Photo of the Day (A Fortnight Ago)

Kate sorting out the nuts in our nut bowl.

Winter Scenes

Some photos from our Christmas weekend up north.
In Thief River Falls (name of town) en route to
"the ranch" on Christmas morning:





Ice fishing on Thief River:


Snowflakes/frost on our windscreen/windshield:


"The ranch", as is fondly known to the girls:




Back in Moorhead with the sun finally out:



Believe it or not, we had even more more snow
down in the Twin Cities than they had up north!

Advent Calendars 2010

Merry belated Christmas, everyone! Forgot to post this earlier. We spent Christmas at The Ranch as we do every year - photos to come. The girls were very excited throughout and in the leadup to Christmas, the girls have enjoyed working on their advent calendars each day. Grandma Karen and Grandpa Arne gave these to the girls some years ago, but they were not quite ready to really appreciate them. This year, both Emily and Jenna were disciplined enough to count down the days to Christmas.

This was the one Emily worked on. Every day she took one little character out of its respective cubby hole, and hung it on a hook.



Jenna's was a magnetic Nativity scene. We'd used this on our fridge in previous years, with dismal results. Containing it on a board and keeping it out of smaller hands' reach was the key.



Kate got the handmade version. Each day she put her hand into a pocket and pulled out an edible treat and a slip of paper with a non-edible treat - sometimes a Christmas book, a Christmas DVD, a craft or a trip.

Photo of the Day

Kate in one of the outfits from her new dress-up chest - a present from Auntie Laura and Uncle Kum Kit - thank you!

Letters To Santa

Translation:
Dear Santa, I am very excited about Christmas.
Love, Emily
And please leave me a note.




Translation:
Dear Santa, I've been wondering:
do you stay alive all year?

Children's Art

We're documenting a lot of the kids' work on this blog because this is the blog their Singaporean grandparents read, and we know Grandma Mae and Grandpa Desmond enjoy keeping up with the girls' creative pursuits. Also the girls are churning out artwork at such a rapid rate nowadays that we can't save all of it, so we photodocument them instead, and we don't feel so bad when they inevitably get thrown away.


Kate made her first Christmas card this weekend:



and inside she signed her name. I helped with the "K"s and the bottom "A" but she wrote the other letters herself. She very proudly gave one of these to her Sunday School teacher, along with a bottle of Hershey's kisses.

Emily made a mailbox



with tiny envelopes and packages to slot into the mail compartments.



Some time ago, the girls had a soccer competition indoors. Emily was the umpire, and she judged the winner according to their style of kicking and how many penalties they collected. Jenna was declared the winner, and Emily made her a trophy, a ribbon and a medal, announcing the Greatness of Jenna.



Jenna made this beautiful bouquet of flowers, each painstakingly cut out and then stuck together.

Pop-Up Cards

We made some pop-up cards over the weekend, inspired by these here. The girls decorated the backdrops,




pushed out the stands, and stuck Christmas icons onto them.

Thanks for the inspiration, MaryAnne!

Cookies for Christmas

We finally got off our behinds and made cookies for Christmas. The impetus was Jenna's last day of school yesterday - she wanted to make cookies for her teachers. And since we were baking for the teachers, we might as well have baked for the neighborhood. Which we did. We literally baked for two days straight, and made snowball cookies (no photos), my old favorite chocolate-and-pecan-dipped shortbread

and krumkake.

But the absolute most important cookies, at least to Jenna, were the frosting sugar cookies. She'd been asking for days to make them.




The secret to Sane Piping By Small Children, we discovered, is twist-ties.



Emily is quite competent at the Piping Bag Grip, but Jenna and Kate are still learning, and prefer to squeeze the bag with both hands. Frustrating for them, and useless for the cookies. I remembered seeing the baking staff at Rainbow (our local supermarket) using twist ties on their piping bags during a hands-on cake decorating thing for kids. Clever, and works - even Jenna was able to produce these beauties all by herself

(I helped with the braids and hair-ties)

Emily popped in to ice two cookies and eat one, before retiring to Make Secret Crafts. This is the one she didn't eat:



After experimenting with different recipes, we decided that Betty Crocker's sugar cookie dough still trumps all (with alterations) and Grandma Karen's frosting recipe, especially during the wintertime (it hardens better than in the summer) is the best.

Here they are:

Betty Crocker's Sugar Cookie Dough Ingredients

• 1.5 cups powdered sugar
• 1 cup butter, softened
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 large egg
• 2.5 cups all-purpose flour
• 0.5 tsp baking soda
• 0.5 tsp cream of tartar
• 0.25 tsp butter essence

Method

1. Beat wet ingredients in bowl on medium speed.
2. Add dry ingredients and mix to form dough.
3. Refrigerate at least 2 hours
4. Roll out to 1/4" thick and cut shapes out.
5. Bake 2" apart at 375F for 10 minutes.

Grandma Karen's Frosting/Icing Recipe

• 2 cups powdered sugar
• 3 tbsp butter
• 3 tbsp milk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• Gel food coloring

(note: in the summer, this does not harden as well, so we whip meringue powder with water before adding in the other ingredients)

Jenna, Emily and I went for a freezing walk around the block, delivering cookies to our favorite neighbors. And the next morning, Jenna gave her precious cookies to her teachers at school.

Paper Painting and Other Inventions

A recent invention of Emily's:



She explained to me how it works. There's the paint palette and paintbrush, see. And there are pieces of paper with double-sided tape on them, that match each of the paint spots. But they're upside down



so you can dip your brush into a paint well,



turn it over and have a dab of paint in that color on it



to paint your picture with.



She made a set for her sisters, too, who coloured their own palettes.



Invention #2 is a Lap Desk



Emily spent an entire afternoon fleshing it out. She wanted me to take photos of it, which I was happy to do. It has three cups - for markers, crayons and stickers. It also has a self-contained paper compartment.




The crayon and marker cups each have a little strip of paper that is a color chart, "so you know what the ink/crayon looks like on paper".


Since the photos were taken, a fourth cup has been added - for trash.

Here's one of her lap desk experiments -
Tree in Marker and its Reverse Image in Crayon.

I'm thinking I need to make her a light box for tracing. Soon.

Invention #3 is a dog bed for Kate's dog family.

Emily woke me up on Saturday morning to say she had made a cardboard bed for Kate's dogs.

"Where did you get the cardboard?" I asked, sleepily.

"From the closet!"



She found my cardboard stash. Hm. Not sure whether to be pleased at her resourcefulness, or possessively panicky.





As an infant, Kate has called dogs "wawa"s, a name which later evolved to "wowee"s. Emily's interpretation of that, "Waowez" - ostensibly their family name - is printed on the front of the bed.




She was proud to say that it fits the entire family.




Kate loves the dog bed.





So it seems we have a new art-and-crafts director in the house. Who has access to my cardboard closet, besides. I shall soon be able to step down and focus on cooking or something more traditionally domestic.