Ice Cream in a Bag

Yesterday was my sweet little girl's 5th birthday party.  Making ice cream in a bag was one of the items on our Summer Bucket List and I figured having the kids make their own ice cream at the birthday party would be fun.  The kids thought it was fun at first but their fingers were getting super cold and their arms tired out and of course the trampoline was calling their attention away so the moms and other adults ended up shaking it up the rest of the time!  :)  Once the ice cream was all shook up and ready to eat the kids were more than happy to climb down from the trampoline and eat away!

 

Here's the recipe I found online:

Prep Time 5 minutes

What you'll need

• Ice cubes (enough to fill each gallon-size bag about half full)
• 1 cup half and half
• 1/2 cup salt (The bigger the granules, the better. Kosher or rock salt works best, but table salt is fine.)
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 pint-size ziplock bag
• 1 gallon-size ziplock bag
• Your favorite mix-ins such as chocolate chips, cereal pieces, or fresh fruit.

Serves 1

How to make it

Combine the sugar, half and half, and vanilla extract in the pint-size bag and seal it tightly.

Place the salt and ice in the gallon-size bag, then place the sealed smaller bag inside as well. Seal the larger bag. Now shake the bags until the mixture hardens (about 5 minutes). Feel the small bag to determine when it's done.

 

Take the smaller bag out of the larger one, add mix-ins, and eat the ice cream right out of the bag. Easy cleanup too!

 

We used crushed oreo cookies and chocolate chips as mix-ins and my hubby even used peppermint extract for a minty ice cream flavor!

 

 

 

 

Pizza & Fireworks

Did you know that Papa Murphy's Pizza has a build-your-own personal pizza?  In Oregon it only costs $4.99 and it's fun for the kids!  

 

This was one of the items on our Summer Bucket List and the kids loved it!

 

 

Check out Tatym's new shirt!  :)  We love Duck Dynasty and she's always walking around saying, "Happy, happy, happy!" 

 

Today just so happens to be the 4th of July and I was so excited to try to take pictures of fireworks!  My friend Rachel is an AMAZING photographer and I was super blessed to be able to take her first ever photography class last year and in the class she told us how to shoot fireworks.  If you have a free minute, you should go to her website and check out her work!  Rachel Diane Photography and you can find her business page on Facebook HERE.  She did our family photos back in May and they are by far, our most favorite family pictures EVER!

Anyways, 2 of my sisters are here visiting us and we had so much fun playing with sparklers and the camera tonight!  Here are a few pictures:

 

 

 

 

To get these shots I used the settings:

f/11

13"

ISO 100

 

:) HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!!!!

 

 

Crayon Fun

Yesterday was our sweet Bitty's 5th birthday and we surprised her with a trampoline so the kids have been spending a lot of time on it.  It's such great exercise and entertainment for them but between jumps they were asking to watch tv and my rule this summer is no tv from 9am-5pm so I knew it was time to scratch another thing off of our Summer Bucket List! 

Today we decided to play with crayons!  First we took blow dryers and heated up crayons and made splatter art!

 

 

 

 

We tried having 2 blow dryers going at once but the breaker kept popping so while Keegan worked on his project, Tatym & I started working on making heart-shaped crayons out of the broken pieces!

 

 

 

 

To make those crayons, we just used a regular heart-shaped cupcake tin, heated the oven to 250* and baked them for 10 minutes (checking every 2 minutes).

 

While those were baking away we decided to try lighting a crayon on fire.  It was fun and interesting and the kids LOVED it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

So that was our fun project of the day!  Happy Wednesday!!!

 

 

 

Hula Hoop Forts

Today is the first full day of having the kiddos back after their church camp this past week and it's absolutely BEAUTIFUL outside so I thought it was a good day to scratch another thing off of our Summer Bucket List!  Awhile ago I bought two hula hoops from the Dollar Tree and today we headed off to Walmart to pick out curtains to hang on them.  My girly-girl of course picked sheer curtains with sequins in black and purple and my handsome boy picked a plain white shower curtain.  The curtains that Tatym picked didn't have holes around the top like the shower curtain does so I had to actually cut the hula-hoop in half and "thread" the curtain around the hoop and then tape it back together.  

  

Then we headed outside to hang them from the tree in our front yard!  

As I'm typing this they are sitting out in their forts laughing and playing games together and listening to music. This is a rare treat!  They tend to argue & fight a lot so finding things they can do together is AWESOME! 

Pottery Co.

The Pottery Co. has got to be one of my favorite places to go with my kiddos, especially on a rainy day!  If you're not familiar with it, they have a ton of different pieces of pottery ranging from little animals & piggy banks to plates and mugs and vases and lots more!  You go, pick out the piece you want to paint, pick your colors and then go to town painting away!  Once you're done you give it to the employees, they fire it up and make it nice and shiny and about 3-4 days later it will be all done and ready for you to pick up!

My sweet girl chose a cute horse to paint and picked about 6 colors to paint it with!

I love her little look of concentration!  :)

She finished painting hers in about 20 minutes!

I don't normally paint anything when I go with her because she finishes so quickly and then gets bored waiting but this time I decided that I was going to paint (didn't get a picture of my project) but I chose a decorative plate which I painted yellow & gray chevron stripes.  I had Bitty help me paint the bottom of it because she was at her meltdown point from having to wait on me so long so I needed something to entertain her!  LOL!  Our pottery will be done on Saturday!  YAY!

Monsters University, Dyed Rice & Stuffed Peppers, Oh My!

Happy Monday everyone!  My oldest child is away at a camp-out for VBS with some friends of ours and my sweet girl was missing her big brother so I was on a mission to have a special girl day!  I surprised her by taking her to the theater to see:

It was a super cute movie and I was relieved that there wasn't a bunch of adult humor which usually ruins a movie for me!  Tatym loved it and we had a great time sharing snacks and giggling away!

Then I decided to consult our Summer Bucket List for a craft project and decided we'd dye rice and make pictures!

 

If you couldn't tell, Tatym is a wee bit of a camera ham!  :)  Catching her making a regular, cute smile is R-A-R-E and I'm ok with that because that's who she is and I love her spunky personality!

So to start I put some rice in snack size ziploc bags.  All we had was brown rice.  I'm sure white rice would make brighter colors but I try not to have it in the house these days as we're switching to a Clean Eating diet.  Anyways, I didn't measure how much rice, I just put some in and then I covered it with rubbing alcohol and Tatym squeezed lots of food coloring in.

Then we left it on the counter for an hour, turning it over and squishing it every 20 minutes to make sure all of the rice was getting covered.  

I then dumped out the liquid, lined a cookie sheet with wax paper and layed the rice on it to dry.

After about 30 minutes I decided to put it outside because 1: the smell of rubbing alcohol was not so pleasant for either one of us and 2: I thought it would dry faster!

Once it was all dry we got out some white cardstock paper that I had on hand and some glue and went to town making pictures and writing words.

And of course, after awhile the colors started getting mixed up so we put it all together in one of the cookie sheets and played in it, pushing it into one big pile and drawing pictures in it.

 While the rice was outside drying, of course I had to make dinner and earlier I mentioned how we've been changing to a Clean Eating diet so I've been trying LOTS of new recipes and new ways of cooking things.  We haven't switched to completely organic but I have been trying to buy everything fresh and eventually will switch to organic.  Tonight I tried my hand at stuffed bell peppers and it was YUMMY!

Here's the recipe that I used and I'm sorry, I'm totally spacing on where exactly I got the recipe---

Ingredients:
4 large bell peppers, any color & make sure they have a flat enough bottom to stand up, remove the top, ribs & seeds
water
sea salt
2 cups cooked brown rice
1 tsp EVOO
1 yellow onion, peeled & chopped
1 large carrot, peeled & grated
1 cup butternut squash, peeled & diced
3 cloves garlic, passed through a garlic press
2 cups fresh roma tomatoes, diced and set over a fine mesh sieve to drain (I just put them on a paper towel)
1- 15 oz can black beans, rinsed & drained
1 cup fresh corn kernels (I omitted this ingredient since we're trying to stay away from corn)
1/2 cup fresh chopped cilantro (I omitted this one too since my hubby doesn't like it)
juice of one fresh lime
fresh ground pepper

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350*.
Place cooked brown rice in a bowl and let cool.
Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.  Place the peppers in the water and cook briefly.  The peppers just need to be a little soft.  Remove the peppers from the water and put them upside down on a plate lined with paper towels to let the water drain out.
In a large skillet, heat the EVOO and saute onion, carrot and squash.  Cook 10 minutes, covered.  Add garlic and cook a few minutes more.  Now add tomatoes, beans and corn.  Cook for 5 more minutes.  Remove from heat.  Add rice to the mixture and season with cilantro, lime, salt & pepper.  Mix together until evenly distributed.  Set aside.
Prepare a baking pan with a light coat of cooking spray or oil.  Place each of the peppers right side up on the pan.  Stuff each pepper with the rice mixture.  Don't pack the rice too tightly.  Bake for 20 minutes and serve immediately.  You can add lean ground chicken/turkey to the rice mixture if you want.

I think they turned out great and my hubby liked it!

Here we go...again! :)

So, thought I'd give blogging another go.  I've been wanting a place to post our fun family adventures without being sucked into the time vortex of Facebook...so here I am!  

Team Courtright (that's what we call our little family) has lots of fun things planned for the summer so I'll be posting  pictures and recipes and all that fun stuff along the way!  Here's a look at our summer "bucket list":

So far we've gone to Wildlife Safar:

 

I also planned a surprise summer kick-off party at our house on the last day of school that was a big hit!

I filled up around 550 water balloons throughout the day (with some help from a fabulous friend), filled up a pool, 2 bins, several buckets, 12 squirt guns and 10 water squirters and the kids had a hay-day soaking each other!  

I saw this idea on Pinterest (click on link to be taken to the blog post) to help with the summer schedule and am going to copy her!  

We have:

Make it Monday--craft/baking project

Take a trip Tuesday--park, museum, farm, etc.

Wet Wednesday--pool, beach, water fight, water game in the backyard, etc.

Thinking Thursday--weekly trip to the library & research something interesting together

Friend Friday--friends can come over for a playdate & possible sleepover

We're really excited about our schedule and it helps since we have a rule of no television on from 9am-5pm Mon-Fri!

So stay tuned for more fun with Team Courtright!