Saturday with the Kids and The Joys of Play Dough

We had quite the day yesterday with the kids here.  It was Zach’s birthday so we wanted to do something special.  We planned for it to be pool day….then woke to cool weather-windy weather and a chance of storms.  UGH. All day I was dreading the afternoon as I was sure we wouldn’t be able to go.  We watched the weather….Rain was all around us but no rain here.  We were hopeful but then we called all of the pools in the area….they had gotten rain and closed.  UGH.

The kids were pretty sad so I thought fast and whipped up a quadruple batch of play dough.

It’s amazing how timeless play dough is….kids still like it.  I like it too.  It’s the perfect thing to keep everyone busy and still be able to talk and chat.  When we first started playing only a couple of the kids wanted to join in.

Then my daughter Kalissa who is 19 even started playing!!

The play dough was a “pied piper” and before long everyone was out at the kitchen table playing….even my 19 year old.

Here’s the play dough recipe if you’d like to give it a try (I typically make it x4 if I have four or five playing:

1 cup flour
1/ cup salt
1 cup hot tap water
2 Tablespoons Cream of Tarter
Food coloring of your choice.  I start with about 2 teaspoons and add until I get the color I want.

Cook this on the stove until it gets in a big clump.  Then I turn it out onto a surface and kneed just a bit of flour in.  Then it’s ready to play with.

While the kids played play dough I tackled the next problem.  Zach, the birthday boy, is gluten free.  So the day before Kelli had brought a cake mix over and baked a cake putting it in to a bundt cake pan.  Well Hubby-not knowing it was THE cake- ate a big chunk out of it.  I didn’t want Zach to know that Hubby did that so I took the cake, made green frosting and turned it into a caterpillar shape.  I gave Stacey a bag of peanut M&Ms and told her to put the M&Ms around the base of the caterpillar turning it into a centipede.  Well Stacey had so much fun with that so before long the “centipede cake” turned into a rainbow as she put M&Ms everywhere.  It turned out all okay….

The kids have been a little apprehensive about my moving to town thinking that town won’t be as fun as the farm so I decided to take them to town and give them a “tour” of town.  We started out at the house.  The house is such a disaster right now that we didn’t even bother going in.  We started out our tour at the park….and apparently our park is so amazing (I was told way better than the ones we went to yesterday).  Who knew??  Anyway, we didn’t even get any further in our tour of town as they stayed and stayed and stayed at the park.    I didn’t even show them some of the other things in town.

We came home and made Zach’s favorite food, pizza.  In the middle of it all, Hubby’s pager went off and there was a garage fire so as a volunteer fireman, he responded.  The kids had the experience of listening to the traffic on the pager and guessing what was happening….We heard more fire departments get called we heard them call for more men and more water.  We heard lots and continued to guess what was happening.  As the talk on the radio calmed we had birthday cake without Hubby.

Just as we were finishing up eating, Hubby came home and told us all about the fire.  Apparently lightning had hit and started the garage on fire.  The firemen were able to save the house.  Hubby did say had the wind been in a different direction it would have been much harder and likely wouldn’t have ended as well.

By then it was late and way past our bedtime.