Cookies and Crayons for Two

We're in that time between school and camp where some parents go crazy, and I get excited to have everyone home with me. Is that weird? I just like hanging with them.

After spending the majority of yesterday in bathing suits outside, we spent the last few hours of sunshine in our teeny kitchen entertaining ourselves. The first thing on our agenda was baking cookies. Baking is a great activity to do with your kids, I just don't like having the goodies around after, because then I end up eating them. I experimented with all of the different cookies in a mug recipe, but honestly, they were just gross. I then stumbled upon a recipe which makes only two cookies, and after trying it out, let me tell you, they are a real winner. The recipe is from No. 2 Pencil and it's actually by the woman who brought us the cookie in a mug.

Start off by preheating your oven to 350 degrees, and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Then soften two tablespoons of butter until just beginning to get melty and blend with two firmly packed tablespoons of dark brown sugar, 1 tablespoon granulated sugar, a pinch of kosher salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract.

Add an egg yolk, 1/4 teaspoon baking soda, and 1/4 cup all purpose flour and mix well.

Add three heaping tablespoons of chocolate chips. Take a 30 second break as your kids try to eat all of the chocolate chips. Then mix it all up.

Form the cookies into two balls (make sure they are the same size so no one accuses the other of having the bigger one) and place on baking sheet several inches apart.

Bake for 8-10 minutes until edges are golden brown. (I did it for 10 minutes and they were extremely soft and the kids ended up eating them with a spoon.) The original instructions say when you take them out of the oven, bang it down on the counter so the cookies deflate and get a lovely wrinkled appearance. I do it and nothing happens, but people live a little and bang those cookies anyway. 

Take half a minute to torture your kids and get a picture of them, when really all they want to be doing is eating those cookies.  

These make really big cookies, so you can probably get four out of them, and just bake them for a little shorter. I love how we had this great activity to do together, but there are no unhealthy leftovers sitting around tempting me.

When we finished our cookie activity we moved onto a little project I've wanted to do for a long time. This is something that is not new at all, but I wanted to give it a go, so we made shaped melted crayons. You know what I'm talking about, it's when you take all your old bits of crayons, and melt them together in a mold, and get a new fun crayon shape. We have a huge bag of crayons that gets dumped out every time someone is coloring. Now we have six fun flowers to keep track of instead. No complaints here.

I put out labeled plates and let Moshe and Lily sort the colors. 

We decided to mix the purple and pink crayons together, so Lily can have all her favorite colors in one place.

After you have your colors sorted you need to get all the wrappers off the crayons. After going through the plate of red crayons, I was highly annoyed it was such a pain in the you know what. I consulted la google and was told to soak the crayons to make the wrappers come off easier. Genius. I don't recommend doing this with a fresh mani.

When the wrappers are all off, chop the crayons and fill up whatever mold you are using. I used a silicone muffin pan. I think it's ruined and wouldn't use it for food anymore, so I'm donating it to the play kitchen. Keep that in mind, don't use your really good pans.

Bake at 250 degrees for around 15 minutes, or until the crayons are melted. After it's out of the oven, I put it into the freezer to help it harden. Pop out the crayons, and viola! New art supplies. I love the way the different colors show.

Anyone here doing anything fun with their kids? It seems like school has been out forever, even though it has only been a week, but I am loving it!

DIY Instagram Magnets

Hi my name is Goldie, and I am an Instagram addict.

Instagram really feeds into my taking too many pictures problem. But I have it, I'm hooked, and I'm probably not stopping anytime soon. 

You know me, I like actually printing pictures. The square shape on an Instagram wouldn't fit into a standard album but then I found out about stickygram and I really wanted to order some. Stickygram is a company that takes your Instagram pictures and turns them into magnets. I love the idea of wallpapering my fridge with my instagrams (have you seen Taza's? It's ahhmazing) but I realized it was going to get really expensive really quickly. They charge $15 for 9 pictures, so if you print a bunch it gets out of hand. And I of course, wanted to use a lot of pictures.

So I decided to make my own!

This past Saturday was absolutely gorgeous and then with the combination of changing the clock and a cold front, my fabulous fall came to an abrupt halt, and it was officially winter. Lily didn't get the memo about sleeping late after the clock was changed and was ready to party at 6 am. Looking on the bright side, I had an extra hour that morning  to work on my super simple DIY Instagram magnets.

The first thing you need to do is print your pictures. There are a lot of ways to do this, and there are websites dedicated to printing your Instagram pictures. I wanted to do mine as cheap as possible. Using picmonkey.com, which is a free photo editing site, I made a collage with 6 instagrams each on a 4x6 picture. When you're on Instagram, the size of the picture is 2 inches by 2 inches. By having 6 instagrams on a 4x6 picture, you end up with printed Instagram pictures with the same dimensions as on your phone. Snapfish was having a penny prints promotion and I ordered 13 pictures. Because each picture had 6 instagrams on it, I ended up getting 78 instagrams for 13 cents. Not bad right?

Here are some of the 4x6s. You can see on the bottom right that I repeated two pictures. I did this so I can give some of these magnets to other people too. 

The above is a cut out Instagram placed on my phone and it really is the same size! I loved how these came out printed. After you have your printed pictures, glue the entire 4x6 onto a sheet of magnet paper. I used mod podge as the glue and it stayed really well. I got a pack of magnet paper in Staples. The package had 4 sheets in it and it was about $10.

After everything is dry, cut out each Instagram picture. The best way to do this is probably with a cutting board as an x acto knife but life is not perfect, and neither am I, so I just cut with regular scissors. 

Here's my stack of cut magnet pictures. At this point you can call it a day, and hang your magnets up if you want. You can also go one step further to give the magnets a little more ooh lala. I'll let you decide what you want to do, I kept going. See that bottle in the picture? It's mod podge dimensional magic and let me tell you it is magic. Like Disney princess magical. It basically adds an extra layer of dimension that makes the magnets look a little more professional. It's really simple to use. Draw a thin line around your magnet with it, and then fill in the middle. It's like decorating cookies with royal icing, just way easier. If bubbles form, pop them with a pin, or even just your finger (like I said, I'm not perfect). You need to let it dry for 24 hours and then you're done! 

I haven't finished all of the pictures I have yet, but my fridge is slowly getting filled up and I love it! I used three bottles of the mod podge dimensional magic which was about $5 each. The magnets were $10 and the pictures were 13 cents. So I spent about $25.13 on 78 Instagram magnets. If I would have ordered that many magnets from stickygram it would have cost $130... DIY for the win!

Any other Instagram addicts here? Do we need a support group? 12 steps or something? Do you display your Instagram pictures at home in a creative way? Let me know below!

Pumpkins Are Everything

I believe I've mentioned that I am a summer girl who is crushing on fall this year. Even though the love of this season is new to me, I have always been a huge pumpkin lover. 

Forrest Gump. If that movie is on I will be watching it.

Anyway, I'm the one in Dunkin Donuts asking for a pumpkin latte well into the winter, until the barista sadly tells me they don't make them anymore. I stock up on pumpkin scented candles for the year, and bake as many pumpkin goodies as I can. The three main ingredients in any dessert on my Pinterest board is always either peanut butter, blueberries, or pumpkin. So it's a good time of year for me to try out some new recipes.

A few years ago we painted pumpkins at a farm and Moshe had so much fun doing it that it's become a fall tradition for us. 

I took the kids to a local county fair yesterday. It was another perfect fall day, and face painting, pony rides, and a pumpkin patch, rounded out the perfectness. Lily took picking out a pumpkin very seriously. 

The pumpkin patch had tables with paint set out, but Moshe wanted to paint ours at home. 

I put out a lot of newspaper on my living room floor and let my little artists get to work. I made a big initial out of painters tape on each of the pumpkins so they would have a fun monogrammed pumpkin when they were done painting. 

^^^no clothes for those under two is always a good idea

I learned a few things having two kids painting this year. It's going to be insanely messy, the less water you have in the bowl to rinse out the brushes, the better, and there's not really going to be any time for mama to paint her pumpkin if she's trying to make sure the kids don't go all Jackson Pollock on the living room.

After the pumpkins dried and I pulled off the painters tape, this is what we ended up with. 

 

Lily got bored well before she had painted enough to cover the area around the painters tape but if you squint you can make out the L on her pumpkin.

After I cleaned up the mess my kids made, I colored on my funny shaped pumpkin (thank you Moshe for finding it for me) with a sharpie. I tried for a preppy pumpkin in navy and green with a modern monogram, and chevron design. I still love chevron, but it's going to be deader than dead in 2014, so I had one last chevron hurrah with my little pumpkin.

Our three little pumpkins all in a row by our front door definitely make me happy and more in love with fall.

What was everyone up to over this gorgeous weekend? Anyone paint some pumpkins? Even better, anyone bake some pumpkiny goodness? Send some my way if you did!