What A Diva Looks Like Before She Gets Her Hair Done

This morning she got outside before I could get to her... Those ribbons were yesterday's decor!

Our Little Trip

Last weekend we went on a little "vacation" to the Seattle area, visiting friends and family. While we didn't get a million pictures, due to camera batteries going out right before Shabbat (of all days), I'll share part of our little adventure with you.

Please pardon my lack of posting! A four day trip is a lot longer then four days if you count preparing and getting life back to normal. :)

Talk to you soon!

Hairdo Help

Lately I've been trying to experiment with new hair styles on my hair. Only, the problem is that my hair is so long (to my waist) that it just doesn't work with the ones I see in tutorials or magazines - even the ones for "long tresses". Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? If at least three people post hair style tutorials on their blogs I'll blog about them. Any comments would be very welcomed too!

Love,

Fourth of July Cupcake Cake

Last night I whipped up this fun dessert for tonight's dinner. It was super easy, and stress-free!

Here's what you do:

• Bake a batch of 24 cupcakes.
• Make a x3 batch of this frosting (just to be safe :). Color about a cup blue, a cup and a half red, and leave the rest white.
• Arrange the cupcakes into a shape of some sort.
• Fill in all the spaces in between the tops with white frosting, making a somewhat smooth surface to decorate.
• Take three decorating bags (or large zip top bags) and put a #18 star tip in one and two round #5 tips in the others.
• Fill the star tip bag with blue, and the others with the red and white.
• Now, got ahead and decorate! Use your imagination. And remember: it doesn't have to be perfect.
  

** Have icing left over? Make another batch of cupcakes, cut each in half and ice the middle, putting them together like a sandwich. Wrap them individually, put them in gallon-size zip top bags, then throw them in the freezer. Perfect for Dad's at-work-snacks, or easy afternoon snacks for your sibs! **

Easy Fourth of July Breakfast

Need a breakfast in a snap? Why not use those leftover pancakes that have been sitting in the bread basket for a couple of days now? Just add whip cream, sprinkles and those cherries that are so bountiful at the moment, and you've got yourself some happy kids. (I know this isn't the healthiest breakfast on earth, but hey, it's the 4th - a good excuse, right?)

Corn Syrup Painting for Preschoolers

Pour a small amount of corn syrup into a (preferably) disposable bowl.

Then, drop a bit of food coloring or liquid watercolors in.

This gives your preschoolers some color options, or if they like, they can do a little mixing.

Let them paint the corn syrup on some thick-ish paper with a q-tip. When they're finished, lay it out to dry and let them marvel at the hard, colored, shiny spots on the paper!

And there you have it: a fun and easy preschool activity.

Could Some Dinosaurs Still Be Living?

The science of "cryptozoology" is becoming increasingly respectable with the increased awareness of many thousands of historic "sightings" of mysterious animals that can't help but bring to mind an association with the supposedly "extinct" dinosaurs of the past.

This section on dinosaurs was from one of my fifth grade science books. I still love it!

Sea Monster or Surviving Saurus?

Cadbury may be a familiar name to chocolate lovers, but cadborosaurs is a name for a giant sea serpent often sighted off the cost of British Columbia, Canada. Up to 50 feet long, these creatures have a head like a horse, a long neck and short front flippers. Its credibility increased when in 1937, a ten-foot-long juvenile specimen was found in the stomach of a sperm whale.

The Mysterious Santa Cruz Carcass of 1925

Many people saw it. The press reported it widely. Washed ashore in 1925 just north of Monterey Bay, California, a giant rotting corpse was analyzed. A respected president of the Natural History Society of B.C., Canada wrote:

My examination of the monster was quite thorough. It had no teeth. its head is large and its neck fully 20 feet long. The body is weak and the tail is only three feet in length from the end of the backbone. These facts do away with the whale theory [which had been proposed by a handful of other authorities], as the backbone of a whale is far larger than any bone in this animal... I would
call it a type of plesiosaurus.

Mr. Wallace theorized the monster might have been preserved in a glacier for thousands of years, only to be released and floated to the area before washing ashore.

One can't help wondering why this and other discoveries aren't more widely reported. However, sea monsters and recently living dinosaur types have not been popular among evolutionists who insist on their mythical millions of years of geologic time.

The Modern Japanese "Plesiosaur?"

Off the coast of New Zealand, a Japanese fishing crew hauled an odd catch in their nets in 1977. The giant carcass was 30 feet long and weighed about 4,000 pounds. To avoid spoiling their fish catch, the men had to dump it back in the ocean, but not before a zoologist on board made notes on the animal. Its long neck, flippers and other details were still intact enough to suggest it was some kind of saurian creature rather than a shark.

Is there really a Loch Ness monster?

In the highlands of northern Scotland, people have reported a gigantic swimming "beastie" for the last 1,400 years. Some 3,000 sightings and even some vague photos seem to bear a resemblance to the plesiosaur of dinosaur times. Nessie is said to be 20 feet long with a serpent-like neck and fat body with flippers on the sides. There may be a whole family of them living in some dark submarine cavern.

Scientist Sighting More Convincing?

Natural History magazine reports the 1905 sighting by two expert naturalists aboard the private yacht Valhalla off the coast of Brazil. One wrote:

I saw a large fin or frill sticking out of the water, dark sea-weed-brown in
color, somewhat crinkled at the edge. It was apparently about 6 feet in
length and projected from 18 inches to 2 feet from the water. I could see,
under the water to the rear of the frill, the shape of a considerable body.
I got my field glasses on to it and almost as soon as I had them on the frill, a
great head and neck rose out of the water in front of the frill... the neck
appeared about the thickness of a slight man's body, and from 7 to 8 feet was
out of the water; head and neck were all about the same thickness. The head had
a very turtle-like appearance, as had also the eye.

From Canada's Ogopogo and Champ to lesser-known sightings in Russia and Japan, there seems to be a lot of evidence that sea serpents of one kind or another are real. Can flying reptiles still be alive?

African explorer Frank Melland kept encountering vague rumors about a much-feared animal
called Kongamato that lived in the Jiundu swamps in northwest Rhodesia,
near the Belgian Congo. When asked what it was, the natives told him it was a
bird, but more like a lizard with wings of skin like a bat's. When he showed them pictures of the pterodactyl and other animals, all immediately went for the pterodactyl, excitedly muttering "kongamato!"

What happended to the thunderbird?

The Tombstone Epitaph printed a news item on April 26, 1890, recalled by Dr. Duane Gish in his excellent book, Dinosaurs By Design. The report told how two ranchers were startled by a gigantic flying reptile with huge leathery wings, a long slim body, having claws on its feet and at the joint of its wings. They said its 8-foot-long head was like an alligator's, with a mouth full of teeth and large protruding eyes. They killed it and cut off the tip of its wing for a trophy. Could this have been the last of the legendary thunderbirds? Many American Indian tribes recall the huge size and powerful flight of this strange beast that thundered when its wings flapped.

We know animal like these really did live. The problem is that we've been programmed to think they died off with the dinosaurs millions of years ago.

Article taken from Unlocking the Mysteries of Creation by Dennis R. Petersen (2002).