Blog Linkage, White Texas Sheet Cake, Pinterest Stuff (Teaching Your Toddler About God AND Unique and Fun Things TO DO in Birmingham), Cousin Day at the Zoo AND Three Weeks with the Chick (An Update)

Good Saturday afternoon!

Lots to talk about today. Shall we get started?

Blog Linkage - Under Pinterest Stuff (below), I copied something from the following blog (www.steadfastfamily.com written by Liz Millay). I spent a little time at her blog, and I love her ideas and how she thinks. Check it out when you have a minute or two.

White Texas Sheet Cake

You will need the following for the Cake:

1 cup (2 sticks) salted butter
1 cup water
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
2 large eggs, beaten
1/2 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon almond extract (or vanilla)
1 teaspoon baking soda

You will need the following for the Frosting:

1/2 cup (1 stick) salted butter
1/4 cup milk
4 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon almond extract (or vanilla)

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease a 15" x 10" x 1" baking pan (jelly roll pan).

2. In a medium sized saucepan, bring butter and water to boil.

3. In a large bowl, combine flour and sugar. Mix. Add in eggs, sour cream, almond extract (or vanilla) and baking soda. Slowly pour in the boiling butter/water mixture. Stir until smooth.

4. Pour into greased baking pan. Bake at 375 degrees for 20 to 22 minutes or until golden brown and toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool cake for 20 minutes.

For Frosting:

1. In a mixing bowl, add powdered sugar and almond extract and set aside.

2. In a medium sized saucepan, add 1/2 cup butter and 1/4 cup milk. Bring to a boil. Remove from heat, and pour into bowl of powdered sugar/almond extract. Stir until smooth and combined. Spread over warm cake. (If frosting is too thick add a little extra milk.)

NOTE FROM ENCHANTING BELINDA - I have to admit, I do the following fairly often. If there is any way possible, I use The Pioneer Woman's Chocolate Sheet Cake recipe and copy the icing.

I make the cake from time to time, too, but the icing goes on a multitude of things in this house.

Pioneer Woman's Best Chocolate Sheet Cake Frosting:

1/2 cup finely chopped pecans
1-3/4 stick butter
4 tablespoons (heaping) cocoa
6 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 pound (minus 1/2 cup) powdered sugar

1. While cake is baking, make the icing. Chop pecans finely.

2. Melt butter in a saucepan. Add cocoa, stir to combine, then turn off heat.

3. Add the milk, vanilla and powdered sugar. Stir together.

4. Add the pecans, stir together and pour over warm cake.

ANOTHER NOTE FROM ENCHANTING BELINDA - Sometimes I use pecans and sometimes I do not. It's fantastic either way.

Pinterest Stuff

Teaching Your Toddler About God

(See Blog Linkage above for blog address.)

1. Read a Toddler Level Bible - This one seems a little obvious, right? You probably aren’t planning on opening up 1 Chronicles and reading it to your two year-old, so you go for the children’s Bible. However, it isn’t long before you realize there are dozens of children’s Bible options! Which one do you choose? For me, a toddler Bible needed to have three things:

Short stories. Attention span issues, remember?

Engaging stories. No dry and boring allowed here.

Accuracy. A little creative license is fine, but let’s not miss the main point of the story.

When choosing a Bible for my son to use, we looked at a number of options, but ended up loving The Rhyme Bible Storybook and The Rhyme Bible Storybook for Toddlers. The stories were short, the rhymes made them engaging and they were true to Scripture. Win-win-win!

When the time comes to actually wrangle that toddler and have Bible storytime, I found these five things to be helpful to remember:

Don’t worry about delving into every detail or implication of the story. At two or three years-old, you are just trying to introduce them to the very basics: what happened, the characters’ names and the simple truths about God. It’s easy to feel like you’re skipping a lot, but I always have to remind myself that we can dive deeper later.

Point out details in the pictures and explain new words/concepts. For example, after reading the story of Noah, we might go back through the pictures and point out all the different animals and talk about how an ark is a really big boat.

Add in silly voices and use motions while reading the story. Use a big, deep voice for Goliath or a slow, sad voice when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. Feel free to break up sitting down with a short activity. Run away like Jonah or flip the light switch on and off for the creation of light.

Read the same story multiple days in a row. It might drive you batty sometimes, but little ones love the repetition. Plus, every time we read the story they understood it a little better and remembered a little more.

Use a real Bible sometimes, too. If a verse or story is simple, look it up in your Bible and read that as well. My son can already tell that my Bible is special, so he loves when we read something from it. We have also tried to memorize short verses from time to time. A favorite for a while was saying Psalm 3:5 as part of the bedtime routine.

2. Play the Stories - Learning about the Bible doesn’t have to end at storytime. Toddlers and preschoolers learn best through play, so once the story is over climb down onto the floor and join in for some Bible play fun.

Here are four ways we play our Bible stories:

Act out part or all of the story. After reading about Noah, we spent some time pretending to be him. A laundry basket became the ark, a blanket the water and stuffed toys the animals. My son had a lot of fun and the story of Noah was reinforced in his mind.

Use toys to play out the story. We have an ever growing collection of animal and people figurines that we often use to play out the story we’ve read. I’ll usually sit down with him at first to play, then, he’ll get the hang of it and play out the story later on his own.

Make up a game from part of the story. Using part of the story to make a game doesn’t have to be complicated to be fun. We’ve adapted “Red Light, Green Light” to be “Don’t Eat the (Forbidden) Fruit.” We've played “Hide and Seek Jesus” (for when he was lost in Jerusalem as a boy) and thrown balls into a basket to “Gather the Leftover Bread and Fish” (feeding the 5,000). Playing games is a great way to involve those extra-active little ones.

Also, sing and dance to music. There are a lot of great age-appropriate Bible songs out there that tell the Bible stories.

Unique and Fun Things TO DO in Birmingham

NOTE FROM ENCHANTING BELINDA - I'm going to mark it in BOLD if I have tried the activity!

Take a jog along Vulcan Street for views of the city below.

Rent a Zyp Bike from one of the docks in town and spend the day exploring the city by bicycle.

Hit the hiking trails of the 1,500-acre Red Mountain Park.

Have a nighttime photo shoot under the LED lights of the 1931 tunnel.

Rent a tube and float down the Cahaba River.

Head over to the Alabama Theater for a screening of Grease or another summertime classic in the Summer Film Series.

Pack your own cheese and crackers for a summer picnic at Railroad Park or along the Rotary Trail.

Bring out the big guns and go skeet shooting at Selwood Farm.

Scout out the best in secondhand clothing at Sozo Trading Company.

Browse the screen printed art like license plates, pins and postcards at Yellowhammer Creative.

Play all day with interactive exhibits at the McWane Science Center.

Pay a visit to the Civil Rights Institute to learn more about the early stages of the civil rights movement in the American South.

Get your fingers covered in sauce with a Southern BBQ feast at Dreamland or Saw’s Soul Kitchen.

Get dumped and make it up with one of the super delicious, chocolate chip Breakup Cookies at Church Street.

Beat the heat with a popsicle even adults can get behind at Steel City Pops.

Explore the up-and-coming culinary scene of Birmingham at Birmingham Restaurant Week.

Dine on some killer pizza in a restored post office at Post Office Pies.

Nosh on the famed tomato salad at Hot and Hot Fish Club.

Suit up for a slip-n-slide block party of epic proportions at Slide the City.

Head over to Satellite Cafe to play Sonic the Hedgehog and other old school games on a classic gaming system.

See a play at Virginia Samford Theater or Red Mountain Theatre Company.

RANDOMNESS - Cousin Day at the Zoo - Austin, Melia, RT, Judith and I went to the Zoo for a quick trip last week...

And when I say quick trip, I mean we rode the carousel, train, played in the Splash Pad AND I asked each of the two kids which animal they wanted to visit.

RT chose the elephant, and Judith chose the giraffe.

Just to show how flexible I really am, we went through the Alabama Wilds portion of the Zoo just to check on the bears, the otters, the foxes and the goats.























Basically, just another fun day at the Zoo!

RANDOMNESS #2 - Three Weeks with the Chick (An Update) - The Chick came home last week after spending the past ten weeks in Asheville, North Carolina. She worked as Waterfront Director at Camp Crestridge…

The same Camp she worked as a Counselor two Summers ago.

Ten weeks is a LONG time, but I can honestly say I have grown as a human being, and while I am despondent and sad and lonely when she is gone for any length of time, I have matured a great deal, too.

That means I am not as outwardly whiny as I have been in the past...

Which also means I am pretty much exactly the same, except if you speak to me in passing, I kinda keep it to myself.

Progress for sure!

As has become our custom, Roxie makes a bunch of appointments during this break, and I go along to sit in the waiting room hoping we can go somewhere fun for lunch after said appointment. Also, I catch up on a lot of my magazine reading and correspondence during this time.

(That's only half true. No correspondence is ever involved.)

Next week, we'll be heading to Auburn to set up her next residence...

The "stuff" is already there, but it has to be situated.

She'll start work and Grad School later in August, and the next chapter of her life will officially begin.

I'm kind of excited. It's been a pretty good read so far!



I hope you have a good week and upcoming weekend. I will be back soon with more, more, more of the same.

Take care.

Sincerely,

The Enchanting Belinda

"Day 12 without chocolate... lost hearing in my left eye."

"If you want to impress me with your car, it better be a food truck."