All
I have to say is I should get a best Nanny Award for how awesome these pancakes
turned out…. Just saying this look freaking amazing!! And homemade chocolate
milk too!
 |
| Amazing! |
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Homemade Donuts!!
Powder donut days now
happen every Friday because of this super easy recipe!
I even get asked multiple
times a day on Monday and Wednesday if I brought the stuff to make donuts. I’ve
had to start telling him that if he keeps asking that he won’t get them on
Friday… you can only remind him so much. (and he told me the other day he tries
to annoy me.. -__- Wonderful!)
But I love making powder
donuts so much more than glazed because I think it is a little less messy. And
they are just different. And who doesn’t love powder donuts?! Here is the
recipe!
Powder Donut Recipe
Materials:
-biscuit dough
-powder sugar
-oil
What to do:
1.
Open the biscuit dough and separate all the biscuits on the
countertop
2.
Using a medicine cup, make a donut shape to make a donut circle
and donut hole
 |
| Super easy to make! |
3.
In a frying pan, heat your oil and place about 4 of the donut
circles in to the oil
4.
Fry each side of the donut (which takes about 4 minutes on each
side at the beginning but time will decrease as the oil gets hotter)
5.
When donut is done frying, remove it from the oil and place on a
paper towel to release some oil
6.
Let donut sit for about 20 seconds and then place in a bowl of
powder sugar and cover it with powder sugar and place it on another paper towel
covered plate
 |
| So many donuts!!! |
7.
Repeat with the rest of donut dough and ENJOY your donuts!
That’s all you have to
do! It’s a pretty simple recipe. If you want to make these glazed, and have a
good glaze, then please share it with us all! We would all love to hear! Hope
you enjoy your very delicious and very addicting new donut recipe!
 |
| Look how excited he is! |
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Homemade Pretzels
Homemade
pretzels are probably one of my favorite things, probably because I love carbs…
too much.
We
made pretzels at the very beginning of the summer and they were really good,
besides the extra salt I accidently added on them. Oops. But once we washed the
salt off, they were really good!
The
recipe is really easy and only uses 5 different ingredients. Here’s the recipe:
Homemade
Pretzels
Materials:
· 1
package of yeast
· 1 ½ cup
of warm water
· 1 teaspoon
of salt
· 1
tablespoon of sugar
· 4 cups
of flour
· Egg
· Coarse salt
What
to do:
1.
Mix
yeast and warm water together.
2.
Add
the salt and sugar to the yeast mixture.
3.
Add
flour and knead until smooth.
4.
Make
into desired shapes.
5.
Spray
cookie sheet with pam or put foil down.
6.
Brush
dough with beaten egg and sprinkle with coarse salt.
7.
Bake
at 425 degrees for 12-15 minutes.
8.
Enjoy!
These
pretzels are soo yummy and I love eating them! So good!
Enjoy
cooking with your kids and creating memories that will last a lifetime!!
Peace
and Love
Kelley
GAK!
GAK!
Have you ever heard of it? Well, if you haven’t it is a lot like silly putty. I’m
not really sure where the name GAK came from but it sure is fun to say but even
more fun to play with! What’s even better? It is super easy to make and only
requires a few ingredients!
Here
is the recipe:
GAK!
GAK!
Materials:
· 1 cup
of Elmer’s glue (I just used a whole normal bottle)
· Food
coloring of your choice (We used green)
· 1 cup
of liquid starch (Found this at Wal-Mart on the laundry detergent isle, if you don't know what starch looks like mine came in blue bottle like the picture below)
 |
| Liquid Starch! |
What
to do:
1.
Pour
the glue and food coloring into a plastic container.
2.
Stir
until the color is mixed thru out.
3.
Add
the starch a little at a time, stirring with a spoon or kneading with your
fingers as the mixture thickens.
4.
Keep
stirring until the mixture looks like putty.
5.
Test
it with your fingers. If the mixture is too sticky, add more starch in small
amounts until the mixture is smooth and rubbery.
I
had to add more starch the next day because it became too sticky but I think
that’s because I didn’t add all of the starch the day before.
 |
| Look at that concentration! |
It’s
lots of fun to play with and can get messy quickly if you’re not paying
attention. I would suggest having complete supervision on any child younger
than 8, just to make sure you won’t find random amount of GAK all over the
house.
Peace
and Love
Kelley
Homemade Play Dough
I
use to always play with play dough when I was a kid and I was super lucky
enough to have a mom who would make me homemade play dough. She even would
sometimes put kool-aid mix in it to make it smell good!
We
made play dough the other day and boy was it a hit. We made two different
batches so that they could have 8 different colors. And boy is a lot of fun! It’s
really easy to make too! Here is the recipe:
Homemade
Play Dough
Materials:
· 1 cup
of flour
· 1 cup
of warm water
· 2
teaspoons of cream of tarter
· 1
teaspoon of oil
· ¼ cup
of salt
· Food coloring
.JPG) |
| Everything that we used |
What
To Do:
1.
Combine
the flour, water, cream of tarter, oil and salt in a medium sized sauce pan.
2.
Stir
over medium heat until smooth.
3.
Stir
continuously until the dough balls, which will take about 1 to 2 minutes.
Remove from heat.
.JPG) |
| This is what it should look like when your remove it from the heat. |
4.
When
dough is cool enough to handle, began to knead it until smooth.
5.
Form
into a ball.
 |
| Dough ball! |
6.
Divide
into four different sections to make different colors.
7.
Add
the food coloring to each section by making a small thumb press into the middle
of the dough.
 |
| Adding the food coloring! |
8.
Knead
the dough until the food coloring is mixed into the dough.
9.
When
dough gets to desired color, make it into a ball and set it aside.
10.
Do
this with the rest of your colors.
11.
Put
each dough ball into its own container.
12.
Store
in airtight containers when not playing with it so that it won’t dry out.
 |
| So many fun colors! |
Pretty
each recipe. We made two batches of this in about 20 minutes. But played with
it for a lot longer than that.
Peace
and Love
Kelley
Crayon Melt Art
We all loved this project when
we did it a few weeks ago. We made two of these, both of them for a Father’s
day gift for the kids I’m Nannying this summer.
This project for adults isn’t
hard but for children (or also tweens) it can be a little challenging, but that’s
when I’m here to help!
It doesn’t cost very much to do
and you can get all your materials at the same store. I got all of mine at
Wal-Mart even though I don’t really like that store, they sell canvas and it’s
a great deal… so yeah…
But here are the instructions.
Crayon Art
Materials:
·
Canvas
·
Box of crayons (We used
a box of 48 crayons)
·
Hairdryer
·
Piece of cardboard (I
just used the bottom of the 24 pack of water bottles)
·
Hot glue gun
·
Hot glue sticks
·
Tape
·
Pencil
 |
| Just a few things you need |
What to do:
1.
Open your box of crayons
and decide what colors you are going to use. With the size of canvas we used,
it didn’t fit all the crayons.
2.
Then place the crayons
in the order that you want them on your canvas. *Don’t glue them right away,
wait until they look like you want them too*
3.
After the crayons are
the way you want them, come the “long” part. Plug your glue gun in and glue
down the crayons the way you want them.
4.
If you decided that you
wanted your crayon art to have a design on them, this would be the time to do
that. You can do it at the beginning but your crayons might get in the way
after you glue them down which will make pulling up the tape more difficult. We
did a letter on our crayon melt and I learned that you should make sure the
tape is stuck to the canvas well so that you don’t burn your fingers on melting
crayon while melting it.
5.
Once your canvas is the
way you would like it, I suggest going outside to do the melting part because
it can get messy, unless you like cleaning up melted crayon in the house. To
each their own.
6.
I placed our crayon arts
on the cardboard bottom holder of water bottles so that crayon wouldn’t go
everywhere on the concrete.
7.
This is the fun part.
Plug in your hairdryer and point it at the crayons… and wait. At first, (like 5
seconds after starting the hairdryer) the kids didn’t think it was going to
work but it takes about 2-3 minutes before you see the crayons doing anything.
You’ll start to see the wax seep on the paper and then it will start to drip.
It’s a pretty cool process to watch. Make sure that your pointing the hairdryer
down and across evenly while heating them so that the crayons will melt evenly.
.JPG) |
| Melting Away |
 |
| "It won't melt" |
8.
Then just let it dry.
When it’s done drying you make have to pick off some pieces from the bottom but
it shouldn’t be that big of a deal.
9.
If you did a design,
then after it is finished drying peel off your tape. When we finished peeling
the tape off ours, we out lined the letter in hot glue, just to give it a
little shine.
 |
| Finished Project #2 |
.JPG) |
| Finished Project #1 |
Hope your crayon melt turns out
wonderfully! Have fun making memories with your kids!
“The best memories are the ones
you can’t explain, you just had to be there for.”
Peace and Love
Kelley
Edible Play Dough
This is such a fun activity and
the expression on the kid’s faces when I told them that they were going to get
to eat this play dough when we were through making it was priceless… They just
couldn’t believe it! So funny! But they really liked eating it more than
playing with it, which didn’t surprise me at all.
To say this is an easy recipe
is an understatement. Seriously, there are only 3 ingredients. 3!
Edible Play Dough
1 cup of creamy peanut butter
2 cups of powder sugar
½ cup of honey
Mix all these together. If you
want to stay clean, you can stir it with a spoon or if you want your kids to
get messy right away just let them mix it with their hands. (I made ours before
the kids were awake so I mixed it with a spoon)
That’s all you have to do. I
told you it was simple.
Hope y’all have as much fun as
we did with this recipe!!
Peace and Love
Kelley
A List of Ideas
So I’m sure many of you have or
have at least heard of the wonderful website called Pinterest…. If you’re a mom
or nanny or grandma or teacher or crafter or a girl (and I even know some
guys), you should totally get one!! Even though you waste too many hours a day
looking at things you will probably never make, it does have some pretty
awesome ideas and most of them are reasonable, affordable, and easy to do, even
if you are the worst DIY person ever. If you’ve never heard of it before let me
tell you. It’s an online bulletin board with different ideas for cooking,
decorating, crafts, weddings, parties, holidays, fitness, pets, photography,
and pretty much anything else you could think of. So each picture is a different “pin” and with
your account, you can create different “boards”. For example, I have at the
moment 17 boards that consist of great ideas, for the home, clothes,
future wedding, hair,
crafts,
food, quotes,
faith, photography, teacher things, Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Holidays, Nannying,
and pets…. These
are all linked to my pinterest page
so you can look at them. You can follow different people (such as your family
or friends, or you could even follow random strangers that just “pin” things
you really like) and get ideas from all over. It is such a neat idea and to say
I spend too much time on the website is an understatement…. O and it’s a really
great study break, just saying.
But this website is where I get
A LOT of my ideas…. Not including or limited to my brain cells also. But I love
doing things that are going to make memories with kids and what better way to
do it by making, creating, and playing with things that they made (and you
helped make).
If you haven’t already clicked
on the Nannying link above, that’s perfectly fine because I’m about to show you
most of those things. I’m going to try to remember to link the post I’ve made
about any of them… and I promise (don’t hurt me if I don’t) to try to add more
before the summer ends… (which for me will be the middle of August, just so you
know)
Without further ado, THE LIST!
2.
Play homemade board
games
3.
Make a handprint
calendar
4.
Make a giant bubble in
the backyard
5.
Play minute to win it
games
6.
Do the hot rocks activity
7.
Create sandpaper art
8.
Make your own Lava lamp
9.
Create salt art
10.
Do the exploding
sandwich bag
11.
Paint with soap bubbles
12.
Make a volcano
13.
Make marshmallow poppers
14.
Paint our nails
different colors
15.
Have a birthday party
for each person
17.
Create the marshmallow
buildings
18.
Create handprint art
19.
Noodle races!
20.
Make a homemade pizza
21.
Go swimming and play fun
games
22.
Make homemade sugar
cookies
23.
Paint in zip lock bags
24.
Create GAK
25.
Go to Sonic on Fridays!
27.
Have a water balloon
fight
29.
Have a squirt bottle
fight
30.
Make homemade bouncy
balls
32.
Have a pajama day
33.
Make homemade bubbles
34.
Create a band with
homemade instruments
35.
Go bowling!!
36.
Make and create our own
homemade slushies
37.
Balloon Ping-Pong
38.
Make sponge bombs
39.
Make homemade popsicles
40.
Go on an ABC walk
41.
Make sidewalk chalk
If you have any other ideas or helpful
hints on these activities, leave a comment and let us all know!
Have a beautiful and fun
creative day!
Peace and Love
Kelley
WELCOME!
Welcome to the Nanny Diaries!
I just wanted to start this
little blog to remember all the different activities I’ve done with the kids I
sit for and so that I can share with y’all different and fun things you can do
as a nanny or a parent.
First, I’ll tell you a little
about myself. I’ve been babysitting/Nannying (I always get asked what the
difference is, and I just say whatever the child wants to call it. Normally
older children don’t want to be told they are getting babysat…) for a little
over 6 years. I’ve never had a full time nanny job until this summer but during
high school that is how I made money. I’ve always been the type of person that
doesn’t like to just sit around and look at the walls so I almost always bring
something to do with me when I’m watching children that I think they might
enjoy. This summer has been no different.
Most of these ideas will come
from what I’m doing this summer, but if I think real hard I’m sure I can
remember some of the things that I’ve done in the past. I may not have pictures
of those things but I am sure that I can explain what we did.
Hope y’all enjoy the ideas and
have fun making memories with your kids!!
Peace and Love
Kelley
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