To wrap up our “On the Farm” week, we made fingerprint corn.
Another craft project with minimal supplies.
This one was pretty simple. I cut vaguely corn-like shapes out of white paper, something resembling leaves from green paper, and put a dollop of yellow paint on a plate.
A new take on "finger painting"!Little fingers, little kernels.
The girls had different ideas of how much painting to do, so Carolyn wound up making a solid yellow corn variety while Anna’s turned out bi-colored.
Who says we need to just use pointer fingers??Not much more room for fingerprints!
We had to wait for the ears of corn to dry, so we went out on the deck and shucked real corn for dinner.
Anna peeled one leaf at a time.Carolyn was fascinated with the corn silk.Fresh corn on the cob: the best part of August!
Including the corn, nearly every part of dinner was from the farmer’s market: new potatoes, eggplant, red pepper and green beans. I love this time of year!
Glue *and* paint in one project? Heaven!Some paint was still a little wet - but we glued it down anyway.
We had to wait until after dinner, there was so much paint on one of those ears of corn, but then we glued the ears of corn to a sheet of brown paper and glued the leaves on top. It doesn’t look quiteas delicious as the corn we had for dinner, but it’s pretty cute!
I found some printables for collages and tried to figure out what materials we had that could work for various textures and colors. Turns out I just had to look in the pantry for a perfect tie-in to “On the Farm”. We used dried lentils, tri-colored couscous, a rice blend, navy beans, (unpopped) popcorn, a bit of wool and pencil shavings. (Those last two aren’t in my pantry, really.)
Harvest Time!
Anna picked up on the idea pretty quickly, and seemed to really enjoy it, but lost interest before she filled in her whole page. She thought the pencil shavings and yellow wool were the most fun, with the lentils close behind.
We love to glue!One lentil at a time...
Carolyn knew what to do without any explanation, but I think would have preferred a more detailed picture – she added details like a corn stalk and a house in the bottom hill (before covering them with green wool for whatever reason) and was picking out the dark brown rice from the blend so she could have her details just so.
A navy bean cloud - very bumpy!Fine details.
Overall? Glue + intriguing objects = thumbs up. I wish I’d had slightly more colorful things for them to use – especially something blue for the sky – but considering I didn’t know what we were doing for a craft project today and threw this together at the last minute, I’m pretty happy with the results!
Anna's study in yellows and browns.Carolyn paid attention to details more than the big picture.(It looked like fun, so I made one too!)
So. “On the Farm”. I really didn’t have great ideas for this theme, but a bit of googling got me some fun things to try. Butter making, for one:
Really not much to the materials for this project!
We took turns passing around the container and shaking it:
Shake, shake, shake!Keep on shaking!
For quite some time it just looked like frothy milk:
This does not seem to be working...
About 12 minutes in, though, it started getting thick and creamy:
Well, it's starting to change, anyway.
At 15 minutes, it resembled whipped cream:
If we added some sugar, we could put this on some pie!
At 18 minutes, it started looking a bit curdled:
Ooh! Another change...
And at 20 minutes, we had buttermilk separating from the butter:
Hey, that's kind of looking like butter!
We poured off the buttermilk and mixed a tiny bit of salt into the butter.
20-ish minutes of shaking = fresh buttermilk + butter!
And then. Then we had buttermilk. And butter that needed a home. So we added flour, baking powder, an egg and some salt…and some commercial butter, because we didn’t want to use up all of our freshly shaken butter:
All the ingredients for buttermilk biscuits.
We rolled the dough out and cut some circles:
The rolling pin is the very best part.More rolling!
And had a delicious mid-afternoon snack!
We should have made some jam, too!
This was lots of fun, and while buying butter is certainly easier, it’s pretty neat to know exactly what’s in your homemade butter – plus everyone got a good arm workout taking turns shaking the container. The one thing I’d recommend, though, is a different container. The package of these Ziplock twist-on lid containers said “leak resistant” but they are most certainly not leak-proof. Once we got to the part where the buttermilk started separating, since it’s a thin liquid, it leaked out the sides. I’m not sure what kind of container would work better. Maybe a canning jar?
We took a fun trolley ride around the area, and learned a bit of the history behind the Hershey chocolate factory. The kids thought it was fun, especially when they periodically handed out bits of candy!
Forget "cheese", say "chocolate"!A nice old-fashioned trolley car.Wouldn't it be fun to live on "Chocolate Ave"?
Then we went on the Great American Chocolate Tour. Anna loved this – in fact, we had to go on the “cow roller coaster” once more before we left, because she really, really loved it. (Luckily, it was free.)
Anna loved those singing cows...
Carolyn would have liked to create her own candy bar, but at $15 per person (and we all would have had to make our own, we couldn’t just all four go in and let Carolyn make one) we decided we could make candy at home. They even have “make your own candy bar” kits in the gift shop for a much more reasonable price.
No cheesy photo ops here, we had to use a bench.
Finally, we hit the road and drove straight home with just one stop for a quick dinner (we had to collect a couple more Smurfs from McDonald’s, of course). The drive was absolutely lovely – perfect scenery and perfect weather. Even the knock knock jokes were mostly tolerable:
Knock, knock!
Who’s there?
Interrupting smurf!
Interrupting smurf wh-
La, la, la la la la, la, la la la la!
(Yes, that’s the smurf theme. No, they’ve never seen the smurfs.)
Today was our last full day here, so we packed it with all the things we couldn’t get done in the rain the other day. First we headed to The Amish Village. It was wonderful! We started out with a very informative, guided tour through a farmhouse:
An Amish farmhouse.A child's bedroom.Just look at those quilts...
Got to meet some lovely farm animals:
This baby cow is only a month old! So cute!Mr. Ed. Wonder what he has to say...?A baby goat. Another cutie!
And then the highlight for the girls…the one-room schoolhouse. They were enchanted! First they played being students. Then they took turns being the teacher. Anna read all the numbers on the number line on the desks. Carolyn read all the school rules and the lesson plans. Then they wanted me to be the teacher. Even better? There was a bell to ring! (Thankfully the rope ended at adult height. Someone planned that well.)
Anna studying her number line.Carolyn waiting to be set lessons.Not the most studious of students!Teacher CarolynTeacher Anna
There were lots of buggies outside to take pictures in. And they were selling bonnets in the gift shop, obviously. Really, it was a fabulous way to spend the morning, and I’d highly recommend it!
Two girls in a buggy....and in another buggy!Just such a lovely place!
We had a nice lunch and went on a buggy ride. It was really more of a horse-drawn wagon with a roof, but it went through some incredibly beautiful countryside. And the girls got to sit up front with the driver and kept everyone entertained with their commentary on all the little white butterflies and the cows in the fields.
A farm and a cornfield on a perfect day.
Unfortunately, the buggy ride went longer than we expected – the horses were tired and couldn’t be coaxed into going very quickly – so we didn’t make it to the pretzel factory tour. We still stopped there to get some pretzels to eat, though. We had a wonderful day, and truly enjoyed spending time in this beautiful, peaceful part of the world!
We packed up the car with water (not nearly enough), swimsuits, sunblock and kids and headed to Dutch Wonderland to open the park.
A view from the monorail.
Apparently, it was a day for cheesy photo ops – seriously, the girls insisted on posing in each and every one of these places and wouldn’t budge until I’d taken their pictures! (I have them trained well.)
Mmm. Giant fake pretzel!Anna didn't quite know what to do...Anna the Knight and Carolyn the Princess.Kids. In. Spaaaaace!We met the princess the first night, now we got to meet Duke & the knight.
We got there early enough that we were able to go on ride after ride with little to no line. It was so much fun! Some of them (like the Frog Hopper) they went on multiple times in a row because there was no line.
The frog hopper. Easily the girls' favorite ride!
The bumper cars were especially fun. It was Anna and Daddy in the yellow car vs. Carolyn and Mommy in the purple car. We definitely put the bumpers to good use!
The yellow bumper car of doom...
When we decided it was time to cool off, we changed into swimsuits and let the kids play in Duke’s Lagoon – a combination sprayground & mini waterpark with (cold!) water spraying everywhere and mini waterslides. I was terrified to even bring the camera near the place after killing my ipod touch the other night, so it stayed safely dry in a locker for that part of our fun. We finally managed to drag the girls out of there with promises of going on the pipeline plunge. Yes, I took two small girls through that twisty-turning blue tube, on nothing more than a rubber raft. It was fun!
We survived the pipeline plunge!
We went on lots more rides after, including the dreaded log flume ride. (I left nothing, not even park maps, in the outside pockets of my bag this time!) Carolyn even went on the flying trapeze by herself!
This ride is hand-powered!Anna had a little help from Daddy.Ready to go!Flying through the air with the greatest of ease...
After dinner, we saw The Frog Prince, reinterpreted into a high dive act. It was really amazing! And even more amazing was that the pool these performers were diving into was only nine feet deep. That’s only 6″ deeper than the deep end of our backyard pool. But they were diving from really, really high heights.
A princess, a frog, and king and two girls.
We didn’t quite close the place down, but we rode the train one last time around the park, saying “goodbye” to all of our favorite rides. The girls had a wonderful time, and are already asking when we can come back!
The forecast today was for “scattered thunderstorms”, so we decided to leave our second day of Dutch Wonderland for later in the week and switch a few other plans around.
The Strasburg Railroad
We thought that taking the train in the rain would be fun, so we headed for the Strasburg Railroad. (To say that we got drenched while waiting to board would be an understatement. Despite our enormous umbrella, everyone’s shoes were soaked through and Anna – poor short little Anna – couldn’t have gotten wetter standing in the shower fully clothed.)
Feeling very glad we didn't pick the "open air" car!Do you *see* how hard that rain is coming down?!?
But it was worth the soaking. The details inside the train were lovely – aside from the velvet seats being green instead of red, it was exactly as Laura had described her first train ride in By the Shores of Silver Lake.
Lovely detailed woodwork and windows.Just in case we got cold...Even the outside of the cars were gorgeous!
The ride itself was fun, too. We were able to open the windows and look out on the rain soaked cornfields, wave to people waiting in cars at crossings, and even see an Amtrak train go speeding by at 100 mph while we waited for the engine to switch to the other end of the train for our trip back.
Looking out the window.Smoke and rain and something vaguely green.It's too bad about the rain - this looked fun!The conductor looking out at the rain.What a great train ride!
By the time we finished watching the engine switch back to the other end of the train again after our trip, it was lunch time, so we headed to the Red Caboose Motel, where we ate lunch in a train car! The girls were extra thrilled to find a friendly cat sitting on the porch when we were leaving.
Switching the engine.The conductor signaling the driver.Lunch on a train - you could even sleep here at the motel!Right next to the tracks - we were on that train earlier!Friendly cat!
Since we were still soaked through, we headed back to the hotel for a swim and a change, and then went shopping at Kitchen Kettle Village, where we bought fudge, jam and beef jerky (blame Denis), and also were able to stop at the absolutely lovely Lancaster Yarn Shop. Where I may have acquired some yarn. But, 1) it’s souvenir yarn, and 2) it’s sock yarn. Neither souvenir yarn nor sock yarn count as “stash”. So souvenir sock yarn must be anti-stash, and therefore actually cancels out some yarn I already own, right?
Kitchen Kettle Village. In the rain.Lovely, lovely yarn shop!
Road trip time! We switched Anna forward facing a few weeks ago, and let me just say, it’s a trip listening to her narrate our drive now. “Daddy, red light! Green light, Daddy! Wait Daddy, the letters on the truck – go back so I can read the letters on the truck, Daddy!”
Anyway, we are in Lancaster, PA for a much-anticipated vacation. We spent a couple of hours at Dutch Wonderland this evening, which is a small theme park – especially compared to the other DW – but absolutely perfect for our two small girls. We were able to let them go on lots of rides all by themselves.
Three princesses!Denis can go on any ride he wants!Carolyn on the Sky Ride.Denis and Anna on the Sky Ride.
The only sad moment of the day was when I discovered that our trip on the log flume ride may have completely killed my ipod touch – aka, the kid entertainment unit, aka the only reason Anna behaves during Carolyn’s piano lessons. That was a harsh, harsh lesson to check the outer pockets of my bag before going on a potentially drenching ride or wandering through a rain storm. (The inside, where my camera lives, stayed perfectly dry, thankfully!) I’m holding out hope that some time drying out will somehow fix it.
Don't bring your ipod touch on this ride!
Anyway, a good time was had by all, and the kids are *finally* asleep. I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings! Oh, and I’ll leave you with Anna’s very first made-up joke:
Why couldn’t the banana cross the store easily?
Because it wasn’t completely peeled!
Our theme this week is “Olden Times”, though most of our week will be spent experiencing that rather than crafting things.
We started today by visiting the Genesee Country Village & Museum, where they were having “Laura Ingalls Wilder Days”. We only spent the afternoon, but next year we will definitely plan to spend the whole day! The girls had so much fun!
Not quite authentic prairie dresses...
First, we ran into a friend of mine, Ron, who was demoing dyeing yarn with indigo, cochineal and onion skins, in dye pots over open flames outdoors. This was in the backyard of a house filled with various spinning wheels and looms. I quite possibly could have spent the day exploring just this one house!
Ron, in his pioneer garb.An antique, sure, but I bet it still works!Makes me want to take up weaving!Carolyn was going for the old time "pout" in this photo.
Then we went to farmhouse where the girls could make cornhusk dolls. They were thrilled! And they spent the remainder of the day playing with them and making up stories for them.
Learning how to make dolls.Wait, where do the arms go?Such simple, perfect toys!
We walked a bit further on and got to taste ginger water, and see cheese being made. Then, after a quick ice cream break, the rain started in earnest. We ducked under a tent and Carolyn, Denis and Anna all took turns making a tin ornament with a hammer and nail.
Watch those fingers!Excuse the blurriness...
We dashed to another house and the girls got to try their hands at kneading bread dough. And then at another they washed some laundry the 19th century way…in the rain, no less!
It's hard work, kneading bread by hand!Anna was thrilled with this activity!You never saw two children so eager......to do laundry. In the rain, no less!
Finally, we rode the tractor-pulled wagon around the entire village, hit the gift shop, and headed home. Both girls had a wonderful time today, but Carolyn especially loved seeing how Laura and her family would have lived, worked and played. I highly, highly recommend this to any Little House fans!
Carolyn in a soggy sunhat.Anna and Mommy on the wagon.
Or, how to get paint everywhere in just a few easy steps…
Paint Pie?
We used a combination of these instructions and these. So we put a layer of bubble solution (maybe 2-3 Tbsp? I didn’t measure) and paint (1 Tbsp? -ish?) in the cups. I poked pinholes in the straws (note that this was not as effective as promised and Anna managed to suck up a bit of the paint & bubble stuff mixture at one point…non-toxic, right?) Then the girls stirred everything up and started blowing bubbles into the tins.
For once I'm actually *letting* her blow bubbles!A pile of purple paint-y bubbles.A bubble print!
We got lots and lots of paint-filled bubbles. And some really neat prints! Because of the “sucking the paint up the straw” fiasco, I wound up doing most of the bubble blowing to avoid any other bubble drinking accidents.
Popping paint bubbles. Messy fun!We combined some colors for extra-unique prints.A red & orange bubble print.
When we’d had enough of having to clean out the pie tins to make more prints, the girls dug out the paint brushes and some more paper and did a bit more traditional painting.
A foundation for a house.Anna loves colors!Gleefully painting!
Clean fun? Not really – the blowing paint-y bubbles bit got little (washable) paint splatters everywhere. But good fun? Yes. Yes, indeed.
