Thursday, October 29, 2009

Painting with Water

When I do school with Arin, Ella always wants to be a part of it.  So yesterday, when Arin was painting her tic-tac-toe rocks, Ella was begging to paint to.  I grabbed a paper plate and a bowl of water and a paint brush and let Ella "paint" the plate.  She thought this was very awesome.  

Growing Up

Ella Jane is really growing up.  She turned one on Tuesday and on Wednesday, she used the potty for the first time and she started weening herself from nursing. She has also used the potty again today.  She is very proud of herself for this.  I ask her if she needs to use the potty and she runs to the bathroom.  I was very surprised about her weening herself - can it really be this easy?

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Stone Tic-Tac-Toe

A few months ago, I came across this really cool tic-tac-toe game.  I had planned to reproduce it for Arin.  Last week we took a walk and found several stones.  Once, we got them home, I realized that I didn't have the red, yellow and black paints that we would have needed to make a copy of their game, so we went with the more traditional x's and o's for our pieces.  We gathered 18 stones. 

First, I had Arin count out the ten stones that she wanted to use.  Next, I had her divide them into two equal piles. 


Then, she picked the colors she wanted to paint the stones.  She chose pink and green.  I had her decide which pile she wanted to be which color. I told her to paint the rocks, but didn't give her instructions on how to do this, which is why only the tops of the stones ended up painted. 



Once the paint had dried, I took a paint marker and attempted to make x's and o's on the stones.  I found that a permanent marker, such as a Sharpie, actually worked better.  I had purchased several small bags from Michael's craft store a while back.  So I took one of them today and drew the tic-tac-toe board on the front.  This bag will now serve as the playing board and also as a storage place for the stones.




Carrot Cake Cupcakes

Yesterday, Arin helped make carrot cake cupcakes for Ella's birthday. I had never made them before, so I found a recipe here on allrecipes.com to use. The original recipe called for two cups of sugar in the cake, which I scaled back to a cup and a half and it called for 3.5 cups of sugar in the frosting, which I cut back to 2.5 cups. Even with my adjustments, the cake ended up with four cups of sugar, which is really an outrageous amount, but it was delicious! We also substituted a half cup of raisins for the 3/4 cup of nuts that the recipe called for since we were making the cake for Ella. We were able to make six jumbo cupcakes and 12 regular cupcakes. Arin insisted that they must have pink frosting, so we added a little pink food coloring to the frosting ingredients.




Ella Jane was happy to have a carrot!

Arin frosted all of the cupcakes, except Ella's. She also learned that no matter how hard you try, you just can't lick frosting off of your elbow. Bummer!