The Search for Miss Direction: Hot Doggin'

The heat continues to reign supreme here in the D. But we're doggin' through (pun intended, you'll see) The kiddos and I spent a fantastic day here at home trying our best not to melt. We took full advantage of National Hot Dog Day (which kind of is a mini holiday around here, especially for Mikayla) and National Peach Ice Cream Day.

We started off our morning by building a giant (and I do mean giant as it required me to move about half the furniture in the living room) fort! What better way to beat the heat than by creating a secret lair for my favorite duo to hide out in. I've mentioned before that I am not the engineer in the family but I think I gave this one a pretty good go. It's still standing and it kept Thing 1 and Thing 2 happy all day.

Then in Kid Kitchen we created three different dishes. We started by making hot dog cookies. You know me and cute food, I just couldn't resist. They both did a great job with this (it is not easy to roll out sugar cookie dough in any semblance of a shape with the humidity where it currently is and they did a really good job!) and these turned out to be one of my favorite cute foods we've ever created.

Then we tackled the peach ice cream. Apparently the small appliance fairy STILL has not gotten the hint that I need an ice cream maker so we made due with what we had. Did you know you could make ice cream in the blender? Last night I sliced up and froze some fresh peaches (you can use any fruit and if you want to buy it already frozen, go for it.) and that with some heavy cream and sugar in my blender turned out some really phenomenal peach ice cream and freezing up all afternoon. We're already making plans to try out strawberry and maybe banana. On a side note, to make it a little healthier if you're into that I don't see any reason why you couldn't swap out the cream for vanilla yogurt or even greek yogurt. We may have to experiment with this one...

And we couldn't celebrate Hot Dog Day without some actual hot dogs. (I will admit to abstaining. A long time ago I was told they contained earthworms and while I am considerably less guillible now (except for when it comes to listening to things from my Dad) I have never really gotten into the hot dog thing) The kids helped me make Chili Cheese Dog Pie. Everyone here loved it! Noah did great with slicing the hot dogs and Mikayla worked well with the grater. I love successful Kid Kitchen's!

The kids (for the most part) have been real troopers about the heat (Noah has suggested we go to Mom and Dad's as they have air conditioning. They graciously said we were more than welcome ;-) ) so we treated them to slurpees tonight after we ran a few errands which probably didn't HAVE to get done, but at least they were in places that were cooler than the house.... We also allowed them a quick dip in the pool instead of baths once the sun subsided a bit. I keep telling them that we only have to make it a few more days...

Caviar (kind of) tomorrow and a trip to the movies in the morning! Until then...

This is what happens when I can't sleep at midnight - I make finger paint! Keep an eye out for it in the next few days...

Coolest fort ever

Mikayla hanging out

My favorite sticky twosome ready to do some culinary creating

Rolling out the cookie dough

Dogs and buns

Our Hot Dogs read for the oven

Peach Ice Cream ready for the freezer

Mikayla spreading out the cheese for the casserole

Our Chili Dog Creation ready for the oven

Our finished hot dog cookies (Note: If I do these again, hopefully it won't be SO hot because I think the cookies wouldn't have spread quite as much. But they're still super cute!)