I love this picture below. Whoops!
She really is the life of the party, and in a really sweet way, she feels responsible to draw out a "shy" person. I so would have wanted her for my best friend when I was growing up.
Love this girl ALOT, and I'm so proud of her for so many reasons.
Cherry Vanilla Coconut Granola
4 cups quick oats--I used quick because that's what Sam's carries and what was in my pantry: )
I regular sized bag coconut( I toasted separately and added with the cherries after it all cooled)
½ tsp salt
½ cup brown sugar
1 tsp Vanilla
1/3 cup oil
¼ cup strawberry jam( or you could substitute honey if you'd like or any jam)
1½ cup dried cherries
Combine the oil, jam, and vanilla.
In a separate bowl combine all of the other ingredients except for the cherries and coconut. You add those after you're all done. Pour liquid mixture in with the oat mixture.
Spread on a baking sheet and bake in a 300° oven for 35-40 minutes. and combine well.
If you're using convection, its a little shorter so just keep an eye on it. We wait until it's looking a little crisp.
We pour it out onto a separate sheet pan when it's ready, or wax paper would be fine, to allow cooling. After it cools, mix in the cherries and coconut. Then into the bags.
Oh.....and look at my messy kitchen. We stocked up on homemade snack foods that day. We made a gargantuous amount of hummus too. I figured out how to make it yummy without the tahini. Yayyyy!! Tahini is the ingredient that makes it not so frugal. We just added more olive oil and also tweaked it with more spices this time. Everyone was happy with it.
Also, we made laundry detergent, and caught up on tons of laundry. If I need to have a laundry catch up day, it helps me to be creative in the kitchen while digging out of the mountain of laundry. It makes the laundry mountain secondary but still it gets accomplished.
We painted these little cuties. Oh, if you can't tell, they are planets. I've been getting a lot of good ideas for my little people at a site called http://playathomemom3.blogspot.com/
Cole helping a momma! We couldn't find the hammer at first. The gigantic "whatever that tool is" didn't work, so max found the hammer for us.
The plan was to make all nine for Max's wall but, we got sidetracked and the bigger girls decided to make glitter night lights. Cute! The lights and the girls!
Max with venus and earth. He made his earth blue, green and a brownish orange color. I tried to get him to paint over the brownish orangey color by showing him a photo of earth from space, and it was that moment that I realized he was right. Africa has alot of the color he 
Jessie wanted to take this picture of her "earth".
Another beautiful treasure and the box of the tap lights from walmart. They ended up about $1 each and batteries were included.
Big sis adding batteries for little sis: )
