The Oven Teacher

The family that works together..........frequently fails together. 

But, I think that's a good thing. 

With the kids all still on vacation, I planned some really fun activities. Most of them did not work out. Not the first time, or even the second time. 

Were there tears of frustration? You bet.

Did we often panic? Oh yea. 

But every time we goofed up, we got a little more determined. We got used to feeling frustrated. Which are pretty important life lessons. Cause things often don't work out the way you think, but hopefully, if you keep trying, you can learn something along the way 

Enter: an innocent piece of polymer.

The picture even says how fun and easy they are! How hard could it be to shrink plastic, right? Anyone can turn on an oven. 

Catherine enthusiastically made some very abstract art.  Lots and lots of it. 

We carefully painted our creations. 

We added details to make our creations special. (On a side note, Catherine is very impressed with angels lately and has decided her name is Gabriel. She's wearing a belt on her head for a halo.)

We were all so excited to see our beautiful big art become little hard plastic pieces of coolness. 

But when we opened the oven, our lovely creations had curled and fallen into the bottom of the oven and were stuck in some yucky goo. Oh, the shock and horror. 

I will admit, my first inclination was to toss everything in the trash and go listen to some Abba, but I had 5 little faces looking up at me for inspiration. 

Drat.

"Remember the Wright Brothers?",  I asked the children. 

"And Thomas Edison had 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb until he succeeded."  

They all looked up at me like I was so wise. 

So, we experimented. We tried painting the other side of the plastic. We tried less time. We tried the microwave (by the way, melted plastic smells really, really yucky). 

I texted Jen, who knows how to do everything in the kitchen. 

Finally, we got this! A slightly less warped piece of plastic. We conquered the Shrinky Dinks together! We did it! 

Next came egg yolk cookies. 

You mix the yolks with food coloring and paint the cookies. 

They looked so pretty!

until they hit the oven. 

Then the cookies grew to four times their original size and kind of exploded. They sort of looked like giant blobs with  red egg on top. The lesson here is stuff might look yucky, but eat it anyway or mom will get mad.  

Our last attempt was the salt dough ornaments everyone told me about. The first batch, fell on the floor. For second batch, someone put in too much water and it became slime.

The dogs ate the third batch. 

But did we quit! No! We made more and they turned out wonderfully! (though I am beginning to feel that the oven does not like me)

I think the kid's really learned alot this week. Why, just today, we couldn't find the hairbrush, so we improvised. Sure, the comb got stuck in Catherine's hair and caused wide spread panic, but the point here, is we learned to adapt. 

And when things really get you down, you can always put stickers on your nose......