Chinese Lantern Candle

Chinese lantern style candles made with yellow and red beeswax sheets:











Be gentle when working with beeswax sheets, they rip pretty easily, but they can also be squished back together easily.

Foods For Chinese New Years

Chinese New Year is January 26 this year, which will be the start of the year of the Ox.




Since we won't be doing as much to celebrate this year as we did last year (last year we were studying China), I am posting some of last year's projects.

We used the recipe for Dragon Eggs from Jan Brett's website and colored the picture of the dragon on the recipe before gluing the printed page into Blaze's logbook.

http://www.janbrett.com/dragon_eggs_recipe_and_coloring_page.htm



This is the finished product



This is Nika admiring the beauty of the peeled egg shell.




Cucumber Salad with Spicy Dressing

1 tsp. soy sauce

1 T. white vinegar

1 T. sugar

2 tsp. sesame-seed oil

1/4 tsp. Tabasco

1/2 tsp. salt

2 large cucumbers, peeled and sliced thin

Combine soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, oil, Tabasco, and salt. Mix well. Add the cucumbers and stir until they are well coated with dressing. Chill until you are ready to serve.

Yes We Can!

A few minutes before noon EST,tomorrow, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. Here is how we will be celebrating:







As we transition as a country from President Bush to President Obama, we are also making a history lesson transition in our home schooling. We are finishing up our unit on the Revolutionary War and moving on to the brand new country forming a government and expanding.
This is a perfect time to talk about what a president's job actually entails, so our reading for this week includes Duck for President
.



There is also a Duck for president website with activities.

http://www.duckforpresident.com/

We also have a "book-on-tape" of So You Want To Be President, which we will be listening to in the car on the way to Blaze's therapies tomorrow afternoon.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

Pride(In the Name of Love) sung by U-2 at the free Inauguration Concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, January 18, 2009



My new favorite Martin Luther King, Jr. quote:

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."

Something yummy to do with all that cabbage in the garden

We've been lovingly "tucking-in" the plants in the garden at night, so they will survive these freezing nights. All of the people who have gardens near us are doing the same, so it looks quite colorful out there, with towels, bed-sheets, blankets, and plastic thrown over the plants. It's been working really well and we should have more cabbages to harvest in a couple days.





Citrus Slaw


1/3 Cup Orange juice

1/4 Cup Cider Vinegar

2 Tablespoons sugar

3 Tablespoons Dijon Mustard

Salt and pepper to taste

Mix all the above items together and pour over one pound of pre-shredded cole slaw mix. Toss until all the cabbage is coated. Serve. ( I used mandarin oranges for garnish).

It also keeps well in the refrigerator over night, in a closed container.

The March of the Toy Soldiers

Our big project this week has been making a set of toy soldiers.

Since we've been learning about the Revolution, Blaze has been talking a lot about the "Red Coats" coming, and I thought he'd like to have some Revolutionary War toy soldiers to play with. I had hoped to find some at Colonial Williamsburg, but had no luck. I couldn't even find any on-line (I'm picky and wanted wood. I also wanted them to be taller than one inch), so we are making our own.
If you would like to try this project, this is how we are doing it (they aren't all done yet).



Supplies:

One package of "Doll Pins", clothes pins sold at the craft store for the purpose of making dolls (the regular clothes pins we had were too thin for the bases)

One package of Doll Pin Stands, sold next to the doll pins at the craft store

Non-Toxic acrylic paint in dark blue, red, white, and black

Two 3/16-inch dowels cut into 1 1/2- inch pieces (I was able to do that with a pair of scissors)

strong, clear-drying glue

small paint brushes

black wool felt and black 1-inch pom poms for the hats

black permanent marker, for the faces



1. Glue the clothes pin into the wooden base, so it can stand up on its own.

2. Using the white paint, paint around the clothes pin, from the bottom of the "neck" to half-way down the "legs". This will be the shirt and pants.Let the paint dry before proceeding to step 3.



3. Using the black paint, cover the base and half-way up the "leg", until the black touches the white paint, leaving no bare wood showing on the "legs". This will be the boots. I painted the boots a little taller on the half of the clothes pins that will be British soldiers and made them more rounded at the top.



4. Paint on the jackets.

In our set there will be 10 British soldiers with red jackets and 10 American soldiers with blue jackets.



I painted the jackets on straight across the back first and then went back and added the points on each side of the back to make the "shallow tails" that were the fashion at the time.



5. Add any decorative touches to the uniforms.
We added lapels of contrasting color and white buttons to some. Others got crossed white straps.

6. For the arms, sand any rough pieces off the ends of the 1 1/2 inch dowel pieces and paint two for each soldier, leaving the tip you are holding bare. The unpainted tip will be the hand. After the arm is dry, glue it to the body and let it dry over night.





7. The hats can be a variety of shapes. The easiest for the British soldiers is just a 1-inch black pom pom glued to the top of the head. The tri-corner hat is a small triangle of black felt. The other hats are made with a small circle of felt that is folded over and glued together.





8. Draw eyes and mouth with a permanent marker.

Ready to march:

Winter Has Come to Florida

Oh, baby it's cold outside!

O.K., maybe not cold compared to other parts of the country right now, but certainly cold for Florida. It was down to 27 degrees last night and is supposed to be lower for the next three nights, so I went out and harvested what I could from the garden yesterday afternoon, before it could freeze, and made a nice big pot of vegetable soup last night.

Blaze won't eat soup, so he had a big plate of raw vegetables, baby carrots and snow peas served with onion dip, and his new favorite food, peanut butter rolled up in cabbage leaves.

I think the cabbages that are still out in the garden will be fine with this cold weather, but I really don't know about the rest. I'll just have to wait until this cold spell passes and see.

I talked to my mom and Ula (who is still staying with her Grandmother until Sunday, when she heads back to college) on the phone last night and they have it so much worse right now. They're near Chicago and have had tons of snow dumped on them and temperatures in the negative numbers. They used to call cold windy weather like they're having an "Alberta Clipper", but Mother says they've got a new name for this one, it's a "Saskatchewan Screamer".