Anything But Pink -- a fun picture book about accepting one's own true colors

 

Disclosure: I was sent a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I am working with The Children's Book Review and J.C. Benthin and will receive a small stipend for this review. All opinions are my own.

What is your favorite color? Mine is pink. Would you want everything in your world to be your favorite color? I know I wouldn't. I don't even dress completely in pink ever. Today's book is about being a different color from everyone else. I will admit when I heard the title of the book, the first thought I had was of a baby girl. I remember getting a shower gift that was white with ladybugs. My friend who gave it to me said she got it so I would have something nonpink to put on my baby girl since everything for a baby girl is always pink. I figured the book would be about a girl who didn't like pink. I was very pleasantly surprised. This book is so much better than anything I was imagining. The book is Anything but Pink by J.C. Benthin and illustrated by Andy Catling. 

Spring Means Gardening--Fruits, Vegetables & Cooking Farm Fresh!

 

Disclosure: I was sent copies of these books in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Spring is in the air!! Up in New England the weather is slowly getting warmer--or at least more consistent. We have been having a roller coaster of temperatures this year. As spring starts up people start thinking about about gardening and fresh fruits and vegetables. Today I am sharing three picture books that focus on just that--gardening, fruits, vegetables and cooking with fresh garden harvests. All three books have an age range of 4 to 9. And all three books are being released today!! The first is I Love Strawberries! by Shannon Anderson and illustrated by Jaclyn Sinquett. 

Sweet & Simple Needle Felted Animals a Crafty Weekends Review & Link Party

Disclosure: Tuttle Publishing sent me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Welcome back to weekly Crafty Weekends!! I took a bit of a break over the holidays and had a three week long party to end 2018. We are back and ready to get crafty!! This week I am sharing Sweet & Simple Needle Felted Animals by Sachiko Susa. 

Boston Tea Party Themed Tea Party Around the World

Yesterday I introduced my new series, Tea Parties Around the World. Today I am going to share our first tea party by looking at a historical one and having a tea party with that theme. Our theme is the Boston Tea Party. (After all we might as well start local.) To start we read some books about the Boston Tea Party. Did you know there were actually four tea parties in the colonies but Boston's became the famous one? These are a few of the books we found at our library. There are a lot out there!!

Non-Candy Easter Egg Gift Ideas

So this month Hazel had to go to the dentist and get four fillings (two pairs of adjacent teeth). As I think about Easter (it is only a little over a week away!), I know I do not want to fill her basket and her plastic eggs with too much candy. And the truth is she gets candy from everyone at Easter. We still have chocolate bunnies from last Easter that she got from somewhere. Steve and I end up eating a good portion of the candy. So this year I wanted to come up with some non-candy ideas to fill her plastic eggs. The truth is she LOVES the egg hunt. She often wants to play egg hunt for a month before and after (at least) Easter.This year I wanted to use less candy and still hide lots of eggs for her. My first thought was Shopkins. I managed to find some Season 3 packages for half price with the ones she really wanted. I put two in an egg since I bought so many.

Little One-Yard Wonders Book Review

Disclosure: I was sent this book to review free of charge from Storey Publishing. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review. I am including links to each item for your convenience but do not receive anything if you purchase them.

Today I get the pleasure of reviewing Little One-Yard Wonders by Rebecca Yaker and Patricia Hoskins. This is the newest addition to the One-Yard Wonders series. I love these books!!

This book has 101 sewing projects for children and babies. It has everything from clothing to toys and room decor. Just on the cover you can see a floor cushion, shoes, a diaper bag and the mushroom tea set and more!! The first project I wanted to try was the Summer Days Hat. This hat is perfect for Hazel with her long hair that she always wants up. Her sun hats tend not to fit over her pony tail.

Ladybug Girl Themed Birthday Party Ideas

Disclosure: Penguin Kids gave me a copy of this book free of charge for this review. All opinions in my review are my own and I did not receive any other compensation.  As in all my reviews I am providing links for your ease, but receive no compensation.

Have you discovered Ladybug Girl yet? Lulu loves to dress like a ladybug and she turns into Ladybug Girl--a brave girl who can do anything. She and her dog Bingo go on all sorts of adventures and learn many lessons along the way. Ladybug Girl is a series of books written by Jacky Davis and illustrated by David Soman. There are picture books, board books and easy readers as well as a few sticker/activity books and gift sets. We were sent the board book, Ladybug Girl Ready for Snow to review and for inspiration for a birthday party. (Penguin Kids challenged me and anyone else who wants to join to come up with some ideas for book-themed birthday parties and create Pinterest Boards for them.)

 Now I will admit I did receive an apology for being sent this one with all the snow Massachusetts got this year. Hazel however enjoyed the book. It is very simple and perfect for the younger set. I find it hard to believe a mother would let a child wear a tutu over her snowpants let alone wings and antennae, but it is a book, so we will go with it. The book is about Lulu and Bingo going to play in the snow. 

My Garden Birthday Party Ideas

So Penguin Kids challenged me (and you) to come up with some birthday party ideas based on favorite books this month. They will be sending me some books to do this with and also wanted us to use our own favorites. I decided our first party idea would be to the theme of the book My Garden by Kevin Henkes. This is one of my favorite books and Hazel loves reading it still. We shared it a couple years ago with a few different crafts and ideas as part of the Virtual Book Club for Children. This story is about a girl telling us how her garden would be different than her mother's. The girl is very imaginative and it includes things like growing jelly bean buses and shells and having only chocolate bunnies. We decided to start with the table settings.

Frozen Themed Birthday Party with free printables and product review

Disclosure: I was sent these items to review free of charge from Oriental Trading. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review. As in all my reviews I am providing links for your ease, but receive no compensation.

This weekend we had Hazel's Frozen themed birthday party. Ever since Hazel saw the movie (her first movie at the theater), I have been collecting Frozen ideas on Pinterest. I got to use several of the ideas I pinned and products I pinned for this fun party. All of the girls had a great time and loved it. Today I am going to share the details with you including the products Oriental Trading sent me for the party to review. First I have to share Hazel's Elsa dress. Elsa is Hazel's favorite character in the movie and she really wanted an Elsa dress. With all the sheer fabric on them I knew her delicate skin would not be able to handle just any Elsa dress, so I made one for her. I used the Simplicity Pattern 1233, however I lined the bodice and cannot imagine using any of the sequined fabrics without lining.

Exploring Cherries and Japan

Today I am going to share our exploration of cherries and the end of our exploration of Japan. At Hazel's request we have been exploring different fruit. She pulls out her magnifying glass and fruit journal and colored pencils for our exploration. We look at the outside of the fruit and record our observations and then I cut them open and we look at the inside and record our observations. Then of course we taste the fruit. We did this with the cherry.

Around the World in 12 Dishes: Exploring Ukraine through Food and Craft

With Ukraine in the news so much, it is a perfect time to explore the country through food, books and crafts. It is also a perfect time for lessons with older children about current events and such. Since we do not let Hazel know about current events or watch the news, we looked at tradition, food and crafts. 

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe and is the largest country that is entirely in Europe. For more information, read the introduction post at Around the World in 12 Dishes. I shared the books we have read and not read about Ukraine. Have you read Jan Brett's The Mitten? I know it is really popular around here and it is the retelling of a Ukrainian folktale.

 We decided to try two different Ukrainian recipes. The first we found in the Ukraine book of the Festivals of the World series.  It is written by Volodymyer Bassis (or Vladimir Bassis--all the sites seem to list both spellings). The recipe is for Strawberry Kysil. Kysil can be made with different berries, but Bassis claims strawberries make the best one.

Strawberry Kysil 
(from Ukraine by Volodymyer Bassis)
Ingredients:
2 quarts of fresh strawberries (I am sure you could use frozen)
2 cups cold water
3/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon potato starch (we used tapioca starch since we could not find potato starch)

1) Wash and hull the strawberries. Put in pan with water and bring water to a boil. Boil on high for a minute then turn down to low and let simmer for 10-15 minutes. I let Hazel use the potato masher while the strawberries cooked to help get the juice out. This makes the next step a bit easier.

2) Push the strawberries through a fine mesh strainer with a wooden spoon. Put juice back in pan.

3) Stir in sugar and bring back to a boil. Boil over high heat for 2 minutes.

4) Reduce heat to medium and stir in starch and dissolve it (Hazel did not do a good job of dissolving our starch so we have chunks in it). Cook for another 2 to 3 minutes stirring until it thickens. 

5) Cool to lukewarm and then put in refrigerator to get cold for a few hours. Enjoy!

Strawberry Kysil is a bit like strawberry soup or eating a liquid form of strawberry jelly. It is delicious but you will not want to much at one time.

Our second recipe came from Ukrainian Classic Kitchen and International Cuisine and it is Ukrainian Yabluchnyy Korzh. Hazel likes to call it what it tastes like--apple pie. It is a type of cookie crust with apples inside. It is delicious!

Ukrainian Yabluchnyy Korzh
Adapted from Ukrainian Classic Kitchen and International Cuisine
Ingredients
Dough:
5 cups of flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
1 cup unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
6 large egg yolks (if I made again I would use whole eggs)
1 cup sour cream

Filling:
7-8 large apples (we used Granny Smith)
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Start by making the dough:
1) Stir together flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. then add the butter and mix with your hands (Hazel loved this part) to make a coarse flaky mixture. 

2) In a small bowl mix egg yolks and sour cream together. Then add it to the dry ingredients. Work it with your hands into a firm, smooth, not sticky dough. (Ours never really formed a good firm smooth dough.)

3) Divide dough into 2 pieces, making one slightly larger than the other. 

4) Turn oven on to 375 and grease with butter (we used the wrappers) a 13 x 9 x 2 baking pan. Do not use baking spray to grease.

5) With the larger dough, cover bottom and sides of pan. The instructions say to roll it out, but I found ours was just too crumbly to do this. I pressed it into the pan.

6) Time to start filling. Peel and thinly slice the apples (we used our food processor). Mix with sugar and cinnamon.

7) Add apple mixture to bottom crust.

8) Roll out top crust or pat it on top. Try to seal apples in.

9) Bake for 45 to 55 minutes. It should be brown in color and the apples should be tender to a knife. Set on wire rack to cool for 20 minutes.

10) Now you can attempt to remove the pan (I did not attempt due to the crumbly nature). To remove: Run a sharp knife along the sides and then put a wire rack on top and flip it over. Remove pan and put other wire rack on bottom and flip back the correct way.

11) Serve at room temperature. You can dust it with powdered sugar (we didn't bother). Refrigerate leftovers but bring to room temperature before eating.

Since it tastes similar to apple pie (Steve's favorite dessert), we all love it!

We also have been reading Urkainian stories. We found a Cinderella tale, The Golden Slipper, which we shared last week. We also found many versions of a Christmas tale involving spiders. All the crafts I could find had to do with spiders as Christmas ornaments or pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs).

Pysanky Source: By Carl Fleischhauer (Library of Congress employee[1]) 
(http://www.loc.gov/folklife/cwc/) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Since we already posted about pysanky, we made a silver spider web and spider Christmas ornament. We found the instructions in Christmas Crafts from Around the World by Judy Ann Sadler. 

In the Christmas legend, the spider on a Christmas tree spins webs of silver for a poor family who has no money for Christmas. Thus why the ornament is done in silver!

Ukraine's Flag

Now it is time for the Around the World in 12 Dishes Blog Hop! Please visit the other posts and feel free to share any Ukrainian crafts, food, etc. posts that you have done.

Fruit Explorations: Limes: Making Raspberry Lime Rickeys!

Have you entered my current giveaway yet?

Since limes were on sale this week, I picked a few up and thought it would be fun to explore them since our last exploration was on lemons. Hazel also found a fun treat drink at a coffee/ice cream shop near my parents which is a raspberry sorbet lime rickey. She loves them, so I thought raspberry lime rickeys would be fun to make.

Hazel explored the limes first on the outside. She described them as green a slightly bumpy.

 Then I cut it in half for her and she explored the inside. Green and smooth and bumpy is her description. Then she liked a piece of it and I wish I could have gotten a picture of her face. She said it was too sour. 

Then I started zesting some limes for our recipe and Hazel was in charge of getting the juice.

Hazel discovered that it is harder to juice limes than lemons. After she got tired of juicing, I gave her some zest to investigate.

Finally we had enough zest and juice to make our Raspberry Lime Rickey Recipe. We started with the recipe at Mel's Kitchen Cafe: Raspberry Lime Rickey. Here is what we did.

Ingredients:
10 oz. bag of frozen unsweetened raspberries
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup lime juice (3-4 limes)
zest from 3 limes
chilled club soda
ice

To begin, mix the raspberries, sugar and water in a pan over medium heat for about 5 minutes. Then using a potato masher, mash the raspberries the best you can.

Put pan back on stove and mix in lime juice and zest. Bring mixture to a boil for a couple of minutes. Remember to stir often so it doesn't burn. Remove syrup and push it through a fine mesh strainer with a bowl underneath to remove raspberry seeds and any solids. 

Refrigerate the syrup to cool.

To make a raspberry lime rickey, mix 3/4 cup of club soda with 3 tablespoons of the syrup in a glass with ice.

I loved them. Steve said they were all right, but didn't drink his and Hazel liked the ones with the sorbet better. So the next day I bought some raspberry sorbet. I put the entire pint in the blender with just over two cups of club soda and around 1/2 cup of the syrup (and then I added more after my first taste). I blended it all together and poured it into three travel cups since Hazel was at her grandmother's house. Hazel liked this one much better!

That is our lime exploration! I hope you will join us for our next fruit exploration!

If you would like to see more of our posts about fruit check out:

• Lemon Exploration
• My Fruit Pinterest Board
• Pineapple Exploration 
• Raspberry Exploration 
• Blueberry Exploration 
• Strawberry Exploration
• Needle Felted Strawberries with Acorn Tops

Fruit Explorations-- Lemon

Have you entered my current giveaway? 

Ok, we did this exploration on Friday, but I did not get the post written, so you get it today. Hazel has been asking for more fruit explorations, and I thought about lemons and making lemonade. Summer officially started today and what is better on a hot day than a cool glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade? So Thursday Hazel and I went to the store and bought some lemons in two sizes--regular or jumbo.

She could not wait to get started, so we did our exploration in our pajamas. She used a new magnifying glass to examine the outside and then I cut one in half for her.

After examining the inside as a half she asked me to cut the half in half so she could see the center better. 

She had fun examining it. She tasted a lick of one piece, but did not like it. Then she started squeezing them for the juice.

When I researched lemon crafts I discovered this neat one at Teach Preschool: Lemon drop painting.The idea is to dissolve lemon drops in a little bit of warm water to make a paint. Since we did not have lemon drops, we tried lemon lifesavers and had no success. Then we found some lemon hard candies and added them, but again no luck. We decided to add some lemon peel, so I made some zest. Hazel of course asked to have some to examine as well.

After our failure with non-lemon drop painting, we pulled out the yellow paint and got creative. Hazel made lemon prints with the half rinds.

Hazel even managed to find one that had a bit of the inside structure left and got some interesting prints. Then she wanted to paint the lemon, so she had fun painting as well.

Now we stopped painting to make the syrup and the rest of the lemonade. She had squeezed about one cup of lemon juice, so we mixed one cup of water with one cup of sugar in a saucepan and Hazel stirred it until the sugar dissolved. Then we heated it to a boil to keep the sugar dissolved.

Then we let it cool for a bit. Finally we mixed the lemon juice, syrup and about three and a half cups of water in a pitcher.

We put it in the refrigerator for at least thirty minutes. We did a little more since we went back to painting. I pulled out a small square colored canvas and started painting a lemon on it. Hazel was suppose to paint the inside of it, but got upset since she thought my lemon looked better than hers. She started over and told me to paint the lemon's inside. 

Since my lemon did not fill the canvas enough, I made a lemon print and painted the inside of the lemon. then I added some strawberries to fill the canvas better. I started painting the strawberry seeds white, but was informed they are yellow. While finishing my painting we enjoyed the lemonade. Then while I cleaned up, Hazel drew in her fruit journal.

Since I had not planned ahead enough, I did not get any books on lemons yet, but will share some with you sometime soon. I also have the song Lemon Drops and Gum Drops in my head from searching the library database for lemon. Hazel learned the song and sang it at school in two concerts. I was singing it all Friday morning.  Hazel has also asked to explore all the fruits again. Stay tuned!!

For more fruit ideas check out: 

• My Fruit Pinterest Board
• Pineapple Exploration 
• Raspberry Exploration 
• Blueberry Exploration 
• Strawberry Exploration
• Needle Felted Strawberries with Acorn Tops

Minnie Mouse Party Foods and Activities -- The Details

Since the my post the other day became so long with sharing our decorations, I thought today I would share the details of what we served and what the kids played. Let's start with the cake since every birthday party needs a cake. Our cake was the strawberry cake we have made for most of Hazel's parties. The original recipe is found at Confections of a Foodie Bride. I have made changes over the past couple of years. At some point I will have to actually write down my changes and post about them. We made an eight-inch round cake and three small round cakes. I bought these pans at Joann Fabrics with a coupon for the ears.  We bought a container of chocolate frosting since black frosting is hard to come by and has so many chemicals for colors. 

Minnie Mouse Party Food

 So the party is this weekend and we finally figured out what to serve. Our menu includes:

• Minnie's Bow-tique Pasta
• Mickey's Meatballs
• Hot Diggety Dog Hot Dogs
• Oh, Toodles! Pizza
• Daisy's Garden Vegetables and Donald's Dips
• Goofy's Grapes and Fruit Bow-quet
• Minnie's Bow-tique Fruit Bows
• Minnie's Pink Polka-Dot Punch
• And of course a Minnie Cake!

Needle Felted Acorn Top Strawberry

So yesterday I mentioned we had collected some acorn caps when we walked back to our car after checking out the swans. After letting them sit for a few days to make sure there were no bugs in them, we wanted to needle felt some acorns. Our plan was to bring them to school as part of Teacher Appreciation Week. I tried to choose wool roving colors for different seasons and one of them was red. Hazel commented on how the red one looked like a strawberry. We decided to make strawberries. Since we have already shared our Strawberry Exploration, we will just share the craft today. We painted the caps green first.

While the paint dried we began needle felting. We took some red roving and rolled into a strawberry shape. Then we needled it as much as possible. I have some safety needle felting tools for Hazel to use, but she did catch her finger once. I always had to finish them since she was afraid of holding them and needling. We also decided to make some unripe ones so we could show the progression of strawberries. 

For these we mixed some colors to make them look like they were ripening. Once the shapes were solid enough, we glued them into the caps. Then let them dry overnight. Now we have some lovely needle felted acorn top strawberries. Hazel decided she wanted to keep all the strawberries and acorns we made for herself and give them to the teachers, but she also wants to make more.

For more ideas on strawberries (mostly recipes) and fruit explorations:

• Native American Strawberry Corn Bread
• Strawberry Shortcake at Strawberry Festival
• Strawberry Banana Muffins
• Strawberry Muffins
• Strawberry Jam
• Strawberry Cake
• Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream 
• Pineapple Exploration 
• Raspberry Exploration 
• Blueberry Exploration 
• Strawberry Exploration
• My Fruit Pinterest Board