Before I begin on the main topic of this post, I would like to share a little something that Brady did yesterday. He was walking around with 2 tinker toy sticks...heading to the living room. I kind of had an idea what was going on in his baby mind, so I grabbed my camera. He climbed over the fireplace hearth, around to the back area of the couch where we store the rock band stuff, wedged himself into a corner, stood up and started "playing" the drums. Sniff sniff....that's my boy!! I think he is vying to be mommy's favorite ;)

So....I have a pretty busy week coming up. It should be a lot of fun, but busy!! I'm hosting book club on Tuesday night (I am cramming the last 200 pages today....at some point). Den arrives Wednesday (YEAH!!!) with Ryan in tow of course. My parents arrive Friday, Logan's party is on Saturday and then everyone leaves on Sunday (booo). In all of that, I also have Logan's 4-year checkup, Bray's 15 month check up, 10 hours of work to do and party prep to finish.

So....the kids were having a "camp out" in the living room with their sleeping bags this morning, watching cartoons etc and Brian was sleeping in. I made myself some coffee and thought I would sit on the couch a read some of my book. Well....then I decided to make Brian some breakfast in bed. We delivered food, coffee, the Sunday paper and a card to the bedroom. The card said "Good morning daddy! You are loved and you know it's true....(open) but in 1/2 an hour we're coming for you! enjoy the paper!" Having used crayons to make the card, I noticed how many of ours are broken. I recently saw an article in Wondertime about making crayon heart necklaces for Valentine's day and thought it sounded like fun. So...I looked up the article, got the basic instructions, and started a crayon melting project (you know....instead of doing something productive to help TOWARDS the fullfillment of this week's activies!) Aiden started the project with me, but I pretty much did it on my own. :)


In case anyone else wants to try this: break crayons into pieces and put in muffin tins. I used paper liners, but I got some leakage so I would double them up or maybe use the foil ones. Place in a 300 degree oven until the crayons melt. My oven took about 10 minutes.
After you take them out (and after convincing maybe one of your younger children, like Aiden, that they are still crayons and will not, therefore, be eaten), let them cool for another 10 to 15 minutes. They should be pretty set, but still a little warm.

I cut mine out with these little cookie cutters we had from Christmas. I made a bunch of new crayon people.

After I was done, I noticed that I had a lot more left overs than actual "new crayons" so I re-divided the scraps into the muffin tin and baked them again.

Yum - fresh crayon muffins just out of the oven :)

I used a small star cookie cutter for the second batch. They have to cool for longer than you would expect...
....as is demonstrated by the one-armed crayon man who was given to Aiden before he completely set. :) The new crayons are lots of fun! Color with the head and you get orange....flip it over and color with a foot - there's red! (the one armed man is hard to see as he sort of blends into the wax paper, but he's missing one of his grey/yellow appendages...) :):)


Well...now that I've killed even more time doing a blog post....I guess I better go settle in with that book now!!!