A Rainy Saturday Morning

The girls and I took advantage of having a cool and rainy Saturday morning to do cozy inside things, like baking banana bread to take to some of our friends.  Both Amelia and Megan helped make the banana bread; their favorite part is measuring the flour and sugar.  They tried mashing up the banana, but decided they didn't like that.  We used this recipe with cinnamon chips instead of chocolate chips.

 

I have decided that the relationship between the number of small children helping to measure flour and the amount of mess that is made is not linear, but rather exponential.

The girls both love to help clean up, though, and they especially love sweeping and mopping the floor.  Which is fantastic because I really do not like either of those chores.  Megan mostly just makes a bigger mess, but Amelia is getting very good at sweeping everything up into her little dustpan an emptying the dustpan into the trash.

Then I copied my cousin Kim's egg carton color matching game, and asked Amelia to find items in all different colors that would fit inside an egg carton.  She immediately thought of her barrette bin, and matched almost all the colors just from that.  Then I asked her to think of something different (because that initial task didn't take quite long enough for me to finish washing the dishes) and she thought of the bead bin.  And of course she was able to find beads in every single color, too.  So I guess I will have to think of a way to make it more challenging. 

Then the girls asked if they could make Froot Loop necklaces.  Wal-Mart had a deal that you could buy a 3-pack of various Kelloggs cereals for $5 and get a coupon for a free $5 book from Scholastic.  I thought that was a pretty good deal, but it means that we have been making lots of Froot Loop necklaces lately.  But that's okay, it's great fine motor practice for Megan, right?