MamaManagement

Construction paper shape art is so easy to pull together. You can plan ahead and cut the shapes out ahead of time, or, you can be like me most of the time and stand next to the kids cutting as you go. Either way, this is so easy and my kids absolutely love it. Here's the idea: Create pictures of whatever you want (We obviously did a lot of Christmas themed pictures last month!) using basic shapes: squares, rectangles, circles, triangles, etc. Depending on the ages of your kids you can either cut out the shapes for them and allow them to assemble things into a picture, or you can draw the shapes on the paper and let them cut them out themselves before creating their picture. Either way, this is all you'll need: - Construction paper in various colors - Scissors (safety scissors if the kids are doing the cutting) - Glue sticks - Crayons and markers for adding details and background drawings - Any other materials you'd like to add, like glitter, google eyes, et

Salad dressing is a funny thing. I find most restaurant salad dressings to be yummy, but most bottled salad dressings to be yuck. (Especially ranch…I don't know what they do to bottled ranch dressing, but it's terrible and they need to stop.) Consequently, I typically don't enjoy an at-home salad nearly as much as I do a restaurant salad (which I have been known to swoon over). That was, until I started making my own salad dressing. For some reason, I was sort of afraid to make my own dressing for a long time. I remember staying with my cousins in Chicago many years ago when I was doing an internship in the city, and my cousin, Nancy, would always make her own dressing for our salads. I would watch in amazement as she, without measuring anything, seemingly randomly put various ingredients into a bowl and whisked them up, and moments later I would have a deliciously dressed salad in front of me. But it all seemed a bit wizard-behind-the-curtain to my 21 year old self. I

Happy New Year!! Welcome 2014!  Okay, so I'm almost three weeks late on this, but cut me a little slack. (Please.) I intended to take two weeks off from the blog for the holidays, but two weeks turned into three weeks and then started knocking on the door of four, and here we are: twelve days into January and I'm just now getting to it. That doesn't mean I haven't thought about blogging. Oh, I have. It means I haven't had much alone time to write. Which means that I haven't worked on the novel since November, and I haven't written a blog post since before Christmas. Sigh. But that's what the new year is for…new beginnings, just when you need it!! However, before I get into the new things for 2014 (I'll be talking new year's resolutions later this week), I want to go back a bit... 2013 has come to an end and 2014 blossoms before us, all shiny and new. I'm feeling pretty good about moving on from 2013. It was a big year for my family. A