Making Our Own Laundry Detergent

My favorite show on TV is Jon and Kate Plus 8 on TLC. Right after it another show comes on about a family with 17 kids! The funny thing about that show is that the parents were in our church when we lived in Arkansas (they were in High School and I was a kid). Anyway, they did a show about being frugal with their money and talked about making their own laundry detergent. I researched it and found out about how much cheaper it is and how much better it is for the environment and decided to try it out. I bought all the ingredients for about $8 and I think it's enough to make the detergent recipe 3 times which should be enough to get us through the year. So, I'll be spending $8 a year on laundry detergent instead of $72 (which is approximately what I was spending on the Kirkland brand at Costco). In the grand scheme of things $64 isn't a ton of money, but if you can find little things like this to do in different areas all over your life then it can really add up.
I used the following recipe that I found at tipnut:
1 quart Water (boiling)
2 cups Bar soap (grated)
2 cups Borax
2 cups Washing Soda
Add finely grated bar soap to the boiling water and stir until soap is melted. You can keep on low heat until soap is melted.
Pour the soap water into a large, clean pail and add the Borax and Washing Soda. Stir well until all is dissolved.
Add 2 gallons of water, stir until well mixed.
Cover pail and use 1/4 cup for each load of laundry. Stir the soap each time you use it (will gel).

I ended up using a funnel and pouring the detergent from the Home Depot bucket into an old laundry detergent holder that I had. Now I can just shake it up before I use it.

Ingredients

Grated Soap

Final Product

Mini Optimus Prime

The voice changer on this thing is soooo creepy, but the boys love it.

Thinning Paint

I decided to do a little exercise with the boys where we thinned paint with water so they could see how you could get a different "look" with just a little change to the paint. Ofcourse Wyatt loved it and Seth wasn't that interested (why do I feel the need to get him so interested in art when he clearly has no interest in it). First, we used full strength paint and painted a line on our paper, then we watered it down a little and painted another line, then we watered it down a little more and painted another line. After that I let the boys paint whatever they wanted.

Seth trying hard to stay interested; I've got to find something else that will interest in him that's artistic/crafty/fun

Wyatt wrote his name in yellow crayon and then painted over it

As you can see, Wyatt loves to paint (all of these except one are his)

Make Your Own Bouncy Balls

A while back I bought these Make Your Own Bouncy Ball Kits at the Dollar Bin at Target. We finally got around to making them and the boys loved it. You mixed a colored sand like substance into a ball form and stuck a blinking light in it. Then you swirled the ball form in water for 30 seconds. Then you let it dry for 15 minutes before you pulled the ball form off and you have your new blinking bouncy ball. It worked pretty well. The sand stuff expanded quite a bit, so Seth's ball got a little lopsided.

Don't you love the Larry Boy hat and Sunglasses?
Drying Balls

All finished

Spider Pizza

I made these a couple of nights before Halloween and the boys loved them. I used English Muffins for the bottoms and then I used String Cheese for the Web. I made the Spiders out of Olives.

Obviously, I didn't pull the string cheese thin enough. I only made half with spiders because it was getting late and I knew the boys wouldn't eat them anyway.

Happy Halloween

Our computer crashed and I'm a little late putting up these pictures, but they were too cute not to share. We went trick-or-treating with our friends, the Rankins, on Halloween. It was their son's first Halloween and our boys were so excited to have him along. This was also Seth's first year to go trick-or-treating. Last year he got sick all over his costume and our driveway when we walked outside to go trick-or-treating, so he stayed home while Jerad and I took turns taking Wyatt down the street. This year we went in our neighborhood then we headed over to Russell's boss' house and hit a few houses in that neighborhood and then we went to my parents.

The Rankins
Howdy, ya'll!!

Our little Indian

You can't tell it from the picture, but Wyatt was actually a Ninja Turtle Cowboy. He had a Turtle Shell pinned to his back. It was totally his idea.

Cowboys and an Indian!!

This weekend our church had their "Family Reunion" and the kids got to dress up in their costumes. Reece was an Indian and Wyatt and Seth went as Cowboys. We had a great time. There were almost 50 baptisms, which prompted some questions from Wyatt, so that was great. The boys had a great time jumping in the inflatables, climbing the rock wall, and getting their face painted.

Seth did great on the rock wall. I knew he would because he does so well on the one at our park. Wyatt got a little nervous. I think Seth will be our dare-devil child and Reece will probably follow right after him. Reece would have climbed the wall, but there was a weight limit for the harness and he was too small.

Reece got Indian Stripes painted on his face
Wyatt and Seth both got a tribute to our great family secret painted on their faces. You know the secret, the one that their daddy is really Spiderman and goes out to fight the bad guys at night while they're asleep. Let them tell you all about it. You might just end up believing them; they can be really convincing : ) I don't know where this came from, but they totally believe it and if anyone steers them away from it I will seriously have to hurt them. They've started asking if I'm "Wonder Red Spider Girl" and what super powers I have too. So, that's pretty cool too.

Muffin Tin Monday

This week the boys' muffin tins had:

Spoon for the Cottage Cheese, Cottage Cheese, Tortilla Chips, Apple Slices

Candy Corn and Pumpkins, PB&J, Queso, Carrots

Juice, Animal Crackers, Raisins, Ranch

Seth ate everything except the queso, it was a little spicy
Wyatt ate everything and declared, "Look mom, I'm eating carrots, just like the guinea pigs!" Usually, we have the little baby carrots, but since I have a huge bag of big carrots for the guinea pigs I just peeled those and sliced them for the boys today. He was sooo excited.
Reece had Raisins, PB&J, Animal Crackers, Apples, Cottage Cheese, and Tortilla Chips. He was very pleased : )

Spider Sandwiches!!

Today I made a special treat for the boys' lunch. Spider Sandwiches!

First, I made the legs with two pretzel sticks. I held them together with raisins. Obviously, there aren't 8, but there wasn't enough room and it was kind of time consuming.
Then I used my Pampered Chef Cut N Seal Sandwich Maker (you could use any product that does this that's just the one I have) to make the peanut butter and jelly sandwhich.
I added raisin eyes and put little dots on the top of them with red decorator gel (which didn't show up to well in the picture).
Finally, I stuck the legs in the sandwiches and the spiders were complete.
I decorated a paper plate with black decorator gel to make a web and since it was gel it also edible.
The boys LOVED it!! I ran out of black decorator gel, so Seth's spider web was made from red gel and he thought that was great too.

Look what came in the mail!!!

I'm sooooo excited!! My very first storybooks came in the mail this week. Okay, I've seen the samples, but this is the first time I've seen my work in print. Yipee!! I'm beyond thrilled. They turned out great. So, if you're looking to make incredible scrapbooks, cards, posters, calendars or more then head on over to Next Step Scrapbooks and GET BUSY!! I'm so excited to be a part of this business. To have the opportunity to preserve my own memories and heritage and help others do the same is wonderful.

The books came in these great sleeves that say "Every Story deserves a book of it's own"

I made an 8x8 book of our trip to Seattle, WA last summer and a 5x5 book of Wyatt's soccer season
Some of my favorite pages. These books are completely customizable. You start with a totally blank book and make the front and back covers and all the pages from scratch. There are templates if you don't want to have to come up with something on your own. It's wonderful.
Wyatt with his book. He LOVES it!! The morning after it got here he woke up and it was the second thing we went to look at (after looking at our new guinea pigs of course).

Painting with Straws

We did this fun little art project the other day. I really watered down so tempera paint so that it was nice and thin and then put it on a paper plate and gave the boys a straw and let them blow the paint around the plate. Wyatt did a great job and really enjoyed it. Seth did okay, but not as well. I guess we still need to work on mouth muscle development with him (something we haven't been doing as much of since he's not in speech therapy).

The "Bird in Tree" I made to demonstrate the project to them
All of our projects when we were done