Our last Read with me Monday was all about The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. We started by making grape caterpillar kabobs to go with lunch and then snuggled to read the story. We love this book, and it lends way for learning discussions. We discussed the life cycle of a butterfly, counting, and the days of the week. After we read the story we made hand print caterpillars. I think it would also be fun to make hand print butterflies, cocoons, and eggs, and then use the pictures to retell the story. 



We made personalized painted plates!! I know this has nothing to do with cooking with your kids... but it was SUPER fun and we did have to bake our plates to set the marker and make it permanent, so I kinda feel like maybe it is okay to post as what's cookin'. These plates are so fun! You guys are going to love this!

What you'll need:

Dollar store plates
Sharpie (or other permanent) markers (for a completely permanent finish, use porcelain 150 paint markers. found HERE)

Doodle, draw, and design your plate however you want. When you're finished, Bake at 300* for 25 minutes to set the marker. Tada!

Update: So, the marker turns out to be less than permanent. Which is still fine if you are planning to use your plates as decorations...however, I wouldn't recommend eating off them. If you want them to be used for culinary purposes, use porcelain 150 paint markers.

Okay, So I am totally running behind schedule. This was supposed to go up on the blog Friday morning... and I remembered late Friday night. I thought that I would remember to put it up this morning...and here I am 10:30PM Saturday night.  I apologize. One day I will get a handle on my procrastination issue...just you wait! ;)
Alright. Now that we have that out of the way... Let me tell you about our super fun, ridiculously inexpensive Family Fun Friday. The idea all came about my husband brought home some boxes from work. Our original plan was to decorate the boxes to look like cars and have a drive-in movie night.  SO...we got busy painting.

The painting took the better part of three hours! I am not even exaggerating. My kids painted and painted and painted and never tired of painting!
Once they had painted the outside of their boxes, they HAD to paint the inside.
Which then turned into playing in the boxes and pretending they were houses. And after about two more hours of that, the boxes were all but destroyed. The kids were exhausted. And couldn't have cared less about not having watched a movie. Painting boxes was all the fun and excitement they needed. And I was more than okay with that.

The best part was we spent over five hours having the time of our lives...and spent no money at all.
What more can you ask for?

After a good night's rest, we were up and ready for more fun.

I bought these absolutely awful things a while back thinking they would be a wonderful sensory activity. Yeah... they were!
Perhaps not in the way Crayola (or I, for that matter) would have suggested. But, hey! Their creativity was sparked... that's always a plus right?  And my poor dying lawn really did look a little better after we hosed all that green off my kiddos.

While I will admit the bubbles were fun while they were out...I have been cleaning up green for an entire week now. It got all over the place!!! I am still finding green splattered in odd places. It even stained our concrete patio. I am a huge fan of creativity and fun...but products that make cleaning up afterward (especially ones that I find my self cleaning up days later) are not my favorite. I am afraid we wont be buying colored bubbles again. The fun wasn't quite worth a weeks worth of scrubbing, if you know what I mean.

Luckily, though, they did come clean (there are not more little green martians terrorizing our neighborhood),  and we were able to go out for frozen yogurt! Delish!!

Total cost for our budget friendly [ completely unplugged] TWO DAY FFF: $8.64

Our Memories: Priceless!