Six Flags over Georgia

N and E earned free tickets through a reading program they participated in during the school year.... I got a free ticket as their teacher, too!

Fun day!

N's Bday Party

It is really hard to believe that I have been a mom for 11 years. 

It's hard to believe how much he has grown up. 

It's hard to believe that I really only have 7 more years with him. 

That is 2,555 days. 

That is only 364 weekends to do weekend type things.

It has gone so fast.

I have regrets for things I should have done and didn't. 

I have a mountain of love for him (and my other kids) that I can not explain.  It fills my heart and drives me to do things I would have never dreamed my selfish self would do!

Thank you, Lord, for blessing me with my sons.

Homemade Cookie Cake

N loves cookie cake, but storebought cakes aren't cheap, so I decided to make one for his birthday.  Found a good recipe and with a few modifications I made this cookie cake!

Here is what you will need:
2 sticks of unsalted butter, softened
1 cup packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 cups plus 2 TB flour  - (I used about 3/4 cup whole wheat and the rest all purpose)
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup or one bag of chocolate chips.
Optional:  1/2 to 1 cup of your choice nuts

Preheat over to 375 degrees.  Cut parchment paper to fit your 14 inch round pizza pan and grease the paper.

Cream butter and sugars in large bowl.  Add eggs, one at a time, beating well.  In separate bowl, mix flour, baking soda, and salt.  Add this to the butter mixture gradually, incorporating well.  Also, add the vanilla extra.  Fold in chocolate chips and nuts (if using).  Spread this mixture on your parchment paper covered pizza pan, leaving a 2 - 3 inch border, as the cookie will expand while baking.  I spread the dough out and used my clean hands to make the edge even and smooth.  I should have snapped a picture but I forgot!  Bake 20-25 minutes until golden but center should still be soft.

Next I made cake decorating icing and colored it with my Wilton food coloring - N choose yellow and blue.  I piped the icing on so it would resemble the store bought cookie cakes!

He was happy with it and it tasted fabulous! 

Completion of a Disney Mosaic puzzle

Tony has been working on this for 3.5 years.  Not very often, but on rainy Sundays when we have nothing else to do he pulls it out sometimes.  Once, early on, one of the kids knocked the box of pieces over. He was worried that we didn't find them all - he was right!  There are 3 missing.  Once he couldn't find the box of pieces in our closet, where we always kept it.  He swore I must have thrown it away in a cleaning frenzy.  After a month of looking in that closet over and over, I finally found it in the filing cabinet (in that closet!) 

But now it is finished - I love puzzles, but don't have the patience for that kind - each piece has a tiny picture on it from one of the movies!  It was definetly a challenge!

Chick-fil-A Cow Appreciation Day

Tony and I were discussing how many years we have been doing this.  I think he took the kids one year b/c I was out of town somewhere and I think I have taken them 4 years so I think this was our 5th year - need to go back and search for pictures!

What to do with that leftover cake?

I had several layers of cake leftover from the Flag Cake.  I didn't want to waste it but we didn't need another cake!  So I put it in the freezer to decide what to do and until we actually wanted more cake.  So I finally pulled it out and chopped it into cubes:

 I made some vanilla pudding, set out blueberries (picked these ourselves!), raspberries and whipped cream.

  Cake parfaits!  The kids loved making them and it was a fun dessert!

Birmingham Museum of Art

We took a little "field trip" down to the art museam.  Tony and I had went back around our anniversary and I knew there were quite a few pieces that related to our studies of this past year.  Lots of peieces from Africa, and Egyptian sarcophagus and some Buddha statues from India.  Noah is very interested in Greek mythology and sadly we only found 1 item relating to that topic.  I took outline maps of Africa - the same ones we used every week to label countries - and had the kids color in each country when/if we found an artifact or art from that country.  The kids enjoyed really looking at all the labels hoping to find something from a country we hadn't yet marked. 

Then we simply enjoyed looking at some paintings.  The talent some people have is quite amazing.  We went out to the sculpture garden and found one Greek mythology statue.

Making Dried Pineapple

We love dried fruit, but it is so expensive.  So a few summers ago, my friend called me up when pineapples were $.49 each at Aldi and we decided to give it a try!  We ended up loving it and now I try to make some a few times a year.  I definetly watch Aldi for this special!   So how do you do it?

First, start with a fresh pineapple.  Cut off the top and bottom.

Now, slice off the peel all around the sides.

Now, cut the yummy flesh from around the core, which you can throw into your compost.

Next, you want to slice the pineapple fairly thin. 

And finally, spread your pieces on to your dehydrator trays. 

Turn on the dehydrator.  Rotate and check periodically.  It really depends on many factors how long it will take.  The juiciness of the fruit, how thinly you cut it, etc.  Just watch and test!

Fuzzy Find

This is an old pic, back from when we attended a wedding of a friend.  We found this in the grass as we were arriving.  You can learn alot about God from nature.  I mean how amazing that He made something this tiny so cute and adorable!

Festive Fourth of July Breakfast

Toast, cream cheese, strawberry jam, blueberries, bananas.  YUMMY!

Flag Cake

I got this idea from The Birmingham News this week.  It looked fun so I decided to try it. 

 I started out with 2 white cake mixes and my blue and red Wilton coloring.

I started out mixing up one cake mix and adding red coloring to it.  It took a lot to make it really red.  Then I baked it in two round pans.  Here are the red cakes cooling:

I mixed up the next cake mix and divided it in to two bowls.  In one of the bowls I made a blue batter

and I left the other white.  I baked each of those in round pans.

After the cakes were cooled.  I cut the red cakes and the white cakes into 2 cakes horizontally.  Clearly, I need to work on this skill as mine weren't really even!  Don't cut the blue cake!

Now you need icing.  You can use the kind from the store or make your own.  I love homemade buttercream icing so that is what I did:

1 1/2 sticks butter

6 cups powdered sugar

3 tsp vanilla

5 Tbs milk

Mix with a mixer and add more milk if it is too thick until you get a spreadable consistency.

Now, start with a red layer, put a coat of icing on, then add a white layer, icing, then another red layer.

Now you need take your remaing white layer, one of the red layers and the blue layer and cut a circle.  You could use a large biscuit cutter.  I used a small Corning Ware dish (you can see it in the background of the below picture).  You will place the white circle on top of the cake, icing, then the red layer. 

 Next, take the blue outer ring and place it around the circle of the cake.  It should be a good fit!

 Now you are ready to finish icing the cake and decorate:

Now for the test, will it really look like a flag?  My kids all gathered in the kitchen to see just how this was going to turn out! 

You can see from this that I didn't do a great job cutting the layers.  My white layer on the bottom is too thin and the red layers are too thick.  But it still looks like a flag.  It was fun to make and my kids will have fun eating it!  And I had enough cake pieces left to make another cake.  of course, it will have a blue center, wtih a red and white ring around the edge and a white cake base but still edible!  Or, you could cube it up and make a festive trifle with it using coolwhip, strawberries and blueberries! 

Lapbooking

If you enjoy hands on activities for your kiddos for what they are learning you should try lapbooking!  It is a nice way to reinforce what you are learning and have a way to look back and review later.  And it is similar to notebooking but making it 3-D!  The basic gist of it is that you use file folders to create a book with little mini books attached to the file folders about the different topics you are studying.  E really enjoys looking back at the papers and things he has made, so is a particularly good thing for him! 

This is a folder book from our Mystery of History vol 1 study this past school year.

To learn more about lapbooking, check out this video from Egghead Academics.

There are many places you can get lapbooks kits, but right now A Journey Through Learning is offering a free 17th Century (Early American History) lapbook for free when you sign up for their newsletter.  I just got mine and it is a great lapbook!  There are short mini-lessons and then activities for each one.  You can supplement it by checking out additional books from your library on the topics.  This is a great way to find out if you would enjoy lapbooking with your family - since it's FREE!

We are studying Middle Ages this year, Christ through 1450, so I will save this one for next year because it will be perfect for our American History studies!  However, I just got the Apologia Botany lapbook download (it was a free gift for subscribing to TOS!) which we will use this year with our Botany study!

Making Blueberry Jam

So after coming home with 4 gallons of blueberries, something must be done with them.  I promptly traded some with a neighbor for a few peaches. I also have a friend, with a new baby and 3 other children who just can't manage a trip to go pick herself right now so I will trade one gallon with her for eggs from her free range chickens.  

So next up, jam......  I made two batches of low sugar jam using the Ball Low-Sugar pectin.  For each recipe I used 7 cups of crushed berries and 2 cups of sugar along with the pectin.  From two batches of jam I got 5 pints, 5 half pints and I topped off the jar in my fridge that was pretty low.  I started early this morning before the kids were even up and had it finished and cleaned up by 8:30!

Z-Man's favorite jam is blueberry and we were down to a few tablespoons in the last jar so this was perfect timing!