Fireworks Cookies and Smoky Bubbles

I've been checking out magazines lately at the library.  I usually just get Family Fun, but this last week Martha Stewart Living caught my eye, mostly because of the cover.  Beautiful cookies!  The are called Fireworks Cookies and they were so fun!  We used our own sugar cookie recipe that I am VERY familiar with (it's a favorite with the kids), but used the magazine recipe for the frosting.  I found that I'm not the biggest fan of royal icing, but it was fun to work with, and did taste pretty good after it was all done.  We invited a neighbor friend over to help with the decorating.  Gibson was exhausted and went and took a rare nap, so he missed out on the fun.  It really reminded me of paper marbling, which we've done several times.

 I was so proud of this one that I made.  I thought it turned out very well.  I only made a few because I spent the majority of the time helping Elsa and R get their frosting on.  I really think I could have fun doing a whole batch of these.

 The finished batch. (Try to ignore the ugly cookie sheet.  Oh no, now that I've pointed it out, you can't ignore it.)

 This is my favorite one that Elsa did.

 Here's a few of Rs.

 A closer look at a few of the finished product.  Like I said, I only got to do one, so the other cookies were done by 5 year olds.  Not too bad!!

And for our next family fun project:

 DRY ICE BUBBLES:  So, we all know that Chris has this awesome job, right.  Well, one of the programs they had this summer was "Wacky Science" and his co-worker made this awesome bubble machine.  It's dry ice filled bubbles!  We had a lot of fun with it!  Chris didn't know where she got the instructions to make the "bubble machine", but here is one you can buy, and you can see how you could make it if you wanted to.  I think the pictures are self explanatory.  Like I said, we had a lot of fun with this!

Those are just a few fun things we've done around the house lately.  It's been up to 100 degrees most days lately, so we've been swimming and playing in the basement a lot.  Summer seems to be flying by too quickly.  We still have a camping trip or two planned though!