Cinnamon Sugar Bunco Snack Mix

It was my turn to host our monthly Bunco night and I wanted to add a little extra dice-related fun. So I Pinterested the heck out of Bunco recipes. (Actually, I compiled my favorites into a list that you can find here.) I found this fun snack mix idea from the Make the Best of Everything blog but she wasn't too clear on how to make them. So I did a bit more searching and found three different recipes to make this yummy Cinnamon Sugar Bunco Snack Mix! Here's how.

 First, lets start with the dice-shaped shortbread cookies. Here's the recipe for shortbread I used from Simple Bites.

Shortbread Cookies

• 3/4 pound (1 1/2 cups or 3 sticks) unsalted butter at room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

1. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, mix together the butter and sugar until they are just combined. Add the vanilla.
2. In a medium bowl, sift together the flour and salt, then add them to the butter-and-sugar mixture. Mix on low speed until the dough starts to come together.
3. Dump onto a surface dusted with flour and bring everything together with your hands. Dump into a cake pan and pat down to make a sheet of dough roughly 1/4 inches deep. 
4. Chill for 30 minutes and then cut into squares (mine were roughly 1x1 inches). 
5. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place squares on a cookie sheet (I used parchment paper) and bake for 10-12 minutes until golden brown. Let cool.

The above recipe suggested a lemon glaze, but I didn't think that would go well with cinnamon sugar. I found a better glaze from Gonna Want Seconds. The recipe is below.

Cinnamon Sugar Glaze

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 tablespoons whole milk
• Mini chocolate chip cookies

1. Combine all ingredients, except chocolate chips, in a small bowl and mix until smooth. 
2. Use a small spoon (I used a baby spoon) or knife to spread a small amount onto each cookie.
3. Before the glaze dries, add mini chocolate chip cookies in the designs of dice faces. 

Now it's time to make the rest of the snack mix. I adopted my recipe from Chocolate, Chocolate and More. 

Cinnamon Sugar Snack Mix

• 1 1/2 cup pretzels
• 1 cup salted peanuts
• Half a bag of popped popcorn; unpopped kernels removed
• 4 tablespoons of melted butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 3 tablespoons cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon course sea salt

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees and line baking sheet with parchment paper. 
2. Mix pretzels, peanuts, and popcorn. Set aside.
3. Mix melted butter, sugar, cinnamon, and salt. 
4. Use either a large bowl or a ziploc and dump all ingredients into it to shake until everything is uniformly covered. 
5. Bake 7-8 minutes and let cool. Add your dice-shaped shortbread cookies and store in an air-tight container. 

The "2 Hats:1 Head" Conundrum

Rose was presented with quite the problem this morning. What does a girl do when she has two hats, but only one head to put them on? Here's the back story:

After she woke up this morning, she saw her watermelon hat laying on the couch and of course demanded that I help put it on her head. I complied and we went on with our morning. Then while we were walking from the kitchen to the living room, she spied her owl hat. She immediately ran towards it while hooting like the little owl she is. She snatched it up and began making that horrible toddler whining/demanding noise while holding it up at me. I explained to her she was already wearing a hat, but she could take that one off to wear her owl hat. Rose thought that was no good. Now holding both her hats and continuing to whine, I only saw one solution that would make her happy. One head with two hats. I must admit she was pretty cute, especially that satisfied ornery smile.

Toddler Life: Rose's Lovey

I've seen all these posts and have heard all this talk about kids having a lovey. Rose has never been attached to any blanket or stuffed animal, so quite frankly I thought it just didn't apply to her.

Well we've found it. It just took cold weather to drag it out of the closet. It turns out Rose's security blanket isn't a blanket at all, instead she has chosen this pink owl hat. She has to wear it everywhere. That means when we're at playdates, grocery shopping, at our own home, and during lunch. Heck, she even naps in it!

Honestly, I think she's chosen wisely. Her security hat leaves both her hands free for playtime and eating. And it makes my already adorable little girl even cuter. We received several comments on it and her today at the indoor playground. Well I have to go now and tend to my little owl.

DIY Shape Book or Flashcards

After making some simple window clings for Rose, I had some left over foam that needed to be used. I've seen some felt DIY shape books online and decided foam could be an alternative and just-as-good material. The foam I used came from a 36-pack bought from the Dollar Tree.

For this project, I only needed 12 sheets to make the book. I began by cutting 6 sheets of foam in half to make two pages. I then punched a hole in the top left corner of each in case I wanted to string them together later.

After that, I carefully cut out two identical copies of 11 different shapes: heart, circle, oval, square, triangle, rectangle, rhombus, trapezoid, pentagon, hexagon, and star. One of each shape was then glued onto a page of the book while the other one was traced with a sharpie and then set aside. Lastly,

I labeled each shape that was glued to the page. And that's it. You can string the pages together to make a book or keep them flat to use as flashcards

Rose surprised me when I handed her the heart and circle and she correctly placed them on the corresponding card. I was so proud of her. This fun learning activity will now be a part of our daily routine.

Afternoon Activity: Bathtub Painting

Rose and I are stuck at home for the better part of today while waiting for a contractor to come and patch up a hole in the garage ceiling. Luckily, we were able to run to the late story time at our library where Rose had an awesome social breakthrough and detached herself from me for a whole 5 minutes to play with the parachute. It was a big proud-mama moment.

After we came home and ate lunch, we were pretty bored and didn’t know what to do with ourselves. I thought about finger painting but I really didn’t feel like cleaning up the big mess that was sure to come with that activity, which of course would lead to a bath. That’s when it hit me. Why not skip the middle part? Why not make the mess IN the bathtub? Well, that’s exactly what we did. I prepped Rose’s paint tray (icecube tray), attached cotton balls to the ends of some clothespins, and let Rose go at it in the tub.

I made sure to use washable finger paint. I recommend the Crayola brand, but you could always experiment making some DIY finger paint (although be careful when using food coloring, it may dye your child’s clothes and/or your bathtub).

My favorite things about this activity is that the prep time was minimal (around 2 minutes) and Rose enjoyed playing for about 30-35 minutes! After about 15 minutes of play Rose started getting bored with the cotton balls, so I introduced some q-tips and she continued playing with those for another 10 minutes. Once she decided that she had enough of painting, I turned the water on and she had even more fun playing in the colored water and helping mom clean the sides of the tub. The one “bad” thing about this activity is that it left a lovely red ring around my tub; but since I used washable paints, it was easily removed with a wet rag.

Overall Rating: 5+ Stars!

Below is a quick summary of why this activity was so awesome and received a 5+ rating:

• Minimal prep time
• 30-35 minutes of play time
• Sensory play: cotton, water, goopy paint
• Learning opportunities for colors, counting, and letters
• Creative play: making art, mixing colors 
• Easy clean up

Afternoon Activity: Cotton Balls and Contact Paper

This post is a bit late and this activity was actually done a couple of nights ago. My one-year-old was a bit restless since we had been inside all day and I, myself, was tired from cleaning the house. That being said, I wanted something that was both easy to clean up and fairly simple to set up.

I have been trying to find ways to utilize a couple of bags of cotton balls that I had previously purchased for a crafting play date earlier in the month and discovered this idea on Pinterest. Five minutes later I had the contact paper taped (upside down) to my daughter’s activity table and gave her a bucket of cotton balls, q-tips, and Styrofoam packing peanuts and let her go crazy.

She played with the whole set up for about 15 minutes. Her favorite part was to take the cotton balls and stick them to the contact paper and pick them up so they left cotton fibers. But eventually she got bored with it and soon discovered that the packing peanuts could be torn and shredded into smaller pieces (that were so much fun picking up afterward). She did this for about another 10 minutes.

Overall, I’d say this was a pretty successful activity. It lasted for about half an hour and clean up wasn’t horrible. If we keep with my previous rating system, I’d give this activity 5 stars. 

Weatherproofing in January (better late than never?)

Yesterday morning I found myself a bit chilly while playing kitchen with my daughter in her playroom. So I made an effort to sit close to the air vent where I knew hot air would be blasting out. As you can imagine I was quite confused when I felt cold air instead. The vent in that room is placed right below a window and there was a freezing-cold wintery breeze coming right into my daughter’s play room. Well, crap. That would explain why our December energy bill is more than DOUBLED the previous month.

This is our first winter in this house (which is around 25 years old) and during our extremely busy autumn months we neglected to check if the doors and windows were weatherproofed. What a mistake. Looking back now, I can recollect conversations between my husband and me about how chilly it was by the couch (which sits in front of 3 giant windows). Duh. How in the heck did we not make the connection?

I showed the problem to my husband and (of course) his solution was to buy new windows. Calmly, I told him to slow his roll and that surely we could find a cheaper and easier solution. So during nap time yesterday, I YouTubed several videos on how to weatherproof old windows and this is my favorite video: https://youtu.be/mQ74FVB9JSI.

Rose and I took a fun field trip to Home Depot today and bought some foam weatherproofing strips and some removable weather stripping (it comes in a caulking tube). Once we got home, we got busy cleaning windows and applying the foam strips. Unfortunately, during the move we misplaced my caulking gun so it looks like that’ll have to wait a couple more days until we find ourselves back at Home Depot. 

But so far we can see and feel a considerable difference in the living room temperature. I don't have to wear a jacket inside anymore! And another plus, the husband was pleasantly surprised when he came home to find it all done and he could remove it from his Honey-Do List. Count that as a couple brownie points for the wife.