Camp Girl

Another milestone on the way to growing up just got checked off. Lily started camp this week. I had planned to keep her home for another year, but due to various circumstances it became evident that now was the right time to send her out into the big wide world.

My little, social, funny, and outgoing girl is loving it.

There's nothing like having your baby girl running into your arms at the end of her day and giving you a kiss and telling you just how much she missed you. Knowing she had a great day and is being taken care of puts my mind at ease during the day when I am missing her too. And it is just too cute listen to her talk about "my friends."

There are of course major sleep benefits to camp as well.

Unless this happens first.

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!

It's a Party in the Kitchen

There are times when I feel like I am drowning in an abundance of kid's toys. I know other parents feel the same way and everyone has their own way of dealing with it. I really like the idea of cycling toys in and out of the children's toy rotation. Toys get forgotten about, and then don't get played with but if it is reintroduced a month or two later, it's like having  a new toy all over again. Unfortunately living in an apartment without massive amounts of storage space, this is not something we do around here. There just isn't any holding place for the toys that aren't being used so frequently.

Lately there has been a lot of princess play around here. I know there's nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to steer playtime back to non princess related imaginative play a little bit too.  We have a super cute little play kitchen from Kid Kraft that I wanted to make a little more new and exciting so Moshe and Lily would play with it some more. I bet you thought this post was about toy organization, when really it's about <gasp!> buying more things!

I added some new food items and children sized aprons that both kids were really into it, but I had been on the lookout for a set of play dishes. When I was in Ikea a few weeks back, I went to check out what they have. The dishes they sell for their play kitchen actually comes with the warning that children under eight should not be using them, because they will break like real dishes. Womp womp. Not something I am interested in.  I moved on, and was browsing through the baby section when I found these:

Images from Ikea.com

The Kalas series, are meant to be real tableware to use for your children, but I decided to bring it home as toys. Each pack was $1.99 so for $8 I managed to stock our little play kitchen with service for six kids. I took the knives out of the set, even though they are not sharp at all. I didn't realize how much of a hit these dishes would be. The kids love to set them up, which is awesome practice for setting a real table. They sort them by color, which is great for Lily, because we are still working on learning all of the colors with her. Whenever Lily sets them up she always comes to get me and show me. "Mommy it's a party!" I'm giving myself some extra mom points for getting something that is accidentally educational.

If you have a play kitchen you really need to get yourselves over to Ikea, and grab a set of these dishes. Better yet, they won't break! And even better than that, even though I bought more toys, they don't take any more room up in my little apartment, because they are stored right in the play kitchen.

Anyone here have anything really awesome in their kid's kitchen? Let me know below.
Have a great weekend everyone!