What a fun day!

First, let me say, today was absolutely B-U-T-ful in our part of Colorado! I wish the weather would stay like this year round.

Anyway, we had a really fun day in school today. We are currently rowing "Truman's Aunt Farm". For those of you who don't know what rowing is, it's reading a children's book for five days in a row and studying different aspects of the book based on social studies, language arts, art, science and applied math. This book has been a long time coming. Last year we started our first day of rowing it and I was at the computer printing off some ant stuff when I stood up and my water broke. Four hours later, little Tyler entered this big ole world. So, we've been very patient in waiting to do this book. Now if our live ants would just hurry and come in the mail so we can put them in our ant farm!

This is really turning out to be a cute book! Part of our study later in the week will be on ants. But today we made an anthill cake! It's basically just a cake (a butter cake was our choice) topped with frosting (milk chocolate was our decision on this one!) shaped into an anthill on one end. Then we topped the cake with crushed graham crackers to look like dirt or sand. We were "supposed" to put tiny plastic toy ants on the cake to make it look like ants trailing to and climbing into the anthill. Well, who can find tiny plastic toy ants? Not this mama! So we used some writing frosting and Daddy attempted to make some fire ants. He is the artist of the family so I'm sure this truly was as good as it would get! He called it the "alien ant farm"! Hope you enjoy the pictures of today's adventure!

Here are the girls in their aprons, ready to bake!






Now the work begins!






What mother lets her kids lick the batter off of the beaters and rubber spatula? This one does! I know, I know... it has raw eggs. I ate tons of batters/dough with raw eggs when I was a kid and I'm fine. Okay, maybe not tons but... that's the fun of helping, isn't it?



Marlie put the "dirt/sand" on our cake! Notice we have changed into dress-up clothes since the baking and cooling of the cake. Life doesn't stand still for the cooling process for heaven's sake. In fact, poor Hannah missed out on the decorating process altogether because she was in tap dance class!



The finished product with the "alien ant". Nice try honey!



Ready to enjoy the fruit of their labor! Now we are all in our jammies. And, yes, Tyler got to enjoy some of the anthill cake too! Just a precursor to his yummy birthday cake in a couple of weeks!