While you are enjoying time with family and friends, eating good food and having good fun, I hope you'll take a moment or two to reflect upon the meaning of this day and thank those who have served and our serving our country so that we can enjoy the freedom we have been blessed with.
I've been doing some patriotic crafts with the kids this week.
Yesterday I blogged about the
popsicle stick flag Sweetie Pie and I made. She loves to do crafts and made a patriotic dream catcher decoration out of pipe cleaners all by herself. I helped her make the star shapes using a star shaped cookie cutter.
I just shaped the pipe cleaner around the star shaped cookie cutter to form the hanging stars.
I also made a second attempt at the
ice eggs. I wanted to make them red, white and blue so I used a bowl instead of a balloon. I filled up the bowl with water that was dyed red from food coloring. I let that bottom layer freeze. For the second layer, I used non colored water and added some army figures. Then I let that layer freeze.
Unfortunately I used a plastic bowl and the bottom cracked. Luckily it cracked after the bottom layer had frozen so there was no mess to clean up in the freezer. I was planning to just add a third layer of blue water so I'd have a bowl shaped red, white and blue ice 'dome' but that plan had been foiled by the cracked plastic bowl. I needed a bowl that would be big enough for the current size frozen ice. I used a glass bowl this time, hoping it wouldn't crack but it was a bit too big. If I just put the red layer on the bottom, there would have been too much space and adding the blue water would have just encased the whole thing in blue. I really wanted the striped look, so I put the red layer in on top, trying to get the red and clear/white layer to float and have a blue layer on the bottom. It sort of worked.
It looked pretty neat when it was all frozen. The kids were intrigued.
I had them put the glass bowl and frozen ice dome into the water table to get the ice dome to melt enough to come out of the bowl.
Once they were able to get the dome out,
I let the Spencinator have at it
with a hammer since it was pretty thick
He had a blast. Here is Sweetie Pie noticing the red, white, and blue layers.
And here's an army man still trapped inside.
Unfortunately with all the hammering, he didn't make it out all in one piece.
The kids still had fun and that's all that matters, right?
