"You'll shoot your eye out!"

It's a Daisy not a Red Rider but you get the idea.

We visited my Grandparents the day before Christmas Eve and my Grandpa asked if it was ok if he gave Alex my dad's old BB gun. This BB gun was my dad's as a kid and hadn't seen the light of day since The Great Mailman Incident of '68.

It's not something we would have bought for him at this age but in this situation we said yes. It's something he can do with Ben (and with sibling and dog in the house!) in a very supervised situation while he is still learning and can learn responsibility.

Alex declared on the spot that this was the best Christmas ever even though Christmas hadn't even started yet.

Frosty?

The Pinterest earring rack

I saw this on Pinterest. It was a link to an Etsy shop that had a vintage cheese grater painted and turned into an ear ring rack.

I didn't have time (or the energy honestly) to hit all the resale shops in town until I could find an old grater to repurpose so I cheated and bought a new on for $7. The feet are simple wall hooks decorated with beads.

Before I painted it I used a course grain sanding block to rough up as much of the surface as I could to hopefully prevent chipping. I also tried to sand down some of the sharper grating areas but I did find that they didn't feel very sharp after two coats of paint. I used a matte satin finish spray paint.

What's been going on inside....

Catapult building, picture painting and Zentangle doodling....

Can't get enough outside time now

Now that there is snow the kids want to be out all the time it seems. Often a few other kids from the neighborhood join in the mix. They've built forts out of sleds, forts out of snowbanks, gone sledding, rolled around.....for hours.

Charlie is very well suited for the snow. His fur is thick and apparently keeps him very warm and his feet aren't sensitive at all. He stays out for long periods of time and even just lays in a snowbank and chews on a stick.

Tidy

Alex and Maya did some work in their rooms too. Some new organizing and moving things around and they have been doing a great job of keeping things neater over the past few weeks since we made the changes.

Maya's room before she cleaned up:

Maya's room after:
This was the major change in Alex's room, he has all these treasures he wants to display but it had gotten out of control. After:
Before:

New Year, new system?

The board on the right is actually a dry erase board, not boring white though! I'm going to try to post a basic weekly schedule up so every one can see who needs to be where and when since we have dance lessons again and Alex will be starting guitar soon, plus the family skiing and Ben traveling more for work.

The board on the left was a plain cork bulletin board I had down in the office. I covered it with some fabric and am hoping now we can post a few favorite things from the mail and the backpacks and recycle the rest right away. I don't want paper piles on the kitchen counter anymore!

We Ski

Alex got cross country skis last year. This year it was Maya's turn! And I got a nice pair of skate skis. Of course then we had to wait forever for some snow!

We all signed up with a local ski club for a family ski lesson program called "We Ski". We've had one lesson so far and then had to take a week off because the snow melted and are very excited to go back again this week.

Alex and Maya are both in their own age appropriate groups and I'm in a beginner adult group. They loved it and can't wait to go again.

SNOW!

A project from back in Dec - Pinterest inspired

This is one of those things I saw as an idea on Pinterest and actually completed!

I bought a $1 painting at Goodwill. It was really awful, it looked like someone's practice piece from that time they took the beginner painting course at the community college. But $1 for a canvas is a good deal!

I covered the canvas with a piece of fabric I dyed a few summers ago. When I got it stretched and tacked on I almost stopped. It looked so nice. I am contemplating getting some smaller canvases and stretching some pieces the kids dyed on them and hanging them in their rooms. But in the end I did continue.

I placed some stick on lettering in the saying I had picked out.

Spray painted the whole thing and peeled the letters back off.

Some thing I learned:

-use fatter letters (I wish more of the fabric showed through)

-use a different type of letters (since I used fabric, where as the tutorial had you paint the canvas the cheap scrapbooking letters I got did not stick very well and spray paint got underneat them in spots making it harder to read)

-be more careful with the spraypaint and don't get interupted while spraying (you can see a few drips)

New recipes

I got a couple of new books for Christmas with recipes! We were doing well for a while last year trying new recipes several times a month then once my diet changed in the spring we found some things that worked for everyone and just stuck with those in rotation.

We are ready to start experimenting again. I am getting a little more confident at substituting things and improvising to meet my requirements.

"The Feast Nearby" has some recipes that look good for canning and preserving that I am excited to implement in the summer. We are going to try making mead from a recipe in that book too.

"1000 Gluten Free Recipes" uses a different flour mixture than what I have been using so far but last night we tried a chicken fried steak recipe and just substituted the mixture we have on hand without any issues. There are a lot of recipes in it that would be gluten free naturally - some people seem irritated when those are included in a gluten free cookbook but I don't mind. It still gives us new things to try that we might not have before!

Some things I missed

I had all intentions on posting more about our Winter Solstice but that week of Solstice and then Christmas just flew by so fast.

These two books are favorites of ours leading up to the Solstice. They are similar, they both have a good history overview plus the scientific facts regarding the tilt of the earth in relation to the sun. All written in ways that kids can understand. They both also have some activities and recipes. Coupled with some of the myths and old stories in "Circle Round" and "Celebrating the Great Mother" I think we get a pretty complete picture of Winter Solstice to read through.

We didn't do anything else really special at home this year because we had the annual Solstice celebration at church that Tuesday night.