Avengers Movie Night Sleepover

A couple weeks ago Oscar earned a special Avengers sleepover with Jeremy for good behavior at school. He had to get green dots all week for the sleepover, so it all was very last minute because we didn't know until he came home on Friday if it was on or not. I did a spur of the moment Avengers lunch for him for that Friday, in hopes that if he had made it through the first half of the day the Avengers lunch would remind him to be good so they could have their sleepover. PB&J Thor w/ string cheese hammers, H for Hulk cucumber, and Captain America apples. I still haven't figured out how to turn a satsuma into Iron Man.

I ran to the store in town and picked up a few supplies on Friday morning, in hopes that Oscar would bring the green dot home.  Once he got home I went to work on some goodies and Jeremy rented the movie on PPV. I guess I should note here that this evening involved lots of processed foods we usually try to avoid...

They each had a bottle of some sort of green sport drink and I used the idea from Cute As a Fox to do these Hulk faces. I just drew these on with a sharpie, since this was all last minute and rushed.

 Oscar thought I should have finished it, so he finished them for me.

Iron Man open faced sandwiches, which I saw somewhere else online and now can't find. hamburger buns (was hoping for bagels, but they don't sell bagels in my town), salami, and american cheese. There were also some Thor hammers using cheese and Pringles Stix.

For dessert there was pistachio Hulk pudding (with a baby Hulk for Alice). Pistachio pudding and Mini Oreos.

I made these Thor hammers out of marshmallows, melted milk chocolate bars, and honey butter flavored Pringles Stix. We snacked on these and some popcorn during the movie.

 And then later we had some Captain America shields.  I should have saved these for breakfast because we were all so stuffed full of junk food by then.  Iced honey buns, fruit roll-ups and sour gummy candy things.

Orange Lunch

The other week I posted a picture of a green lunch I made for Oscar during a week they were working on orange, so now here's the orange lunch. I didn't start out with a plan to make an all orange lunch (or an all green lunch), but once there was cantaloupe and satsuma in there I figured I should run with it.  Carrots, cantaloupe, string cheese, PB honey banana sandwich, satsuma and a butterscotch disc.

I feel a little guilty sending monochromatic lunches, since it's healthier to eat a variety of colors at each meal. But not that guilty - I'm sure this is way healthier than whatever they served at school, even with the piece of candy. I'm excited about lunches this month - I need to pull out my Halloween cookie cutters and start putting them to good use before it's too late!

S.M.A.R.T. - Unique BBQ

The SMART topic (SMART description mentioned in a previous post) this week was "Unique BBQ" and what would be more unique than some grilled stingray?? Jeremy brought some stingray home and we weren't quite sure what to do with it. Enter the SMART topic and a recipe from here. Just a warning, I would NOT recommend this... 

Peel and chop tomatoes and onions and garlic.

cook 'em with some other stuff.

Put that "BBQ sauce" on your stingray and grill. The stingray was pretty flavorless. It probably wasn't the worst thing I've ever cooked, but it was far far far from the best. This place STILL smells like stingray. ugh. Jeremy's cousin tried frying some the very same night and said it was delicious. We might have to lift the frying ban, but I hate the smell of hot oil, too - hopefully it won't be a double whammy. 

Fall Bucket List

Fall Bucket List

• Go for walks and gather pecans
• Go to a pumpkin patch
• Go on picnics
• Try a pumpkin spice latte
• Make Halloween costumes
• Take kiddos trick-or-treating (what sort of bag does Luke Skywalker carry?)
• Send a fun and delicious Halloween snack for Oscar's class (bonus points for healthy)
• Make caramel apple nachos
• Have a bonfire and make s'mores
• Carve pumpkins
• Drink apple cider (gallons of it)
• Go on a date
• Make leaf art
• Make handprint/footprint art
• Wear scarves
• Make pumpkin cookies with maple frosting
• Take family pictures
• Go to a football game with Oscar
• Go on a nature walk
• Scottish Games!
• Road trip to Ohio 
• Plant trees 
• Make Christmas presents
• Cook something in our dutch oven

We wanted to have things on our bucket list in an activity jar so that we could just pull something out and then do it, but since they can't all be done spur of the moment, I divided them up into three jars. For the things in the "EAT" jar, we can choose one before I go grocery shopping so I can pick up supplies.  The "ADVENTURE" jar has things that take a little bit of planning or good weather, like nature walks, picnics and pumpkin patch. Those will work best if we choose them at the start of the weekend.  "PLAY" has good spur of the moment activities for when we have a spare hour or two when we're home. Since this is my 400th post, I was hoping to have some sort of giveaway, but I couldn't think of what to give away. So instead, you can download and print these things here: eat, play, adventure, jar labels, round labels, background and make your own activity jars for the season! The to-do pages have blank strips so you can add some things from your bucket list as well.

Fall is HERE!

Butternut squash and spicy sausage soup. We can officially call it fall. We've even had some cool weather (with windows open and everything!!) This is still one of my favorite fall recipes, and definitely in my top 5 favorite soups of all time. Do yourself a favor - click on the link. Go make it. Yum.  I've posted about the rolls before, too. Winning combo!

Alice thought it was pretty good - she was using BOTH hands to scoop it in her mouth.

This post is the meal for my GABI Autumn (Photo) Bucket List, one of our October challenges.

GABI September

Phase 2 of GABI had two domestic challenges - Kitchen deep clean before and after, what is your cleaning routine and what sort of cleaning products do you use?

So above is about how our kitchen usually ends up. We do a nightly dishes/counters/sweep cleaning and Monday is my day for deeper kitchen cleaning - fridge, oven, microwave, mop. We use vinegar/water/tea tree oil and baking soda for most of our cleaning needs. I added some printables that I found on pinterest, but can no longer find the website they came from!

Challenge #2 was to pick a nook that needed some TLC, what sort of things did you buy to help organize? pinspiration?

This nook needed a LOT of work. It was mostly just straightening things up, taking some things off of the bookshelves so that they didn't feel as cluttered, and dealing with that stack of stuff by the wall.

The computer chair FINALLY got some new fabric on it (it only took 4 years after blogging about it...). The bumbo got a belt attached and was set aside for Lucy. Some work things got taken to work, a few books got put in a donate box.

I did buy the two drawers that are underneath the printer.  I had been searching and searching for one drawer that would fit there, but after months of carrying around the measurements and a tape measure, I gave up and bought these.  The books and dvds in the basket on the printer are all ones that I've listed on paperback swap and swap-a-dvd. 

The nook looks a lot better now and hopefully upkeep will be easier! 

Experimental pizza leftovers

Most of the time our homemade pizzas end up costing more than we would spend on a frozen pizza. Here are two things I thought of to help keep cost down. 

When we make the whole wheat pizza crust that I posted, We can make two large thin crust pizzas and two boy size personal pizzas. If we don't have company, I plan on trying to freeze those pizza duplicates for an easy weeknight meal the following week. Pizza freezing suggestions welcome!

I also planned an extra meal that would use up any extra ingredients. The pesto, sausage and tomato pizza left us with 1/2 lb. Italian turkey sausage and a bit of pesto, so I added onion, garlic and bell pepper, some whole wheat pasta, a can of fire roasted garlic tomatoes, and some spinach. It turned into the pasta version of the pizza we had and it was yummy! We also had some glazed carrots along with.

This pasta was also yummy cold, so we all had it for lunch the next day!