Apple Nachos

I don't know why it took me so long to make these things!  I actually saw the recipe before I even knew Pinterest existed and just forgot to make them.  It took me seeing the pin, then having a friend review them, to get me to actually try them.  Apple Nachos!  Pure deliciousness!

You can really do these in so many variations.  We had melted peanut butter, caramel, and chocolate chips on ours.  The link above uses nuts and shredded coconut as well.  These were so incredibly good!  I set them down in the middle of the dinner table for everyone to snack from.  The 3 year old took one apple and the next time I looked over, this is what I found;

He totally claimed them for himself.  When I reached over to take one he reprimanded me with a loud, "Hey!!"  Sorry dude, gotta share these things!  We made short work of them and you'd better believe we'll be making them again and again and again.

The two paper filled plates above are from the corn dogs mini-muffins we also had.  

Baked Corn Dog Muffins

Okay, corn dogs are awesome.  They're yummy and delicious and everyone in the family likes them.  Not so yummy and delicious on the whole health front though.  So when I saw this pin for Baked Corn Dogs how could I not try them?  I mean, they still probably don't qualify as health food, but they are a definite step up from the fried stuff.

The linked recipe has it's own link for a cornbread mix but I went the easy way and just used a box of Jiffy mix.  I gave the boys a couple of nitrite free hot dogs and told them to get cutting, a job they both thoroughly enjoyed. 

While they were busy with their job, I mixed up the Jiffy mix, then we added the chopped up hot dogs and popped them in the oven.  I used mini muffin paper cups for mine because my muffin tins are gross and getting rusty I wanted to be more festive. 15 minutes later and they were done!  Do you think they liked them??

Those two muffin paper filled plates at the top were theirs.  They had 11 of them.  Each. The bottom plate was our apple nachos. (see link for post)

The 6 year old declared this the "best dinner ever!", as well as putting them on the menu for his birthday dinner.  Hey, it is only about 11 months away-gotta plan!  Both the 6 year old and 9 year old said the corn dogs muffins were their favorite part of the meal, even above the caramel, peanut butter, chocolate covered apples.  That's sayin' something!  This one gets an A++ and we'll make them often.

Sight Word Shooting

When I saw that this pin involved Nerf guns, I knew it would be a hit.  Add Nerf guns to pretty much anything and my boys will enjoy it.  I wish I could come up with a way to sweep, dust, and pick up the house with Nerf guns.

Yesterday I taped some sight word cards on our sliding glass door for my Kindergartner and I would say a word, then have him shoot it.  The sight word cards I had were a bit too easy for him but he still really REALLY enjoyed this activity.  An added teaching moment was when I showed him how to use the sight on the gun to aim at his target.  This will be very useful should he decide to become a sharp shooter someday.  A well rounded education, that's what we're all about here.

I'll be doing this project again for sure.  I want to make some cards with more difficult words on them and I would love to try it outside at varying distances like the original poster did.  I'm thinking it would be great for math practice as well.

Sweet and Sour Chicken

Tonight we had Sweet and Sour Chicken in honor of the Chinese New Year.  I did a Pinterest and Google search of a few different recipes and then kind of modified a couple of those to make this.  I used this sauce recipe  and, instead of breading my own, I used this chicken.

It's the Perdue Simply Smart and it's our current favorite chicken.  It's all natural, the ingredients are all easily pronounceable, it's low in fat, and it's just darn good!!  The husband has it every.single.night for dinner.  He's one of those odd people who can do that with out getting completely sick of a food.  I think his whole menu consisted of 6 different foods before I met him and I like to think that I have opened his eyes and expanded his horizons to all of the yummy food goodness out there. He insisted he hated garlic, until he found out I had been sneaking it in his food for years, he insisted he hated Chinese food until I made him try some back when we were dating and now he loves (at least some of) it, he insisted he hated bagels until I forced him to try them, and he wouldn't let a tomato come within 3 feet of him.  Still can't get him to like pickles or olives (of any color) though.

I digress....

I cooked the chicken for it's regular time and while that was cooking, I steamed some shredded carrots and assembled the sauce from the recipe linked above.  Once the chicken was done, I just cut it up in pieces, poured the sauce over it, and put it in the oven for about 15 minutes at 350 while I made the rice and got the dinner table ready.

This was a HUGE hit!  Everyone loved it!  Overheard from the 9 year old during the course of the meal, "This is awesome!"  "This chicken is delicious!"  "You should make this a lot more often."  "My favorite part of it is everything!".

The 20 year old had 2 big helpings and said she loved it as well.  Even the 6 year old, who despises (and I'm not exaggerating) chicken ate the piece I served him.  He even said it was better than other chicken, but made sure I was still well aware that that didn't mean he actually liked chicken. I scarfed it down myself and would have had seconds but I wanted to save some for the husband to try when he got home.

Any meal that doesn't get whines and moans goes on the regular rotation so this will certainly be one of those!

Oatmeal Chocolate Peanut Butter No-Bake Candy Bars

I pinned these No Bake Oatmeal Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars a few weeks ago without actually reading the recipe first.  I was hoping to use gluten free oats and Enjoy Life chocolate chips to make them safe for everyone to enjoy.

Turns out, they call for coconut oil which my touchy stomach doesn't tolerate.  It pretty much rejects anything that's super healthy, I think it hates me.  But, I still wanted to try them for the rest of the family so today I whipped up a batch.

These were ridiculously easy to make, took only about 10 minutes tops.  I made them with gluten free oats, substituted agave nectar for the honey since agave is lower on the GI scale and therefore less affects your blood sugar, added a couple of tablespoons of fiber powder, and I omitted the dried cranberries because we didn't have any. I also halved the recipe since we were low on agave and peanut butter so I made them in a 9" round pan instead of the 9 x 13.

These were a huge hit!  The older two boys and the husband absolutely love them!  Since I used the super expensive gluten free oats, the 3 year old won't even try them of course.  I convinced him to take a tiny nibble off one corner and he wouldn't try any more, saying he doesn't like them.  I'm considering force feeding him as I know he would like them if he gave them half a chance. (kidding, kidding)  I'm hoping that his older brothers utter enjoyment of them may convince him to give them another try.

These are definitely still a treat, but a pretty darn healthy one with the oats, coconut oil, and fiber.  I'm guessing we'll be making these pretty regularly.

*UPDATE:  These did not even last 24 hours.  They're gone.  The 3 year old finally tried one and said "I like these now!" and the 6 year old suggested I make more tomorrow after saying "These are SO delicious!"  The husband called them "dangerous" and I'm pretty sure he's the main reason they're already gone.

About Me Adjective Frames

I have to admit, I didn't actually read the blog post about this Adjectives activity but just went by the picture.  Looking at it now, I pretty much got the right idea. ; )

The boys and I worked on Parts of Speech earlier this week, new learning for the 6 year old and review for the 9 year old.  We played some Mad Libs and then did this face framing About Me activity.  I've also been discussing choosing more interesting words in writing with the 9 year old and recently got him a children's thesaurus.

We pulled that out and got to work thinking of words that described each of them and looking through the thesaurus for inspiration.  It was fun for me to see which words they identified themselves with and they had fun finding a word like "smart" in the thesaurus and choosing which variation of that word they liked the best (the 6 year old chose "bright").  It was good reinforcement for learning parts of speech when we'd find a word like "play" and talk about how that was an action word, but the word "playful" was a describing word.

The boys and I all enjoyed this activity and it's another one I'm sure we'll revisit in the future.

Lung Model

We've been continuing our study of the human body this week and today we focused on the lungs and how they work.  We made this model of a lung and diaphragm after reading about lungs in a couple of our body books.

The model was easy to assemble with minimal time and supplies needed.  My boys were especially happy to drink some Root Beer so we could get the bottle for this project!

It was actually really cool to see how moving the "diaphragm" up and down would make the balloon lung fill and deflate.  You could also put the mouth of the bottle up close to your face and feel the air coming out. The 9 year old said "I really like this!"

I'm sure we'll be revisiting this project in the future with the younger ones!

Homemade Orange Julius

Growing up I l-o-v-e-d getting Orange Julius's from the store at the mall.  I haven't had one in years (are there many around anymore?  I guess I don't really go to malls these days.) and my kids have never had one so when I saw a pin for Homemade Orange Julius  I decided to make some for them this weekend.

They turned out pretty good!  They were a little thin but that was not the fault of the recipe.  I remembered, a bit late, that our ice maker in our freezer is broken so had to make ice the old fashioned way and the cubes didn't really have time to fully freeze so it was a tad watery.  The boys still liked these though and they want to try again tomorrow with some totally frozen ice cubes.  I'm not sure they'll become a regular thing around here, but they were good and fun for a Saturday night, and probably a Sunday afternoon, treat.

I noticed the spill on the counter top a bit late.  Please ignore it.

Tie Dye Cloth Napkins (or Our Further Venture into Hippie Hood)

Last summer I was on one of my many Salvation Army treasure hunting trips and I came across a plethora of white cloth napkins that I'm assuming, due to the "Northwest" stamped in the corner, had come from the airline.   They were marked in groups of 3 for $1.99 but were yellow tags which were 50% off that day so I bought a bunch with the intention of using them in lieu of paper napkins someday.  I got home and put them on a shelf in the laundry room and there they sat for the next 9 months or so.

Doing all of these Pinterest projects lately has gotten me in full on crafting/project mode and when I was doing laundry earlier this week, I happened to notice the napkins sitting on the shelf and made it my goal to get something done with them.  I had thought about dying them to hide stains from use.

When I was pregnant with the 3 year old, the family tie dyed t-shirts in matching colors for the new baby and his big brothers to wear when he came home from the hospital.

Oh gosh, he was just the cutest little thing!

We had a bunch of dye left over from that project, as well as all of the rubber bands, so yesterday the boys and I covered the table with plastic and got our creative on.  The boys had a blast doing this!  They needed me to help with most of the rubber banding but they would choose what patterns they wanted to do and we had fun experimenting with some of our own ways of folding and banding the napkins.

The absolutely LOVED using the dye!  They must have commented at least 20 times about how much fun tie dying was, how we should do it more often, how cool it was...And I only had a minor panic attack over two young boys playing with dye in my kitchen. (only two small splatters on the floor, whew!)

We let our napkins sit wrapped in plastic overnight and today we got to reveal them and check out our handiwork!  I ran them through the wash, and unfortunately, some of the white turned a bit dark from all of the excess dye so they're not quite as vibrant as they were before the wash, but I still think they look pretty darn cool!

Some of our favorites ended up being the experimental ones like the corner design in the upper right and the diagonal stripes on the lower left.

The upper right with the top and bottom stripe was another experimental one.

We also did some freehand designs like the top center one.

So now we have 20+ cloth napkins to use to reduce our use of paper napkins and paper towels.  With the bright, happy colors I think they'll be a lot more fun to use too!

Ham, Turkey, and Cheese Sliders

Last night I tried out this recipe for Ham and Cheese Sliders, only since some of us don't eat red meat (or as I like to say "nothing that walks on 4 legs) we made some turkey and cheese ones as well.

It was only the boys and I for dinner last night so I cut the recipe down to 6 sliders, instead of the 24 the recipe calls for.  I also didn't have any poppy seeds so I omitted those as well.  I had read some comments about the bottoms getting soggy, and I was also worried about how my picky eaters would react to the topping, so I drizzled it on really lightly.  I wish I wouldn't have.  The topping is really what makes these yummy!  Both the older two liked them and I think they would have still liked them with more topping.  I made mine with turkey and Swiss, the 9 year old's were ham and Swiss, and the 6 year old had turkey and American.  Everyone enjoyed them and ate both of their sandwiches.

I think we'll probably make these again someday and next time I'll be more generous with the buttery goodness on top.

Photo Wall

I pinned this awesome photo wall a long time ago and totally forgot about it.  Last week, I was going through my "For the Home" board, trying to find some new decorating projects I could try for little to no money and saw this pin.  Now, I'm a bit of a photo freak.  I LOVE photographs and having them all over my home.  My biggest complaint about our house has been that there's not enough wall space for all of the pictures I want to hang.

So last week, I spent some time going through closests and drawers and storage and collecting all of the picture frames I had.  I did buy a $3.00 8 x 10 at Walmart and a .50 small frame at the Salvation Army, but all the rest of them were ones I already had laying around.  I tend to pick them up at garage sales during the summer to hang on to for whenever I might need them. Glad I did!  I painted some of the wood ones with the blue paint that we used on our family room wall, the green paint from our living room wall, and the pink spray paint I've used for a couple of accent pieces.

Once the frames were all painted and the photos all collected, we got to work laying out a plan.  I had some leftover brown packing paper from our body mapping project last week and, as luck would have it, it just happened to be almost the exact same size as the wall.  It was just short about 6 inches at the top.  We laid that out on the floor and then arranged the photos how I wanted them on the paper.

Once we had the lay out done, I then used a marker to put a dot on the paper where each nail should go.  Then we taped the paper up on the wall and the husband hammered the nails over the marks I made while the 20 year old and I put all of the pictures in their frames (in the picture above, the photographs are just laying on top of the frames).  I had taken a picture of the layout on the paper so we knew where each photo should go on the wall as well.

There were a few frames that didn't have hangers on the back so I used another ingenious Pinterest trick for that...a pop can tab as a photo hanger!  We couldn't screw into the frames, like in the link, so we just used the go-to lazy person's solution...duct tape!

This morning, two of the heavier frames had fallen so I'm going to have to use something a bit stronger, I'm thinking I'll super glue the pop tab on and then duct tape again, but the tiny frames are holding up just fine.

We got all of the frames hung up and then I rolled some painter's tape and stuck that behind a lot of them to keep them from hanging crooked.  Here's the wall before....

And here's my new photo wall.....

I absolutely love it!!  I love the pops of color, I love the artsy collage look, and most of all I love the fact that we can display more of our family photos in a pretty way.  I have pictures of all of the kids as babies, pictures of my grandparents when they were a young couple, high school pictures of my parents, and pictures of myself as a child.  What a great family history wall!  I wish I had some pictures of the husband when he was little but hopefully I can eventually get some and add those as well.  This has been one of my very favorite Pinterest ideas that I have tried so far!  I want to fill every wall in our house with photos now, but that might be just a bit too much??

Crack Potatoes

Tonight we had chicken for dinner, along with these Crack Potatoes.  I was really looking forward to them!  I halved the recipe, partly because only a couple of my family members like hash browns, but mostly because I have very little will power when it comes to cheesy type potatoes.  I tend to eat half the pan myself before I know it and my stomach hates me the next day.  I also used turkey bacon, cooked and crumbled, instead of Bacon Bits.

These were super quick to put together and smelled super yummy while they were cooking.  The end result, however, left something to be desired.  None of us were big fans of this one.  The 3 year old actually took a bite, pinched his nose closed, and said "Ew, gwoss!"  I'm thinking that's a thumbs down??

The 20 year old, husband, and myself ate what was on our plate but no seconds.  (okay, I did have a couple of more bites out of the pan.  I guess even not so good cheesy potatoes are a weakness)  The ranch flavor was REALLY strong, too strong for most of us, the 20 year old is the only one who said she actually liked them but she didn't like them enough to save the leftovers.  They went in the garbage.  I think maybe if I just used half a ranch packet, lots more cheese, and some butter or something they might be better.

The recipe has a lot of great reviews so it's obviously a hit with some, but we won't be making it again.

Super Hero "Dollhouse"

When I first joined Pinterest several months back, I saw a ton of cute pins of bookshelves made into dollhouses for Barbies, or Polly's, or whatnot.  I thought they were adorable and what a fabulous idea, but, being as I have 3 boys, not a project for me.  Then I got the idea to make a kind of boy dollhouse.

I spent a couple of weeks hitting up the local thrift shops until I found this guy for $5.00 that I thought would fit the bill perfectly. 

 I took the boys to the craft store with me to pick out some scrapbook paper in themes they liked.  I thought about decoupaging the paper right onto the bookshelf but I wanted the option of changing out backgrounds or even repainting the bookshelf should the kids get sick of the dollhouse thing eventually.  So, I scrounged around in the garage and found some old yard signs that were made out of a heavy plastic material that I thought would be great to use to mount the paper on.

I measured the back of the shelves and cut the signs to the right size, then simply taped the paper to the signs.  The kids had 4 backgrounds they wanted and the bookshelf only had 3 shelves, so I made one reversible.  The forest scene reverses to a haunted house spooky scene.  

We wanted some kind of standard super hero design, so the kids picked out sky paper for the bottom shelf and then made paint chips into city buildings, another Pinterest idea.

It turned out pretty cool and, 4+ months later, it's still played with almost every day.  Not to mention, it makes a cute shelf for their action figures to be stored on when not being played with.

Valentine Garland

Okay, so this isn't one I saw on Pinterest, I came up with it all by myself.  But, I'm going to pin it so, therefore, I can include it on my Pinterest blog.  : )

When we were at Target this past weekend, all of the Christmas items were 70% off.  I found these felt heart ornaments that came as a 3 pack for $1.00 originally but were clearanced at .30 per pack.  I picked up a few of each color (red, purple and hot pink) to make a garland with.

This morning I cut all of the gold hangers off and strung them on some white ribbon, tying each one on to keep it from slipping around.  That's all there was to it!  For about $3.00 and 30 minutes, I have a cute Valentine decoration.  Target had a ton left when I was there on Sunday!

Pizza Rolls

Tonight we had Pizza Rolls, or I guess they're really called Pepperoni Rolls, for dinner.  We changed up the original recipe a bit.  I used the Pillsbury refrigerated pizza crust instead of the frozen bread dough, even though I still have 4 loaves of that in the freezer from when we made the Braided Spaghetti Bread, and we used turkey pepperoni, so no cool big deli slices for us.

This was fast and easy to put together.  I stuck it in for 10 minutes, then checked on it.  It was lightly browned on the outside so I cut into it to check that and the dough was still raw, cheese not melted.  The bottom was getting pretty dark however, so I moved it up a rack in the oven and stuck it back in for another few minutes.  I'm not sure how long, because I actually forgot about it, and when I went to check on it, it was really brown.  I was a bit worried dinner was ruined and we'd be calling up the pizza delivery guy but figured I'd at least try it and see if it tasted burned before I threw it out.  It wasn't bad!  It was actually pretty good.  The inside dough was just cooked so if you're going to use pizza dough for this one, it seems like the outside has to be pretty dark before the inside will be cooked enough.

Everyone liked this and had seconds.  We'll probably have it again in the future.

Fabric Scrap Bracelet

So I could have sworn I had this project pinned but I can't seem to find it on any of my boards and did it from memory, so I have nothing to link it to.

I was at the Salvation Army today, on one of my many thrifting trips, looking for things to re purpose and I found this beauty for .99.  I have been looking for bracelets in this style for awhile, wanting to try the project that I saw somewhere but can't quite remember where, but was having a hard time finding ones that wouldn't fall right off my 8 year old sized wrist.  This one fit and the price was right so I bought it!

Sorry for the world's worst picture.  I really need a camera.  Maybe hubby will buy me one?  You know, for the sake of the blog??

When I got home, I pulled out some fabric that I had laying around and ripped two strips from it.  I didn't measure but I'm guessing they were about 1/2" wide and 20" long.  I put a dab of fabric glue on the inside of the bracelet and just started wrapping the fabric around, gluing a bit more as I went.  That's it!  It was ridiculously easy and literally took about 5 minutes. Cute, huh?

Ingenious Chip Clip!

Well, there's not much to say about this one except that it's super easy and free!  Pinned it under my "Why Didn't I Think of That" board and when I was cleaning out my closet this week, I found a hanger like this, remembered the pin and here we go!  Perfect, since most of our chip clips have been lost or broken.

Caramel Cream Cheese Dip

One of the treats we had during our New Year's Eve party was this Caramel Cream Cheese dip. We actually had it for the first time a few nights earlier when we had some friends over but it was so yummy, and such a hit, that it was requested again.

It's super super easy with only 3 ingredients and takes about 3 minutes to make as well.  I topped ours with the Enjoy Life chocolate chips instead of the toffee chips to make it safe for everyone.  I also used light brown sugar instead of dark as that's all we had.  The original recipe says that dark gives a richer flavor but we thought it was great with the light!

I had apples, graham crackers, bananas, and pretzels to dip in it and the 3 year old had gluten free pretzels, gf animal crackers, and fruit for his.  We pretty much finished off the whole thing between just the 5 of us...so good!  I have a feeling this will become a stand by for get togethers and parties at our house.

Cerebrospinal Fluid Experiment

Going along with the anatomy lesson we did yesterday, today's Pinterest activity was a cerebrospinal science experiment.

The boys really liked this one! The 9 year old and 6 year old were both really interested in it and enjoyed trying different ways to shake around the unprotected "brain".  They tried doing jumping jacks with it, skipping, "acting crazy", and then dropping it from different heights to simulate a fall.  We weren't able to break, or even crack, the egg but I also didn't let them drop it from higher than 4 feet since the cover wasn't super secure and I didn't feel like cleaning up splattered egg today.  But there was a lot of brain rolling around and knocking into the sides of the skull so they got a good general idea.

They were quite amazed by how well Mr. Egghead was protected by the water being added.  They tried all of their same activities and were literally open mouthed with how different it was with the water there to cushion the jostling around.  We talked about what it would be like if we didn't have cerebrospinal fluid to protect our brains during activities like wrestling with their dad, playing football, exercising, or falling.

This one was a hit!