Relaxing in the sun!

After grocery shopping this evening, Lloyd and I drove home via the range roads again and took one of our favourite routes along a road that is edged on both sides by large ponds/ marshes and bullrushes. In amongst the marshes, on the drier area, Lloyd spotted something and stopped the car, reversed and told me to grab my iphone!!! He had spotted two moose lying down and relaxing in the sunshine! They were too far away to get a good picture and this was the only camera I had. I didn't want to get out of the car as I didn't want to disturb them - they looked so relaxed out there in the evening sun!

I hope you can make them out in the distance - two dark blobs lol! We haven't seen any moose on our own land for so long - we think the work on the house has kept them away!

Click on the picture to make it a little bigger.

Laminating!

Today we have been finishing off some table mats and laminating them using a laminator we bought a couple of weeks ago (thanks Tara). You can read more about this laminator and how we got it, on the homeschool blog (link to the right). The children are really enjoying seeing their projects being laminated and protected!!

Let me know if you need an invite to the homeschool blog - it is updated regularly despite what it says to the right!!

Crackled paint!

This ATC is just one I made to play around with the Tim Holtz Distress crackled paint I bought last week - have to say I am LOVING it!!!! It is soooooo easy to use and the effect is so great :) It's a one step crackle paint and dries really fast! You can even use your heat gun to make it dry even faster! LOVE it!!!! You can ink over it, wipe over it and then stamp on it too! SIMPLE!!!! :)

Anglophile ATC's

These are two atcs I've created for an Anglophile swap I'm taking part in - the ATC's are just a part of this swap though.....I plan to send special extras with my swaps as the person I am sending to LOVES anything to do with England :)

Bunny pot....

This is the little Avon rabbit pot that that I found at the thrift store last week. It's a 1983 Avon pot. I paid $3. for it. I thought it was gorgeous and have it on my scrapbooking shelf in my bedroom at the moment where it is safe. I just think the rabbit is so sweet.

In the future it will come out at Easter and go somewhere in the kitchen each year as the green trim matches my kitchen :)

As a collector of old Avon perfume bottles (I have a lot of them stored in England still) I couldn't resist snatching this up!

Abigails home made table mat

Recently Tara mentioned that her Daughter had a small laminating machine that she LOVED, and recommended this machine as a great resource for the home and for childrens crafts and hobbies.....Tara uses one in her daycare setting also with the childrens projects there and I thought this sounded fabulous! I checked out the laminator at Walmart and thought it was a brilliant idea!!! thanks Tara!!!

We finally tried it out yesterday when Abby made a table mat with her favourite theme - horses!!! I think we will be laminating a LOT from now on :) it worked really well :)

Brazilian sweetened condensed milk cake

I baked this last night - a recipe I found on the 'Eat Me delicious' blog. It has a really simple but strange recipe and I thought I'd give it a try as I had the ingredients. Instead of a ring pan I baked it in a loaf pan for 40 minutes (until a skewer came out clean).

I think it's one of those cakes you either LOVE or hate......Sam really wasn't keen but Abigail LOVES it - Lloyd really liked it too!!! Even warm out of the oven and he doesn't normally like them warm....

This cake doesn't have the normal texture of a sponge cake. It's hard to describe! I think it would be nice sliced with tinned fruit though!!! :)

I'm loving baking and cooking in the new kitchen - just a shame I only get to use it at night and that I still don't have counters yet! Can't wait for the work to be finished and to have it to myself ALL DAY and have lovely quartz counters to work on and a huge island :) And to be able to bake with the children each day :) We have so many plans and so many recipes saved that we want to make! So many experiments we want to do too! We even have plans to make paper - there are some fabulous paper making kits at Michaels we want to get that will get us in to paper recycling and we can't really start doing that until the island is done - but Susie and I want to start doing that as soon as the island is done - we were looking at it all last week and choosing the sets we want to get and talking about everything we want to get to get us started.......the frames etc so we can start making sheets of recycled paper and card stock together :)

Anyway, here is the recipe:

1 can (395g) sweetened condensed milk
4 eggs
120 g all purpose flour
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
50 g unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Preheat the oven to 180ºC/350ºF; generously butter a 22cm* (9in) ring cake pan.

Place all the ingredients in a large bowl and mix well. Pour the batter into prepared pan and bake for 20 minutes, or until risen and a skewer inserted in the cake comes out clean (about 35 minutes).

Remove from the oven and place on a wire rack to cool completely before unmolding.

This mornings sunrise

10 ways to beat the blues....

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7998308.stm

including stroking your pussy and getting intimate with friends ;)

Dance Recital

Abigail recently took part in her year end dance recital with her dance school. Her class (with only 5 students - how wonderful!!) danced to songs form the musical 'Grease' and also the song 'Move It' from Madagascar. Then they took part in the Finale....it was such a lovely evening ad I really enjoyed watching it. :)

Ice cream!

First really warm day and we headed out to celebrate - where else but the ice cream store!!! :)

Easter fun!

Egg hunts, painting eggs, hopping bunnies game, jelly bean bingo......just endless Easter fun!

Science - Senses....

We're working on the topic of Senses right now and one of todays experiments involved sticking our hands in cups of water of varying temperatures and then sticking them in cups of warm water and seeing how the water felt on our hands - did it feel warm or cold depending on whether our hands had been in hot or cold water????

Abigail also had to follow directions I called out in an odd order to draw something and see if we drew the same picture. She also had to draw pictures of things she likes to smell and another picture of things she likes to taste. We looked through the Senses book and read about the five senses but Abigail seemed to know most of it from last year anyway so this is really a rerun for her. Fun though...more tomorrow!!

Snow day....

After days of lovely warm t-shirt wearing Spring weather, we were hit in the butt by typical Alberta weather!! As much as I hate it, I have to say I am just very very grateful for the gorgeous Easter weekend weather - and that this will be short lived and gone before the weekend!

environmentally friendly wrapped Easter Eggs.....

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7990446.stm

Being Brits, we don't 'do' the Easter Bunny thing! Our kids get a big Easter Egg each which we hide and they have to hunt for - they aren't easy to find in Canada but luckily Walmart often sells proper Easter Eggs ie British style ones but only a few and they tend to be Nestle and Smarties or ones the kids aren't keen on - and we are particular in that they HAVE to be 'eggs' as in British style eggs ;) because thats what we grew up with ;)

Anyway....we hide the eggs and they hunt for them indoors first thing in the morning! Lloyd hid the older boys sooooo well that it took them ages to find them :)

Real Easter Eggs come with so much packaging that it always makes me feel so wasteful, so I was interested to read the above article on reducing packaging of easter Eggs....

Our kids don't get Easter baskets filled with toys or gifts from the Easter bunny - but we do a hunt for little eggs outside later in the day and we did treat them to the dvd of Bedtime Stories that we all watched together while they ate their stash of candy from the egg hunt!