Yet another Zoo trip

Yes I’m here to talk about going to the Zoo again. We love going to the zoo. It’s a good way to spend a few hours as a family doing something outside in a fun and controlled environment. We go so often that we know what animals we like to see and the ones that we don’t really care for. Which is to say we know our way around really well and hit the best spots most often.

Last April we bought a year pass to the Zoo in Fresno and lucky it worked in Boise too. I knew buying the pass would save us money, and enable us to go to the zoo on a whim because it wouldn’t cost us more then a few dollars. I had no idea just how often we would end up at the zoo or how much money we would save. Our pass expired at the end of last month so I counted up our zoo trips and was astonished to find out that we visited the zoo 18 times. 18 times! In 12 months. It would have cost us over $250 to visit the zoo that many times, and that’s just admission. We paid $55 for the pass to the Fresno zoo. I’d say it was well worth it. We have already bought our pass for this year of course.

Since I’m already talking about the zoo I might as well share my favorite pictures from our trip this weekend.

I have no idea if the zoo would tell us to stop it or not, but Lil loves to feed popcorn to the geese outside the zoo entrance (there’s a big park). I popped a little popcorn before we left the house and Lil tossed it at the geese with great pleasure.

Zoo Boise 5/6/12

Zoo Boise 5/6/12

Zoo Boise 5/6/12

Zoo Boise 5/6/12

Zoo Boise 5/6/12

We have a tradition of sharing a soft serve ice cream cone at the zoo and this time while we were ordering they had delicious brownies next to the cash register so we bought one.

Zoo Boise 5/6/12

Baby ducks!
Zoo Boise 5/6/12

Coati!
Zoo Boise 5/6/12

My little birdy.

Zoo Boise 5/6/12

Zoo Boise 5/6/12

Zoo Boise 5/6/12

While looking up how many times we went to the zoo I noticed that the number of pictures I took each time grew smaller and smaller. I don’t think I’ve taken our real camera to the zoo in the last half dozen trips, I just use my phone and hope that I get the best pictures possible.

Random Mobile Shots

I haven’t done one of these posts in a long time. I miss them. Here are some random shots I took with my cell. These shots are just too cute/unique not to share, but don’t really deserve a whole post just about them.

My little belly dance princess

Lil decided to combine her belly dance outfit with her halloween tutu. I loved the look.

My little belly dance princess

Rocket ship pillows my Mother in Law made

My Mother-In-Law made these little rocket ship pillows for two of my nephews.

Roasted Bananas for muffins

Roasted banana for muffins.

Making banana bread muffins

Lily helped me make the roasted banana muffins.

Making banana bread muffins

Blowing a 'poofer'

Lily loves ‘poofers’. We spend most of our walks looking for them and then blowing them. I’m sure the neighbors don’t love that she does it, but I don’t care. It’s her thing.

IMG_20120502_151350

IMG_20120502_151434

I’m joining Amy from A Good Life‘s phone picture link up.

I’m gardening!

For years and years now I have wanted to grow some kind of garden in the summer. I wasn’t picky, a few pots on my porch would have made me happy, but I just never got around to it. Something would always come up, or so I would tell myself, but really I was scared. I was scared I would kill all of the little plants and waste all of that time and money. Scared I didn’t know what I was doing and would do something wrong. I don’t know, scared of letting myself fail. All of these have a ring of truth to them.

My very good friend Paula (whom I miss very much) put this garden into motion last fall. She sent me a bunch of garlic to plant. Apparently if you plant your garlic in the fall and let it over-winter it tastes much better. I know, I had no idea things like this happened. I very dutifully planted the garlic in pots and covered them with leaves to protect them from the frosts and freezes of winter. I pretty much ignored them after that until a few months ago when my Father In Law David came inside and mentioned that I had sprouts. Lily and I ran outside and low and behold there were beautiful green sprouts peaking above the leaves. These little spouts set my mind on a garden for sure.

Just like every year Waldo and I talked about putting in a garden and because of the garlic I started making a list of what I wanted to grow. David laid drip-lines in the garden area to make life easier; most of the garden will be automagically watered for me. One day while Waldo worked Lily and I went to the store and bought some little started plants. While we were at Home Depot Lily wanted to grow a little flower so I let her pick one and she was so proud of that little plant. After getting our lovely little plants we went home and went to work.

David helped me dig the holes (thankfully, I probably would have given up otherwise, the ground was much harder than I expected) and Lily and I planted all of our little plants. After they were planted we all stood back and admired our hard work. Just the act of planting the little food plants was very satisfying. I can’t wait to harvest and eat something I grew.

Garden

Strawberries, spinach, broccoli, red and green peppers.

Little Garden Helper

My little garden helper watering the new little plants.

Drip Line In The Garden

I have added some plants since this picture was taken. We also have some leeks, russet potatoes, white potatoes and tomatoes which were suppose to be peppers, but were mislabeled.

Lil's Flower

Lily’s little flower.

Lily and the homemade puffy paint

In a land very near a Mommy wanted to do something to entertain her Small Girl and remembered seeing a Pin for homemade puffy paint. So the Mommy set forth and mixed up the concoction.  The Small Girl picked the colors from Mommy’s new package of pretty food colorings.  Mommy put them in some squeeze bottles and they set off to round up the necessary craft items.

Homemade puffy paint art

This was my attempt at using a ‘white board’ type background. Lil was too anxious to paint to let me take pictures of her paint.

Homemade puffy paint art

*Notice the Spring sticky wall behind Lil?  It’s been added to quite a bit since it was first put up.

Homemade puffy paint art

Homemade puffy paint art

Homemade puffy paint art

Homemade puffy paint art

Homemade puffy paint art

They dried really hard and still puffy. It was a fun craft and I’m sure we’ll do it again although next time I’m going to thin it down just a little, Lil had to squeeze pretty hard to get the paint out. It ended up being a collaborative effort and the resulting pictures were neat.

Puffy Paint- 1 c salt, c flour, 1 c water, food coloring

I put it all in a bowl except for the food coloring.  Once it was mixed well I separated a little out to a second bowl and put some in a storage container since I only had two bottles to work with. I then stirred the color in and moved it to the squeeze bottles.  Since I’m going to thin it down next time I might be able to just mix the food coloring straight in the squeeze bottles, but this time I was glad I had the bowl and spoon to work with.

I’m linking up with Nanette‘s Pinteractive post. Be sure to check her out.

Nannersp

When Kitchen Gadgets are lemons, Make Lemonaid

I have a few recipes in my repertoire that require me to stand at the stove whisking a sauce or whatever for up to an hour or more.  It is tiring and boring work, but luckily the results are worth it in the end.  To make my life easier for these food items Waldo kept telling me he was going to buy me one of those self-stirring as-seen-on-TV things.  We were walking around Fred Meyers one day and found the stirrer thing on the shelf for like $5.00.  We tossed it in the cart and decided to make something with it the next week that would use it.  I ended up making a tomato sauce and put the stirrer to the test.  It flunked! It flunked like a frat boy that hasn’t been to class all semester and drank his brains out.  It hardly moved around the pan and after about 7 minutes I took it out and finished stirring the sauce myself.

I knew this thing was never going to be used in the kitchen again so I decided to see what kind painting instrument it would make.

I started out by dropping globs of paint on a paper in a open cardboard box*.

Painting with a auto stir gadget

Lil put the stirrer in the box and we turned it on.

Painting with a auto stir gadget

It did the same thing in the box that it did in my sauce pan. It drifted to one corner and stayed there. I showed Lil how she could gently move it around.

Painting with a auto stir gadget

I was pretty impressed with how the first one turned out, even if Lily’s paint choice wasn’t my favorite.

Homemade puffy paint art

I didn’t like how all the paint got corralled in the middle because of the sweeper arm so I cut it off. I figured this thing was never going to by used for sauce so I didn’t need it.

Painting with a auto stir gadget

* I use this box for a lot of different art and painting projects. It’s just a little bigger than 8×11, so paper fits great. Sometimes I use a little tape on the underside of the paper to keep it down, but it’s usually not necessary. It contains messes nicely, however marbles will still fly out of given enough shaking.

Painting with a auto stir gadget

Painting with a auto stir gadget

Painting with a auto stir gadget

I cleaned the feet of the stirrer between every painting so the colors were clean.

Painting with a auto stir gadget

The little stirrer vibrated crazy fast and the way the colors mixed was a surprise to me. I really like how these last turned out. They are the newest addition to the art wall.

Homemade puffy paint art

My phone doesn’t do the colors justice.

Homemade puffy paint art

I was so excited about this project, I thought Lil would love it, but sometimes you just can’t tell with her which way she’s going to go with something.  So I so so relieved when she loved it. We give Robo-stir painting a 7 out of 10 crayon review. 🙂

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