A Tribute to Montana

I don't deal well with death. I especially don't deal well with the death of pets. My brothers family is in the process of loosing one of their most beloved family members, so today, I will post a tribute to Montana. We love you buddy!

A shout out to Little N

I've been called out, that Little N does not get near enough attention on this blog. So, here's his shout out. Today, we painted with his feet. Such a cute little foot.

A few days ago we did hand prints. I must say these are two of the cutest hands I have ever seen.

Little N participates in most of our activities, he sits quietly (sometimes) to watch his mom and big sister craft, and anticipates getting bigger to join in the fun. We couldn't do our thing without such a great audience. Love you Little N.

Recycling Day

So, Big N disappeared into her room with the kitchen recycling bins. What was she doing you ask? Building a tower no doubt. A future architect??

This has given me a few ideas for future crafts. Now, to see if we actually get anything done that's worthwhile to share.

Pizza Fridays

Yes, I know it's not Friday, but in order to participate in Pizza Friday, you should have the recipe a little bit early. Our family LOVES pizza. After years of getting takeout pizza at least once per weekend, we decided to embark on the pizza making adventure and found out it was actually quite easy and delicious. It took about three weeks to perfect our crust (it was a very important part of the puzzle), and we regularly change up the ingredients, but we try to keep it on the light and healthy side.

Making pizza dough with toddlers is a great activity. Big N LOVES helping knead the dough, and because I haven't found a big difference in the crust in regards to the length of time or amount of kneading that is required, I let her go to town on the dough until she gets bored of the activity.

Pizza Dough

Ingredients:

1 tbsp yeast

1 cup hot water

1 tbsp sugar

1/2 tbsp olive oil

2 cups whole wheat flour

1/2 cup white flour

Directions:

Combine yeast with the water and sugar. Let sit for 10 minutes. Stir in the olive oil and the flour. Knead for around 5 minutes. Cover and let rise for at least 90 minutes.

Instead of using a pizza sauce, we almost always use either a garlic/olive oil mix or a BBQ sauce. We find the olive oil mix enhances the flavour of the pizza toppings and the BBQ sauce is a nice change of pace. Our toppings usually include chicken, peppers, mushrooms and cheese.

We let Big N put the toppings on the pizza, and it usually looks a little something like this:

I ended up making a double batch of the dough last Friday, so we ended up using it today for our lunch. We had an Italian sausage, red pepper, spinach and mushroom pizza with an olive oil sauce. It made for a pretty delicious lunch if I do say so myself.

We roll our crusts THIN, so out of the dough recipe above we either get two pizzas that are the size of a cookie sheet, or one bigger pizza on our pizza stone.

Brown!

Big N and I decided to take down the painting that didn't quite seem complete on the wall and add to it. If you recall, this is how it started out.

We basically just started adding colours and magically we ended up making the chocolate brown colour I was looking for yesterday. Now, this would have been great had we realized that all the colours mixed together were going to be brown, but unfortunately the rest of the paintings that this one sits with are in the black family, so it will do for now, but eventually, we will probably try and make another picture with a little more black and a little less brown.

We always start our art projects with brushes, but in the end, it always turns into finger painting. In this picture if you look closely, you can see Big N's fingers, Little N's feet and my fingers. All in all, it was a good way to spend a half hour on another not quite spring day.

Pink Painting

Pink is a fun colour. It just happens to almost be Big Cousin's third birthday. So, Big N and I have been working on some artwork to put in her room. During our most recent visit, we found out that she had a new pink and brown monkey themed room, so, we're taking that into consideration in our artwork.

We made some pink paint (while trying to instill the fact that red and white mixed together makes pink, did she understand, no likely not, but I tried.) Then, came the tough part, trying to make chocolate brown paint from only primary colours. Since it's been a really long time since I took any form of art (like 15 years), I resorted to a good ole' google search. Supposedly, equal parts of red and green make brown. Well, maybe if you squint really hard or are colour blind, what I made might have been brown, but it was pretty much black. So, I tried again, this time adding yellow and red and green and blue and black and white, and guess what, it was almost brown. So, I had Big N start her painting.

Then after looking at it again and again, I decided our almost brown colour was really more olive green. So, I just kept telling Big N to use more pink, eventually taking away the "brown" option. We worked on what kind of designs we wanted to put into the art, and ended up with a circle pattern.



Now, I have a plan for this artwork, but I have to wait and give it a try before I reveal it. Just in case my art skills are really horrible, I would hate to disappoint the recipient before she even gets it.

Soap Crayons

Late last week Big N and I were bored (it happens a lot these days), so we embarked on an adventure making soap crayons. It's a super easy activity and doesn't require a lot of preparation, or unknown ingredients.

First we grated some bars of soap (the cheapest bars we had on hand, this time it was Lever 2000) while sitting on a big blanket so I didn't have to slip and fall on the floor once this activity was over.

We separated our grated soap pieces into three separate bowls and added a different colour of food colouring to each bowl. We added just a little water to each bowl, and then we mixed each bowl together until we had somewhat of a uniform colour and consistency.

After I convinced Big N that we were done having fun (about a half hour later), we put the three colours into a long ice cube tray. We let this sit for five days or so.

I just took the crayons out of the molds tonight, now they aren't that beautiful by any means, they still turned out. I'll have Big N try them out tomorrow in the tub to see how they work.

Now if we were to do this activity again, I would likely use the smaller grater on the soap pieces. As you can see, there are still pretty huge chunks of white soap pieces. I think with a smaller grater, it would have turned into a better hunk of soap.

You can see this and other great toddler activities over at My Delicious Ambiguity: Tot Tuesday

http://www.mydeliciousambiguity.com/2011/02/tot-tuesday-43.html