Rex Johnson

I mentioned awhile back about our new family member Rex, but haven't shown off pictures yet.  Rex is our pet guinea pig, and we only get to have her for the year because of our seminary's pet policy.  So next year, she's visiting the grandparents and then we'll get her back after Jeremy graduates.  This seemed like a really great idea at first...the kids needed a pet to help get them through this transition to internship and to learn how to care for another living thing.  But Liliana loves Rex so very very much, I'm a little afraid of how hard it's going to be on her next year.  In any case, right now Liliana is LOVING having Rex around.  It has definitely made her more gentle and compassionate.  Plus it's been a lot of fun!  Check out some of Rex's adventures:

Checking Rex's heart

Rex was off to fight fires, he's quite the heroic guinea pig.

Liliana said Rex was upset so she was holding her like a baby and shushing while doing a little bouncy walk.  It was so very sweet and loving.  She kept saying, "It's okay Rexie.  It's okay baby."

Rex and Micah versus Liliana.  Rex was not a fan of this one.  Too loud for her.

I blame the Kung Zhu toys for this.  Micah isn't a big Rex fan, so he made his sister put the pig on the tank.  They were conspiring together and laughing hysterically and then shouted for me to bring the camera.

Rex does have a cage (a Rubbermaid tub actually) and spends 95% of her day in it.  These pictures are from three months of playtime.  When we don't allow Liliana to hold Rex, she sits by her cage and talks to her, sings her songs and shows her her dance moves.  It is ridiculously cute and so good for her!  Rex is a great pet because she doesn't smell, is easy to clean up after, cheap and we can leave to go someplace without giving her a second thought.  Plus she's adorable and makes happy little squeaky sounds!  We thought she'd be a "starter" pet, but I can't imagine ever having any other kind of furry family member.

Captain America!

Micah has been all about Captain America lately.  We were at Target a couple weeks ago, and he saw this Captain America shield that shot out little ninja stars and he. had. to. have. it NOW!  He still had some money from his car washing business saved up, because I won't let him make impulse purchases.  So I told him, like always, he had to wait and we'd research a bit more and think about it.  We got home and googled it and it had terrible reviews.  We talked about how other boys and girls had spent all their moneys on the toy and then it didn't work very well and what a disappointment that must have been!  The wise young boy that he is then remarked, "Okay.  I guess I'll get something else instead.  Plus you can just make me one anyways.  Then I can have it RIGHT NOW!"  We're working on delayed gratification (*cough* unsuccessfully).

He has hounded me daily since then to make him his shield.  Today, when I couldn't take it anymore, I cut out the basic shape and outlined it for him and then broke the news to him that he was going to have to do the coloring himself.  Mostly, because I was so sore from doing P90x that the thought of using my arm muscles to color made me want to cry, but also because I wanted him to see how much work these little projects he thinks up for me actually are.  (Might I remind you of the Yoda costume!)  It seems like anytime he gets a new interest, I get a new project!

Look at that concentration!!

And of course, Liliana needed a shield too!

Showing off his hard work!

Bye Bye Bouillon

Warning- if you are a vegetarian, you probably do not want to read on!

We eat a LOT of soup in the fall and winter time.  There is nothing I love more than a big pot of homemade soup and freshly baked bread on a cold winter night.  But it's August...so why am I craving soup so badly???  Maybe because of the awesome Homemade Chicken Stock I whipped up tonight in anticipation for all those great soup nights.  Our house smells incredible right now!  And yours can too....just follow these easy steps!

Homemade Chicken Stock

•  Roast a chicken.  We usually just stick a thawed whole chicken with a little butter and salt/pepper in a crock pot for the day or in the oven for a couple hours.  Easy peasy! 

• Pull all the chicken off the bones.  The thing I love about whole chickens is that for about $6, it's enough for a fabulous dinner for the four of us and then there's enough extra for us to pick off to use for another meal (like soup or a casserole).

• Stick all the leftover bones, skin, juice, etc. all in a pot.  Add enough cold water to just cover the carcass. Then add some celery, onions, carrots, garlic, etc.

After dumping it into the pot from the roasting pan...see I told you vegetarians to stop reading, this looks disgusting!  But it makes something soooooooo yummy!!!

•Bring just to boiling, then reduce to low and simmer for like 4 hours.  Skim the foamy stuff off whenever you feel like it.  The more you skim it, the less cloudy your broth will be. 

Oh my gosh does it smell FABULOUS!!!!

• Strain with a fine strainer, cool and freeze and you're done!  You can freeze in ice cube trays to add in a little at a time if you want, or in containers.  Ours boiled for awhile and a lot of the water boiled out making the stock more concentrated.  So when we use it for soup, we'll be adding more water back in.

Total from our one roasting chicken, we got about 8 cups of concentrated stock...so it should make about a gallon of broth when we add back in some of the water.

Look at how easy that is!  And talk about economical!  To buy this much canned broth would be way expensive and the only cost of this was probably less than $1 for the vegetables (and actually I wouldn't even count it in our case, because we never eat up a whole thing of celery before it goes bad and the carrots we pulled out and saved to go in the soup I'm making for tomorrow- yes we are having soup in August, so we would have used those anyways). 

I didn't skim very often, (because I watched a whole bunch of "Say Yes to the Dress" instead of monitoring it.)  But it tastes the same either way and we often make creamy soups, so it doesn't really matter how it looks.

I always thought making homemade chicken stock was way too hard and not worth it...but this stuff is just so much healthier and full of more nutrients than the little bouillon cubes and it really was hardly any work at all.  I've heard that it really helps fend off illness...so I can't wait to test that out this cold/flu season.  Next time you have roast chicken, give it a try!

Good Clean Fun

I have to admit, I feel kind of stupid for not having thought of this earlier.

Our kids LOVE washing dishes!  To the point where it's kind of a hazard sometimes because they'll move a chair to the sink and start throwing dishes in, glasses and knives included and run water to almost overflowing. 

Look at cute little Baby Micah washing dishes!!!!  I can't believe this kiddo is going to be 5 on Monday!

 Occasionally, we'd give the kids a separate bowl of soapy water to scrub stuff, but it never occurred to me to fill our water table with suds, until yesterday!

Oh man did they have fun! 

Liliana could have played in it for hours!  I cut her off eventually because we needed to eat but she asked right away when we could play in the "soaps" again.

 I used Johnson's Baby Wash to make the bubbles for two reasons.  1-  It's tearfree.  2-  I had done a couponing deal on it when I was pregnant with Micah...27 cents a bottle at Target!  What a deal, right!?!?!  Plus I'll be having more kids, so I probably need like 30 bottles or something, right?!?!  Wrong!  We went through maybe 3 or 4 bottles and the rest are being used to make homemade bubble solution or being donated to crisis nursery centers. 

 

If you don't have a water table, you can easily do this same activity by filling any old Rubbermaid tub or kiddie pool with soapy water.  We used an attachment on the hose to shoot the water really fast into the tub to get the foamy effect.

Smores Pudding Parfait

I'm on an anti-boxed food campaign right now.  I buy things like pudding mixes, thinking we'll make it and then they sit in our cabinet for months on end until I make it out of obligation or get rid of it or even worse, move it thinking we'll eat it at our new house.  Since I have the time to cook from scratch, it's generally healthier, and a lot of times cheaper- we've been a lot of that.

This homemade pudding recipe is almost just as easy as the boxed kind and my guess is you've got everything in your cabinets for it already.

Homemade Chocolate Pudding

Mix together in a large microwave safe bowl (I used a 4 cup Pyrex glass measuring cup).

1/2 cup white sugar
1/3 cup cocoa powder
3 tablespoons cornstarch
Pinch salt

Whisk in:

 2 cups milk

Microwave 3 minutes.  Stir.  Microwave 2-4 additional minutes, one minute at a time until thick and glossy.

Pour in to parfait glasses, cover with saran wrap and refrigerate until cool.  To make it "smores style," when pouring into the parfait glasses, pour a little bit in, then put a big marshmallow in and then pour the rest of the hot pudding mix in.  Top with graham crackers right before serving and serve warm.  The marshmallow will get all gooey and delicious!

Easy, scrumptious, and Liliana approved!

Letter/Sight Word Identification Worksheets

We've been working on the letter A with Liliana.  And by working on, I mean we did the Great ABC Hunt, and we've been pointing it out more often...other than that we've been shoving her in front of the television while we catch up on chores and summer reading.  ;-)  In any case, I made this rockin' worksheet for her to help practice too!  (Let me know if the worksheet thing doesn't work as I've never tried uploading PDFs before, so I can email it to you if you'd like it.)

A Worksheet

 

Worksheets, generally speaking, are boring, so this isn't any plain old worksheet.  She got to use Bingo dabbers to make a circle on the letter A.  Instantly more fun because there was a mess factor involved.

(Have I mentioned how much we love Auntie Jenna???)  Micah couldn't possibly be left out, but letter identification is way too easy.  So I had him find all the words that ended with -at instead and mark them with the dabber.

Here's a copy of his worksheet.

AT Worksheet






Different sizes and different fonts to make it a little more tricky!  They both did GREAT!  Next week, we're going to do O's for Liliana, because she's started pointing them out on her own and -it words for Micah.


This has nothing to do with anything but it's waayyyyyyyyy too cute to not share!

Hope you're all enjoying the last few weeks of summer!!! 

The Great ABC Hunt

A few months ago, someone was playing with Liliana and asked her what color the toy she had was. She went through about 10 colors before the person finally told her. I freaked out a bit. WHY ON EARTH DOESN'T MY TWO YEAR OLD KNOW HER COLORS!?!?!? Then I realized...I never actually taught them to her. Hmmm.... second child maybe?!?! It took just a couple of days of pointing out colors as we played and she had them down flat.

And now we're onto ABCs. Micah knew his ABCs by this point, but Liliana was not interested in sitting and doing learning worksheets or anything and I refuse to try to push something on her because learning should be fun.

So enter the great ABC hunt!

I found a bunch of bulletin board letters at a rummage sale, all for $3!!! I decided to start with A because I thought it would be easy for her to recognize, not because it was at the beginning of the alphabet. I taped the letters up all over the house, half of them were A's and the other half were other letters. I gave her an Easter basket and she went around collecting just the A's. The other letters she gave to Micah.

It was good for her to try to recognize A's in different sizes, colors, and fonts! She did Great!!! She had a lot of fun and now she points out A's all over the place!

If you don't have cut out letters, you could easily do this same game with letters written on post it notes or scrap paper. If you have older kids you could do this with sight words. Like, find all the words that end in -at.