Annie's Fairy Garden

Back at Christmas my sister-in-law made the girls a really cute play fairy garden, complete with flower fairy dolls. Think of it as a fairy-themed dollhouse. The girls played with it for months until the imitation moss was getting all over the room, so finally I had to take it apart and save the components for re-assembly later.

For Annie's birthday, Collin and I pulled out some of those accessories and planted a live fairy garden in an old enamelware bowl. We spent an evening date re-potting succulents at the university greenhouse, and brought a few divisions home as well as several new succulents from Walmart. Incidentally, Walmart has a really good selection of succulents these days, most for around $3. It's as good or better than many selections we've seen at plant nurseries. Thanks for making them trendy, Pinterest!

The miniature bridge, fairy light, glass river stones, and little toadstools all came from the first play fairy garden. The larger mushroom table is actually a champagne cork that I painted a while ago just for fun when I noticed its natural mushroom shape.

Several pieces from Annie's informal rock collection (doesn't every kid come home from walks with their pockets full of rocks?) made their way into the landscape, including this little stump that I think is a deer antler segment.

The blue glass marbles cascade as water down a creek bed banked by some of the larger landscaoe rocks, while pea gravel rounds out the look.

I fixed up an old $2 vanity chair from a thrift store for the plant stand. When I bought it I'd been thinking of reupholstering it, but I never found the right room for it, so when I needed a stool for the fairy garden it was the perfect solution. A few coats of paint on the seat, and it was a whole new chair. 

We set it up behind Annie's bed in the bow window of the girls' room, which is the sunniest spot in the house. Now we'll have to see if it can withstand three curious girls! I hope it can, because I need a good spot to over-winter some of my potted plants, and eventually I'd love to set up a plant-covered window seat in this space. An reading nook surrounded by plants sounds just about perfect.

A few of the extra succulent clippings went into this small fruit bowl for my kitchen windowsill, so I'll also have some green to enjoy all winter. Even when the view from that window is entirely white and brown, there will still be some living plants inside to help hold me over until spring planting season. It'll be fun to see which plants have outgrown their space by then, and which do well in the group planting.

Happy Birthdays, Annie and Laurel!

Laurel and Annie’s birthdays are just a few weeks apart, with my birthday in between, so we’ve been eating a lot of cake lately. In mid-August Laurel turned two, and on Sunday we celebrated Annie’s fourth birthday.

One birthday tradition we have is to go pick out a Happy Birthday balloon from the Dollar Tree every year. Laurel picked out a cupcake balloon with purple on it. It was perfect for her. In this picture she's pretending to call Collin to tell him about her new balloon. The phone call went something like this: "Hi Daddy! I two. Hupcake bawoon! Purple. Bye."

Laurel is really into anything purple, so I made her strawberry cupcakes with purple strawberry frosting on top. On top I tried making some fondant laurel flowers and leaves. It was my first experiment with fondant, and it isn’t as easy as it looks on Cupcake Wars. (Incidentally, Cupcake Wars is the girls’ and my favorite TV show to watch together on Hulu.)

These cupcakes won't win any decorating awards, but they were delicious!

Of course, we had to find some purple ice cream. I was about to grab a container of blueberry pomegranate chocolate chunk, which is sort of purple and very delicious, when I saw this berry parfait frozen yogurt. It was the exact same purple as the cupcake frosting, and turned out to be quite tasty as well!

For Annie's birthday we decided to make a sunshine cake. It's just a basic 2-layer round cake (lemon, of course), but the second layer we chopped into six pieces, turned them around, and frosted the whole thing in lemon and orange frosting. Add a smiley face and some fondant eyes (I saved some of the fondant from Laurel's birthday for decorations on Annie's cake) and you've got a happy sunshine!

Laurel had to lick the frosting to see if it was any good.

Then Jenny wanted to get in on the action, so while Annie was saying "Cheese!" and Laurel was trying to lick the candles, Jenny did a face plant on the closest sun ray and licked the frosting. Mmmm.

Annie and Laurel are both like, "No, Jenny! Don't eat the cake!"

We were traveling on Laurel's actual birthday, so we decided to save her presents and let Annie and Laurel open them together. Annie got the light purple fingernail polish she'd been asking for for months, while Laurel got her own pair of sunglasses since Annie was given a pair earlier this summer and the girls are frequently fighting over them. Yesterday I painted 40 toenails purple, and there was a lot of happiness on that account for the rest of the day.

Laurel's main birthday present wasn't finished in time for her actual birthday, which was the other reason we postponed giving her presents until Annie's birthday. I made her a quiet book, which she is unwrapping in this picture. She likes it. A lot. I took many pictures of the quiet book, and I'll put up a post about it soon. It's really cute, if I do say so myself!

Annie's main birthday present was a big set of cookie cutters, something else she's been begging us to get her. Our big project in preschool right now (year 1 of 2, since Annie won't be starting kindergarten until 2015) is to learn the ABCs. We're learning a letter a week, and happily this week we're on C... which is for cookie cutters! We've already made ABC biscuits for dinner last night, and today we made ABC oatmeal raisin breakfast cookies for Collin's morning microbiology class.

Preschool meets Microbiology

Oatmeal raisin cookies don't lend themselves to getting cut out with cookie cutters, but I more or less used this recipe, substituting raisins for the dried blueberries, and added a pinch of nutmeg and 3/4 c. flour. I had to thoroughly chill the dough before rolling, and then several times again as I cut out the letters. It was a lot of work, but the girls and I had fun using the cookie cutters, and how many times can you safely eat E. coli?

Now that birthday season is over and we're settling into more of a regular routine, I hope I'll be able to post here more regularly. I have a backlog of really fun posts waiting to be written, including Laurel's quiet book, some of the fun projects Annie and I are doing together in preschool, and more pictures showing you our new home and town.

Homemade Popsci... I mean, Ice Pops

Yesterday the girls and I made some homemade popsci... I mean, ice pops. Like Kleenex, I have trouble remembering Popscicle is a brand name instead of a generic category. Our ice pops were just a couple cups of chopped strawberries and half a banana blended up with a couple spoonfuls of sugar, and frozen in ice pop molds. Delicious and so simple.

We found these ice pop molds at Walmart for a couple dollars. Similar to these ones, and like the ones from my childhood, they have sippy straws built into the base to catch the drips.

The sippy straw was Annie's favorite feature of the ice pops, but Laurel had a little trouble with it. When she got down to the melted puddle at the end she tried blowing through the straw instead of sucking. Big bubbles of thick strawberry puree kept bursting out and flying all over our picnic blanket, Laurel, Jenny, and me. It was hilariously messy.

Yum.

Scary Bugs

Just past the neighborhood park and on the way to one of our favorite thrift stores there is an art studio with some unusual sculptures out front. There are big, rusty praying mantises, and an upside-down dead rusty beetle. Annie is fascinated by these bugs, and is always asking if we can walk past them. A couple nights ago, we had this conversation:

Me: “Annie, do you know what we’re doing tomorrow?”

Annie: “I don’t remember.”

Me: “We’re going on a walk. Do you know where we’re going?”

Annie: “Salvation Army?”

Me: “No, but you’re close.”

Annie: “The place with ties?”

Me: “Yes, we’re going to Opportunity House!”

Annie: (so excited she can’t get the words out) “And can we… can we…”

Me: “Yes, we can see the scary bugs.”

Annie: (running off) “Daddy! Daddy! We’re going to see the scary bugs tomorrow!”

Pink Flamingo

One of my minor missions in life is to find a way to incorporate a pink flamingo into our garden without it looking tacky. Collin is convinced this is impossible, but I think it is merely difficult. This has become a long-standing playful dispute between us, so any time we see a pink flamingo, the joke comes up again. All that to say, when I came across a free pattern for a knit flamingo by one of my favorite designers, Susan B. Anderson, I knew I had to make it.

Like many small projects, this one took a little more than the one evening I anticipated. It was more like three evenings, but the result was totally worth it.

The girls totally love it. Annie calls it a "Mango," which was pretty cute when she said at lunchtime, "There's a mango on our table!" It took me a minute to translate that.

This is such a Laurel look. "I'm keeping my eye on you. Don't take my flamingo away from me!"

On a somewhat related note, the girls and I watched Gnomeo and Juliet this week. We loved it. Sure, it was kind of cheesy, but it was such a fun movie to watch with little ones. Annie burst into tears when the gnomes started fighting, and Laurel applauded at the happy climax at the end. And, yes, there was a pink flamingo, who was a complete nutball, but then surprisingly wise.

We left our flamingo on the back steps, ready to greet Collin when he gets home from work today.

Music Appreciation

My girls take music very seriously...

They're listening to Veggie Tales version of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" on Grooveshark, which is one of our all-time favorite songs. And not to be giggled at.