Minnesota is so cold this week

 

I decided to make some rainbow bricks. Honestly, I didn't think about what I would do with them after frozen so... I decided to line our retaining walls with them. However, it's snowed (barely) and of course the snow covers them up! HA! My plan has been foiled. I made 50 bricks and was able to line the upper retaining walls and a little bit of the walls leading up the stairs. I had 4 leftover so I dug out around the little retaining wall I made around the bird feeder and lined that one too. 

Had I actually come up with a plan, I think I would have made 100+ to be able to make a snow fort for the kids - more castle-like than igloo. I don't like how kids don't think about how the igloo forts can fall in. I've seen my children run at snowbanks full send and there's no way both of my kids would stay off the top of an igloo. Kids just don't know any better!

So, noted for next year is to buy a snow brick maker to make a castle for the kids. The kids next door are older and so they don't usually mind when I steal their leaves for piles for my kids or shovel snow into a large snow bank either - mostly because it's all less yard clean up for them. 

Tips and tricks I learned: 

1. IT'S SO COLD. I used an old Brita pitcher filter and went in/out of the house about 10 times. I'm not sure how else to do it because in Minnesota you have to turn off the outside water lines so they don't freeze and the pipes don't burst. You can't do it one by one and walk them out from the sink because you'd have colored water everywhere with spills. 

2. Fill up the tins FIRST, then randomly do the food coloring. The Monkey dripped 2-10 drops of coloring in each tin and by the time we got to the end, she had made way more blue/purple than any other color and I didn't notice until it was too late. 

3. Wear gardening gloves instead of mittens to place the bricks when they're all frozen. Your mittens will end up with dye on them - I used my gardening gloves and they worked so well to punch out the bricks.

If it gets below freezing where you live and you need a winter activity - this was actually a ton of fun. Totally going to do this next year too! I saved the majority of the tins but because a few froze to the sidewalk, some have holes.