Felt Food

Our moms group recently got into making felt food. One of the moms pointed us in the direction of the blog Helping Little Hands. Polly has a tutorial for making every kind of food imaginable over there and I was inspired to do some for my children.

Now mind you we have about every food imaginable already for our kitchen set (consisting of a wooden stove which I built)and it almost never gets used! So my hope is by adding a few pieces that will fit into the small pots and pans that they have to play with maybe we can get some use out of it!!

So here are my creations so far:


Pancakes with syrup and butter, eggs, and cookies with frosting. If I had to do them over I think I would have stuffed the cookies with a little batting...they are a tad flat! But they will do!
My further plans include fajitas and tortellini....more items that can be made in a pan on the stove! We will see if they are a hit or not!

The Day's Activities!

Monday was the anniversary of Do-Do 's Baptism day so we celebrated with mini donuts after lunch!


Do-Do has an intolerance to wheat but just for experimentation we decided to let him have a bit of donut and he didn't seem to have a problem until the middle of the night. Well in all honesty since he hadn't shown signs of distress before dinner I gave him another bite after dinner since everyone else was enjoying them! At 10pm he awoke SCREAMING. I couldn't get him to stop for about 20 minutes. He was then awake for the next hour alternating between making a mess and fussing. I got him back to sleep just before midnight and at 5am the cycle repeated itself. So much for the wheat experiment. Needless we will not be repeating this for a LONG time.

In other news Flower Picker has been dying for a pair of flip flops since Snow White got a pair of hand me downs from our mail lady. She wears them all over the house! So today I saw a rack on the way out of the dollar store and picked her up a pair. They are at least 2 sizes too big but she hasn't taken them off since we got them home! The little things that make her happy!!!

At Home Fun

This morning we went to see a friends daughter get Baptized and went to the small reception that followed. At the reception the girls played with the other children who were there varying in ages from 2 -8 or so. I am always amazed to see how children who don't know each other can immediately become friends and act as if they have known each other their entire lives.
Adults on the other hand stick to their own group of familiar friends and rarely go out of their way to have a conversation with a new face let alone become friends with one! This strikes me at the playground and the library as well when we meet children who we may never see again and the girls have a fantastic time with them while the other mothers and I often seem to strain for polite conversation with each other while trying to pretend to be busy attending to children or reading something. I myself am as guilty as any of doing this while encouraging the girls to introduce themselves to strange children! Anyway I think I will try to be more outgoing to new faces on our outings in the future!
(After saying all this I will point out that there was not anyone at the party this morning that I did not know so I had no problem in this area today!)

Since we were out all morning I decided we needed an afternoon at home free of the pool or other away from home activities! So we pulled out the wikki stix and the girls and I made and ocean/beach scene on the side of the refrigerator! Complete with octopus and a clam with 3 pearls inside!!

We had not played with them in a long time so it seemed like a brand new toy. That's always fun! I was reading through the booklet that came with them and I need to remember them when I am planning lessons for Therese this fall. They can be used as manipulatives for math and can be really formed into any creation that we might be studying...including letters and phonograms! So thanks Grammy for the fun toy!
Katie

Feast of St John the Baptist

Today is the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, one of only three births celebrated in the church. To celebrate I looked at the recipes from Catholic Cuisine and although I love Grasshopper Pie! I had neither the time nor the ingredients to make it so we decided to just eat banana bugs instead!



We used banana slices, chocolate chips and broken pretzels to create our cute edible creatures! We read the story of the birth of John the Baptist while we ate! (Sorry the picture is fuzzy...I will remember to take 2 to be safe next time!) The girls really enjoyed the snack although the 2 year old really just wanted to eat rather than create!! Happy feast day!
Katie

Little Flower Bugs

I wanted to just give an explanation of how I named my blog! I have had a special devotion to St Therese for many years, in fact my oldest daughter is named after her! So I knew that I wanted to honor her in the title. As for the bugs!! There is a story about how the lady bug got it's name as "Our Lady's bug" which I have pasted here:

The most commonly circulated story about how the ladybug got its name is quite interesting. According to that account, quite a long time ago in Europe, a small farming village was experiencing unprecedented problems with insects that kept devouring the crops. Faced with certain ruin, the peasants fell to their knees and began to beg the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary to send help in their calamity. Their simple faith was soon rewarded. The farmers began to notice a change in the crops. The dying foliage started to revitalize and greenness once again appeared on the landscape. Something was definitely reversing the devastation. As they looked closer, the farmers noticed small red bugs with black dots festooning their tiny concave, shell-like, bodies. Like soldiers called in to battle, they were eating the culprits—destructive aphids.

“Our Lady’s bugs, Our Lady’s beetles,” the grateful villagers proclaimed. Eventually, as the small insects became a familiar part of their lives, the people shortened their name to ladybugs, the term by which they are still known today and perhaps one of the reasons why they are so well-loved. Whatever the case, ladybugs are the allies of farmers; they are tiny soldiers that patrol the fields making sure there will be food on the table for everyone.

So I decided that since bugs and flowers go together I could honor both St Therese and the Blessed Mother in the title of my blog to hopefully remind me to live each day with a childlike spirit like St Therese and to always stay close to the Blessed Mother as model of Mother.

Katie

Adventures in Blogging

Well here it goes! After following blogs for some time now, I have decided to give it a try! I have thought about blogging for a while but have been intimidated to begin!

I have found so many great ideas on other blogs and I never seem to find the time to DO the great things I find because I am always finding other great ideas! I am hoping that this blog will help me to be accountable for being creative with my children. I am also planning on posting about our upcoming homeschool adventures this fall. I am thinking that blogging a few times a week will give me accountability in holding to our school schedule!

I am not sure that I will have lots of fantastic ideas to share but this will be a place for me to document the adventures of daily life in our family. It will be a place for me to see the ways that I am succeeding as a mother, teacher, wife and daughter of God and the ways in which I need to grow in these areas. I am looking forward to "meeting" others in the blogging world and sharing in their adventures too!

Katie