Bakers Dozen

M and E's dad, Brian is the cookie expert at our house so E and Brian spent some quality time baking.He has a "secret recipe" for some yummy chocolate chip cookies. In fact they are so yummy he won a blue ribbon at the state fair when he was 7.Although he insists that his grandma and mom had something to do with that.Well what ever it was he does make yummy cookies and now E is following in those footsteps.

Easter Sunday Fun

The girls and I will be in Texas for Easter visiting my brother and I am not sure we will make Easter crafts as my nieces and nephew are in the tween stage so crafts may not be there thing?It is a a few days before we leave so we are making some easy yet fun crafts.
The egg critter idea comes from the Family Fun April 2009 issue. It was a very cute idea and the materials were simple. In fact we had the eggs from previous year Easter baskets and the felt we had from other projects.If you do this project with a child younger than four they will need assistance for almost of all the steps as the felt ears, tail etc. are very small and hard to glue on.

http://jas.familyfun.go.com/crafts?page=CraftDisplay&craftid=12148

E loves baking!!!I mean seriously loves to bake. I don't posses the patience to let her bake very often with me. E likes to do all the steps and insists that I don't help with anything but the oven and the clean up. As a result of my showing little patience for her passion she often tries to invite herself to my good friends Beth's( she is way more patient than I am she proves it to me every time I am with her).

So if you ever have a child that loves to do something you don't have the patience to do with them, take my advice find some other adult that does.I think it is important to allow kids to explore their passions and interests but I also think that it must be fostered in an environment of love and patience.

Easter bunny cookies.Simple and delicious. Use pre made sugar cookie dough to cut down on time and mess.

Birdseed Biscuits

This week the girls worked on making biscuits for those "poor cold birds" There is a great story for inspiration in the February 09 Family Fun magazine. The recipe will follow for mixing up the bird seed dough.Two things with this craft I liked is that both M and E were able to do the whole process without my assistance and we used materials we had already.What I didn't like is that the biscuits don't stay together as well as we had hoped. They crumbled when we try to hang them up so next time we will use peanut butter in place of the flour to glue the mixture together.

Recipe made two heart biscuits.
3/4 cups birdseed
1 tbsp flour
2 tbsp water
Spray or wipe cookie cutter with oil and place it on a foil covered cookie sheet.Pack the mixture into the cutter,insert half a straw near the top to create a hole for hanging.Bake the biscuit with the straw in a 170 oven for about 1hr.

M and E decided to put the crumbled biscuits in a bowl for the birds to enjoy. I just forgot to put out the hot chocolate as E pointed out.

We get many birds in our front tree and side bushes but a Cardinal visits us daily.