Snow Day #4?

Dyed Rice.  This one was super simple.  Put a cup of rice in a bag with one teaspoon white vinegar and your choice of dye.  Close the bag and agitate.

Spread damp rice on paper towels to dry.

Make kids go outside while rice dries.

 Allow the kids to use the rice however they see fit.  My girls had a tea party with blue rice tea.  It was delicious.

More snow day activities...

"Borrow" mom's old herbs and "cook"...

Get dressed up and play dental hygienist...

...because that's how dental hygienists dress.  Chandler is subduing the patient.

This last one takes a bit more preparation, but it was worth it.  We gathered up some of our plastic animals and shells that hang around the house, then submerged them in hand-colored Knox gel.  After it firmed up, we excavated our creatures with any tools we could lay our hands on - forks, spoons, pastry brushes, water bottles.

Some sampling may have occurred.

After the exhumation, we boiled it all down and started again.  We got at least three rounds out of one box of gelatin.  A little strange, but a big success.

...and snowed...

I just read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, so on our third snow day of the year, I did my best impersonation of Ma, by boiling sugar and molasses and giving the resulting goop and a pan of snow to the girls.

When the girls dribbled the molasses goop over the snow, it hardened into "candy" which the girls liked to eat well enough.

Frances made a candy "F."

She was a tad pleased with herself.

It was a great activity, really - literary, seasonal, gastronomic and brief, a winning combination.

And then it snowed...

like so:

Yep, after a relatively dry winter, snow decided to set up camp in Boston.  The first snow day was great.  After getting something like three feet of snow over twenty-four hours, the T shut down and Mark got to stay home for the day.  We finally got out the microscope we got Frances for Christmas.

And it just happened to be the day before his birthday, so we celebrated early.  The girls "helped" me make cupcakes.

Notice the fingers in the icing.

The girls also helped me make a paper chain to decorate for dinner.

We had some pretend tea to steal ourselves for....

...a trip outside.

You know it was cold because both girls agreed to wear hats and  gloves.

We stayed outside, mostly digging out the car, until the girls looked like this:

Such a good day.

There are many more posts like this yet to come.  By the time I'm done, it will be a guide to staying at home with two kids for an extended period of time.  Big fun, coming up!

Express Train for the Looney Bin, All Aboard

Here are the girls getting ready for school one morning:

Don't they look on-task?  How we get out the door each day is a mystery.

First Hair Cut; Boo

Chandler, dear, pulled out much of her hair this summer.  She was getting six teeth at the time, so we thought the hair-pulling was some sort of pain management technique.  She eventually left it alone and it did what hair does (grow back). 

At Christmas, she started at it again.  We had no teeth to blame this time around.  She was tired from waking up all night, but she seemed really happy during the day with lots of family around, dogs to play with, and sheep to watch.  Chandler kept at it after we got back into our home routine; she started to look like she had mange.  We decided we had to do something, and so...

Thankfully, she was completely cooperative during the haircut, she looks cute with the short hair, and she seems to have quit the pulling.  At least for the time being.  I'm trying to be quietly optimistic.  Do I sound quietly optimistic?

Who said TV was bad?

Frances has been obsessed with My Little Ponies for a long while now, and I have to admit I don't hate it (I think I once saw a Big Lebowski reference).  This summer, she wanted to make a quill out of a feather, because Twilight Sparkle uses a quill.

Frances must have grown tired of the shows she's seen on Netflix over and over, because she branched out to some new version of My Little Ponies in which the ponies have morphed into people - people who play guitars.  After discovering this new version, Frances wanted to make a guitar.  Your wish is my command, little person.

Now she's determined to put strings on it.  I'm working on that.