April 2012 – The Creative Salad

Our Future Paleontologist + Dinosaur Excavation Activity

We visited the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits during our visit to LA last month, an activity that turned out to be a formative experience for our daughter:

Since our visit, the grown-ups in our house have taken turns pretending to be animals stuck in the tar while our little saber tooth tiger gently nibbles on us. (Clearly, this is her idea, not ours!)

We’ve also been busy polishing our excavation skills:

In the museum gift shop we purchased this fantastic dinosaur excavation kit. (FYI: the La Brea Tar Pits formed 10,000 years ago, long after dinosaurs became extinct; however, the gift shop sold a wide variety of science activity kits, including ones with dinosaurs.)

Using a hammer and chisel (contained in the kit), we uncovered a detailed bone replica to clean and then assemble. We bought the Brachiosaurus kit, but they also sell skeletons of Triceratops, Velociraptor, Stegosaurus, T-Rex, and Pteranodon.

(Note: the magnifying glass and brush were our own; they’re not included in the kit, but we thought they were essential props for this particular activity.)

Oh, we had such fun pretending to be paleontologists!

Our daughter now refers to her assembled Brachiosaurus as a dragon skeleton since we’ve been reading Dealing with Dragons before bed each night. In our daughter’s mind, this dinosaur resembles the (friendly!) dragon Kazul. Because, as she frequently reminds me, in our imagination anything is possible.

Birds Eggs: Identified

Just like last year, we have a birds nest full of eggs on our front porch, situated in a repurposed sugar bowl that’s part of our wind chimes.

Last year’s eggs belonged to a House Finch and were light blue with brown spots:

I’ve been thinking that this year the birds were a different species because the eggs looked so different. Right now these dainty white eggs with brown spots sit in the nest:

(Yes, the egg count is now up to five!)

I’ve finally gotten a glimpse of the parents and the verdict is in… we have House Finches living on our porch AGAIN this year! So much for my theory that the eggs belonged to a different species. I find it fascinating that two birds of the same species can have such radically different egg colors.

I find it even more remarkable that the mother and father birds are both able to fit inside the sugar bowl at the same time, sitting on top of the eggs. The sugar bowl can’t be more than three inches across at most. What little birds! I’m trying my darnedest to get a picture of that for you. (I need to set up a bird blind. There’s no fooling this mama bird!) Stay tuned!

You Are My Sunshine Redux + Interview

In our Music Together class we sing a different version of the classic song “You Are My Sunshine” with a more clear message of love and acceptance. We’re excited to share it with you.

(I love this You Are My Sunshine Print from Etsy)

Here’s how it goes:

“You are my sunshine, my ~~only~~ little sunshine,
you make me happy when skies are gray.
~~You’ll never~~ I hope you know, dear, how much I love you.
~~Please don’t take my sunshine away.~~
You brighten each and every day.”

Isn’t that so much kinder and loving?! Yes, please.

It’s even cuter like this:

Here’s a brief, adorable (!!) interview with our daughter that took place after the song:

Too sweet not to share. (In case you’re wondering, she’s obsessing over and acting out scenes from The Boxcar Children and Surprise Island, two delightful books that I too adored as a child.)

We chat like this all day long.

I love that little girl.

The Ladybug Release

Our tree kale unfortunately appears to have developed an aphid problem.

I secretly felt a little giddy over this scenario though because suddenly we had a great reason to buy 1,500 ladybugs to release in the garden!

We’re all about educational, non-toxic pest management in our house.

Unfortuantely the ladybugs weren’t the cure-all we were hoping for. We placed numerous ladybugs right on top of delicious aphids and, much to our horror, the ladybugs walked right by and completely ignored them:

Not the scenario I was anticipating. HOW DARE THOSE LADYBUGS IGNORE OUR APHIDS?! We bought them for a purpose, darn it. How could they not be hungry?!

I couldn’t help but vent my frustrations on twitter:

First the ladybugs skipped out on a tasty snack and then they flew the coop. Two days later, they were nowhere to be seen.

Yet here we are, a few weeks later, and our aphids seem to be disappearing. Perhaps a few ladybugs have lingered in our garden or I’ve simply been more diligent at removing infected leaves.

Regardless, the whole ladybug release experience was so much fun that we want to do the whole thing over again. I may have to take a trip down to our neighborhood hardware store and pick up a few more ladybugs.

Who can resist a practical, fascinating, eco-groovy, AND super fun home-school activity?!

A Healthier Popcorn Recipe

I’m not going to lie: I sometimes let our daughter eat popcorn for dinner. I can make all sorts of excuses: it’s late; we’ve had a long day; popcorn is super easy; she adores it. But the truth is we’ve found a way to make regular popcorn into a filling, nutritious, and protein-rich snack chock full of omega-3’s, omega-6’s, vitamins B-1, B-2, B-12, C, E, and carotene, iron, zinc, lignins, and lauric acid.

When the kid says she wants popcorn for dinner, I can’t argue with that!

Here’s our family’s favorite popcorn recipe (thanks to our friend Mariah for the flax seed oil tip!):

We melt coconut oil in the bottom of our stovetop popcorn popper and pop around 1/3 cup of popcorn kernels.

We then thoroughly coat the popped popcorn with 1-2 tablespoons of flax seed oil. On top of that we mix in 1/4-1/2 cup of nutritional yeast, depending on how coated we want the popcorn (my daughter and husband like every kernel completely covered in yeast!), and a pinch of salt.

If you’re like our four year old, than you may want a side bowl of nutritional yeast to go with your popcorn so you can roll each kernel until it’s mounded in nutritional yeast (oh, the protein! oh, the B-vitamins!).

It’s finger-licking good!

Please try it and let us know what you think!