Slices of Life

I had tried my hand at making a homemade version of the Good Seasons Italian dressing.  I found a few recipes on Pinterest and while I thought the dressing was delicious my boys did not agree. We finished off the bottle but I still had a lot of dressing mix left and thought perhaps I could make a good  marinade out of it. I was right! We served the chicken with a tossed salad and some squash casserole I mixed in 1/4 cup vinegar and 2 Tablespoons of vegetable oil with all the leftover herbs and spices then poured it over the 6 boneless skinless chicken breasts and let it marinade all day. I cooked the breasts under the broiler for 8 minutes per side and then checked to make sure they were cooked fully. They were chock full of flavor and everyone gobbled them up! Just look at all those herbs and spices!  Now I keep the Italian dressing mix in the pantry to use as a marinade! Italian herb mix: 1 Tbsp garlic salt 1 Tbsp onion powder 1 Tbsp sugar 2

My boys rarely want a traditional birthday cake.  I actually miss making and frosting cakes but the birthday boy always gets to choose what we eat. Ian decided this year he wanted a trifle cake made with brownies, some sort of peanut butter taste, some chocolate pudding and Heath bars. So that's what we made! Ingredients: Box of brownie mix (13 x 9 family size) Chocolate instant pudding and milk the box calls for 8 oz. cream cheese, softened 1 cup peanut butter 1 cup powdered sugar container of cool whip Heath bars (about 6 crushed) or an 8 oz. bag of Heath toffee bits Prepare brownies in a 13 x 9 pan, following the directions on the box.  Let them cool completely. Prepare pudding according to package directions and let sit for just a bit to firm up a little. Mix together cream cheese, peanut butter and powdered sugar Assemble all of your ingredients together-- brownies, pudding, peanut butter filling, cool whip and heat bar crumbles. Start by cu

Looking back through my blog this year I am noticing that every weekly wrap- up sounds pretty much... well... the same.  We do a few pages in math, reading, writing and language arts most days.  We sprinkle in some geography, read aloud a few books, and add in some art projects.  But for the most part I feel like our weekly wrap ups are getting long and boring and repetitive.  So from now on I am only going to focus on the highlights or big moments of the week! This week we spent most of our time out of the house (and hardly touched our books at all!). On  Friday, after finishing most of our schoolwork, Alec helped me make a pudding pie with a shortbread and Oreo crust.  Then we all headed out to go see Born in China .  We rented Sing on our way home and spent a rainy night watching a fun family movie.  What can I say? It was a movie kind of day! Saturday , Ian went to work and Evan went with us to visit some family.  They had built a new house recently and we had yet to se

On Friday we went to see Born in China ; the new Disneynature film and we all enjoyed it so much.  At one point during the movie we see a bunch of animals moving around on the screen at sunset with orange and yellow skies behind these black silhouettes... Evan leaned over and told me we should try making paintings like that.. Obviously I was going to honor that request! We decided to pick African animals to go with our African study and it was just the perfect addition to our 100 days of Art Challenge. We started by deciding where the ground would meet the sky and then filling in colors for our sunset.  We made sure to blend our colors together and then paint our ground black. We let them dry. To add the animals we decided that instead of trying to draw them and possibly ruining the whole painting that we would print off templates and use carbon paper to trace them onto our canvases. Once traced the boys used black paint and paint brushes to colo