Edible Playdough

28oz peanut butter
2 1/2 cups powdered milk
6 TB honey

Run powdered milk through a food processor until powdery (I should have done this but didn't- you can see that it made my dough a little grainy). Combine all ingredients. Mix well and knead with hands until workable.

Makes enough for about six kids to have a little to play with and plenty to eat for a snack!

Set out other little snacks to use for decorating (cheerios, raisins, nuts, marshmallows, coconut, pretzel sticks, etc) I also set out a couple of little pots of honey that the kids could use with the pretzel sticks as "glue."

Lots of fun!

Mama's Busy Game: Categories

I find that most days there are times when I am busy doing something with my hands, but my mind and mouth are free to interact with my daughters. Sometimes it's nice to just enjoy silence and time to think, but at other times I don't want to waste the moments with M and G.

One game that M and I often play while I'm making dinner is "Categories." I think of a category and we each try to think of examples. I might say, "Let's think of different animals." Then I ask her "Is a lion an animal? Is a chair an animal?", etc. (M really enjoys it when I make ridiculous suggestions!) Then she will do the same thing, and we will go back and forth until we have exhausted the category, and then we will move on to a new one.

This game is, of course, very flexible, educational, and can even help teach morality. One recent category we've explored is "Let's think of good and bad times to be silly."

Can you think of some good categories to explore with a two-year-old? (I may use them for dinner tonight!)

The Little House

Uppercase/ lower case wheels

I have great hopes for my new little box of brass fasteners. It seems like they could enable a lot of fun creativity. My first project with them was a set of simple wheels for M to turn and practice correctly aligning her capital and lower case letters. It works well and has become a semi regular feature during our school time.

Does anybody else have interesting ideas for things to do with the fasteners?

Homemade Book: See and Say Book

My mother is very good at thinking about M's next logical step in her progress toward reading and making little books geared to help her advance. Her most recent book is especially good in this department.

It is a simple story with events, people, and places especially tailored for M's world. The words in the story are interspersed with pictures so that as I read to her and track where we are with my finger M can supply the words that are illustrated.
Here is a little video of R and M reading the book together.

(Often, my mother and I make books for M using these blank books, but this time my mother just taped pieces of cardboard together- not quite as durable, but it still looked nice!)

Review: Island Adventure Water Table and Your Ideas for Summer Fun

It's certainly fun to have a new enticement for little ones to want to spend time outdoors; so when I was recently given the opportunity to review the Island Adventure Water Table made by Little Tikes, I jumped at the chance.

Here are the table's basic features:
- three bellows for the child to push
1. to make a water fountain spurt up
2. to cause a drawbridge to go up over the moat
3. to make the water in the moat circulate and push the toy boat forward

- a small waterwheel that turns when the child pours water into a spout
- a toy car and toy boat

Pros:
- Probably the best recommendation is that we've had it for weeks, and my daughter still asks to go play with it just about every day. She can play by herself, and play imaginatively and creatively.
- The water wheel works very well and is fascinating to toddlers
- The height is just right for 2-5 year- olds to play standing up

Cons:
- The bellows for the drawbridge and water circulating in the moat don't work very well at all. In fact, we have yet to succeed in getting the water from the bellows to push the drawbridge up- even once.
- The legs fall off every time every time the table is moved.
Bottom Line: If you are looking to buy something engaging and relatively inexpensive for summer fun, I think this is a good option, but I would suggest maybe letting your kids discover what the moving parts do on their own. If you get them excited ahead of time about the way it is advertised they may be in for a disappointment.

The water table is a fun choice, but I'd also love to hear about other summer toys that your families have bought or made or ideas you've come up with that don't require any props at all!

A Pleasant Home

[W]e must get over the idea that we can't decorate by ourselves. Granny's antique rocker, the stool we got at a yardsale, the pillow embroidered by a friend, the stack of baby's books, the sheets of music at the piano, the flowers picked from the garden this morning; these are what give our homes soul and make them pleasant to be in.

Now, I am not here to promote a certain kind of decorating. We all have different likes, opinions, and resources. We put the bowl of fruit on the table because we love the way it lights up when the sun pours in the window. We are God's people. He created light and texture and color for His glory and our delight. The more we delight in his gifts, the more we can please Him. Our homes are the canvases He has given us to paint. Let us paint them with soul, with gospel, and with all our might.

-Nancy Wilson from Praise her in the Gates

Our Family's Fourth Passover

Starting a new family tradition can be awkward or even feel silly. Sometimes that means that the tradition is not really a good "fit" for a family, but other times it just takes persevering and tweaking to get to the point where it is worthwhile. Such has been the case with our family's celebration of Passover. This year felt very comfortable and rich with meaning.

Part of the reason it felt so much more worthwhile than last year, I think, is because M has entered the "why" stage and was constantly asking us for the reason for everything that we were doing that was unusual. R and I loved the way this reminded us of Exodus 12:26-27

And when your children ask you, 'What does this ceremony mean to you?' then tell them, 'It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.'

We really like the idea of passing on our faith in this way- building rituals into our family life that are not only poignant to us as mature Christians but that also cause our children ask questions which provide natural opportunities for us to explain things that are precious to us. We like being able to teach without constantly "talking at" our children. The questions allow them to lead the way.

As with last year's meal we adapted some elements from Jewish tradition and found others ourselves.

Early in the day, M and I took out the suitcases and packed them with things we might need for a trip. Then we carried them downstairs and set each person's suitcase beside their chair. We also draped each person's coat over their chair (A modern equivalent of God's command to the children of Israel to eat "with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand.")

Before the meal, R hid pieces of leavened bread around the house for M to find. Once she found them we had her throw them out of the door.

We ate lamb, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs (spring greens) and drank grape juice for our Passover meal.

In a traditional Jewish Seder an extra cup is set out to symbolize the anticipation of the Elijah figure who will come and announce the coming of the Messiah. In folk Judaism, Elijah is said to sip from the cup of wine at each house on Passover night. We set out an extra cup with grape juice to symbolize the presence of the Messiah Jesus at our meal. M was particularly interested in this cup. We told her that it was for the Guest at our table whom we could not see. (You can just imagine how this would affect the active imagination of a two-year-old!)

After the meal, R read Exodus 11 and 12 aloud while M and I looked at the corresponding pictures from The Read and Grow Picture Bible.

And that's it! There are a lot of other things we could have done together to celebrate Passover, and maybe we will in future years, but for now, I'm glad that we've kept it manageable; I think we will be more likely to keep the tradition alive if it is simple.
Does your family do anything to commemorate Passover? Please feel very welcome to share your ideas and memories in the comments section.

Birdcall Pet Names

Lately I've been reading The Shaping of a Christian Family: How My Parents Nurtured my Faith by Elizabeth Eliot. I smiled at this anecdote that she shares about her father:

Wherever we went he watched for birds. He wanted so badly to give to each of us the love he had for those beautiful creatures ever since his teen years...He gave each of us a special bird call that he used instead of our name if we were at a slight distance away, in another room, across the street, or in the backyard. Mother's was the chickadee; mine was the wood peewee. As I write, it is springtime on the coast of Massachusetts and the wood peewee has come back for the summer. From time to time the tiny three note call rings pure and clear from the oak wood next to our house, and I want to run and say "Yes, Daddy?"

Find and Paste Letters

Here's an easy and engaging activity my mother recently did with M. She prepared pages with letters of the alphabet widely spaced out and asked M to search for occurrences of each letter in snippets of newspaper headlines, magazine articles, etc. Then my mother cut them out and M had the task of gluing them on to the correct area of each page.

Resurrection Rolls

A friend recently gave me this recipe for Resurrection Rolls, and I'll be making them for Easter breakfast this year. Each roll is baked with a marshmallow in the center so that, when it's broken open, one discovers that it's hollow inside-- just like the empty tomb. (The first comment below the recipe gives a couple of neat ideas for making the process of making the rolls meaningful, too)

Munchies for Game Nights

There is a little detail to which my mother consistently paid attention when we were growing up that I am convinced paid off exponentially in making our home an enjoyable place to be. Every time our family played a game together she was tireless in making sure we had tasty and healthy munchies at hand.

It gave people a little something to do when it wasn't our their turn, and made sure that everyone's blood sugar stayed at happy levels. Mostly she cut up fresh fruits and vegetables, but sometimes there was fresh popped popcorn too.

Such a simple thing, but a definite happy trademark of our home growing up- something our friends remember as well.

Has your family discovered any details that help to make game nights successful in your home? Please feel free to share them in the comments section.

Free Family Fun in Austin: Bats Under the Bridge

I just love exploring a location to uncover all of the interesting places and events that can be enjoyed for free or inexpensively. Our family has lived in Austin, Texas for a little over a year now, but before last week we had never gone to see the bats make their nightly emergence from under the bridge downtown. (And not just a few bats either- 1.5 million of the creatures live under that bridge, making it the largest urban population of bats in the world!)

It was definitely something interesting to behold. Just before sundown the bats began to flow out from under the bridge in a steady stream, and remained clustered together in a dark, silhouetted trail that reached across the sky for miles (pictures don't do it justice).

It turned out to be a very pleasant and unique family experience. We arrived at the bridge about a half an hour before sundown, and so had time to take a stroll by the lake during that golden hour before dusk. Then we found a place to sit together on the lawn and listened as the high frequency bat noises grew louder and louder and a few began to trickle out from under the bridge. For the next fifteen minutes or so they continued to fly out, and we chatted and watched.

Apparently, March is not the most exciting time to view the bats. (There aren't as many as there will be as the summer goes on). I imagine we will go back another evening later in the season to see them again.

Does your hometown have some frugal, unique activities or locations? It would be interesting to hear about them!