Cookies

I set Elise's quiet book aside last week to make a few other little projects--97 to be exact!
96 of them were cookies.
:)



A friend was planning a bridal shower and asked if I'd be interested in taking an order for decorated cookies. I said sure, not really knowing what she wanted. We looked at a few different designs and finally decided to do her original idea of using an edible wafer paper graphic on the cookies, something I've never tried before. The wafer paper looked like a regular sheet of paper (made of potato starch, so a little different texture) that had to be cut into the individual 'Mr.' and 'Mrs.' prints.



I love that we made the cookies square! Much more fun than your typical round sugar cookie, right?!

First the cookies were outlined and covered in royal icing.



Once dry, I brushed the back of the wafer paper with corn syrup and stuck the words onto the cookies.



Added edible glitter, a few black swirls on top and some pearl sprinkles and they were done! Aren't they cute?

This is how they were packaged later to put on the tables. I heard they were a hit at the shower--so happy everyone liked them!

And I've decided that wafer paper is not my favorite thing to work with. Although I'm all for making big sticky messes every so often, corn syrup is not the easiest thing to just "brush onto" a piece of paper. But that's okay... when it comes to baking / decorating I like trying new things.  :)

And the other project I made last weekend was this!

It had been a few months since I've been to a sewing class so I signed up to make this cute little bucket. I was planning to make a small one, just big enough to hold Elise's hair bows. I'm not really loving the ziploc bag they're in at the moment. But when I got to the class, the teacher AND another worker there informed me that they prefer we make a bigger size, as the smaller one is hard to maneuver around. Umm...okay. Would have been useful information BEFORE I got to the class. I think it was just a scheme to make us buy more supplies, since the fabric I was going to use was not big enough for the new pattern. :)
So I quickly found and bought some fabric, then had to spend the first hour of class time cutting out the new pieces. The sample one had cute little handles on the sides, but because I was already short on time I skipped that part and just made the basic bucket. Maybe I'll add some handles on later. Or maybe not.

I don't actually know what I'll use it for. It's way too big for hair bows, obviously. At the rate she's growing hair it would take years to fill it. Maybe it'll work for her hats? Or shoes? I'm not really sure what one does with a large fabric bucket.

And that was my weekend. I think that's the most productive I've been in a long time! But I'm glad it's over for now and I can get back to Elise's birthday gift. Hopefully I'll have pictures soon!

Birthday Planning!

With the kids' birthdays coming up, I have lots to keep me busy the next few weeks! This is the first year Parker understands what a birthday is (somewhat, anyway) so I wanted to let him help out. I showed him some cakes of various things--animals, cars, trains, etc. and asked him what kind of cake he wanted. At first he said yes to all of them, so it took a few minutes to help him understand that he only gets to choose one. But once he got that it didn't take him long to pick one out. Keeping with the cake theme, he and I picked up a few things for goody bags, and we baked a batch of cookies yesterday and put them in the freezer. I tried to get an early start this year so I'm not running a bunch of errands the day before the party. All that's left for his party is to get the food for lunch that day, a few balloons/decorations, and make the cake. I'll leave all the fun little details for later when I can post pictures of the party!  :)

I have an idea of what I want to make for Elise's cake, too. I've been pinning a bunch of pictures, so now I just have to sit down and pull things from different sites to make it just right. Hard to believe our baby girl will be one in just a couple months--where did this year go?! 

I had wanted to make her a quiet book for her first Christmas, as I did for Parker, but with a newborn AND a toddler this time around, that didn't happen. After she was born I still considered trying to make it for Christmas. And then I laughed that I would even consider such a thing. :)

So....it will have to be for her 1st birthday instead. And you know what? She will never know the difference! My goal was to work on it over the summer and have it finished by now. Ha! Haha! Yeah.... I finally found and ironed the fabric for it last week.  

At first I thought I'd use the same pattern as Parker's but that's boring, right? I might use one or two of the same pages. But I went on Etsy and Pinterest and looked at a lot of quiet book pages and patterns and I think I found enough different page ideas that can fill the book. The downside is that because the pages I found were from so many random sites, I'll have to make up patterns as I go along. It may take a bit longer since I'll have to draw them out first, but Elise will end up with a one-of-a-kind book! I went ahead and cut out the cover and the pages so I'm ready to start putting the pictures on them. Will post pics later of the finished book!

The Good and the Bad

This week started out with the best day ever!!
Why was it the best day ever?
Because we found a home for our dog, Dodger!!!!!

We've been trying to find Dodger a new home for a year now and we finally found someone who wanted him. Actually, my sister-in-law found his new home. So she is now (and quite possibly permanently) my favorite sister.  :) So as of Sunday, September 1st, we are Dodger-free! Although he was hilarious in his little hat, I can't say I'm sad to see him go.


This week we also made a little change with the kids' sleeping arrangements. For the past couple months Elise has been waking up at night. It started out with once a night, then turned into two or three times and the only way to get her back to sleep was to feed her. It was getting a little ridiculous. It felt like we had a newborn again and neither her nor I were getting much sleep. But I couldn't blame her, though. She was going through a lot of changes and I'm sure it was affecting her once good sleeping habits. To start with, she had been sleeping in a bouncy chair and was starting to outgrow it and couldn't get comfortable. Because of that we were making her sleep in a crib that she wasn't used to. Add to that her getting ready to crawl and the fact that she was still sleeping in our room and could see and hear us, and I suppose that's a bad combination for any baby to sleep well.
So we had to make some changes. First we had to sleep train her again so she could put herself  back to sleep at night. Thankfully, we only had to sit through a couple nights of her crying/screaming before she figured it out. To make it easier, we moved her into Parker's room and let him sleep in our room for a while.  After a week or so of her sleeping through consistently, we (mostly I) decided it was time for Parker to move back into his bed so we could finally have our own room back.

It's one of those things where you never know how it's going to go.

Well, the first night went surprisingly well! Parker went to bed a little while after Elise, so she was already asleep. Thankfully he was quiet and they both slept through the night...until Elise woke up around 6 am. I got her back to sleep but Parker was wide awake--an hour and a half before his regular wakeup time. :/
That was a long day. Parker's lack of sleep started showing itself around 12:30 and I couldn't wait for naptime!
Naps have been a little harder. Because they go to bed awake and the room is light, they can see each other and they end up sitting there talking and making noises rather than sleeping. Guess they'll need a little time to get used to being in there together. But thankfully they've been doing well at night, which is a huge relief.

The bad that happened this week was Elise getting chicken pox! Poor baby. She woke up from her nap on Wednesday with the most red, tired little eyes I've ever seen. She looked like she hadn't slept in two days. When I picked her up to hold her I felt a couple bumps on the back of her head. I thought they must be bug bites but when I looked more closely, I noticed several more bumps/spots around her head and face. We still weren't sure it was anything... I told Kyle I had given her a new food for lunch and he wondered if it was just a little rash from that. But later on it seemed like she was breaking out even more and some of the bumps were really big so I took her to urgent care. In the back of my mind I kept thinking it looked like chicken pox but I didn't think we had been around anyone sick. We had to wait over an hour to see a doctor, but they confirmed my suspicion and chicken pox it is. She's been breaking out more the last couple days--I hate seeing her sweet little face covered in those awful red bumps. On the bright side, I guess she won't need the chicken pox vaccine shot she was supposed to get in two months.  : /