Friday Post - Bathtime

 We've gotten a lot of bath toys, we've made a few purchases, and we've tried a lot of different hand-me-downs.  Here is a list of toys and gadgets that worked for us.

 My sister had a proper baby bath, like the one pictured here, and it worked really well for her.  It would have worked with our first baby, but we had a little baby sling and a large oval shaped bin instead.  It worked fine.  We had to use that same big tub for baby number two, because when we borrowed my sister's special little bathtub he started trying to roll himself out of it the minute he had any muscle.  This is the kid who at 8 or 9 months was crawling ON HIS BACK USING HIS HEAD FOR LEVERAGE.

 Somehow we managed to get by bathing the first baby without ever needing a faucet cover.  We got one immediately for baby number two, and good thing too, because he's managed to bash his head against it numerous times.  He's also figured out how to take it apart, because it has a pretty simple design.  That hasn't caused us problems, though.  Yet.

 The bathtub floor stickies were essential for baby number two as well, because he gets excited and decides to run or stomp in the bath.  Even with the stickies he has fallen down at least four times.  But I don't want a full mat because they're so much harder to clean.  (He's pretty much learned his lesson at this point, anyway.)  These can just be shoved to dry in the toy holder.

 We got the kids a rubber duck, of course.  We bought the big one, of course.  I didn't really think about how big 32 centimeters was when we purchased it.  It's huge.  The kids like to pretend to ride this thing. They're both CRAZY about it and talk about it even when it isn't bathtime.  He's their friend.

Now, the rubber duck holds air and has a hole in it, which is a big mistake for a bath toy.  They fill with mildew and become dangerous and impossible to clean.  My husband cut a slit in its mouth so that we can bleach the inside of it and water can pour out of it easily.  It will be the only squeezy toy we get.

 The kids like to pour water.  These Ikea stacking cups are fantastic for that, because they have holes in them, and slits for pouring, and they stack. 

The kids also like to drink bathwater, so sometimes I skip putting these in.

These cups are no longer available.  :(

 This Green Toys Tugboat is our favourite toy for pouring, by far, though.  And we have TWO of them in different colours.  Which means they each get to hold one.  They can't figure out how to drink from it, either.  Green Toys does a whole load of awesome bath toys that are designed to drain properly, pour and float.

 We fill out the tub with a pack of foamy letters and numbers.  We got them when my daughter went through her alphabet obsession.  My son doesn't seem to be that interested, so I don't know that he'll catch on as fast as she did.  Also, we're missing a load of them.  But he likes to stick them to the tub, or the wall, or his sister...

 That's pretty much it for toys.  The kids are satisfied with that, and it's easy to keep track of.  We do have a random bath book, but I use it for diaper changes so that I don't have to worry about their bathroom reader getting poopy.  I'll have to get more for potty time.

We store everything in one of these sliding bath toy trays.  Everything else we looked up was hung from a suction hook.  We had suction hooks on a few things in our bathroom and they were constantly falling down in the middle of the night.  Plus, the toy holders made with netting take forever to dry and are a pain to get into.

I have a drawer right next to the tub that this rack fits in perfectly, so when everything is dry, I just shove it in the drawer.  We are completely satisfied with it.

Friday Post - Pouring - a bread recipe

I took a Montessori preschool book out of the library a while back just to get a bit of a checklist of things that I should be working on, seeing as I'm not sending my children to real preschool.  One of the activities on the list that we haven't been doing is pouring.  They say I should start with large beads, work towards beans, grains, and finally water.

I started with beads and they just ended up being carried around the house.  I gave up.

A few weeks later, I decided instead to get my daughter to help me make bread.  It worked out really well; she was riveted.  The thrill of standing on the stepping stool and being at counter height!  The the look of pride as she holds measuring spoons and dips their contents into the pan!  The squeals of delight as the bread comes out of the machine!

Yes, we have a bread machine.  It's been so completely vital to our routine, that I don't know how we'd function without one.  Oh, wait, I do know; we'd be paying $5+ per loaf of bread.

We got our machine as a wedding present, and we had asked for the Panasonic 'raisin and nut' dispenser model because it has a timer on it (hello, fresh bread baking in the morning), but also because it's one of the few models that doesn't have a poor track record for breaking down.  We priced it out, just because we were curious, and if you're making two loaves a week, you could even get a fancy Zojirushi and break even by the end of the year.

We've come a long way in just two weeks.  My daughter might be able to make bread all by herself in a year, except that the pan is too heavy and the machine is too tall.

We've tweaked the recipe a bit from the book.  This is what we do:

1    tsp yeast (either bread machine or regular dry yeast.  doesn't seem to matter.)
1    cup white flour
2    cups brown flour
1/2 cup rye flour
2    tblsp sugar
2    tsp salt
2    tblsp oil
2    cups water (usually a bit less than that, and then add more depending on how the dough is mixing up.)
1    cup or less of a 10 grain mix, or a handfull of sunflower seeds or whatever is in the house

I measure pour the flour and oil, and I prepare the 2 cups of water to be poured.  My daughter does the rest and has started to memorize the ingredients.  She knows which buttons to press on the machine to make it start, and I like to show her the dough being mixed so that she knows what kind of a consistency it should have for it to turn out right.

I'm in love with this bread.  It's gritty but moist.  It's dark and flavourful, but rises well.  It melts in your mouth.  Plus, it doesn't have that weird cardboard flavour that most store-bought bread has.  Probably because it doesn't have preservatives in it.