The Boys Got Pet Turtles...

... Sorta. We read a book about Blue getting a pet turtle named Turquoise. And then we made our own pet Turquoise. We even made her a tank just like the books. And then of course we had to have a water dish and carrots and celery and lettuce. It was fun.

A closeup of Jacob's Turquoise. He drew the happy face himself!

Daniel's Turquoise. She's cute. And apparently she doesn't like lettuce.

Halloween Continues Giving

So Jacob actually wanted to be a monster for Halloween. But I had the whole easy iPad thing planned and a monster costume seemed like an awful lot of work. So we compromised and made these CUTE monsters out of milkjugs. They carried them around and collected their candy in these instead of a plastic bag.  Jacob's is the green one with lots of eyes and scary teeth. Daniel's has "Mater" teeth. 

FYI- Painting milkjugs with kids acrylic paint is impossible and doesn't work. After getting really annoyed after the second attempt (the first was to put a little paint inside the jug, shake it up, and let it dry... it never dries) I just took Jeff's advice and wrapped the peeling painted jugs in clear packing tape.

So Halloween is now long gone. The monsters have been well played with... but now are not recyclable... 

Last week we made toilet paper roll bird feeders and they were a HUGE hit with the chickadees. We could stand right under the tree while the birds were eating. It was cool. 

So this week I cut the mouths of the monsters open really big, filled them with bird seed and hung them in the tree. The birds aren't too sure yet, Jacob says they think the monsters are scary. 

Neat eh? We have now spotted chickadees, blue jays, some sort of sparrow, and woodpeckers in our little tree. 

Halloween Treat

First of all... Monster Popcorn. Or whatever you want to call it for whatever occasion. Here I made orange and green. So yummy. Tastes like the colourful Kernel's Popcorn. Want to know how to make it? I will share! 

First pop your corn. I have an airpopper and I popped 1/2 cup of kernels for each colour. I think it makes about 10 cups of popcorn. Put the popcorn in the biggest bowl you can find.

Melt 1/4 cup butter and 3 tablespoons of honey in a pot. Add 1/4 cup sugar and one regular package of jello (not the no sugar stuff). Any flavour will do. Bring to a boil and then turn the heat down and simmer for five minutes. 

Now CAREFULLY pour the mixture over your popcorn. Mix until all covered. Now you may spill or something, don't be fooled by the pretty colours and seemingly harmless popcorn. IT IS VERY HOT. SCALDING HOT. IT IS ALSO STICKY. DO NOT TRY AND CATCH THE FALLING POPCORN! Can you guess I speak from experience. Let the popcorn fall on the floor.

Now put the popcorn on a prepared baking sheet. This is another step with possible spillage.

I tried two different ways of prepping my pan. One was I oiled the pan with canola oil. The other I used wax paper. Neither worked great. I would try aluminum foil and oil next time. 

Bake your popcorn at 300 for about 15 minutes. I also wonder if you could skip this step entirely. 

Let it cool then scrape it off your pans. 

The pans will come clean... just soak them in water for a day.

Eat. Yummy.

I used orange jello (obviously) and blue jello with 6 drops of yellow food colouring to make it green. The store didn't have green jello. Personally I thought the orange tasted a little weird but the blue jello flavoured popcorn was delicious.

Our family costume was an iPad. Jeff was the calendar app.

No More Pretzels in the Bowl

This post is for my brother who has previously claimed that blogs about giant pretzels make him homesick. I hope tiny baby pretzels do the same.
Anyways, I made something delicious. Pretzel bites with cheese sauce. So good. I literally could not stop eating them. I made them for lunch, snacked on them all afternoon, and then had more before I went to bed. I am not going to give a recipe because I copied it exactly from here. I think the only change I made was that I used hard margarine instead of butter and sea salt, which I don't know if it counts as Kosher. I love it when a recipe turns out perfect just the way it is.
Note: Daniel took one taste of the cheese sauce and started crying. So I gave him tomato sauce instead for dipping. The cheese sauce was amazing but the pretzels tasted really good in the tomato sauce so it was hard for me to decide which to use.
Also, this recipe makes about 200. Make sure you share! I had a friend and her two kids come over to share the pretzel love.