Beethoven Lesson for Kids

March 4th, 2013 | Posted by Kat in Homeschooling | Kids - (0 Comments)

We recently started homeschooling our kids, which has given me the opportunity to do something that I love even more in our home – teaching about music. I grew up in a family that appreciated and loved classical music, and it makes me happy to pass that on to my kids as well.

As part of our music lessons, we have been talking about different ideas in theory and have been learning some fun songs, but I wanted to also make sure that they were learning about composers and how their music continues to live on today. I thought I’d share our Beethoven lesson plan:

  • Beethoven Bio from Making Music Fun
  • Listened to an excerpt from his Fifth Symphony (since it is “classic” Beethoven….and my son is playing it in a piano recital so he has a vested interest)
  • Listened to an excerpt from his Moonlight Sonata….
  • ……..And compared it to this modern version by The Piano Guys:

  • Listened to an excerpt from his Ninth Symphony (“Ode to Joy” – vocal awesomeness starts at 0:34)…….
  • ……..And (probably somewhat irreverently) compared it to this version by The Muppets:

I love hearing the original music, and it is fun to see how we have interpreted it in OUR day. Happy teaching! :)

 

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Dryer Cloth!

October 17th, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Cleaning | Tips - (0 Comments)
Dryer Sheet 4

I had posted earlier about a foil ball to put in the dryer – which worked well, but sometimes things were a bit static-y. I decided to try this idea from That Crazy Family, and it works PERFECTLY. No more running out of dryer sheets! No more throwing away a dryer sheet with every load! And it takes the static out awesomely. Hooray!

All you need is a washcloth and fabric softener (click here for another awesome tip with fabric softener). I use both of my red washcloths because I can find them easily when I’m pulling the wash out. They have been washed and dried many times themselves, so I don’t worry about bleeding.

Take your washcloth and saturate it with fabric softener. I just take about a capful (you may need more or less, depending on the size and absorbancy of your washcloth) and dump it on the washcloth. Then I squeeze the washcloth so I can mix the fabric softener in.

Let it dry.

Voila! Instant dryer sheet. I have been using my dryer cloths for several months now and can say that they WORK, and work well. I use each cloth until I can’t smell or feel the fabric softener in the cloth (easily 20 loads), and then just put more fabric softener on it again, let it dry, and use it all over. Easy, cheap, friendly to the trees and animals – there you go!

The only times I do NOT use my dryer cloth is when I am drying towels or rugs. You don’t need a dryer sheet or fabric softener for those. (For a tip on getting the stink out of your towels, click here. It’s awesome.)

Enjoy! :)

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Organizing Your Insurance History (fun, right?) ;)

October 6th, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Organizing - (2 Comments)
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Okay, I am BACK and ready to go. I have finally (I think) gotten used to the routine of teaching my early-morning Seminary class (daily studying New Testament with high school students before school) and am ready to work more of my normal life into my routine. Whew! And it has finally started to cool down here which means that I am finally ready to start my annual “purging of the file cabinet”. It brings me a great deal of joy to go through and get rid of stuff that I don’t need, and organize the stuff that I DO need in a more effective way.

Tonight’s project: Organizing past insurance information.

Sounds fun, right? I mean, what else could you want to do on a Saturday night that is more fun than this? :) Now, why should you want to do this? I’ll explain in the form of a question – have you ever shopped around for insurance? What is one of the awful things that they ask you for? Yep, your insurance history. They also ask you other questions, but those are for another post entirely. If you have everything typed up and printed off in a place where you know you will find it, it will take you two seconds to give your past insurance history. If you are like me and have never done it, this is what you go through to try and find the information EVERY time:

Yep. The green file folders of wonder. I put boring documents in the ugly green folders. Insurance qualifies as boring, so into the ugly green folders the information goes. I have over 10 years of information in these babies. And I always want to hit my head against the wall when I am applying for a different insurance and have to dig through ALL of this information to get the same few pieces of information over and over again.

How to start?

1. Find your past insurance information and get it all in one place. Hopefully you have it filed away at least – that should help you out a bit. If not, good luck. :)

2. Download a cute font. This always makes tasks like typing up your past insurance history so much more enjoyable. Fun fonts are the way to go.

3. Start new documents for each type of insurance, and possibly even for each person who has been insured in your household. If it is just you – hooray! That will be all the easier. If you have a spouse and five kids who you have been insured and you have changed jobs or insurance every year for the past 20 years….you may have a little more work cut out for you. But hopefully a lot of information will be the same from one person to the next. For us, my husband usually has been able to be insured through his grad school or his work at a good rate or have it covered (as far as health and dental insurance go), but my kids and I have had to be on private insurance and I am not afraid to find a better plan and move. This means I have my work cut out for me a bit.

4. Get all of your history in order – find your current insurance FIRST and work back from there. List the company, the policy number, and who is covered under the policy as a minimum. You may also (at least for your current insurance) want to put info on copays and such just to not have to dig around and find that info if you have a question.

5. Go back through your history, at least for a few years. I have had companies ask me for as far back as five years, but some are only concerned that you have been covered continuously for the last year or so. The more information you have to give them to show continuous coverage, the better. I have gotten good rate discounts on car insurance for having continuous coverage for the past 15 years, and private health insurance companies are a lot more willing to insure you and to not have as many dings against your health history if you have can show continuous coverage.

6. After you have gotten as much history as you can, starting from NOW and going back, save your files and back them up somewhere safe. Also, print out a paper copy to stick somewhere where you will find it. For me, the papers will go in the front of my ugly green folders because that is the first place I will look.

There you go! Easy, if not a little time consuming. In another post, I’ll talk about organizing your personal health history, both to have a record, but also to be able to more easily and accurately give information for re-shopping health insurance, which will be another post. That is something that I have learned a lot about through the years and have had a lot of friends come talk to me for help in understanding options and I have felt like there is not good, clear information about shopping for insurance and what coverages are needed.

Until next time – happy organizing!

Kat :)

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Test Your House for GERMS

August 23rd, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Ideas | Kids - (1 Comments)
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This idea comes from parents.com and it is crazy awesome. I am somewhat of a “germ aware” person and find myself often wondering what kinds of gross things are living on the surfaces of things like play places, sinks, shopping cart handles, etc. This post has a way to make your own gels to grow bacterial cultures. Nerdy? You bet. And super cool.

Make Your Own Bacterial Plates

Supplies Needed:

  • 1/2 c. water
  • 2 tsp. sugar
  • 1 packet of unflavored gelatin (1 oz.)
  • several plastic or paper cups
  • plastic wrap
  • cotton swabs

How to:

Step 1: Prepare your cups. I used 6 cups. You really could do more, though. I cut my cups down so they were shorter – maybe 2″ tall. You could even go shorter than that if you would like – my cups were plastic and tended to rip more easily when they were cut down shorter than that.

Step 2: Boil your water. I microwaved the cup in a microwave-safe glass measuring cup. It took about a minute – you can literally watch the water start to boil in about that time.

Step 3: Mix in your sugar and gelatin and pour into your prepared cups.

Step 4: Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate your cups for 24 hours to allow your “gels” to firm up. And they will really, truly be firm. If they are squishy at all, give them some more time.

Step 5: Go around your house and find “questionable” things to swab. The original poster had found that her houseplant was actually the grossest place in her house, while the toilet and the inside of her daughter’s mouth were not very gross. Be creative! Here is what I tried:

The smudged one was a second swab I took of the sink – I took one “before” cleaning it with Scrubbing Bubbles, and one after. I’m always curious if the cleaners that say they kill 99% of everything actually work. We also have kids over here often to play, and they almost always gravitate to the piano, so I thought that would be interesting too. I wanted to test our plant for myself too. I also wanted to try the doorknob to our pantry since that is one that gets high usage. And, of course, I left one as a control. “Control” just basically means you leave it alone to make sure there wasn’t something wrong with the gel that you made. I actually cheated a little bit and swabbed that one with a “clean” cotton swab, just because I wanted to make sure the cotton swab itself wasn’t a carrier.

Step 6: Recover with plastic wrap and leave in a dark, warm spot for 4-5 days.The first day there will be very little to nothing that happens. Don’t despair! Once the colonies get growing, they will grow quickly.

Our Results (in grossest to least gross order):

1. The Houseplant (gross!)

2. The Piano Keys

3. The Uncleaned Sink

4. (And this is a VERY distant fourth – there was practically nothing) The Cleaned Sink

5. The Doorknob

6. The Control

Wow! I will definitely wipe off our piano keys. Sick. And I will NOT eat food off of my houseplant if it falls on it. *Shudder*

That was a LOT of fun, and will definitely be something we try again. What would you swab?

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Quinoa Recipes

July 23rd, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Recipes - (0 Comments)

I have a bag of quinoa in my pantry that stares at me every once in awhile and makes me think, “Hey – I should really figure out how to use this.” Here are a few recipes that I have found that look promising:

Broccoli-Quinoa Casserole from Eating Well…..Living Thin(ner)

Black Bean and Tomato Quinoa from Epicurious

Quinoa and Roasted Pepper Chili from myrecipes.com

Greek-Style Quinoa Burgers from wholeliving.com

Lentil Quinoa Salad from Melissa d’Arabian

Quinoa Tabbouleh from Aarti Sequiera

Corn and Manchego Tri-Color Quinoa Salad from Cheese Please

Wow! These look good. What are your favorite Quinoa recipes?

Enjoy! :)

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Dried Fruit – Oven-Syle

July 18th, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Recipes | Tips - (1 Comments)
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I saw this pin and decided it merited a try: fruit that was better than twizzlers – sweet! It comes from The World Gourmet. As I read through the page and it said to add salt and pepper, which I opted not to do because that would seem to take the “twizzler” taste out of things.

Since I was already doing strawberries, I thought I would experiment with bananas and raspberries too.

Step 1: Cut up some fruit (quarter or halve the strawberries) and put onto a baking sheet.

Step 2: Bake at 210 degrees for 3 hours. The bananas seemed done at this point, but not the raspberries or strawberries.

Step 3: Flip fruit over and keep baking for another hour or two. I just made this step up. The fruit was still not done (minus the bananas), so I kept baking. Here is what it looked like after 5 total hours and some sampled fruit along the way:

End result: I should have taken the bananas off at 3 hours because they were burned…..one of my boys tried the bananas out at the 3 hour mark and was not too fond of them, so they just may have been a flop. The raspberries were not done at 3 hours, but tasted a little burned at 5 hours. The strawberries were AWESOME. I would just stick with those next time. They didn’t taste quite as good or sweet as twizzlers, and I probably prefer them fresh, but they ended up tasty enough. Not nearly as pretty as the picture on The World Gourmet, but that is probably because I am not a Gourmet. :)

Overall Rating: *** (out of 5)

Difficulty: Easy.

Would I Try it Again? Possibly, but like I said before, I preferred the fresh ones and those take less time to be done.

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Cheapest. Dryer. Sheet. Ever. (with foil!)

July 16th, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Tips - (0 Comments)
Foil Ball

I ran out of dryer sheets today and didn’t want to go to the store, so I found this way to make a cheap dryer sheet out of fabric softener and a rag from Heather @ Fake-It Frugal (I’ll review that idea after I have tried it out). The fabric softener was taking a bit to dry, so I decided to try the trick that she mentioned at the bottom of her post, but hadn’t tried out yet. Take aluminum foil, ball it up, and chuck it in your dryer.

I was doing a load of kid laundry, so I figured if it was horrible and staticky that they wouldn’t notice too much (especially the boys), so I tried it. I took about a foot long of aluminum foil, crumpled it up and stuck it in the dryer with my damp clothes. After the clothes were dry I pulled them out and they felt….normal! I even did a test with picking up a fleece PJ top that had a lightweight hand towel on top of it – the hand towel didn’t stick! It came right off. Hooray!! And no worrying about possible staining or adding extra chemicals to the clothes either.

Thank you Heather! :)

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Medicine Box: A Trip Tip

July 12th, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Tips - (0 Comments)
trip 2

For those of you who are traveling, don’t forget to take your medicine cabinet with you. And I mean all of it. According to Murphy’s Law, your child (or yourself) will get an ear infection, a fever, or have some kind of crazy itch and you will have to go buy a whole bottle of whatever you only need a little bit of and still have a whole bottle of whatever it is that you need left at home. That’s how Murphy rolls.

We have our kid variety of Advil, Tylenol, assorted allergy meds, Wally’s Ear Oil & our otoscope, a thermometer, Bandaids, Cotton Swabs, stomach ache meds, etc. Just go through your stuff and pull out one of everything. We stick ours in a little Rubbermaid box and it slides nicely under the bench in the van.

There ya go.  Easy, and you will likely stay healthy if you pack this along. :)

For other trip tips, click here.

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Easy Paint Chip Art

July 9th, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Ideas | Tips - (4 Comments)
tree pic

A several months ago, I found a picture on Pinterest where someone had taken paint sample chips and cut them in circles, painted some straight reed-looking lines on a canvas, put the circles over the top of the “reeds” and – VOILA! – art.

We had decided to paint our living room and kitchen and I had acquired a TON of paint samples in the process. Some people are “color choosing” gifted – I am not one of them. I also had a fairly large canvas that I had found at goodwill several years ago that needed some love. I called my friend Becky, who is a VERY talented scrapper, to see if she had some circle-shaped punches I could borrow. She sent a few over and it all began.

I painted the background of the canvas a light color, and decided that instead of several straight “reeds” I wanted to have more of a curved branch look and painted that on as well.

Then I took some time to organize my colors and arrange them onto the canvas before gluing any of them on. In order to keep it from feeling like too much of a color explosion, I decided that I wanted the top & left to be concentrated with lighter colors, and have the bottom and right be concentrated with darker colors, but still to have some colors (pops of pink, etc.) scattered throughout.

Once I had the colors where I wanted them, my mom (who was in town and helping me with a bunch of projects) and I used glue stick to glue them all down. Then Mom painted on several layers of Mod Podge to keep it all sealed together.

There you have it! An easy, personalized art piece.

Enjoy! :)

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Glowing Volcano!

July 6th, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Fun | Ideas | Kids - (0 Comments)
GV 9

This is a twist on the classic “vinegar and baking soda” volcano – it GLOWS. Super cool.

Here is what you need:

  • Highlighter (yellow is best)
  • Water
  • Vinegar
  • Baking Soda
  • Black Light
  • Glass Containers

That is IT. I found this idea from Play at Home Mom and thought the kiddos would love it. And me too. :)

Step 1: Clip the back off of the highlighter. Supposedly you can put pressure with scissors to get it to “pop” off, but I ended up finally using an exacto knife after I almost broke my scissors.

Step 2: Get the color out of the highlighter. Just take the “ink” part of the highlighter and put it into water. If you had a hard time opening the highlighter and didn’t want to cut into it, you can just hang the highlighter so the tip is facing downward into the water.

I actually squeezed some of the highlighter ink out when the tube was soaked in water, and then let the rest of the color get out into the water by letting it soak. I was a little excited to hurry it along…..

Step 3: After the tube is basically white from the ink coming out, find a dark room and hook up your black light.

Cool!

Step 4: Make your “volcano” liquid by pouring some of your highlighter water into a container with some vinegar. Stick your volcano liquid container into another container to catch the “lava” as it flows out. You don’t want messes!

As you can see, the color diluted down quite a bit when I added the vinegar. Keep watching though – it turned out just fine.

Step 5: Dump some baking soda into your “volcano liquid” and enjoy the show!

We had some more vinegar and baking soda on hand to alternate so we could keep the fun going.

There you go! Super easy cleanup and a very fun experiment.

I saved the rest of the highlighter water that we didn’t use in another container so we could try it again another time.

Enjoy! :)

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Easy Peasy Shredded Chicken

July 2nd, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Tips - (0 Comments)
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This has made my life better. Really, it has.

Shredding chicken is my absolutely least favorite thing to do of all times. Or at least it is close. I have a problem: I do NOT handle inanimate objects that do not obey my will very well. I still have a hard time cutting with scissors for more than a minute (Kindergarten 101!), sealed plastic objects that say “easy open” and you STILL have to pick at them for 25 minutes before the plastic finally yields and separates, and chicken that is prepared to shred but still takes way longer than it should to get it all shredded nicely.

No more.

This was a tip I found from Gwen @ Simply Healthy Family. Gwen, you are awesome.

Step 1: Cook your chicken. I just chuck several chicken breasts into a pot of boiling water and let them go for a long time.

Step 2: Take let your chicken cool down, just a bit. I found that with chicken RIGHT out of the water it actually was a little harder to get everything shredded uniformly. When the chicken is still warm, but has dried out a bit, then you are good to go.

Step 3: Chuck it in your KitchenAid with the cookie dough paddle attachment and let ‘er rip!

That’s it! That is all you have to do!! Look at how beautiful that chicken is. It makes me happy.

Gwen, thanks again. Plus also, I have a great recipe to share on Wednesday with your easily shredded chicken. This is one that my husband and son have both requested for birthday dinners – it’s awesome.

Enjoy!! :)

 

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DIY Holiday Window Clings

June 29th, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Fun | Kids - (0 Comments)
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I love the 4th of July. It probably ranks as my favorite holiday. I love America. I love our freedom. I love to think about all of the sacrifices that people have made to make this country great. And I love fireworks. :)

I found this cute idea on Pinterest, and thought it would be perfect to adapt for the 4th of July. It originally comes from Merry at Merry with Children. I found a comment from a Kindergarten teacher on Merry’s blog that made this project WAY easy, and very fun. Teachers are awesome!

Materials:

  • Glue
  • Food Coloring
  • Liquid Dish Soap
  • Plastic Sheet Protectors
  • Templates (if desired)

Step 1:Take your glue bottles (about half-full) and add several drops of food coloring. I probably added 35+ drops of red to my “red” bottle because I didn’t want it to end up pink.

Step 2: Add a few drops of dish detergent to your glue.

Step 3: Shake well. Take the lid off and squeeze the bottle to “knead” the color into the glue. Let the glue sit overnight (or at least several hours) to let the color settle in. In the picture at the top, you can see the white on the bottom – that’s what it looks like with just shaking and not waiting yet. If you look to the picture just below, you can see how letting it sit for a few hours makes a big difference – the color went the whole way through.

Step 4: Put your templates into your sheet protectors and go to town! To me, things that “scream” 4th of July are stars, the Flag, fireworks, and the Founding Fathers. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington are two of our family Founding Father heroes, so I googled to find silhouettes of them that I could print off and have us fill in.

My husband and I were excited to try out our project, so we worked on Ben and George and added a few decorations of our own. I also wanted to see how long it would take for them to dry.

My husband’s handiwork.

My work – I wrote the letters for “America” backward so the writing would look the right way for people looking at it from the outside.  The part of your window cling that is touching the sheet protector is the part that will stick to the window.

The kids woke up bright and early and were excited to make their own window clings. Squeezing the glue directly from the bottles made it a project that they ALL could do – even my 2-year old. No paintbrushes required.

Here is how our final clings turned out:

I LOVE how the silhouettes turned out – SO awesome. And yes, I did flip this picture so “America” is a little bit more readable. That’s what the neighbors see. :)

We’re still waiting for the kids’ work to dry as we speak. They had some fun (and some very abstract) red, white and blue creations.

The clings all pretty much dried overnight, except for the very middle of George Washington. The thinner the glue, the faster it will dry. HOWEVER, the thicker the glue, the sturdier the clings will be.

You could modify this easily for any holiday, or just to do for a fun summer project. Add glitter. Whatever. Seriously, this was an easy, fast, fun project.

Enjoy! :)

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Make Your Own Rain Gauge

June 22nd, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Fun | Ideas | Kids - (0 Comments)
RG 16

We had a couple of really good storms here last week – the kind that dump down rain for quite a while. Since we’ve been in a drought for a year and a half now, rain is a big deal. Both times I checked the official rainfall expecting to see at least an inch of rain, give or take, and I was shocked to see the “official” amount was listed as 0.25″ and 0.08″ of rain. The official gauge is across town, and apparently the storms missed that area. I did find one website that has people self-report rainfall, and the estimates in my area were more in the 1″ range. But it made me think – I need a rain gauge. I had griped about the rainfall measurements on facebook too and one of my cousins mentioned that I should just make one as a project with the kids – that was enough for me! Great minds think alike. :)

I started scouring the internet for how to make your own rain gauge, and some fairly complicated (or, at least, multi-step) plans came up, and even though some of them had sand in the bottom of the gauge to keep it from falling over, we get some crazy winds here and I was pretty sure that it would just fall over in the first storm and we’d have a mess.

Then I found this idea from the Franklin Institute website. Any place that is dedicated to and promotes Benjamin Franklin has to have good ideas, right? I modified it just slightly to make it work a little better.

Here is what you need:

  • A wire coat hanger
  • A wide-mouthed glass jar (I used a queso jar)
  • A sharpie
  • A ruler
  • Packing Tape
  • Pliers, or similar, to help you unbend the coat hanger

That’s it! The gauge itself is simple. Take your glass jar and your ruler. Line the “0″ of your ruler up with the bottom of the glass jar and mark with the sharpie every so often (I did every 1/4″). Then write in some numbers so you can easily see some of your major measurements (1/2″, 1″, etc.).

I wanted my “measuring” to be visible on the back side so I wrote my numbers backwards so that when you are looking “through” the glass, you can see the numbers the right way. If you are happy with the numbers on the front of the jar, you can just write them the normal way.

Take a strip of packing tape that is as long as your jar is tall and put it over your numbers. This will help to keep your numbers from rubbing off as you take it in and out of your rain gauge holder, and will also keep them from rubbing off.

Congratulations! You now have a rain gauge! But where to put it?

That is where the coat hanger comes in. This part is going to sound a little more complicated in writing than it is in real life, so just take a good look at the pictures as you are going along and you will be able to figure it out easily. You are just basically going to use the coat hanger to make a sort of cup holder for the rain gauge. You need support on the bottom and around the sides, and you need a way to hang it up. You will are just bending a wire to do that. It really is not too tough.

Take your handy pliers (if needed) and twist apart the wire on the top to open your hanger up. Mine was a thicker hanger and the pliers definitely helped to get it started. Now you can start to make the “cradle” for the gauge.

After you have untwisted it, start from the hook side and go down to the first major bend. Open it up so the long part of your hanger makes an “L” shape (or 90 degree angle) from the hook part of the hanger. With the hook end up, place your gauge onto the long part of the hanger so it is touching the hook end of the hanger. The part underneath your gauge is what will be the bottom part of your gauge cradle. Bend the long side up so it runs parallel to the hook part. If you took your gauge off of the hanger it should look like three sides of a rectangle – two long and one shorter. The shorter one, again, is the bottom of the cradle.

From this point on you will be working with the long portion you just bent up. Keeping that part running parallel to the hook part, measure up a couple of inches and bend your wire sideways. If you had your hook piece on a wall, the other end should face either directly to the right or directly to the left. Take this part and start bending it into as much of a spiral as you can around the rain gauge. Mine ended up going around about 1-3/4 times. I had to keep sliding the gauge in and out to make sure that it fit snugly in the wire, but not so tight that I couldn’t get it out again. The idea is to make a safe place for the gauge to hang up so it isn’t blown over, but you have to be able to take it out to dump your rain water out after a storm.

Your gauge holder is now done! Wahoo! I took mine to my back fence and hammered some nails on either side of it to support it along one of my fence boards. As you can tell, my fence has seen better days so I didn’t feel too bad about hammering it into the board directly. You could also find more creative ways to fasten it if you’re worried about your fence, or if you think you may want to move it to another spot someday.

When you are looking for a location to put the rain gauge, make sure it isn’t directly under something like a tree or a roofline that would cause it to give an inaccurate reading. It’s good for it to be in the open. That being said, we’ll probably need to move ours up so the gauge itself is near the top or over the fence so the fence board itself isn’t blocking rain.

I’m planning on printing out a sheet, or having a notebook where we can record the daily rainfall and have our own household annual rainfall recording. Go us! :)

There you go! Super simple rain gauge. Fairly easy (and cool-looking) gauge holder. Now we just need to add some rain and we’re in business.

Enjoy! :)

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Make Your Own Back Massager

June 11th, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Tips - (0 Comments)
M 4

I was talking to one of my friends about back pain that I have chronically had for years. My lower back gets tweaked really badly, to the point that I can’t twist or turn or jump without pain. And sometimes – not often lately, thankfully – it is just not being able to move without pain period.

She then passed on a wonderful tip that a friend who is a chiropractor had passed on to her. I tried it one day when I was feeling a lot of lower back pain and it WORKED!

 

Here is what you need:

Two tennis balls (or, in our case we had racquetballs on hand)

A sock

 

That’s it.

Take your lovely tennis (or other) balls.

Place them into your sock. Tie a knot to keep the balls in place (I tied ours to give the balls a little room to shift around). It is a good use for an old soccer sock.

Lay your lovely sock ball massager on the ground and lay down with your back on top of it. Arrange the balls on either side of your spine, and start slowly pushing yourself to move the sock up and down your spine. It hurts a lot, at least for me, but is good, productive pain. After doing that until I didn’t have any pain spots left, I could stand up and turn and twist without pain. Hooray!

My 7-year old also has issues with knots in his back, and was VERY happy to use this.

Thank you, Cynthia! That is a back-saver. :)

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Pasta Tuna Salad – “Pasta Puna Pasta”

May 28th, 2012 | Posted by Kat in Recipes - (0 Comments)
PPP 2

This is a big favorite in our family that I found from my friend Michelle @ Made By Michelle. It is perfect for the warmer weather that we have been having here, and is great for summer. Our kids love it enough that they have renamed it to “Pasta Puna Pasta”, and they do a little happy dance when they find out we are having it for dinner.

And yes, that is dill that you see there. Yum. Yum. Yum. Yum.

 

Ingredients

1-1/2 c. pasta (shell, farfalle, whatever)

1 pkg. frozen peas, thawed (10 oz.)

1-1/2 c. chopped carrots

1/4 c. onion, finely diced

2/3 c. mayo

2 T. lemon juice

2 tsp. sugar

1 tsp. dill weed

1 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. pepper

1 can tuna (or we will use 2 cans for dinner)

 

Cook pasta; drain well and set aside to cool (or run cold water over it to cool it down faster). Combine pasta, peas, carrots, onion and tuna in a large bowl and mix well. In a smaller bowl, combine the rest of the ingredients together (mayo, lemon juice, sugar, dill weed, salt, pepper) and mix well. Pour mayo mixture over pasta mixture and toss lightly to combine.

That is it! It is very easy, and INCREDIBLY yummy. I will probably consider doubling the recipe the next time we make it because we go through it so quickly and wish there was more.

Thanks Michelle! And don’t forget to check out her blog – she is very talented, and makes a lot of cool stuff to sell. You can see her ad on the sidebar as well to get an idea of what she can do, or just go check her site out.

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