Snow Treats!

With a blizzard on the way, I wanted to share these two recipes for snow treats that we tried earlier this winter. For all of the years I've spent living in Maine playing snow and even eating the white stuff, I never thought to actually use it to make real food. Genius, and kids dig it too. First off, Snow Cream. You can mix up the liquid ingredients in the house, and then tote a mixing bowl and spoon outside to add the snow and make your treat al fresco. We'll be making this to go with Rowan's cake for her birthday tomorrow! Here's the recipe:

Snow Cream:

• 1/2 to 3/4 cup cream
• 4 tablespoons sugar 
• 1 teaspoon vanilla 
• 1 egg (optional) 
• 1 bowl of light, clean snow (6-8 cups)

Then, if you have a candy thermometer and are feeling slightly more ambitious, there's Maple Snow Candy. 

Maple Snow Candy:

• 1 cup of 100% Pure Maple Syrup
• 1/4 cup of unsalted butter
• a candy thermometer

Put the maple syrup and butter in a saucepan over medium heat and stir constantly. Use the candy thermometer to make sure you boil the sugar and butter to 220 degrees Farenheit. Remove from stove and after cooling for a couple of minutes, take the pan outside and pour the syrup out onto a clean patch of snow. The syrup will cool and form into a sweet treat the consistency of taffy. You can try to peel clumps of it off the snow or use popsicle sticks to twirl the maple candy onto.  

Cuteness

So this is something that I'm seeing a lot of these days...cuteness, of the tiny-but-vertical sort.

Easy Valentine Stamps

I tried a genius idea from Pinterest yesterday while working on Valentine making with Rowan- take the roll from the middle of a toilet paper roll and crease it so that it bends in and makes a heart shape on the ends- then just dip it in paint and let your kid go crazy making heart stamps all over the place. We put glitter on the wet paint hearts to dress them up a bit. Rowan loved that we were stamping with something from the bathroom of course.

Letter Pretzels

Last week Rowan and I felt like doing a baking project for our morning snack and decided to make letter pretzels from an old cookbook we had when I was a kid. It was lots of fun! Here's the recipe, and then photos of the result:

Letter Pretzels
from Kinder-Krunchies by Karen S. Jenkins

1. Dissolve 1 Tablespoon of yeast in 1/2 cup of warm water.
2. Add 1 teaspoon of honey and 1 teaspoon of salt.
3. Add 1 1/3 cup flour.
4. Knead.
5. Roll pieces and form letters- you can form letters on wax paper over a letter guide if necessary.
6. Brush with beaten egg.
7. Sprinkle with salt.
8. Bake 10 minutes at 425 degrees.

A delicious way to practice letter shapes

Retta didn't really help, but she did look awfully cute in her snowman dress

For the Birds

Last week my dad surprised us by coming down for a last minute lunch date, and he also brought along a fun project--a birdhouse to build with Rowan! For Christmas he had given her the pre-cut pieces and had drawn some plans to follow as well. Rowan loved hammering all the nails in and writing "Rowan's birdhouse" on the bottom. I was thrilled to see her so enthusiastic about building things--a nice departure from the current princess obsession! Thanks Gramp!

 

Double Digits: Retta at 10 Months

Woah, wait, how did this baby get to be 10 months old already?!! Seriously, only two months until I'm baking a little baby cake?! Ugh, it's great to see your baby thriving, but little people are great measuring sticks of time passing. At least I can look at her and think about all the good stuff that's happened to us because of her over these fast 10 months.

Retta is full of it at the moment....chomping on anything in sight to get those two top front teeth to break through. Our coffee table now has a cute little bite-mark border around the top edge, as do most of our books. Over the past month I've retrieved a giant ball of cat hair, multiple wood chips and pieces of bark, a tube of paint, a tube of diaper ointment, and a shard of glass from our daughter's mouth (I really do watch her vigilantly, I swear!). She has developed lightning fast Go-Go Gadget arms as well- while riding around the house in her baby carrier, she flings an arm out and grabs whatever is in sight, like a blender jar full of smoothie ingredients. Retta and the cat's food dish also seem to share some sort of magnetic relationship, and in the last week she has banged her head on more objects than I can count. It seems like nearly every day I am wondering if I need to take her to the E.R., or at the very least invest in a bouncy house for our living room that she could just bop around in. As our neighbors like to remind us, "It's all about containment right now!" So true, so true. When we are going somewhere and I finally have both girls strapped in their carseats and have that momentary piece of mind knowing that they can't get into something and hurt themselves, I feel so at peace. After we buckle the girls in, Aaron and I have started joking, "We have achieved containment folks!"

The wonderful thing is that the little grins and giggles, the waving, the blowing kisses, the wild tub splashing, and the peekaboo more than make up for all the baby chasing. Every chance I get I find myself drinking in that baby smell and that soft baby fine hair that's just starting to get a little curl to it, and kissing those cherub cheeks... and every time I hear, "mmma mma, ma-MA, MAMA!" I want to capture those cute sounds in a bottle and keep them close to my heart for all of time.

Chewing on a tape measure

Chewing on a sock

Still chewing...this time on a book

Waving

Wearing her aptly named Wild Thing hat

Trying to figure this sippy cup thing out

Contemplating

Baby Jowls

All packed up and ready to go

Potions!

A magic potion. Secret ingredients? Eye of newt and the hair of a unicorn.

Potions have become of Rowan's favorite new activities. This is something that Aaron loved to do as a kid, and now she is carrying on the tradition. We put a mixing bowl and spoon in the sink and let her go to town with adding ingredients and stirring them together to make a magic brew. She likes to use spices, food coloring, bits of food from the cupboards, and especially any kind of cooking oil, which makes instant bubbly gook on the surface of the potion. I am always surprised at how long she will spend tweaking her concoctions and stirring...it's a great time-suck, like at the end of the day when the last 15 minutes until Aaron comes home feels like forever. So, maybe it is magical after all--saving my sanity while occupying her!