Friday recipes; or Fricipes

As promised, another DIY for homemade crayons, stolen straight from my Green Living Family Tips for Nick Jr. Magazine. I wrote it, so I guess it's probably OK for me to steal it.

This is a great option for birthday favors, along with homemade Play-Doh or a homemade CD burned with your favorite kid tunes.

Recycle your crayon bits

1. Collect broken and used crayons for a rainy day project.

2. Remove the paper from crayons and fill muffin tin halfway. Use just one color, or mix a bunch for a tie-dye looking crayon. Bake at 200˚F for 12 minutes, or until wax melts. Watch closely. Let cool.

Friday recipes; or Fricipes

Last week, the girls took home a tiny tub of Play-Doh from their summer reading program. It was a sticky mess and I promptly threw it away and promised my elephant-never-forgets-minded 4-year-old I'd make some myself one day it rained.

So she kept waiting and waiting and waiting for a rainy day. Today, still no rain despite predictions of 80 percent, and I gave in.

I don't know why I had waited so long. Homemade Play-Doh is super easy and fast. It doesn't have any mystery ingredients and you can decide on the fly what colors you want. Break out the cookie cutters and you've got yourself an afternoon.

Simple Mom just posted a super recipe for the stuff on her site a few days ago. Rather than steal it, I'll just go ahead and link directly to her site. I just made two batches and found it simple to follow with a great result. Next week, I'll post my other favorite rainy day DIY — homemade crayons.

Seeds of success

I'm nowhere near being able to claim my gardening project a success (I'm somewhere between four weeks and four years away from being able to actually eat anything I've planted) but I'm, yet again, hopeful.

My radish seeds have sprouted in the garden. I don't have much hope for the lettuce plants that my fat beagle is continually attacking, for whatever reason.

And in my south-facing front window, I have the start of basil, chives and, today, parsley. My daughter's popcorn seeds she started at the library story hour are looking the best of the lot. Perhaps I'm Christine (the) Gardner by name only.

My daughter, she was a Gardner right at birth.

Ready, set... Garden

Our family finally got the time to start our garden project. I'm really nervous my raised-bed plot, which we built yesterday and came out extremely good looking and sturdy despite my family's handy-gene deficiency, will look just as neat and plantless as it does at the moment.

But I began feeling really great about the prospect of growing veggies with the girls this summer.

In fact, I was feeling almost hopeful. That sounds super corny, right! But my daughters got in the dirt with me yesterday, planting our tiny radish and carrot seeds (I read these grow great together because radishes mature first, making space for the slower-growing carrots) and larger pea seeds. And bonus, my makeshift compost pile hasn't yet attracted rodents.

Now I'm thinking, "Maybe we can do this. We can teach the girls about nature, grow some kick-ass veggies and have a great time."


Or maybe it's the April Garden Flu that dies down sometime around the second week of drought and heat in mid-July. And this after $28 on lumber, $14 on topsoil and a few bucks on seeds, probably more than I'd spend if I bought grocery-store radishes every week between now and Labor Day.

Oh well. Now, if I can stop the girls from rolling around in the nice, fresh black dirt (not a joke), then we'll be all set.

But you can't ruin my euphoria, much like you can't convince me that daily red wine is a rock-solid solution to future heart problems. I'm going to go ahead and believe what I believe.

Laundry a go-go

Today, my new high efficiency, front-loading washing machine was delivered.

It was almost too much excitement for one day, proving once again how incredibly lame I am. I don't even like to do laundry (no, really, you ask) but this new piece of machinery, along with it's low-energy use and ability to actually clean my clothes rather just get them wet while I scrub them vigorously with a toothbrush, really has my blood pumping.

But I do have a bit of a dilemma. Turns out, you can't use any old laundry soap with these machine. Oh no. That would be too —oh, I don't know — common. Instead, I sent my husband to the store for HE (high efficiency for all you commoners out there) soap, which was $12 for 64 loads.

Are you kidding me? I just spent a year making my own soap for about $2 a month.

So I checked the Web and found high sudsing is the main culprit for messing with these new washers. Homemade soap does not do much sudsing. This site here does a good job of pondering this dilemma.

For now, I'll stick to the Tide we bought, but I'll return to this issue soon. I just think if we're going to make washers that save energy and money, we should save a little money.