Blueberry Oatmeal Bars

On Saturday Hazel decided instead of playing outside in the gorgeous weather she wanted to bake cookies. She was persistent so I gave in. We looked through a few recipe books and decided on Bert's Best Blueberry Oatmeal Bars from C is for Cooking by Susan McQuillan, RD. The nice thing about this book is it gives the instructions that the kids should be able to do. Of course, Hazel wants to do all of it, but that is besides the point. Hazel insisted I wear her chef hat. She had it on with her matching apron, but I was too slow with the camera. Sorry!

Blueberry Oatmeal Bars (adapted from C is for Cooking by Susan McQuillan, RD)

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (ok the recipe calls for all purpose, but I used whole wheat)

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (now you know Hazel will be happy with this!)

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup packed light brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup (1 stick) softened butter

1/2 cup vegetable oil (we used canola)

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 cups uncooked old-fashioned oats

2 cups blueberries (fresh or frozen)

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 13 x 9 inch baking pan with aluminum foil. Lightly spray  the foil with a cooking spray.

Hazel measured the flour herself!

2) KIDS: In a small bowl, mix together the flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt.

And she measured the cinnamon herself!

3) In mixer bowl, beat together brown sugar, granulated sugar and butter until fluffy. Beat in oil, eggs and vanilla. With wooden spoon, mix in the flour mixture until blended. Stir in oats and blueberries.

Apparently in our house, step 3 is for kids as well!

4) KIDS: Use a rubber spatula to spread the batter evenly in the prepared pan.

5) Bake until golden brown 30 to 35 minutes. Put pan on cooling rack. Once cool lift foil to remove from pan and then cut into 24 bars.

I found this neat site My Fitness Plan that gives you the nutritional breakdown from famous recipes including this one. (It may ask you to sign up but I just hit close and it gave me the information.) Then I used that information to calculate the Weight Watcher Points Plus and each bar is 4 points plus.

I would add walnuts next time to this recipe!! All of us enjoyed these and are still enjoying!!

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Happy Family Times # -A Visit to Gloucester

Have you done something fun with your family this week? Come share it with us! Kelly from Happy Whimsical Hearts and I are collecting ideas to inspire us all to have more fun times with our families. Here is something we did this week and you can share below!

This week Steve had a day off and we headed to Gloucester, Massachusetts. I had been told about a wonderful health food store, The Common Crow, in Gloucester by the parent/child teacher at Hazel's school. I have been wanting to check it out for awhile, but haven't had the time or energy to find it. Since Gloucester is in the area that Steve is  in charge of for his company he knows it better than I do. We finally found a time to go before the summer season truly hit and made traveling hard to get to Cape Ann.

Source: Wikipedia

In my rush to get out the door since I needed to be home to go tutoring in the afternoon, I forgot my camera. However, this picture is one of the things that says Gloucester to anyone around here. We stopped at this statue as we drove by the water. This statue is surrounded by plaques with names of all the fishermen from Gloucester lost at sea. (Some of you may remember hearing about Gloucester, MA in the book/movie The Perfect Storm. Book written by Sebastian Junger.) A nice family told us about a playground by the beach, but we did not make it there this time.  We did manage to find a post card of the light house that we had bought awhile ago locally and found this nice photo card of the harbor.

After visiting the Man at the Wheel statue, we went to find the Common Crow. While dealing with one way streets, we discovered that one way Main Street was definitely a street we wanted to walk down and do a bit of shopping or checking out. So we parked near The Common Crow and checked it out. Then we were hungry for lunch, so we went looking for a good place. We found Sugar Magnolia's which was wonderful. Then we stopped in a few stores--the toy store, the children's clothing store and then headed for some coffee and tea. We stopped in the Pleasant Street Tea Co. where I got the best chai latte ever!!

Then we headed home. However some things about Gloucester and Cape Ann. Gloucester is the oldest seaport in America. It went through several different names, but Captain John Smith presented a map of the eastern coast to Prince Charles who named the land Cape Anne, after his mother, in 1614. The name has been shortened to Cape Ann, but still remains. (Source: Discover Gloucester) I definitely want to go back and explore Gloucester some more when I have more time.

To share a picture of our family I will show you a few from our family walk this weekend.

Now it is your turn to share how your family has spent some quality time lately.

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Readathon 2012

As summer time begins next week and for many of us it has really started since school is out, it is important to remember to take time to read and to have our children read. As a former teacher I can tell you how much our children forget during each vacation, but they forget so much over the summer. It is important for us as parents to encourage their reading to help them maintain their knowledge and learning experiences.

I know as a parent the summer time often means an increase in social time, family vacations, and just time to enjoy the beautiful weather, however while doing these things we often forget or let our guard down on the educational things. This is what creates the summer slump or the summer slide. (For more ideas about combating this visit PBS Parents.) I know Hazel cannot read yet and I do not plan to teach her unless she starts to on her own, but this is because of our choice to send her to a Waldorf school. However, we always try to read to her each day at least before bed time, but also throughout the day. So this year, I am joining to support Readathon 2012! 

What is Readathon 2012? It is a program where MeMe Tales, PBS Kids, Harper Collins and several other publishers have joined together to help combat the summer slide. The program will be six weeks long and kids will be able to get free books to read in each week's themes. And for every person who signs up at MeMe Tales they will contribute money to send one child to school for a day via The Food for Education Program. Kids will earn badges and certificates for their reading during the program. Parents will have access to many resources to encourage the reading as well as many bloggers sharing crafts and activities to go along with the books.

How do you join? Go to MeMe Tales and create an account. For more information visit this wonderful post at MeMe Tales.

Each week there will be a theme for books. The first week is Animal Fun. I know I cannot wait to see what books we can get for free with that theme. Hazel loves animals!!

So come join me and Hazel in reading this summer with free books (electronically) including stories like Thumbellina, Jack and the Beanstalk and Exploring India and these are all free right now! And if you are like me without a smart phone or Nook or Kindle, you can read the books on your computer.

Multicultural Monday: Learning about the World through Animals

On Friday Hazel and I went to the first of three Toddler Treks that I signed us up for at our local zoo, Stone Zoo. We will be going to one each month this summer. Since the zoo expected 800+ students from various schools, the instructor decided to keep us in the Discovery Center since it would be too hard to stay together as a group. She had planned several activities for the kids including showing them cards and asking what animal it is and would you see this animal in your backyard or at the zoo. This got me to thinking that the zoo is a perfect place to look at some multiculturalism. It is where we go to see the animals we do not see every day or in our own neighborhoods. The Stone Zoo is one of two zoos in the Boston area known as Zoo New England. The other is bigger and is in Boston. The Stone Zoo is nice since it is a good size for a young one and we do not have to drive into the city and deal with parking. (You may remember I shared our last visit to the zoo in a Happy Family Times post.)

 A great book to go with this lesson is Around the World on Eighty Legs by Amy Gibson. The book has hand drawn animals from around the world--broken up by regions of the world with poems and sometimes information about them. It is a fun read, but not as informative as I had hoped. However it is a great starting point to see which animals live where and then you could easily research them more.

Stone Zoo itself is divided into sections having to do with where the animals are from (or at least the environment they live in). Since our class was to start (and ended up staying in) the Animal Discovery Center, we went to the right (which is the way we usually go anyway). The first animal you see is the American Bald Eagle. They also have a replica of a nest. As the visitors we were talking to said their family of three could lay in it comfortably if they had to. Then there are the black bears. This is one of the newest additions to the zoo and one of my favorites. Since both of these are native to the United States, I will not go into them. Then we looked at the llamas. By this time it was time to head to our class so we went to the Animal Discovery Center where they have a corner of the room as windows to watch the llamas. The llamas like to come and stare into the glass so it was quite fun. These of course are normally found in South America. Although according to Wikipedia, they originated from North America and migrated 3 million years ago.

Llama on left is staring at window!

Inside the Animal Discovery Center they have six Panamanian Yellow Frogs (I found four of them in the tank), corn snake (who was very active), gecko, tarantula, and box turtles. From this list you can see they are also from all over the world. The Panamanian Yellow Frogs are obviously from Panama. The other animals can be found in parts of the U.S.A. as well as other places. A box turtle was taken out of the tank for the kids to learn more and to touch. I did not take any pictures in here, but I did take a picture of Hazel's craft. They had the kids play a game where they were caterpillars and had to bring the instructor five of the foam leaves they had "hid" around the room. Once they had found five, they received a butterfly and then had to find a flower of the same color. Then they had the kids make a paper chain caterpillar and if they wanted they stapled the butterflies on to change them to butterflies.

Hazel's caterpillar

Turned into a Butterfly

After class we joined the crowds to check out some of the animals. We continued in to the Sierra Madre area of the zoo. This includes the llamas, coyotes, bats, coati, cougar, jaguar, and gila monster.

Sleeping Jaguar

We got to see the coyote, but did not get a picture of him. The jaguar and the cougar were sleeping.

Coati

We did see the coati briefly, but there were large crowds around their cages. We didn't bother trying to get into the bat area  or the gila monster because of the crowds. We did see the rosy boa (in a cage here as well as in the Animal Discovery Center). After all this, we went and saw one of Hazel's favorite animals--the flamingos! They were building their nests and sitting on their eggs. Hazel thought they were sitting on rocks, but I showed her that they were mud and not rocks. This of course took our journey to the Carribean!

We went indoors to the exhibits there. They have the African crested porcupines, the Inca tern, a hornbill, Emperor tamarins, blue macaws, meerkats, and two-toed sloths and a large tortoise. I did not get any really good pictures here because it is dark and the windows tend to show dirt in pictures. Sorry!

At this point we went to the gift shop. I found some great books for references and learning more.

This book was written by an 8-year-old about the zoo!

Dover Press Books that use stickers to help learn about animals and their environments!

A coloring book that gives details about each animal on the page

Some origami for us to try!

Next we saw the American river otter. Ok, I have to share this picture because it was so cute. The otter came out to say hi to a zookeeper. Maybe he thought it was feeding time or something. You can see him standing on his hind legs towards the back  here (look below here).

Then we saw the monkeys and the white cheeked gibbons. The white cheek gibbons take us to Asia. They have a family of them. The father lost part of his arm at his previous zoo. The mother was carrying her baby this time.

At this point, Hazel was getting tired and wanted to go to the playground which is in the barn yard. It was a bit crowded there with older kids and I had to help her get down the slide since the older boys wanted to climb up the slide and then were chasing each other around it. Then we went for the rides near the snack bar. She of course had to go on the train.

Then the pink hippo.

Then she went on the zebra truck. Then it was time to go. We were tired and hungry. We talked about getting lunch but the snack bar was full of all the school kids getting lunch. So we went to the car. There I called the vet's office and found out we could pick up Fluffy (second day of x-rays), so we headed there which is basically down the street from the zoo. We found out Fluffy was fine! Best news of the week but we needed to watch her as we started to feed her again. Overall it was a fun day with many things to learn about and how animals live in different parts of the world. I am sure we will share more zoo visits with you soon.

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T-Shirt Weather

Reminder: Sharing Saturday is still open!! So is the Teacher Gift Link Party! Please stop by both and share your amazing ideas!!

Hazel's Mermaid T-Shirt

My Mermaid T-Shirt

Summer has finally hit here in New England. So since it is t-shirt weather, we decided to paint our own. T-shirts were on sale this past week at Joann's (4 for $10) and AC Moore ($2.99). We bought a bunch in different colors for both of us and a few for gifts. I also used my 50% off coupon at Joann's to buy some metallic and glitter fabric paints. Needless to say we will be making some for the various holidays this year. I had seen a few places using freezer paper stencils and read somewhere that contact paper would also work. I also had seen a tutorial in Family Fun Magazine to make your own silk screens so they would be reusable, but I didn't want to invest the money and time into this. Since I had a piece of contact paper cut that wasn't used for its original intention, I went with that. It was so easy! I googled for free stencils and for certain pictures. We had decided we wanted mermaid t-shirts to enter in the Mermaid Project Competition.

So to start I traced the stencils onto the clear contact paper. Then using an Exacto type knife I cut out the portions for each color. (On some of the multi-colored ones if the colors were not too close I would cut them both out of one as to not waste Contact paper.) Then we chose the color for the first part and I put the stencil on the t-shirt with a magazine inbetween the layers of the fabric. We put some paint in a plastic egg carton and Hazel dabbed it on with sponge applicators I bought the last time we painted t-shirts for Valentine's Day.

Hard at work on her mermaid!

Close up on the mermaid painting

The mermaid was the only one we used twice. So we did these together each layer. First we did Hazel's and then I would remove the stencil and put it right on my t-shirt and dab the stencil with a paper towel since I wanted different colors.

Stencil Removed

Painted stencil

In between colors we had to wait four hours for the paint to dry completely. So we did all the first round and then waited. Did some second round before Hazel went to bed, but finished the second round in the morning as well as the third round from the ones we did the night before. Here are some of the ones we did. (There are more methods below!!)

We bought Hazel a new sun hat which she loves and she wanted a t-shirt to match it so I copied the fish and used the picture as a stencil. It came out pretty good. The unicorn I want to fix. I let Hazel choose the colors and the white she chose doesn't really show up well and neither does the pink mane and tail. Still thinking about what I will do with it though.

I bought some large farm animal stamps ages ago. Hazel wanted to use the duck one and I let her paint it whatever colors she wanted and as many times as she wanted. She wanted to make a mommy duck, a daddy duck and a baby duck so there are three. This was probably among the easiest method and the one she could basically do by herself!

Then for Father's Day, we made my father a t-shirt. Or at least I should say we started him a t-shirt. We did the front. We will bring it to him and give it to him but when my nephew comes for his visit this summer he will complete the back for him. I will leave him some of the paints to do it. We used Hazel's handprints to make a heart. I saw this idea at Craft Passion.

Hazel put paint on each of her hands and we made handprints. Then I used the paints directly from the bottle and drew the heart around her hands and wrote the words. Hazel calls my dad Pop. My nephew calls him by his first name so his will be different on the back.

We have some more ideas to try, so stay posted for another t-shirt post. Enjoy!

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