Soap Monsters

I started this blog when I became an official stay-at-home mom last fall to write about my experiences of trying to keep baking with a baby around all day.   I've continued to bake, but haven't been doing a very good job of taking pictures and writing about my experiences.   I'll keep working on that.

However, since this blog was started to write about my experiences of being a stay-at-home mom, I'm going to expand it to write about my experiences of having both boys at home with me this summer!

Today was our first official day of Caleb's summer vacation.   I've told him that each day we are home together we are going to do "school" as he calls it.   He needs to spend time reading, writing and doing other things.   He struggles with writing neatly, remembering to use punctuation and with his spelling, so I told him that he needs to spend 15 minutes each day writing.   Today he was writing a letter to his former 2nd grade teacher at Carrie Busey, Mrs. LeVanti.   He told me that I should be writing while he is writing instead of just sitting there watching him write.   So my plan is to blog about our summer experiences while he writes.

Since I've always had a very busy job during the summer months, I've never had a summer like this with Caleb.   I'm really excited to get to take him to tennis, golf, and diving lessons.   I'm excited to go to the libary, the pool and the park with both boys.   I'm even a little excited for the "I'm bored" conversations that we are going to have.

We've decided that we'll do "school" each afternoon while Foster takes a nap (well, hopefully he takes a nap!).   Today we had a good time looking through his "Blast Lab" book for some summer science experiments.   We did the first one today .... we made soap monsters.  

Do you know what happens when you put a bar of soap into the microwave?    It's actually really fun to watch!   And when you take it out and let it cool for a bit you can decorate it with eyes, nose, mouth, arms and legs and make it into your own soap monster.   

After we made the monster we talked about why soap does this when you heat it up in the microwave (the water inside the soap expands when it gets hot).   My very bright almost 3rd grader made the association on his own between this experiment with the soap and what happens to popcorn to make it pop.   He's so smart!   And he says he doesn't like science.    He even said that he had fun!   Here's hoping we can keep having fun all summer with our "school" time.

Substance or Style

At the beginning of February we were on a cruise.   The food on this trip was amazing and very plentiful.   On one night of the cruise there was a chocolate buffet at 10 pm.    We were lucky enough to get to go check out the chocolate, the sculptures and all of the gluttonous display before they actually opened it for all of the passengers.   Caleb probably took 50 pictures of the chocolate sculptures, the ice sculptures, and all of the food.   It was beautiful and appetizing!

While the display was breathtaking, the food was less than spectacular .... which was unusual for the food on this trip.    It made me start thinking a lot about what is more important and how to find a balance in the food that I made in substance over style.  

I would love to have my food and my displays and my pictures to be as beautiful as what they displayed for our chocolate buffet on the cruise, but I don't ever want the highlight of what I make to be looking at it instead of eating it.   

I was also thinking of this as Caleb informed me that Tuesday was Dr. Suess's birthday and we should have a birthday cake for him.   So on Tuesday I made a white cake and split the batter into four bowls and colored each bowl with a different color and swirled it together.   Rather than regular frosting on the cake I wanted to just have cool whip and strawberries on top of it.   I knew that we would like it more if the berries were chopped and mixed into the cool whip, however doing this made the frosting not very smooth and pretty, but it tasted delicious (unfortunately I forgot to take a picture so that I could show the rough looking icing on this cake).

This weekend I made cookies and bread to take to our new neighbors (that's right, I'm trying to win over new friends with food!) and here are a couple of pictures.   I'm hoping that I've made some progress in my stubstance vs. style battle.

Cranberry Swirl Bread

Lemon Gems