for a fun fall craft so my coupon wouldn't go to waste.  There wasn't much fall stuff to choose from, but the Christmas stuff was already out in full force, so I caved and bought this cute little kit for felt trees.  It was only a dollar, and it provided well over an hour of entertainment by the time we arranged all the circles by size and color.

Needless to say, I've had a jump start on my holiday decorating since early October.  :-)

I was afraid if I put these away I'd forget all about them by December, so they've been hanging over the kitchen table for weeks.  (Uncle Joel, you're real proud of us, right?)

Last Friday we baked up a STORM.  I had workmen here all day working on a project with the house, and it was super cold outside.  Max started a fire in the fireplace, and my helper and I spent the whole day in the kitchen.

We made FIVE kinds of cookies, and assembled cute little trays to deliver to the neighbors.  We wrapped great big bows around them and made little tags with fall leaf stickers.  I didn't know at the beginning of the day that this project was going to get so big, but the idea just grew as the day wore on.

The frosted fall leaf cookies were our favorites.  We also made ginger snaps, snicker doodles, magic cookie bars, and chocolate white chocolate chip.  YUM.

Saturday morning I made a book bag for Hayden to take to a birthday party for one of the girls in his choir class.  I love these sweet fabrics.

That night while Hayden was at the party, Daddy and I took Emmie to Chilis for dinner.

MEMORIES are some of the most fun things to make!  :-)

This week Ems and I worked on turkeys.  We water colored the feathers onto heavy watercolor paper using crayon resist for the feather markings.  Then we cut the other parts out of construction paper.  We practiced cutting, gluing, painting, and drawing.  We worked on this one a few nights in a row right before bedtime.

See?  Seasonally appropriate.

It does happen occsionally.  :-)

George

Happy President's Day!!

By Emma - Age 5