Making Halloween Dough Ornaments!

I made these dough ornaments several years back for one of our first Christmas Trees! (Before the Children!) I remembered how cute they were and that they are still around ~ Hard as ROCKS and as of yet, unharmed in any way! All I did was use a simple recipe and at the time some Christmas Cookie Cutters. I got to thinking that I had some Halloween Cookie Cutters, and that Creston would probably really like to make these with me! I was right!! ((I'll list the recipe below!))


Dough Ornaments

2 Cups Flour (I used all purpose)
2 Cups Salt (I didn't have enough table salt, so I used pickeling salt!)
1 Cup Water
a pencil or pen...something to poke a hole in the ornament with (to hang it by)
paints to decorate the ornaments with, string to hang them with, glitter, ect.


1. Get your recipe and all of your ingredients together!
2. Mix the flour, salt, and water to make the dough.

3. Knead it for about 10 minutes.

4. Roll out the dough...

...and cut it with the cookie cutters.

5. Put the cookies on a cookie sheet and bake them at 225 degrees for about 2-3 hours (flip them every 30 minutes so they bake evenly. Poke the holes in the cookies BEFORE baking!

6. When they are done, let them cool completely before decorating. Then......DECORATE THEM!!!

These cookies will last forever!!!!! The salt preserves them. The ones that I made several years ago have held up and haven't molded or turned any funky colors!!!

Hope that you enjoyed this "cooking" lesson!!!

There will be more to come soon!!!

Halloween Activity!

I decided that this year, when we go to the few houses that we go to Trick-or-Treating, that we would in return for the candy, give a "Thank You" card to our friends! I had thought about making candy treat bags to give BACK to those giving our kids candy, but that seemed realllllly redundant, so I opted for the craft instead! I was able to do this with BOTH Mackie and Creston! I took each one of them into the dining room seperately and allowed them to stick their foam stickies onto the pre-printed Thank you card. Then we added the stickers, the hanger and the bow on the front!!! They were really very cute!

I was really tickeled watching Mackie do this as he was all about "I do it my sewf!!!!" I would "start" to peel off the sticker just enough so he could get it off the rest of the way....he was a BIG boy!!

Creston also thought that this was GREAT! He was able to peel the stickies off all by himself without mommy helping him!

He was very pleased with himself!!!

Now, I'll have to think up something just as cute to make for next year! :o)

Catching up...

As with our Family Blog, I often get a little behind in the postings of our daily lives. This is also happening here! So sorry! I know several of you like to follow along with our progress, so hopefully I will start "filling in" posts for the past few weeks. October is always a busy month for us, especially when we make Molasses. We were sidetracked for a couple of weeks while getting that all ready. Then, on the 20th, Mark's best friend passed away unexpectedly, so we really haven't felt like doing much of anything for the past week or so. We are finding more and more that life can and will throw so many unexpected things our way. So often, things don't seem fair, but life must go on...our loved ones would want that for us...they wouldn't want us sitting around being sad for days on end, so back to some sense of "normalcy" we must go.

Hopefully, as I mentioned, I will be able to fill in the blanks and do some "blog-bursts" in the next few days. Hope that you all are having a GREAT week. Halloween is on it's way! I finished the boys costumes yesterday! I'll post pictures soon!!!

9/26/09-10/2/09 Update!

*ASU Ballgame!

*Eli's 2nd Birthday Party!

*Hunting for Wooly Worms!

This week, we started things off with a WET Football game! Creston liked it, though! It was really nice to spend some one on one time with just him, me, and Daddy. :o) (Mackie got some quality Nana & Paw-Paw time too!) I got to show Creston the band and the pre-game and half-time shows!!! Mark got to explain to him about the actual game! We almost got through the third quarter, and HAD to leave! I was freezing!!!

We got to go to our good friends little boys birthday party! Creston got to play with all the other little boys and girls there and even played a little "football" with some of them! (I'm finding that Creston and Mackie both get quite a bit of interaction without being enrolled in a pre-school...this is something that is often discussed as being a drawback to home-schooling, but anymore, kids have PLENTY of opportunities to get involved with other children!)

The Wooley Worm Festival is coming up! The little fuzzy worms are EVERYWHERE!!! Hopefully there will be some to "catch" closer to the Festival weekend! If you take them to the school, the wooley worm people will buy the lives ones from you for $1.00 a piece!!! They boys found one and had a good time watching it crawl all over their frisbee! Then they dropped it in the grass and it was lost forever!!! I couldn't get them to let it crawl on them though...we'll have to work on that one!

It was a good week! We didn't do a lot of "book" learning, but we did do a lot of outdoor stuff and got to play with some good friends! YAY!