Baby, it's (too) cold outside!

Like most of the midwest, last week we had temperatures that were incredibly cold.

(the little numbers at the bottom of the thermometer show that it had actually warmed up from -13 to -9 in the past few hours.)

But before the arctic weather hit, we first got a foot of snow. The combination made the roads here impossible to drive on. They were packed down with snow and ice that just couldn't melt because it never got warm enough. We were out of school for an entire week due to the weather.

What do you do when you have to stay inside for days on end? (because of course this snow came right after 2 weeks of no school due to Christmas break). Here are some of the things we did to stay busy:

1. Bring some snow inside to play with:

2. Make suncatchers with glue and food coloring (credit to this blog for the idea):

3. Bake a zillion different things (Becca's absolute favorite thing to do is bake). I only took pictures of one of the things we baked - pretzels. I have made homemade pretzels with the kids lots of time before, but we always start with frozen bread dough. Since I didn't have that on hand, and getting to the store was not a possibility, we made dough from scratch from a recipe I had cut out of a magazine years ago. I would not recommend this! The process took forever. Much much easier to start with ready made dough.

The picture below shows a combination of the article I had cut out, and a picture of Becca making the pretzels. A few differences I would like you to note:

a. Nowhere in the original article are the kids wearing as much flour as was necessary for making the actual dough.
b. In fact, there does not seem to be any mess at all in the picture on the right.
c. The kids on the right are using exactly one utensil to put the egg on the dough - a pastry brush. If you look closely at Becca, you will see she has out about a million different kitchen tools for this project including a candy thermometer, a zester, tongs, and a corkscrew. Why did it never occur to me that corkscrews and dough go hand in hand...oh that's right, because they don't.

4. Then when it finally got above 0, we went out to play for a bit:

Hope you are all staying warm where you are!