we had a visitor in the backyard this evening. i was washing the dishes and looking out the window that is over the sink and spotted a turtle! he wandered over through the wire fence at the back of the yard that separates us from the little bit of wooded area behind us. we took some pictures and he wandered around a bit. when he couldn’t make it back through the fence, i had to pick him up and put him through it. then he wandered on his little turtle way. i’m assuming it is a male, since men won’t ask for directions. i did put on gloves before picking him up, and i gently touched his hind legs to get him to retreat into his shell so i wouldn’t accidently hit his head when i put him through to the leaf pile on the other side of the fence. the girl sat and watched to make sure he wandered back into the woods and not our yard.
I tried tinting the plain batch of play dough. Since I only used small balls of dough, I only needed a couple of drops of food coloring. They were about the size of a golf ball. The colors came out pretty vivid, but again, they were small bits of dough, and it would have taken a good bit of coloring to color the whole batch this way. I also tried using paste food coloring that is usually used for coloring icing. that worked really well and since it is a concentrated coloring, it didn’t take a lot of coloring to get darker colors. Once the color is worked into the dough, it doesn’t come off on your hands. I ended up with some black coloring on my hands, but that was where I touched the gel before it was worked in all the way.
I made a few batches of homemade play dough today for the kids to play with this summer. The girl is having a friend spend the night tomorrow night, so i though it would be good to have it ready for them. The recipe i used is a pretty common one floating around the internet and i have seen it in a few books for kids’ activities.
you will need:
1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
1 cup warm water
2 tsp cream of tartar
1 TBSP oil (i used veggie oil)
mix everything in a saucepan and heat over low heat stirring constantly. It will slowly thicken and turn into dough. You can either tint the whole batch one color using liquid food coloring while you heat it, or you can make a plain batch and knead it in after it’s cooled a bit. It needs to cook long enough that it will form a ball in the pan as you stir it around. If it is too sticky to knead when you take it out of the pan, you need to pop it back in the pan and heat it longer. once it has cooked long enough, plop it out on the counter to cool a bit. You want it to be cool enough to knead it to make sure it’s smooth and not sticky. I kneaded it a few times to make sure it was smooth, then I covered it with plastic wrap and left it on the counter to finish cooling. It’s ready to play with once it is cooled. Store it in a plastic container to keep it from drying out. My plastic containers are a little big for each batch of dough, so I am covering the dough with plastic wrap and then putting the lid on the container.
It’s nontoxic dough since it’s basically flour, water and salt. But it is NOT an edible dough. If your little one eats a hunk of it, they may end up with a tummy ache from the salt.
If you want to add the coloring to the dough after cooking it, roll the cooled dough into a ball. Make a well in the middle of the ball and add a few drops of coloring to it. pinch the dough over the coloring and carefully begin to knead the dough. carefully because you don’t want to squirt food coloring every where. I’m not sure how much coloring you can add this way, so I don’t know if it is possible to add too much. so just start with a few drops and add a few at a time. I have a batch of plain dough to try this with, but it is still cooling.
so it’s been a busy week. yeah it’s only wednesday night, but a lot has been going on. friday night carl, cherryl and i went to the george strait concert. blake shelton and julianne hough were the opening acts. i had only heard one of julianne’s songs before other than the cover song she did. i had forgotten some of the songs that blake shelton sings were his songs. he’s got an odd sense of humor. he sang the free credit report dot com song from the pirate commercial. and as always, george strait put on a really good show.
at some point in the last few weeks, the door bell broke. the pizza lady informed up of that. thank you pizza lady. who knows how long it’s been busted. we bought a replacement. it’s a wireless one, but we forgot to get something to cap the wires with and you can’t just let wires hang out without something on them. so the new doorbell is on the kitchen table along with the new weed whacker line thing that needed a longer bolt to attach it to the weed whacker.
tuesday the boy got 3 awards at school. and today was the 5th grade promotion for the girl. in the fall i will have 2 kids in middle school. they will both be at the same school next year so i only have one bus stop to go to in the morning. the nephew will be going to the school here in the neighbor hood. we are too close for a bus to come through so we will have to walk or drive, but since he will be on the same schedule as the boy and girl, i only have one set of school hours to remember instead of the 3 i had to remember this year.
the girl got to go to lunch with carl and some of the guys he works with. thankfully she’s her daddy’s girl and is already a smart alack so she wasn’t corrupted by them. for example, we had dinner at 5guys with pirate and his girlfriend over the weekend. when pirate asked the girl “what’s up?” in true smart alack style she replied “the ceiling.” yep she’s definitely one of ours.
tomorrow, i finally get to go for the mri on my jaw. i had to postpone it once because they hadn’t gotten the preauthorization from the insurance company, and then i got a call earlier this week telling me i needed to go to a different office because they can take better images or something. oh yippie! so now i have to drive farther to get the mri. the other place i at least knew where i was going. oh well, that’s that the gps is for.
we have a plastic pool we are going to use for a sandbox. we have to get some more sand, but we have a few bags to start with should it ever stop raining long enough for the lawn to get mowed. i bought shrinky dinks to play with, and i think we’ll make some playdough next week.
i think that’s all that is going on right now. happy summer!
i found this recipe over at bethanyactually.com and finally got around to trying it. i’ve been looking for some new snacks that are easy to make and this is really easy. the only hard part is watching the chickpeas to make sure they don’t burn. the link to bethany’s post is http://bethanyactually.com/yummy-and-healthy-roasted-chickpea-snacks/
you need:
one 15oz can of chick peas
1Tbsp olive oil (i ended up using regular veggie oil since i was out of olive oil)
1-2 Tbsp worcestershire sauce (i used 2TBSP)
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp salt
drain the can of chick peas, then rinse and drain again. lay them out on paper towels to dry. i didn’t let mine dry much, and i should have at least patted them dry, but i didn’t.
turn the oven to 400 degrees.
mix the rest of the ingredients in a pan and heat them up. toss in the chick peas and stir to coat them well. this is where having dry chick peas would have been helpful since the sauce doesn’t coat wet chick peas. once they are coated, spread out on a foil lined cookie sheet/jelly roll pan. make sure it has a lip all the way around or you will have little chick peas rolling all over the place. now if you are like me and don’t wait for the chick peas to dry, you can pour the sauce that didn’t stick to them over the top of them once they are on the baking sheet. even if they were dry, pour any remaining sauce over top anyway. 
put them in the oven to roast for 45 minutes making sure you stir them every 10 minutes.
mine were done at 40 minutes.
Last monday, i took the nephew to the park so he could play a while before the rain started. he was having fun climbing up the ladders and coming down the slides. while watching him play, i yawned. i didn’t think it was any different from any other yawn until my mouth wouldn’t shut. well crap! now my jaw is locked open. kiddo thought i was playing around since i was talking funny. and so the adventure begins. after taking kiddo back to teh house, i went to the urgent care place to see if they could help. it was a fairly slow day for them so i got back pretty quickly, but by the time i saw the doc, it had already been an hour that my jaw had been locked. two docs, a nurse, a shot of lidocaine, time waiting for Red to get there to drive me, a shot of valium and several attempts at resetting my jaw later, i’m still stuck with my mouth open. valium was not my friend that day. i’ve had enough of my head being shaken around, so now it’s time to go to the ER. the ER took some x rays, used me for a human pincushion, and finally gave me something better than lidocaine for the pain. the first doc (yes it took more than one here too) was smart enough to wrap gauze around her thumbs for padding before she tried to reset my jaw so she wouldn’t have to worry about me biting down on her thumbs. urgent care guy, you should think about doing that. anyway, she had no luck either. time to call in a bigger doctor. before he came in they gave me more meds. thank you ER doc for that. i zonked out from the second dose of meds, but carl tells me it took the second doc 2 tries to get it reset.
now i’m having to track down an oral surgeon that will take our insurance to make sure it is healing well. there are 4 within a 50 mile radius all of which are on the other side of the river. yippie!
now should you ever find yourself with a locked jaw in search of medical attention, make sure you take a pen and paper with you. trying to talk is pointless as it just makes things hurt worse, and no one knows sign language. not even numbers or the alphabet.