Favorite Pinterest idea to date...

I have no good picture of my finished product, but this is the shelf I could easily clear off and consume in a month not to mention the pinto and refried beans.  

This is an awesome money saver, they taste delicious, and I feel like I'm giving the family higher quality food.  

Stephanie O'Dea has awesome slow cooker recipes and her instructions on how to make black beans in your slow cooker are great.  I cooked them for an extra hour and still felt like they were a little tough.  But after being frozen and cooked into some chili, they were some of the best black beans I ever ate.  I love this.  We eat TONS of beans around here and I'm looking forward to making these on a regular basis.  

Playing and working with Emma

In the morning after we drop off Ada at school, we will often come home and get right to work.  Em will usually go right for the watercolors or some other thing in the art supply bin in the kitchen.  Right now there is a tray with glitter glue that both the girls are LOVING.  They squirt it out (or I do it for Emma- where she points on the paper) and spread it around with a qtip.  Ada has made "Saturn", "Jupiter", and last night while skyping with Nana and Gampa, she made "all sorts of roads".  I love having the art supplies out all the time.  Luckily they both really like to do that sort of thing, so they always have a go-to activity.

I'm getting myself sidetracked.  Emma and I will come home from school and... do art or work on some of the "Montessori- type" work I put on a bookshelf in the living room.  We will work together or she works on her own and I get the dishes put away or other stuff I need to do in the kitchen.  I finally got the Valentine's stuff put away and got this up over the weekend.  The button thing is mostly for Ada- I made it for our plane trip but it didn't really get used while we were traveling.  The color sorter is good for both girls in different ways.  Then I have some of those color tiles ( I made them with paint chips and woodsies), and the Melissa and Doug magnetic dress up girls Ada got for Christmas from Gramma Deb (a favorite).

Made this from 2 buttons we had from a lacing toy we got from the Popes and a piece of ribbon from a Christmas gift.  The felt was just left over scraps from other projects and I just cut random freehand shapes.

But this is really how Emma would rather play with the buttton work...

The color sorting work.

For the record, Emma is 1 and cannot accurately sort these colors.  I put them in the bins to demonstrate and she just plays with the pieces.  She especially likes putting little pom poms in and out of a little frog that has an open bottom.  Ada can identify colors and the objects and makes up stories for each one.  Her favorite is the little red flipper/jumper thing.  When Emma found the car she walked it over to the car I made Ada when she turned 2.  I just pulled it up from the basement because I'm kind of sick of looking at it and was going to recycle it.  She drives the car around the car (funny, Ada used to do the same thing).

And then, there's Peek-a-boo...

I heart pizza dinner

Tonight we had pizza shaped like hearts.

I used scissors to cut the dough into heart shapes and parbaked to make it easier for the girls to put on toppings.  I had wanted to make my own dough and put pink coloring in it to make it extra festive, but alas the pop and fresh dough was what happened here.

Pre-baking: this was the huge one we made for Papa.  Basically it has every thing on it that we like on pizza: mushroom, pepperoni, artichoke hearts, olives, peppers, buffalo chicken.   I tried to make an arrow out of an olive and put it on the center heart- kind of a fail, but that's why it looks so weird.

Ada's mushroom and pepperoni pizza.

Pinterest-inspired book for Emma

We made this as Emma's Christmas gift from Ada.  I had wanted it to be a more hands on activity for Ada- print pictures, glue to pages, add stickers, drawing, etc, but alas, this became an after bath photo shoot before bed then upload to Shutterfly and a few clicks later we had a book.  Again, taking a page from the Just Make It camp, instead of the perfect minds eye project, this became a project that got done.


Here is were I got the idea to do this...

I wish we had added some words that Ada could read as she gets a little older.  Something like:

 "Ada is holding an orange car"   "Papa is wearing black glasses" and so on.

Emma made a gift for Ada that they both play with now.  You can see a picture on Flickr of the nesting wooden dolls I got for a couple dollars at Hobby Lobby and simply gave her one color for each doll and let her have at it.  I just used the regular finger paint we use for painting and Tony put a healthy amount of soap on the edges to help them open and close more easily.