Chicken Soup

Are the leaves changing where you live? Having grown up in Florida, I’m used to greenery and soaking up the sun on the beach through December but I absolutely love having actual seasons here! Everything is the perfect shade of orange and red and yellow.

But with this display of colors comes colder weather and that means sniffly noses and little coughs aren’t far away. All of a sudden I feel everyone around here is getting sick. Several of our friends have coughs and/or fevers and it seems to be spreading, eek! So before we come down with something I wanted to boost our immune system and hope that it just skips us this time. Fingers crossed! We’ve been taking some extra vitamin C but I wanted something more, something yummy and healthy, something with cold fighting powers mixed in. Chicken noodle soup it is.

We normally buy whole chickens and if I don’t use the carcass right away, I freeze it for stock or soup. This was the perfect time to use one up. This past weekend Morgan also closed up our garden and pulled the last of the carrots. These little guys were definitely making it into the soup!

I started with the base of onions, celery and cute garden carrots (plus some extra from the store).

Then I added 8 cups of water, the chicken bones from a yummy roasted chicken and some herbs.

I had some sage, basil, oregano, and thyme from the garden and found some bits of bay leaves in the pantry.  I tossed it all in, let it boil, then reduced to a simmer for about an hour.  Right before we were ready to eat, I removed the bones, and added some pasta.  A few pinches of salt later, lunch was served!

One of Starr Lily’s favorite things is having picnics in the living room, so we got cozy on the floor and gobbled up some delicious and immune boosting soup! Even Baby Koala Bear got a spot at our picnic.

Is there something you like to eat to keep your family healthy?

All the extra candy

So after a fun trick or treating night with dear friends,

we ended up with a good amount of candy.  We don’t eat a whole lot of candy around here so this year we decided to have some fun with it! Instead of letting it sit in a bowl and collect dust until the next “candy season,” we did some art and experiments with it all.

First we dumped it all out on the kitchen floor and sorted it.

Starr Lily sorted her “dulces” based on color, or type, or shape.  We found candies that had S’s on them (her new favorite letter) and made a separate pile for all the skittles.

Next we practiced some cutting,

and more sorting,

and pouring.

Then, we observed.

Within a few seconds of adding water, we had some awesome colors! And because she put different colors into the same bowl, they started blending! It looked really cool. I pulled out the paintbrushes and some paper and she painted with those colors for a little while, but the blending was what really captured her attention.

Eventually she poured them all into the same bowl, but she made this little work of art first.

Isn’t it adorable?  Ha! I think all her art works are great. But seriously though, look at how focused she was at getting those little papers to stick with her skittles paint!

I’m not sure what else we”ll do with the other candy.  Maybe see if they float or not? Talk about density? Maybe cut some open and dissect them with tweezers and other pincer tools? Either way, I think she’ll enjoy playing with them.

Have you done fun experiments with candy? I’d love to hear what you did.

Halloween 2013-Up!

We have a tradition of going all out for Halloween.  Now I’m not a big fan of haunted mansions and zombies and the like, but enjoy the chance to really play an awesome game of dress up.  It started back in college when we did some pretty epic entries into Trunk or Treat at our church, and there was a bit of a lull post college/pre kids when we could only convince the dogs to dress up so much, but then kids arrive and we were allowed to go crazy again.

So far, we’ve been a bluebird in a forest, King Kong and the Empire State Building, Hey Diddle Diddle, and Hansel and Gretel (along with the witch, of course).

This year, we decided to include the dog and he was the original inspiration.  You see, I know Doug loves a good project, so I thought making the dog talk would be right up his alley, and it was….but then he just didn’t have enough time and ran into some issues and the talking dog never happened.  The rest of the costume hopefully made up for it.

We love a good theme, but something a little out of the box when possible.  It seems a waste to sew up costumes that I can just go to the store and buy, right?  Luckily our kiddos are still young enough that they don’t demand much of a say, plus they just love dress up so are happy to participate in any costume.

First I made Kevin the Snipe.  This was the one that required the most sewing and work on my part and I wanted to get it out of the way.  I started off with a basic fleece costume (there was an elastic band under the bum, raglan sleeves that I shortened, and I colorblocked it to make it match the feathers I had planned).  After I had the basic structure, I hand stitched feather boas over it to match the inspiration.  I included a few craft feathers that were stitched/hot glued for the accent colors, too.  For the hood, I started with the hood from the pattern, then added yellow fleece for around the eyes, cut up some ping pong balls, and glued them in with some felt.  I used some pipe cleaners with feathers attached for the crest and a sheet of yellow foam for the bill (painted orange at the end).  For some structure, I attached a baseball cap underneath and a pipe cleaner inside to help keep the bill from going more mask.  It still flopped a little, but it didn’t bother her at all.

  Dexter became Russell, the Wilderness Explorer Scout.  We started with a thrifted yellow shirt and a matching hat found at a local outlet store.  I made the vest and bandanna, and printed out the WE logo on some iron on paper to attach to the hat, flag, and shirt.  The flag is just felt on a stick, Doug used carpet pads with badge printouts for the sash, I made the little bead thing he had in the pictures out of felt and a shoelace.  Then we just decorated his backpack with lots of stuff on carabiners.

Mr. Fredrickson came together pretty easily with a thrifted jacket, bowtie, and cane but then we ran into a slight roadblock with the hair.  You see, Doug doesn’t have hair so we couldn’t just spray his white or something, and old man wigs are very hard to come by.  I did the best I could to make him a nice head of white hair using some headband webbing and felt for the under-structure and craft fur for the hair.  I think it gets the point across….

Last, the Up House.  Pretty essential part of the whole costume since it definitely doesn’t have the most recognizable characters.  Doug built a house facade out of some craft wood and painted it up.  We decided that just the front of the house was enough (and would make my life a little easier, too).  It had some buckles to attach around my neck, then we just tied some balloons on.

Dug the Dog was all set as is, and we were ready to set out!

Anyone else love a good family theme?