Brickey

I have a few things to write about, but first:  Shauna and I made soap.  You can read a little about it on her blog.  Today, I tried it out, and it is so cool!  It's soap!  It suds up so nicely!  And we made it from shortening (among other things)!  This is such a rush!  (You may now snicker at how ridiculous I am.  Speaking of ridiculous, have you seen the Steve Nash commercial?  It's really funny.  You should look it up.)

So here's what we've been doing lately:

For some reason, I decided to make taffy, molasses taffy.  Don't ask what I was thinking.  It was a cognitively weak moment for me.  I ended up throwing the whole thing in the garbage.  Frank wouldn't come downstairs.  He insisted the smell would kill him.  Hours later I did finally convince him to come down, but only with a handkerchief tied around his nose and mouth to help filter out the horrible stench.  (It wasn't burnt or anything, molasses just smells bad.  And tastes bad.  What was I thinking?)

Frank and Aiden made catapults.  They are really cool, and we use them to shoot marshmallows (the small ones).  They had so much fun assembling and painting them, and boy can they get marshmallows flying!  If you're bored, you can pick them up at Michael's for $1 (including paint and glue).  Totally worth it.

 

In other news:  Elise learned to use a mouse!  I'm pretty excited about this because now I can do things (like clean) while she is playing on the computer.  It gets really monotonous to sit and click for her...

 

(Someone should wipe that girl's face off every once in a while...)

We made Transformers out of paper.  It took a long time.  I have to document this so I will remember why my house isn't clean.  Oh yeah, it's because I waste my time doing insane things like assembling Transformers out of paper.  Isn't it cool that it actually transforms?

Frank enjoyed getting his Valentines ready.  When I first told him he had to write his name 24+ times, he just about lost it, but once I showed him that he could put the cards in an envelope with candy, he decided he would survive.

And finally, we made Valentines sugar cookies.  I don't generally do sugar cookies.  They just never taste that good to me, but I decided with a little effort, I should be able to find a recipe I like.  So I googled it, and I guess I got lucky, because I really love this recipe, though next time I'll stick with vanilla extract instead of almond.  I like almond extract, but in these cookies it seemed a little too powerful. 

I was even brave enough to break out the squirters.  I wasn't really sure how that would go, but I put twist ties to prevent too much coming up the top of the bag, and the kids did really well with them.  Sort of.  Elise's cookie ended up looking like this:

Mmmmm....  Frosting.
Frank's totally professional.  He did this himself, though I helped with the letter "a".  He tried "a" a couple of times, but was getting very frustrated with it.  Good thing it's relatively easy to scrape off an errant letter "a".

Mmmm... Frosting.