Crayons

I used to hate doing art projects with kids. Especially when it came to "let's just draw/color", not my cuppa tea.... I wasn't that creative. What was I going to draw? Stick figures? Hearts? Traces of hands? Now that I've spent a good deal painting and finding ways to enjoy colors and different styles of artwork, it's become fun.

Now I enjoy using Crayons and creating bits of art with kids. And yes, most of them end up with stickers randomly on them or the addition of "rainbows". It is, after all, about the kids... 

Painting with a Toddler

Today I was brave. I decided to brave the mess of paint and let Elsa paint with my watercolors. I lined the part of the counter that she was working at with plastic wrap and taped it down in one spot to hold it in place. She wanted blue, purple and red. With a paper plate palate, I got her set up.  

It was so fun to see how into it she got. She was serious and had fun. She was excited to show Lisa when she got home for lunch and said that one of her three paintings was for her and the others were for Samuel. 

For an hour of fun, there was hardly any cleaning up to do. And this water color paint comes off of skin relatively easily, which is a good thing. :-) Unlike glitter... 

Her works of art. The middle is by far my favorite and her first one, the green one was her last one and she says it's a princess. 

Zucchini

Today was a great day. I went to the J. family's house at noon to hang out with the younger kids cause Mrs. J. had something else going on. It was fun, we talked, they showed me their shell and rock collections, their trophies and ribbons and other things they thought I'd be interested in. They're sweeties. We went on a walk in their neighborhood, the boys picked me gigantic handfuls of dandelions and clovers. On the way back, this sweet couple offered us some produce from their gorgeous garden. They gave us mass amounts of ripe pears, plums, tomatoes in different varieties and zucchini. It was quite the 1/4 mile walk back with four kids and bags full of produce. An adventure!

We spent the rest of the afternoon eating lunch, doing dishes and chatting about random stuff before I left. I seriously <3 those kids.

Got home and almost immediately started making zucchini bread with Jane. The kids had been dying for more since they ate the last of the previous 12-16 loaves we made (okay, we gave away quite a few)... Jane and I settled on making x6 our recipe, a total of 12 loaves. Everything was going great until I counted out the last of the eggs. The recipe called for 18 total. I had 17.

1 egg short.

I could have made it work. I don't think it would have ruined the batch of bread, but I wasn't willing to risk wasting 6 cups of oil, 6 cups of chocolate chips and a multitude of other ingredients. So not worth it.

I grabbed my wallet. I would just head out to Walmart, just a five minute drive away. I stood stupidly in the driveway, the only car there was Dad's car. Jane wandered over to Craig and Janay's house and borrowed an egg with the promise of a loaf of zucchini bread tomorrow.

Friends

From last weekend:

I have friends of all ages, adults, parents, teens, kids, toddlers... I'm lucky I have so many amazing people in my life. On Friday, I got to hang out with some of my favorite little friends. It was an early start, I won't lie, after CAP the night before, I was exhausted. I spent Thursday frantically making gingerbread cookies to decorate, pack for Tennessee and still drive Jane to choir and CAP in the evening. To add it it, Dad was just in from Turkey, so we wanted to catch up and hear all his stories.

The little J. Kids are super sweet. They love talking, running around and playing games. 

We talked from the time the parents left to nine or nine-thirty. The breakfast, then we played with bubbles and then we played hide and seek. They had some really creative hiding spots. After all that, we decorated gingerbread cookies. I requested that they do as pretty as possible, which, for the first time ever, actually seemed to work! 

Joyanna's creations 

Timmy's creations

Nathan's creations

Some of my creations

Stefanie's creations

Jane-O's creations 

We had a lot of fun besides decorating. We made personalized pizzas with the option of two sauces, two cheeses, two veggies, olives and two different kinds of meat. They were delicious! Jane was amazing, she did dishes and helped me keep an eye on their very quiet baby. She was pretty stoked, because she got to help feed baby goats and see other animals. :-)