Slime, baby!

Was browsing around on the web one day this summer and saw a recipe for Glow in the Dark Slime. Which was all well and good until I made the mistake of showing it to the girls. Well they haven’t forgotten about it for one single day, and have been begging to make it ever since. So I finally sucked it up, got all the weird ingredients, and we plunged in. And I’ll be danged if that stuff didn’t work!

If you’d like to make your own (and boy I know you’re just dying to, heh heh), you’ll need this stuff:

Any kind of 2-liter bottle will do, we got ginger ale because it was on sale at Target for a buck. Plus Ro and Ree love the stuff and never get to drink it (except on airplanes)(and when making slime, I guess). They were pretty thrilled to help empty the bottle:

Once your bottle is empty and rinsed, put a cup of Borax in it (we had to use a funnel) and then fill it the rest of the way with water:

Then shake the heck out of it for about 10 minutes so the Borax will dissolve a bit. If you have a sister, it’s extra fun to mock the faces she makes while she’s shaking:

By the way, I’ve seen other slime recipes on the internet that didn’t require this bottle/shaking step, just mix one cup of water and 1 teaspoon of Borax in a bowl.

Anyhow, pour some glue into a plastic cup and pour an equal amount of water in (we eyeballed it, like we do with everything, so I’m not sure how “equal” things were, but they were good enough). Stir it up, add a teaspoon of glow-in-the-dark paint (we found ours at Michael’s) and 3 drops of food coloring. (The original lady used neon food coloring, which sounded cool, but I couldn’t find it.) Then add some of the Borax water in a teaspoon at a time, stirring the whole time. You’ll start to see clumping on your popsicle stick. And suddenly you’ll have slime!!:

Thrilling, weird stuff. Don’t add too much Borax water or it’ll become too stiff, kinda like silly putty (which is fun too):

Wonder what the girls will want to make tomorrow?

PS: Thanks for all the input and ideas on the birthday party – you guys crack me up and are super helpful at the same time. I just love reading your comments.

PSPS: If you’re clicking around the internet, check out my review of the slick little OnStar FMV mirror.

Bright and bold or girly and soft?

Ro and Ree are having a ball deciding what their upcoming Chinese birthday party should look like. Only trouble is, they flip-flop back and forth. I know the imaginary visualization stuff doesn’t cut it for my girls (or for me), so last night after they went to bed I grabbed a few things we had around the house (and a glass of wine) and quickly made each half of the dining room table look like the parties they’re describing.

Ahhhhh, that’s better. Now we can see what we’re working with here.

The first theme is bright and fun – let’s call it Colorful Chinese Celebration. It features bold red, shiny gold, vivid purple, and some fun decorations we found in Chinatown this weekend. The red silk table runner has purple designs throughout (it’s hard to see in the pic) and the gold shiny paper will be new although this stuff pictured is leftover from Christmas, so don’t look too closely or you’ll see holly leaves, heh heh:

The second theme has a softer feel – let’s call it Pretty Plum Blossom. This one has bunches of plum blossoms (which will be in vases but are just sitting on the paper for this pic because I was getting sleepy), muted gold paper with white and pink blossoms, and dark pink, light pink, and red accents. The pink pieces of material are our pillowcases (hey they were the right colors!) and the various red Chinese items are things we just have around the house: (I made all of the pics clickable to the bigger versions)

This was fun to do! After seeing these sorta-real-life examples, Ro likes Colorful Chinese Celebration and Ree likes Pretty Plum Blossom. Hmm, I like them both. And there, my friends, is the crux of the “problem” -- if I had a clear favorite, I’d just pick and be done with it. In any case, our dining room sure does look festive like this, and it will be interesting to see what we end up with. Ro and Ree are so agreeable that they really will be happy with anything.

Well, maybe I’ll mosey on into the dining room and make a decision. Or maybe not... In the meantime, I’m curious, what’s your fave?

Chinese-themed birthday party

The girls’ sixth birthday is about a month and a half away (yipes), so I guess it’s time to start thinking about that party... Ro and Ree want to do a “Chinese-themed” birthday party with Mulan touches. They’re fascinated by everything having to do with China right now and spend hours and hours poring over every single Chinese book, map, and photograph we own. Plus, Mulan completely holds their hearts – seriously, Mulan is the main squeeze these days, no other princesses need apply. So I booked a Mulan performer for our day and whiled away some time looking on the web and Pinterest to find all sorts of partylicious ideas.

I saw darling Chinese parties done in red, white, light pink, and dark pink, but I think we’re going to have the girls pick their fave fabric in Chinatown (San Fran) and then let that dictate the party colors:

I’ll bet that same trip to Chinatown will yield plenty of beautiful and inexpensive lanterns, fans, umbrellas, and other decorations:

There were a bunch of cute game ideas that would be entertaining -- chopstick and pom-pom races, decorate your own fortune cookie stations, or Chinese jump rope:

For a mid-afternoon party, wouldn’t appetizers and some kind of fun kiddo drink served in adorable mini-teacups like these be great?:

I love the idea of using red lunch bags adorned with stickers or stamps for treat bags, and I’ll bet the girls would enjoy decorating these and picking out goodies to put inside:

No actual work has been done yet, of course (unless that heavy mouse-clicking counts), but browsing creative ideas online sure makes party-planning exciting! If anyone wants to keep an eye on our party progress (or any other things we’re planning), you can click this button to subscribe to my boards:    The board for the sixth bday is called “Chinese Party.” Oh, and if you’d like an invite to Pinterest, please leave your email in the comments section.

If you have any other ideas for our Chinese party – food, decorations, games, you name it -- please share!!

PS: While you’re clicking around, check out my review of OnStar’s new FMV mirror!

Our big girls started 1st grade today!

They’re pretty excited (and so are TubaDad and I). We participated in the neighborhood ritual of walking to the school office last night and checking out the freshly posted teacher/class lists, then went for a last summer dinner at Ro’s fave restaurant, Pasta Pomodoro.

Ro and Ree picked out their first-day outfits, and apparently nothing would do but their Chinese dresses. Good thing Catherine brought us a whole bunch from her trip to China, because these ultra-delicate dresses are in constant use lately – I had to resew all the snaps and frogs last night before bedtime. We had exactly two minutes to spare this morn, so went outside and snapped a couple of pictures before heading to school – yay!

Ro is in red, and Ree is in purple. And you can see that Ro is sporting her self-styled bangs from the recent scissor incident, which is one of the things I included on the “How to Tell the Girls Apart” tip sheet I handed to the teacher this morn. Heh. The other tips (in case the bangs aren’t visible or get grown out) were that Ro’s bracelet is on the right arm (think “Ro right”) and Ree’s on the left arm, Ree’s face is wider and Ro’s nose turns up more, and Ro’s voice is deep while Ree’s is high.

I love the new backpacks they picked off of Amazon. Fun, feisty, and a little funky, just like them. They have matching lunch boxes inside those backpacks, today’s lunch was hot buttered parmesan noodles in one of those squatty thermoses, roasted seaweed, a TJ’s fruit bar, sunflower seeds, and a fortune cookie. (If I’d really had my act together, I would have slipped a custom first-day-of-school fortune into that cookie. Oh well.)

Ro and Ree, have a wonderful first day of school. We love you and can’t wait to hear all about it!

PS: I took this self portrait right after dropping the girls off. Not sure exactly what TubaDad was thinking at that moment, but I was kind of stunned thinking that this is it, our little babes have grown up and are in full-day school now. Wow.

OnStar review

Can you believe I actually did an automotive-related review? And I took the kids on a solo road trip to Tahoe to test the device. It’s true -- check out my review of the OnStar FMV mirror here and see what a non-car person thought.

How come we never knew about the Wolf?!

For our last summer hurrah we wanted to take a family vacation but couldn’t decide where the heck to go. Then at the last minute I Googled “best waterparks on the West Coast” and hit what looked like paydirt! We took a blind leap and booked The Great Wolf Lodge in Grand Mound, WA, and Oh My Word it was fabulous!

We loved everything about it, plus (and this is a huge plus) it’s one of the only family vacations we’ve ever taken that we didn’t come home exhausted from. Wheeeee!

Flying there was half the fun (as usual). And the girls (as usual) disdained my suggestion that they wear comfy jeans and tennis shoes on the plane.

Once there, Ro and Ree screamed with joy to see that we had an actual little-kid log cabin complete with bunk beds smack dab in the middle of our hotel room. Seriously, they must have let a five-year-old design this room it was just so perfect.

I think this funny sign (which we stumbled upon outside a local Church’s chicken establishment) sums up the girls’ new attitude toward swimwear on this trip:

Yep, that’s right, Ro and Ree suddenly decided that one-piece swimsuits are SO last year, and gleefully scoured the clearance racks at the mall for $3 bikinis before our trip:

The waterpark was huge, kept at a constant balmy temp, and completely indoors -- so we didn’t need sunscreen the entire trip. (squeal!)(could there be anyone in the world who detests sunscreen as much as I?). There were a bunch of thrilling three-story-high rides, a crazy wave pool, a soaker-play area, a deep pool with fun climbing things, and a toddler play area.

The girls got free wolf ears at our first dinner and wore them pretty much constantly after that -- during dessert, an emergency hotel evacuation, to bed, while coloring in the lobby, for the nightly story-time, and over breakfast hot chocolates:


And they LOVED the lodge game called MagiQuest. I was pretty skeptical at first, but let me tell you that game is genius. The kids buy custom wands at the lobby store, then they’re off on electronic, animated, wand-based scavenger hunts all over the lodge. Each quest has a series of clues, and the lodge is tricked out on every floor with magical forests, animated paintings, treasure chests, wizards and pixies, and I don’t even know what else. The girls had fun for days tearing around on their quests (Ro called them “questes” which cracked me up):

Goodbye for now, Great Wolf, you can be SURE we will be back.

If anyone has other cool suggestions for neat family vacations or questions about Great Wolf, lay ‘em on me! And if you’ve been there (to any of the locations), I’m so curious to hear what your family thought.

PS: Did anyone notice that we’ve had another scissor incident (gritted teeth) and Ro is now sporting self-styled bangs? I guess their teacher will easily tell them apart again – remember that they started school last year with Ree’s arm in a bright pink cast...