30 Day Challenge: Mega Floor Doodles

Read all about this awesome challenge here!

We're already to Day 7 on this Challenge!? It's flying by!
Day 7:

Mega Floor Doodles

Well ours are more Mega Wall Doodles. Our floors are all carpet, so today, while Daddy took the little ladies to the playground, I taped and taped and taped paper all over the walls!

I was so excited to see the girls' faces when they came home from the playground. Here is the exact conversation Charlotte and I had about it.

"Momma, what did you do to the walls?"

"Oh nothing, I just taped paper all over them so you can draw."

"Well what are we waiting for!? LET'S DRAW!"

and 

she did!

She started off with a story about meeting a new friend at the playground.

 I brought out some stickers that were included with some balloons we had from Lexi's first birthday.

We made a lot of faces and some aliens too

By the afternoon the girls had drawn all over the biggest wall

After dinner they wanted to give paint a go.

I thought it would be nice and relaxing for them to do before bed

They really had fun painting all over their drawings 

Charlotte said she was putting mud on the faces

I thought for sure that drawing would be the first thing the girls would want to do when they woke the next day

Turns out they wanted to be ballerinas first

 and draw second

 All of the paper is still up because there is still a lot of paper they haven't used yet

 These two walls are near the kitchen, 

I was hoping they would feel inspired to draw while I was doing dishes or cooking

instead, they still would rather help me in the kitchen

which is A-OK with me!

(I'm still keeping the paper up just in case)

 Are you playing along with the challenge?! It's not too late to join in on the fun!!

30 Day Challenge: Family Time

Read this post to learn all about the 30 Days to Hands on Play Challenge I'm participating in!

Day 6 Challenge:

Family Time

If you are looking for pictures in this post you will not find them. Though it seems like I blog about every little thing in my life, what you see is only the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to spending time together as a family, our favorite part is having the memories that only OUR family (Daddy, Mommy, Charlotte, and Alexis) remembers.
Sunday is traditionally our family day every week. We start off every Sunday with pancakes and then see where the rest of the day takes us. It's usually lazy days snuggling together on the couch, playing games, reading books, and eating snacks. If it's nice outside you'll usually find us at the playground.

Trust that we were able to get the most out of family time for the Challenge on Day 6 and I hope you were able to as well!

PS is it cheating to clean the house IF we were playing Cinderella?

Are you partaking in the 30 Days to Hands on Play Challenge? I'd love to follow along with you! It's not too late to join!

Pancake Sunday 11.6

Instant Pancake Mix

Pancakes

Today I tried a new recipe, Alton Brown's recipe for "Instant" Pancake Mix, you know, like Bisquick. The recipe has fantabulous reviews, 500 something 5 stars. 

WHAT!?

That's just crazy, I had to try it.

So the recipe for the dry ingredient is enough to make pancakes on 3 separate occasions.

Store your pancake mix for next Pancake Sunday

The wet ingredients called for buttermilk, like always, we didn't have any so made our own sour milk.

Just, apple cider vinegar mixed with milk.

The recipe also calls for egg whites to be mixed with the milk

it made a ton of little bubbles in the milk

Mix the wet and the dry

Mix until just combined

don't try to get the lumps out

Since these pancakes are plain you can add whatever your little heart desires.

One of my little hearts asked for bananas on her's

Since there is a lot of butter in these pancakes and you need to butter the griddle (so they don't stick)

the tops and bottoms are super yummy crispy

Just when I was finishing up my plate of pancakes, hubby woke up and ate all the rest. 

Then declared he loved them

I didn't.

The batter was way to runny for my liking and from experience runny=eggy.

I like big and fluffy.

These were borderline crepe-y to me. Everyone else liked them though so I suppose I'll be making them again, especially since I have the mix hanging out in my pantry.

30 Day Challenge: Play Dough {and Day 4 update}

Read this post to learn all about the challenge and to read my mission statement.

The challenge from Day 4 was

Pretend Islands

but after two failed attempts to initiate play on day 4 and a failed attempt on day 5 I decided that pretend islands was a lost cause (at least for now). I'm not really sure what happened with that because pretending to be in shark infested waters is one of their favorite things to play at the playground and lava ground is popular for the grocery store. I'm sure soon enough the girls will be hopping from pillow to pillow and I'll never be able to get anywhere in the house that I need to because all the islands will be too far apart to jump to. Day 5 went much better.

Day 5 Challenge:

Play Dough!

We all love play dough and especially making our own. Making it is half the fun! We've been out of play dough for a little while (SHAME!) so I knew the girls would be really happy to have some around the house again. It is definitely the go to activity for them and I like it because it's not super messy but keeps them super occupied.

We used the play dough recipe that Anna from The Imagination Tree posted here.

It's mostly a no-cook recipe but, the water is supposed to be boiling so I added it in and Charlotte stirred it all together.

You can find a ton of other play dough recipes here.

Everyone helping make the play dough

So here's what we did for the challenge:

Plunk the play dough in front of the girls

Plunk some doodads in front of the girls

watch them go to town

 At first is was a bit chaotic, the girls were just squishing the dough and adding everything they could get their hands on

A birthday cake for my birthday coming up soon!

 Then they finally started slowing down, taking their time and creating things

A nice smile for a little blue man

Lexi practicing cutting 

 A Lego man garden with a little blue pond filled with pebbles

 Finally toward the end of play we had a nice jewelry shop up and running. We were creating rings, bracelets, and necklaces as fast as we could. We had very demanding customers...ourselves!

 Hey Anna! You said it's not really messy!!

As a surprise for Charlotte, I let her make some Cloud Dough after Alexis went down for her nap. You can find Cloud Dough play here at The Imagination Tree and here at Tinkerlab. It was nice to get some special one on one time with her. We spent a lot of time rubbing the cloud dough in our hands, the texture is really nice. It's so hard to describe, you just have to make it! It was fun to make big clumps of it and then rub it in our hands to "snow" down into the bin at one point it was also parmesan cheese being grated into the bin. The cloud dough turned into a bakery, filling up silicone cupcake cups, measuring spoons and cups. When we were done, we put the lid on the bin and set it aside to be able to pull out again for some fast fun!

Don't forget, it's not too late to join in on the challenge!

Falls Lake State Park

This is a map we have hanging up on our wall. It's hanging directly to the right of me at this very moment. It has a list and location of every single state park in the state of North Carolina and we have been slowly checking off every. single. one.

Pink spots are where we've been, yellow spots are what's left to visit within 2 hrs of us

This post is all about Falls Lake State Park. 

It's about and hour away from where we live, straight highway.

This is not going to be super detailed post because we didn't explore every little section of the park. It's more like a collection of separate parks grouped together to form one park. There are seven different areas to this one park. We wanted to visit Sandling Beach but it was already closed for the winter (PS I was ticked about that considering it was about 70 degrees the day we went) so we ended up visiting Rolling View instead. If you click the link to go to the map, you'll see toward the bottom left a fishing pier, that's where we started off, then we made our own trail along the beach.

The first thing we noticed on the beach was that the water was low, like a couple hundred feet low. Then we noticed clams all over the shore. They were everywhere!

You know what clams mean? LUNCH! Animal prints started appearing all over the beach, it was fun looking at the prints and trying to figure out how long they were there for and if it was more than one animal.

Heron tracks

Charlotte drew her own version of heron tracks, I think she did a great job!

We followed deer tracks, some sort of dog tracks and racoon tracks!

Racoon's have the cutest little tracks

See all the bugs on the water? And the dark fish spots under the water?

The water had left the ground super squishy and we had a really hard time keeping Char and Lexi out of it. At one point Lexi became stuck and I caught her just before she fell down face first into the mud. Both pairs of white sneakers are now brown.

All over there were signs that the water of the lake used to be much higher than it was. There were clams on fallen trees

Dirt under trees was eroded out exposing roots

 and water has carved tree stumps into organic sculptures.

 It's a beautiful park.