The Beach

We spent Thanksgiving in California with my family and spent some time at my parent's newly acquired beach house while we were there. The weather was wonderful, and we enjoyed a nice walk on the beach.

Sara loved digging in the sand.

Sara and her cousins went back to the beach later in the day. Here they are before leaving the house. Not sure what that face is Sara is making!

And here's an awesome video of Sara doing what I think is supposed to be hula dancing, but she calls it "Sand Dancing". Silly girl. :)

Halloween

The girls each had two Halloween costumes this year. Accidentally. Well, kind of.

Here's what happened.

I was determined NOT to buy a Halloween costume for Sara this year, only because she has several dress-ups that she could use, most of which had never been used for Halloween, including a mermaid, a bee, and a purple princess dress. The tricky part was, I wanted Sara and Ava to have cute matching/coordinating costumes, so I had to think of something to go with one of Sara's already owned dress-up costumes. I thought Ariel (aka, "The Little Mermaid") and her sidekick fish Flounder would be adorable, but I wasn't having any luck finding a cute Flounder costume on the internet. So then we went to plan B, which was pull out the costume Sara wore on her first Halloween when she was 10-months old, and hope it wasn't too big for Ava who was 2-months old. It was a little big, but it worked.

So, Halloween costume combo #1 was, a strawberry and a bee. This was at our neighborhood Trunk-or-Treat.

And for some fun, here is Sara wearing that same strawberry costume three years ago for her first Halloween:

{Sara, Halloween 2009}

I dressed up a little as well, if you call wearing black and buying some Halloween-colored striped tights "dressing up". I also have bats floating above my head, so it counts as a costume, right?

For anyone keeping score of Halloween costumes past (though I doubt any of you are!), yes I did wear that same bat headband once before, and yes, I just wore black and called it a costume at last year's trunk-or-treat too. Sometimes we are creative with costumes, and sometimes we're not. When I'm not feeling creative with costumes, I usually just end up re-using something I already have. Works for me!

Oh, side note: So we were getting ready for the trunk-or-treat and I asked Rob to make a paper spider and web to decorate the trunk while I was out running errands. In my head I was picturing just a plain old two-dimensional spider and web, but Rob had something much better in mind.

It's hard to really tell from this photo, but that spider is 3D, origami style! And the web has some slight 3D effects to it also. Let me just say, I was SUPER impressed! We taped the spider and web to our front door after the trunk-or-treat, and I fully intend to save them to use for decorations next year too! THAT'S how good they were!

Oh, and lest you forget, it was totally Rob who decorated our trunk with construction paper last year too. He realized that the under-side of our trunk had these cut-out shapes that looked like a giant face, so we just added some paper and voila! On the cheap halloween decor!

{last year's trunk-or-treat decor}

So, as you can see, we keep Rob around for decorating trunks once a year. He's pretty good at it. :)

SO...I started this little story by telling you the girls each had two costumes for Halloween this year. RECAP: Costume combo #1 was a bee and a strawberry. 

NOW onto costume combo #2!

As I mentioned earlier, I really wanted the girls to be Ariel and Flounder from "The Little Mermaid", but I couldn't find a cute Flounder costume and couldn't attempt to make one in time for the trunk-or-treat which was the Saturday before Halloween. BUT, I was able to talk Rob's mom into whipping up a last minute costume for actual Halloween day, and here's what we ended up with!

Can you believe Rob's mom made that Flounder costume? It was so awesome! She used a yellow jumper she already had (it's one that her kids used to wear!) and altered the length and added felt for the flippers and fins. I helped, but she did all the work. Thanks Angie!

We already had the mermaid costume, so I just needed the red wig and we were good to go.

So there you have it! The tale of two Halloween costumes. I just hope they won't be expecting two costumes every year from now on!

Rides at Liberty Park

There are some fun little carnival-type rides at one of the parks here in town, and Sara and her cousins have enjoyed them a few times this summer. Here they are on the 4th of July.

Riding the ferris wheel (Sara with cousins Abbie and Mason)

Cousin Zé with her parents Bry and Emma on the ferris wheel. 

Airplanes with cousin Cole (he's in the plane behind her)

Carousel 

The rides are pretty old and ghetto, but for a 3-year-old, they can't be beat!

J.R. Watkins -- an unplanned nostalgic gift

A few Saturdays ago, Rob and I were at our local grocery store (the larger, all-inclusive, sells clothes and housewares too kind of place) looking for some ideas for Mother's Day gifts for his mom and grandmother who we would be seeing at dinner the next day. (Yes, Angie, I just confessed that we waited until the last minute to find a gift for you. As if it weren't abundantly obvious already!) -- We were in the soaps and lotions aisle when I saw some hand soaps and lotions that I liked the look of. They had an attractive vintage label, and even seemed legitimately authentic by using the word "apothecary" and the tag "since 1868". Then there was the clincher; the word "NATURAL". I didn't know much about this brand, but I was sold. The buy-one-get-one-half-off coupons attached to the shelves were just a bonus at that point. SO we picked up two each of the lavender hand soap and body cream, wrapped them in cute gift bags when we got home, and that was that.

Rob's mom and grandma both seemed to enjoy the gifts, and both said how much they love the lavender scent (which is why we chose that one). Success.

I didn't think anything more of the gifts we had given them until we received the thank-you note from Rob's grandma who is always so consistent about sending detailed, heartfelt thank you's. This note was no different, and started out much like the others we've received in the past, but when she started talking about the lotion and soap we gave her, a smile came to my face and I was suddenly surprised by what I was reading.

It says:

"What a nostalgic ride the J.R. Watkins products are. I can actually remember the Watkins man coming to see if we needed any of his products. I think my mother used to buy from him. But especially my grandparents on a farm in Mesa depended on him for so many things--regularly. I'll use the soap and lotion with delight and nostalgia."

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Rob's great grandmother and great-great-grandparents both used, and even relied on these products. What a fun thought to think of The Watkins Man going door to door, even farm to farm, seeing which products his customers needed more of. Knowing that the J.R. Watkins brand truly has been around, used, and loved "since 1868" made me like the products even more.

Intrigued by Rob's grandmother's note, I looked up J.R. Watkins online and found they make much more than just soaps and lotions. In addition to all kinds of natural personal care items, they also sell natural cleaners, dish soaps and laundry detergents; natural remedies for pain relief, cough & cold, sun care, and dietary supplements; and even natural gourmet flavor extracts, seasonings, sauces and oils.

Something about it makes me want to buy every product they sell! What can I say, I'm a sucker for authentic natural products, and when you throw in the nostalgia aspect of this particular brand, there's no turning back. J.R. must be doing something right, because right along side Rob's mother's mother's mother's mother, I am now a believer. 

Natural Egg Dying

My sister-in-law and I gave our first attempt at natural egg dying on Friday. It was a fun experiment, and some of the dyes worked really well and relatively fast. Check it out!

We let the kids dye eggs with store-bought artificial dye kits while we got started on our natural dyes (which take a lot longer to prepare and dye than the pop a tablet of dye into vinegar kind). -- Don't worry, the little one on the left has juice in his cup, not dye. :)

We looked at several different natural egg dying blog posts to get ideas for ingredients to make our dyes. Here's what we ended up trying:

Back Row: beets, red onion skins, yellow onion skins, turmeric, turmeric + blueberries

Front Row: blueberries, red cabbage, grape juice concentrate, strawberry puree

OUR METHOD was to boil all the dye ingredients (separately of course) to extract the color from the food/spice. Then we strained the liquid from the food bits, poured the dye solution into mason jars, added a little vinegar, then dropped in an egg. The only exception to this method was the grape juice concentrate, which we just thawed and added the egg directly to it, and the strawberries which for some reason we tried to puree them in the blender instead of boiling them. As you'll see in the photos below, that didn't work. At all. If I ever try using strawberries again, I'll definitely boil them instead.

After a few hours of letting the eggs sit in our natural dyes, here's what we got:

beets, red onion skins, yellow onion skins

turmeric, turmeric + blueberries, blueberries

red cabbage, grape juice concentrate, strawberry puree

Like I said above, the strawberry puree did absolutely nothing. If you attempt strawberries, try boiling them instead. And actually, just try boiling raspberries instead of strawberries, because that is what all the websites recommended. We just happened to have strawberries on hand so we tried them, but messed up on the method. Oh well. :) 

The beets and red onion skins were the last dyes we made, so their eggs didn't sit in the dye bath as long as the others. I think they would have produced a better color had they sat longer. Also, we didn't have as many red onion skins as we did yellow onion skins, which accounts for the drastic difference in color saturation between the red and yellow onion eggs. The turmeric worked great! As did the blueberries, and the interesting combination of turmeric plus blueberries (a suggestion on one of the blogs we found) which produced a beautiful green. But next time I would try straining the blueberry solution through something finer like cheesecloth to get a smoother texture. The speckling on these eggs is kind of beautiful though.

The kids got out the costume box to entertain themselves while we worked on our natural dyes. :)

Left Bowl: grape juice concentrate, strawberry puree, red onion skins, beets, red cabbage

Right Bowl: blueberries, yellow onion skins, turmeric, turmeric + blueberries

** Now an interesting thing happened when I put these eggs back into their cardboard container and drove the 10-minute drive back to my house. THEY CHANGED COLOR! Check it out:

Here's how the eggs looked before I left my sister-in-law's house:

beets, red onion skins, yellow onion skins

turmeric, turmeric + blueberries, blueberries

red cabbage, grape juice concentrate, strawberry puree

And here's how they looked when I got them home:

yellow onion skins, turmeric, turmeric + blueberries, blueberries

red cabbage, beets, grape juice concentrate, red onion skins

The four eggs in the back stayed mostly the same color, but the eggs in the front changed dramatically! I don't know if it was having them enclosed in the egg carton or the heat from the trunk of my car or what, but I was very surprised when I got them home and saw the different colors. 

Here's a side-by-side comparison with lines connecting the same eggs before and after their change in color:

color-changed eggs as pictured in bottom photo: 

red cabbage, beets, grape juice concentrate, red onion skins

I really don't know what made those four eggs change colors like that--maybe we needed to let them dry longer before putting them back into their cardboard carton?--but they turned out beautifully. 

clockwise from left-center: red onion skins, grape juice concentrate, yellow onion skins, blueberries, red cabbage, beets, turmeric + blueberries, and turmeric in center.

COLORS AS THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO APPEAR:
PINK: beets / strawberries?

RED: red onion skins
ORANGE: yellow onion skins
YELLOW: turmeric
GREEN: turmeric + blueberries
BLUE: red cabbage / grape juice concentrate
PURPLE: blueberries

WHAT WORKED:

• Blueberries - boiled in enough water to cover for about 20-30 minutes. Strained liquid, let egg sit in liquid for 1-2 hours. Produced a lovely marbled dark blueish color. Would have done differently: strained through cheesecloth to get smoother consistency and less marbling on egg color.

• Turmeric - boiled a few tablespoons in water until dissolved. Let egg sit in liquid for 1-2 hours. Produced a rich yellow color.

• Turmeric + blueberries - combined some blueberry liquid with some turmeric liquid. Let egg sit in liquid for 1-2 hours. Produced a nice green hue with blue marbling (see "would have done differently" under blueberries to reduce marbling).

• Yellow Onion Skins - boiled skins from about 8 onions in water for 20-30 minutes. Let egg sit in liquid for 1-2 hours. Produced a rich red-orange color.

WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY:

• Beets - boil beets longer and let egg sit in liquid longer. (only boiled for about 10-minutes. Egg sat in dye for less than one hour).
• Red Onion Skins - boil more skins and let egg sit in liquid longer. (only boiled skins from two onions. Egg sat in dye for less than one hour).
• Red Cabbage - chop cabbage smaller to allow for less water in boiling. Let egg sit in liquid longer. (Boiled 1/4 head of cabbage cut into large pieces for about 30 minutes. Egg sat in dye for 1-2 hours).
• Grape Juice Concentrate - maybe try 100% juice not from concentrate instead? Let egg sit in liquid longer. (Egg sat in dye for about one hour).
• Strawberries - boil to extract color, let egg sit in liquid longer. (Pureed berries instead of boiling. Did not work at all. Egg sat in puree for about one hour).

WEBSITES FOR DYE MIXTURES AND METHODS: these are the websites I found and referenced to make our natural dyes. 

• Two Men and a Little Farm - has a great list of several options for each dye color
• Comfy Tummy - their colors are so rich! I will try their method next time (boil dye material for 30 minutes, then boil egg in dye liquid (instead of hard boiling before sitting in dye).
• The Make Your Own Zone - good color saturation also.
• Katie Did - shows lots of variations in results. Her red cabbage blues turned out so pretty!

OVERALL REACTION TO NATURAL EGG DYING:  it's a lot more time consuming than using the dye packets you buy at the store, but the natural dyes produce beautiful, natural, rich colors not found in the store-bought dyes. I will definitely try it again with a few alterations. You should try it too! And if you do, let me know how it goes!

Now the only problem is, the eggs are so beautiful, I don't want to crack them open to eat them! :)

Neighborhood Trunk or Treat

Sara, Queen of the Fairies

 

A costume of things we already owned plus a shirt from the thrift store to complete the look. Can't beat that!

Our trunk at the Trunk or Treat:

We gave out apples from the apple trees in our yard, and candy too of course!

Rob noticed that the inside of our trunk had these cut-outs that looked like a face, so we put construction paper inside and voila! On the cheap trunk-or-treat decorations!

Sara chilling on top of the car while enjoying a hot dog, chips and drinks provided by the Neighborhood Watch.

My costume was "wear a black skirt and black sweater and Sara's witch hat from last year's costume." Done. 

I stayed by the car to pass out treats while Rob and Sara went around to all the other trunks.

 Sara enjoying her spoils.

Happy Halloween!