Grandparent's Day

"What children need most are the essentials that grandparents provide in abundance. They give unconditional love, kindness, patience, humor, comfort, lessons in life. And, most importantly, cookies. ~Rudolph Giuliani

Happy Grandparent's Day!

Book Inspiration :: Potato Prints

This week's inspiration came from the book, "One Potato" by Diana Pomeroy. It's essentially a counting book that uses fruits and vegetables as the objects to be counted. All of the illustrations were created by using potato prints - what a cool idea. After reading the book we were inspired to try potato printing too.

I cut two small red potatoes into four basic shapes - circle, square, triangle and rectangle. Then Grace and I filled a paint tray (really a dinner tray but it works great for painting projects) with four colors of poster paint. We added some brushes to the tray, then it was time to get messy.


And messy it was - we both ended up with paint from our finger tips to our elbows. Who knew painting with potatoes could be so much fun!

Gymnastics

With school officially back in session we're settling into a new routine. On Tuesdays Grace attends a gymnastics class at the local YMCA. She's been going there weekly since this past May when she declared that music class was "boring" and wanted to "learn to do cartwheels". Suffice it to say that she's learned to do cartwheels and so much more - loving every minute of it.

Dean and I frequently find ourselves saying things like, "Grace please don't do front supports on the counter", "Don't do forward rolls on your bed, it's not safe", "The helper stool is for standing on, not for practicing your straddle jumps" and ..... I think you get the idea.


Gymnastics is a good thing - well actually, a great thing!

Labor Day

We're just getting home after spending a wonderful day at Meme and Pop's house. They held a family BBQ to celebrate the holiday - eleven of us were there. Grace had a great time being entertained by someone other than Dean or myself. All the swimming, playing hide and seek, making beautiful music on the piano, eating delicious food and granting wishes with her magic wand made for one tired little girl. Oh what fun we had with family!

We hope you enjoyed your Labor Day too.

Weekend Gardening

This morning we all spent a bit of time outside. While Dean was mowing the lawn Grace and I worked in our little garden. It was time to sow the seeds for some fall veggies. We're hopeful to have miniature pumpkins, butternut squash and beautiful sunflowers in the months to come.


Reading the seed packet is important, especially for novice gardeners like ourselves. The pumpkins and squash seeds needed to be sown into hills, something we've never tried before. So we now have six hills scattered around the garden - "sooooo cute" according to Grace.


Here's what one side of our garden looked like after we were finished. We're keeping our fingers crossed that the lingering dark clouds don't decide to pour buckets of rain our our hills, washing them away!

Book Inspiration :: Full Moon Cookies

I'm starting a new series of posts called "Book Inspiration". They'll highlight how books inspire us to do so many wonderful activities together. So here's the first...


This week the book, "The Moon Might be Milk" by Lisa Shulman inspired us to celebrate the full moon by making cookies (I know... like we really need inspiration to bake).

In the story a little girl by the name of Rosie was on a quest to see what the moon was made of. Along the way she asked various animals what they thought. Their responses included, milk, an egg, sugar, butter, and flour. When Rosie returned home, with the animals in tow, she asked her grandmother. With that Gran began to place each of the ingredients the animals had mentioned into a bowl. She formed the dough into balls then baked them. When cookies came out of the oven everyone exclaimed "the moon". Perhaps the moon is a giant sugar cookie - a sweet story indeed.

The last page of the book included a recipe, "Gran's Sugar Cookie Moons". In celebration of the full moon we made the cookies together. Grace's favorite part was rolling the balls of dough in the sugar - big surprise! The "moons" tasted delicious and may have started a new tradition around here.

As a side note, we made numerous attempts to see the full moon in all it's glory but the clouds had a different plan - oh well, maybe next month... with moon cookies in hand!

Grace's Match Day

Four years ago Dean and I stared at this photo with amazement. This beautiful little girl, living halfway around the world, was chosen to be our daughter. We're so incredibly thankful that our dream of becoming Grace's parents was made a reality through the gift of adoption - a gift that made us a family!

In other news, my Etsy shop is officially open for business (here). I had been waiting for a special day to begin listing some of my handmade items - Grace's "Match Day" seemed perfect. Oh, just in case you were wondering, the panda theme is in honor of her. After all, she makes me One Happy Mama!