Monday, February 26, 2018

Spring Break Travel Arts + Crafts Activities!



The count down to Spring Break is on and we are over at the OOLY blog today sharing some of our favorite travel arts + crafts projects today! Easy ideas to help keep things creative wherever you're headed or just to freshen things up at home if you are staying put too. Check it out! 

Friday, February 16, 2018

The Friday Five!!

So much for my goal of blogging regularly. I blinked and two weeks went by! Somehow even though the kids are now at school all day, I find myself even busier and struggling just to keep all the plates spinning. In any event, here's what we were up to this week ....


Reading -- I love cooking but am not always comfortable coming up with my own recipes. I've been reading Salt Fat Acid Heat this week and LOVE learning about all the science behind cooking. I've always had a general idea of how these four elements work in cooking, but this book is so interesting and has been giving me the confidence to experiment more (there's nothing worse than spending a whole evening cooking and having the entire family have to eat something yucky for dinner). The kids and I are on the second book in the Book Scavenger series and love it! It's especially fun because it's set in San Fransisco and we just visited there this past summer -- I'll eventually finish those vacation posts! 

Cooking -- this Slow Cooker BBQ Beef was a HUGE family fave this week -- I hardly had any leftovers for lunch! I'm about 15 days out from finishing my Whole60 -- it's been going awesome, but I have a bachelorette party coming up right at the end, so I'm still figuring out my strategy for that! 

Making -- Kane has been super into drawing lately and loves these printable comic book template pages from the Picklebums

Wanting -- I'm loving these Tai Capricorn Pendants ... I need a Gemini

Playing -- now that Cam is more proficient at counting money, the kids have had more frequent and intense games of Monopoly. This week it seems that someone always ends up crying, but I guess they're still getting math in? 

Friday, February 2, 2018

The Friday Five!!

It's been so long since I've done a Friday Five that I almost forgot what to share! We are also smack in the middle of wrestling season, and with both kids wrestling this year, I feel like almost all of our non-school time has been spent in a gym. So we haven't had a lot of creative time lately, which has been driving us all nuts! Nevertheless, here's what we've been up to this week ....



Making -- the kids are PUMPED for the Eagles in the Super Bowl this weekend and have been busy making signs to hang all over the house with oil pastels and decorating all our windows with these amazing gel crayons (they wipe right off, promise!!). 

Playing -- I've finally succeeded in getting the kids to play their math homework games together! We are always looking for dice, so this set of math dice has really come in handy! 

Cooking -- we successfully wrapped up our first Whole30 of 2018 and I decided to extend it to a Whole60 -- I'm just not ready yet! These pork chops with potatoes are a huge family fave and I always wish I had an enormous cast iron skillet so I could cook double the recipe at once! 

Wanting -- not to become that super annoying clean-eating friend, but I tried out Vital Proteins collagen in my coffee this last Whole30 round and kind of love it. Maybe I'm just imaging it, but I do feel like my skin and hair have been better. I always get a bad case of dermatitis in the winter, so I'm willing to try anything! I'd like to kill two birds with one stone and try the Collagen Creamer, but I need to wait until I finish up my canister of regular collagen. 

Reading -- Kane is obsessed with the Adventures of Tin Tin and has a volume with him at all times. I love that he is digging into something himself, but it's impossible to get him to put it down to do anything -- like walk down the street. My mom brought me some of my favorite childhood books on a recent trip and we've all been enthralled with Black Beauty this week. I love the Illustrated Junior Classics version and we are finding all sorts of neat tidbits about the value of treating animals (AND PEOPLE!!) with kindness and respect. Love