Saturday, September 5, 2020

autumn themed sensory rice

Now that I’m homeschooling all four kiddos at different levels I’m going back to my preschool days of teaching and pulling out all the sensory activities. Regardless of age all our kids love sensory play. Not only is it fun, but it also helps to break up their structured learning throughout the morning and it always keeps them busy.

Today we made a few different batches of colored rice for our sensory table to use this fall. We mixed up green, orange and yellow for a fall leaf theme and we also mixed up purple, orange, green, pink and black for halloween. The kids have always enjoyed scooping and pouring rice, but it’s great for burying letters, numbers, flash cards, animals, pumpkins etc and trying to find them. Making colored rice is simple and there are a few different ways to do make it. I opted for all food safe ingredients just in case a few grains make it into Etta’s mouth! So here you go...instructions can be found at the bottom 😉

pdf version right HERE!

printable chore charts

over the last few months our chore routine has become inconsistent. maybe this has happened in your home too. we’re not going anywhere, we’re not seeing anyone, the priority is still there, but it’s slid on the list of things to do. especially since we were out of town for several weeks and now we’re full blown into the summer months.

it actually dawned on me to revise our chore charts for summer, but the thought slipped away and then i saw someone on IG share a free printable and of course i lost that too. so i recreated what i saw and if anyone you know who created this original design please let me know so i can credit them. anyways...we are not super strict on chores and don’t want to make it something the kids dread, but understand that we are all part of this family and we all contribute and help each other. this chart is simple to act as a checklist as they can look and know what age appropriate chores can be done each day. we’re also notorious for the ‘oh i forgot to do (blank)’...you know how distractions can easily get the best of us.

so in an effort to find some kind of order again amongst the crazy i’ve added these charts below for you to print yourselves in case you need a little order in your life like me. happy friday!

CHORE CHART LINK

Chocolate Hazelnut Frozen Fudge Bars

Okay, so if you love fudge bars then you need to stop what you’re doing and mix these simple homemade fudge bars up right now! We love all the fun and festive frozen treats in the summer and I was eager to try and make our own fudge bars where I could control the ingredients and just try something different. I didn’t think fudge bars would be too difficult and my original thought was to just freeze chocolate milk, but I didn’t want it to be icy milk. Does that make sense?

After looking at a few different recipes I chose to mix up two of our favorites chocolatey ingredients: fairlife chocolate milk and chocolate hazelnut spread. Mindblowing! Why has it taken us this long to put these two together?!?! First off if you haven’t had the Fairlife chocolate milk I really think you’re missing out. It’s absolutely delicious and to pair it with the hazelnut spread is just dynamite.

Chocolate Hazelnut Frozen Fudge Bars

*makes 6 frozen bars*

1-1/2 cups chocolate milk

1/2 cup chocolate hazelnut spread

In a bowl whisk together chocolate hazelnut spread and chocolate milk until combine. Pour into popsicle mold. Freeze overnight. Remove and enjoy.

This post is not at all sponsored, just me sharing something we love and use.

Guest Room Makeover for $500

In early March we had plans to host our friends and our guest room really needed some love. We hadn’t done anything to this space since building our home six years ago. It was a blank slate, a very boring, plain, blank slate and it was perfect for a little makeover.

We wanted to try to use things we already had on hand and keep this makeover on a minimum budget of $500. We felt it was doable based on what we had and what we wanted to do. We already had the bed, linens, curtains and leftover paint in the garage. We built our design around those things and then went straight to work.

Our home is a craftsman style and our interior has some modern farmhouse touches so we decided to add some texture and dimension to the walls by adding board and batten using 1x3 boards. This was fairly simple for us since we installed this same thing in both our entryway and dining room a few years ago.

Instead of purchasing two full size bedside tables, we built two and attached them to the wall using a stair tread and two corbels for each side. We also swapped out the light for a ceiling fan to help keep guests comfortable and lastly, added some adorable wooden pegs near the door.

For decor we shopped the house again and pulled the vintage floral print I found from a local antique shop a couple tears ago. I love having a diffuser for our guests as well especially if they’re not familiar with essential oils because this gives them an opportunity to try them. I think it’s also important to have extra blankets and throws just in case it’s a little chilly.

Hopefully we can host friends or family in this space soon, but until then it’s being used a nice little quiet getaway for us!