Want an easy sweet treat to enjoy with the family? Here is my new go to. You don’t need the stove and only use 1 bowl, so clean up is easy! This is a great recipe to use with the kids and get the whole family in on since it can be easily done around the kitchen table. You will need: -A bag of chocolate chips (or peanut butter, butterscotch, white chocolate...or a mix...whatever will make your tastebuds happy) -Cereal (I tend to use whatever bag(s) of cereal have been opened but not finished in a couple weeks time) -A microwave safe large bowl -A silicone spatula -A cookie sheet or two -Wax or parchment paper (optional) Directions: 1. Pour the chips into the bowl. 2. Microwave a couple of minutes until it is very easy to stir. 3. Pour in and mix cereal a little bit at a time. You want to make sure that cereal can be completely covered by the melted chips. Be sure to scrape the edge and bottom of the bowl as you do this to make sure none of the melted goodness gets wasted! 4. Spoon small clusters of the mixture onto your cookie sheets. (pro tip: make them bite sized, so you can pop them in your mouth) 5. Put them in the fridge to harden. 6. Move them to a bowl (I store mine in the fridge to make sure they don’t melt together over time). Enjoy!! Have fun experimenting with fun flavor combinations and other add ins like dried fruit!
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We are about to enter our 3rd week of home learning. Where we live, teachers are beginning to get guidance as to what home learning should look like and my kids are beginning to get guidance and activities to work on during the week. With that in mind, I am going to switch up this post this week and provide you with some resources that I have found over the past week that might be helpful to you or may give you and your family a fun way to learn something new. If you have a Baby Shark fan in your house, here is a fun video for you to watch while practicing good hand washing and cough/sneeze catching techniques! Thank you Pinkfong and some of our favorite Nick Jr characters for this gem! Have little ones in the house? Dr. Katy Huie Harrison with Undefining Motherhood has a post with 25 Toddler and Preschool Activities at Home. Do you have a student at home who is struggling with their distance learning on a computer? Control Alt Achieve has an article from 2016 that has some tips and tricks on Chrome Extensions for Struggling Students and Special Needs. Do you love someone with Autism? A team at UNC has created an online toolkit for those supporting students with Autism during this time of home learning. Have you or someone in your household been wanting to learn how to play that guitar or ukulele collecting dust in the back of the coat closet? Fender is offering free online lessons. Have you been wondering how your toddler is able to complete all the activities you had planned for the day in about an hour? I have some back up for you! This website has many great fine motor activities great for 2 and 3 year olds. Are your little ones having trouble with social distancing? This video may be a good place to start a discussion about it if you haven't had one already...or if you need to have one again. (I know it has been a topic of conversation almost daily in our house). Is your child about to start distance learning with Zoom...and you have no clue how to help them set it up? Someone has made an instructional video just for you! This link takes you to a teachers pay teachers free download that gives you a few home learning choice boards for your preschooler and kindergartner. Access the whole collection of School House Rock on YouTube! (You just clicked on it didn't you?...not just for the kids! :) ) This article tells you about 33 National Parks that you can explore as a family from your home! I hope that you and your family have a wonderful, healthy week full of learning and fun! We've still got this! We are now a week into this new reality of working and schooling from home. I will say that it was definitely a week of learning and I am going into this week with a different mindset. I have learned that my family needs a basic outline of what we are going to do. I have come to the conclusion that we are typically on the go so much that our natural at home stance tends to be more of a relaxation mode. We need to work to find a better balance. I have asked the kids to start a wish list and every evening before bed we will talk about what we will do the next day. It will be a mixture of things that we need to do and things that we would like to do. This way we all wake up in the morning on the same page and with some direction and purpose. As we all head into week 2, I have added to the list of resources (so take a look!) and I have put together another week of lesson and activities ideas for you to use if you wish. We got this! Where I live, in a matter of 24 hours the structure and routines of our daily lives changed significantly with the spread of COVID-19. When our routines get upset and simple things that we typically take for granted are no longer givens (like children going to school, parents going to work, and being able to find cold medicine and toilet paper at the grocery store) it can cause many emotions and some stress. Know that I am keeping you all in my prayers. You’ve got this! With school closings, it has been amazing to see the response from the vast majority of humans. While there are articles about people not following the social distancing recommendations and others hoarding hand sanitizer and toilet paper, I have been overwhelmed by so much good. Resources are being offered from just about every type of business out there for the benefit of the community. Amazing teachers world wide are finding each other in Facebook groups to collaborate and support one another; answering questions and sharing their ideas and creations with other educators. Humans are helping other humans in simple ways that are making a big difference. I would like to make a very, very small contribution as well. My Facebook feed has been bombarded with so many amazing resources for teachers and parents to take advantage of to keep their students and families engaged while schools are closed. Here are two google docs: a compilation of some of these resources (I will try to add new ones as I find them) and a table with the activities/resources I plan to use with my 3rd-5th graders this week at home (Note: I have a tendency to over plan and we may not get to everything everyday!). Please check back! I plan on sharing my planned activities/resources each week as I compile them. If your kiddos are younger or older than mine, don't worry, the first google doc has a little something for everyone! While we have this “time-out” from our regularly scheduled programs, I encourage you to also take walks, cook together, play board games, sing silly songs, have dance parties, make up new games, read in blanket forts (with flashlights!), color, lay on the floor and play with toys, build Lego creations, and, well, you get the idea. Learning can happen in so many ways! I feel like I am always paying for something. Groceries, piano, baseball, pictures, field trip, hair cut, tutoring, dance, gas,...I could probably type all day long before I run out of things. I know I am not alone! Something that has helped me save a little bit of money along the way has been an app called ibotta. Do you have it?
I have been using it for almost 2 years now. There are some people who are very good at ibotta-ing like some are good at couponing. I am not one of those people...I am an amateur and don’t always remember but still have gotten over $600 in rebates in the time I have been using the app which I think is amazing! How does it work?
That’s it! It is that easy :) Wanna give it a try?? Click here to sign up! Do you already use it? Tell us your favorite ways to spend your rebates! About a week ago we adopted a puppy! My husband and I are self proclaimed “big dog” people. We grew up with large dogs and when we were first married we had a 75 lb lab mix. It has been years now since our first dog passed away and the kids have been wanting a dog. After much thought and an unsuccessful adoption of an older, medium sized dog a couple years ago who ended up not being kid-friendly, my husband and I decided that the best fit for our family right now would be a puppy that we could train and that could grow up with the kids. We also decided, even though the thought was a bit painful, that we needed a small dog--a dog that likely wouldn’t grow to be over 25 lbs. It isn’t that we don’t like small dogs. We love all dogs, we just have always had large dogs and are drawn to them. We wanted to adopt a puppy from a rescue if we could, so we started checking out the local sites regularly and last week a chihuahua mix puppy was posted as being available to adopt. So, we filled out the paperwork and went out to adopt our Teddy. Now that he’s been a part of our family for a week, I’ve learned that I love small dogs too! In no particular order, here are some things I love about our small dog:
We’re only a week into this new journey and it has been a great week! Welcome to the family Teddy! I’m sure I’ll be sharing more of our adventures with Teddy as time goes on. Until then, are you a small dog person or a large dog person? Summer day trips are one of my favorite things. It is nice to be able to pack up for the day and go have a fun time with the family. It is even better if you can have a fun day-cation for not much more than the cost of a tank of gas. If you find yourself close to the DC area, check out Colonial Beach, VA. This small town has a small beach on the Potomac River with street parking right there. Parking is $1 per hour that you prepay at a machine (that takes credit card!) that are well marked. Once you pay, it prints a receipt and you put that on your front dash.
Earlier this week we packed a cooler with lunch, snacks, and drinks; grabbed our beach bag (beach umbrella, flat sheets, floaties, sand toys, and sunscreen; hopped in the car and drove! Because of the location of Colonial Beach, you don't encounter the same traffic that you do when you drive to larger ocean beaches. It is a very small, sleepy town and we have never encountered large crowds, so as a mom I'm able to relax a little more. It is easier to relax under the umbrella and watch the children play from a distance. Since it is a beach on the Potomac River, there aren't ocean waves. Small children are able to play more independently. We had a wonderful day of playing on the beach as a family. This has become one of our go to day trips. If you live close by or are in the area visiting, go check it out! Click here to see the Virginia is for Lovers page on Colonial Beach. A cool aside: While we were there, at lunchtime, a bus came around with free lunches for school aged children. It pulled up and the driver, over a loud speaker, announced "Free lunches for school aged children." Many children ran up to the bus from the beach and got a lunch. I've heard of many school districts implementing a summer lunch program for school aged children to help combat hunger when children are out of school. I was so very happy to see this! Thank you Colonial Beach Public Schools for having this program and giving me a chance to see it in action! I don't know about you, but my kiddos are still a little on the young side to be staying up to watch the ball drop in Times Square. And if I'm truly honest with myself, I don't want to try it. My kids are not the best sleepers. No matter what time they go to bed at night, they're up the same time every morning....and that's usually about 5:30 am. 7 am is sleeping in...and that happens very rarely. SO, staying up to watch the ball drop would result in very cranky children for a day or two. But that doesn't mean that we can't still have fun!
When my oldest was about 3 years old I started to have an early celebration with the kids. I searched YouTube for the ball drop from the year before, made fun snacks, popped open the sparkling apple juice, and we settled in front of the laptop to ring in the new year! Now that my oldest is more aware of what year it is, she realizes that the ball drop we're watching is from last year. But, with a promise to record the ball drop and watch it the next morning, she is still content with our New Years Eve traditions...and in bed by 8! What does your family do to ring in the new year? Life moves so fast that the ability to unexpectedly slow down is often a welcome treat. Yesterday while I was at school I heard rumblings of the possibility of snow. In schools these rumblings spread quickly among the teachers. Many were bummed that it was coming on the weekend, but snow is still snow!
We woke up to a dusting, but weather reports suggested a day of snow where we would get 1-3 inches of snow. I was a little nervous about the snow...I had a full day planned. We were supposed to be at church in the morning for a training and then in the afternoon we were supposed to drive about an hour away for a surprise party. I do not like to be out driving in the snow. BUT, everything that we were supposed to do got postponed today! Today we got the gift of time. The unexpected kind. It is so nice. Since we were going to be out and about all day, I didn't have anything planned for dinner. I poked around the kitchen and pulled out the crock pot, some frozen chicken thighs, a can of diced tomatoes with Italian seasoning, some taco seasoning, and a box of Spanish rice. I put the frozen chicken thighs, taco seasoning, and diced tomatoes in the crock pot and cooked it on high for a couple of hours. When the chicken was cooked all the way through, I used a couple of forks to pull it apart, then I added the rice with a cup of water and stirred it. I cooked it on low until the rice was cooked all the way through. I plan on serving it with some re-fried beans. It was so easy and wasn't much work at all! What do you like to cook on snow days?? What are your favorite things to do when you have found time? My youngest has been really into drawing and coloring lately, which is awesome! We have a ton of crayons, colored pencils, and washable markers at our disposal for all of our artistic musings. Yesterday morning he was hard at work creating a book. He spent all morning coloring and writing his book. When he was done he very proudly showed it to me and read it to me and that's when I saw it... THE MARKERS BLED THROUGH THE PAPER! No problem! We use washable markers in this house!...wrong. He had decided to go into my drawer and get out the "teacher markers" (read permanent markers).....Hmmmm...So, I went and grabbed my go to cleaner. The kind that a neighbor growing up taught my mom how to make that I use now and it cleans everything. No joy...didn't even come up a little bit. So, I got to thinking. In my classroom when I need to get permanent markers off of things with a glossy finish I use a dry erase marker. Our kitchen table isn't raw wood. It has a glossy type finish. I figured worse case scenario, I just add a little more art work to the table, right? So, I go grab my handy dandy dry erase marker and start coloring the table and wiping little bits at a time... Wouldn't you know, it worked! Little by little the permanent marker came off our kitchen table with the help of a dry erase marker and a paper towel! Afterwards I used my normal cleaner to get the residual dry erase marker off the table and it was as good as new! So, if you have a glossy finish to your table and find yourself in a similar situation, don't fret! Go grab a dry erase marker and a paper towel and give it a try. Hopefully it will work as well for you as it did for me! :)
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my momma hatI always love the way this hat looks on me. It's not always an easy hat to wear, but one that brings me so much pure joy. Archives
April 2020
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