Rebecca came up with this art project on her own, always the best! Somewhere I picked up a set of glittery chipboard letters, the kind you can find with scrap booking supplies, thinking that they would make good glue-ing fodder. Which they did, more or less, but here Rebecca has decided to turn them into a letter necklace, by twisting them up into a chain of pipe cleaners. She spent quite a while wrapping them up, with no particular rhyme or reason. I’m sure you could turn this into some sort of literacy activity, but we were just playing.

And peanut butter cups! I’ve had a lot of ‘and’ posts recently. I could split them up, but whatever. I guess I feel like I have a lot of little things to say that don’t really ‘rate’ their own posts, whatever that really means!

But peanut butter cups! They are delicious, and they are easy to make, even for a 4 year old! You can even make them look ‘official’ if you buy the kind of peanut butter cups that come in a little plastic tray and then re-use that as a mold. We got these molds from some Newman’s Own peanut butter cups.

To make your own peanut butter cups:

1) Find some Newman’s Own peanut butter cups, eat them, and clean the tray.

2) Dump some chocolate chips in a bowl and microwave them stirring frequently until they melt. The stirring part is important.

3) Spread the melted chocolate around the inside of the mold, smearing it up the edges and leaving a hollow bowl shape in the middle. Put the mold in the freezer for a couple of minutes to solidify the chocolate. We had three trays, and by the time we were done with the second two the first one was ready to come out.

4) Put a spoonful of peanut butter into each of the chocolate cups, keeping it away from the edges.

5) Spoon more melted chocolate over the tops of the peanut butter, making sure that the chocolate gets down around the edges of the peanut butter to meet up with the first layer of chocolate.

6) Stick them back in the freezer to solidify the top chocolate.

Enjoy! We stored them in the fridge, but they’d probably be fine out on the counter too. And since they are made out of real chocolate and peanut butter, not that suspicious vegetable oil stuff, they taste really good! Rebecca had a lot of fun making them too. What 4 year old doesn’t enjoy smearing melted chocolate around?

Notice the haircut? That was a christmas morning present. She’s been wanting that consistently for quite a while, and now that it’s done I like it too, surprisingly enough! (I’m firmly in the long hair camp myself.) She slouched quite a lot when I was cutting off her ponytail, when it was off and she straightened up I was rather shocked at how short she had managed to get it without my noticing! Chin length in front, but up above her hairline in back. And so she ended up with a reverse bob, because that was what happened, and it was practically instantly exactly the haircut that she should have had, no getting used to it period, no who’s child are you? And I would have had no idea how to get there if it hadn’t happened by accident!