Canada Scores!!

Is it just me, or is anyone else happy the Olympics are finally over? Nonstop coverage for the past couple weeks has become more than tiring. Unlike Kyle, who likes to watch all the events, there are only a few I really care to see. I watched a little of the snowboarding and ski jumping but my main interest was in hockey. I know, I know, I can watch hockey almost any night of the week so why choose that sport out of so many others? Not sure... although it's always fun cheering for our favorite NHL team, it's different when all the best players come together to form an all-star lineup called Team Canada. The win is so much sweeter when it represents your country as a whole rather than just a city. And since hockey is Canada's game, it's always a big deal to see them play in the Olympics.

So our home was a house divided last week--just for fun, of course! Kyle somehow convinced Parker to cheer for Team USA, so I dressed Elise in her little Canada shirt and we had our own cheering section of red and white. When the USA and Canada hockey teams finally met, it was a tense two hours! As you can tell by the smiles, this picture of the guys was taken before the game...

Canada beat the USA--and went on to win gold--in both mens and womens hockey! We were so excited to see them win!! And in the process, I won a dozen cupcakes in a friendly bet with someone. Ah...the sweet taste of victory.  :)

 In celebration of our win and to cheer Kyle up I made a Canadian dessert called Nanaimo Bars. Chocolatey, custardy goodness in a pan! I think it helped.  :)

Green Muffins

The past few days if I mention I'm going to make dinner, Parker follows me out asking to help. Although there hasn't been many things he is able to help with lately, I hate turning down his offers to come out and be of assistance. I want our kids to learn how to cook and to enjoy trying new foods. So I decided that whenever possible, meaning when I have food prep that's kid friendly, I'm going to let Parker help even if it takes a little longer to get the meal ready.

Since tonight's dinner is already in the crockpot I asked Parker if he'd like to help me bake something this morning while Elise was napping. I had copied a recipe from Pinterest for green muffins--what little boy wouldn't like that?! When I told him what we were making, he was SO excited to get started! Did I mention green happens to be his favorite color?  :)

Here is the recipe I used. The bright green color is from spinach! There's a little sugar and some applesauce in the recipe to give them a slightly sweet taste.


I wasn't sure what Parker would think when he saw me putting big leaves into the blender, but I told him they would turn the muffins green and he didn't seem to mind... actually, he added them in like it was just a normal ingredient.

We scooped the batter into a mini muffin pan and Parker pulled up a chair to watch them bake. A few minutes later we had nice puffy green muffins! He couldn't wait to try them. I'm sure he would have grabbed one hot off the pan if I hadn't been there to keep his little fingers back.




We had lunch a few minutes later so along with our sandwiches I gave both kids a couple muffins. Parker loved them. He ate four (or was it five?) at lunchtime. Elise picked hers up and looked at it for a minute before taking a bite. She ate hers a little more slowly, so I'm not sure if she loves them (although she seems pretty happy with it in the picture).

I tried a couple, too.  ....can't say I love them...  but they're okay. And if it's a way to get more veggies into Parker, then I'm totally fine with making them again!  :)

December

I had good intentions of posting earlier this month. Every time I sat down, though, I would either forget what I wanted to say or realize the pictures I wanted were still on the camera and unaccessible at the moment. And now here we are at the end of December already! Just so I at least get one post written this month, here's a quick summary of what we've been up to the past few weeks...

The first week of December we went to a dinner party in Salinas. Kyle's company has a nice Christmas dinner each year and it's always in a different location. They take the employees (and spouses) out to dinner and then put them up at a nice hotel for the night. I haven't been able to go for the past three years because we either had a new baby or had nobody to watch Parker. But this time both kids were old enough to leave with a sitter and Kyle couldn't stay overnight because he had to work the next morning. So I could finally go!! I was excited to get dressed up and have an evening without the kids. Maybe next time I'll remember to get a picture of us on the way out...

And we've been making some holiday craft projects! I found gingerbread man kits similar to the ones we made last year. Here are the finished men (and woman). I'll let you figure out who made which one...  :)

We made penguins, too. Six little ones came in the package, and the pieces were stickers so they only took a few minutes to assemble.






Next we all made a gingerbread house. I've been wanting to make one and Parker is old enough this year to help stick the candy on. I considered making one from scratch so it would actually taste good but I didn't know if I wanted to spend the day measuring and baking huge pieces so I cheated and bought a pre made one. The downside is that all the large pieces were broken. So when I assembled the house it had icing 'glue' all over the sides to hold the pieces together. But by the time we finished decorating it you couldn't really tell. I had set out two trays of candy and Parker didn't stop decorating until every last piece was used! He had so much fun and it turned out pretty cute!

Aside from gingerbread and penguins I also decorated Christmas cookies this year. I don't typically spend a lot of time on them but I wanted to make some pretty ones. When the kids were napping last Saturday I made a batch of royal icing and began decorating several dozen cookies. They took a while to finish, but I enjoyed being more creative this year. I packaged most of them in small bags and gave them to friends at church the next morning. Kyle enjoyed the leftovers. :)

I had signed up to bring cookies for Christmas dinner as well, so I made another batch. I didn't want to spend all of Christmas eve decorating these ones, though, so I used soft butter icing and sprinkles. But they weren't just any cookies, they were a cookie Christmas tree!

Isn't it great?! Everyone thought it was cool...and everyone wanted to be the last person in line so they got the huge cookies on the bottom.  :)

Christmas is so much fun with little kids! Over the two weeks leading up to the big day he asked me at least once a day if it was Christmas yet and if we could open our presents. I finally showed him on the calendar how many more days it was and we began counting the number of sleeps left.

On Christmas Eve, it's our tradition to open our stockings and one gift (a new pair of pajamas). Among other goodies, we each get a movie in our stocking so we end the evening by watching a new movie. However, this year we had company for dinner, so we were a little late opening things and we skipped the movie. Then we get up Christmas morning and, after breakfast, open the rest of the gifts.

Parker was so excited! We try and take turns opening gifts so we can see what everyone got and the fun lasts longer. But after tearing open a couple gifts, Parker came over to the tree and started looking through the gifts, asking which ones he could open next. He just couldn't sit still!











Elise, on the other hand, couldn't care less. We tried to help her open some but she kept walking away. She would pick up a bow or something that was already open and go walking out of the room with it. We finally gave up and left hers in a pile for later. It's been almost a week and there are still a couple she hasn't opened. We'll just wait until she's grumpy and needing something new to play with.  :)

 Seems like we were in and out every day last week! Monday and Tuesday we saw Kyle's parents and a sister who was in town visiting, then we had Christmas in Manteca with Kyle's family, we were able to see friends that had moved and were back in town for the holidays, we brought our nephews home for a couple days, and we had friends over Friday morning for lunch and to play games. It's been a crazy, busy week!

Thankfully this week is a bit slower. No big plans for New Year's Eve. Staying in our warm house, watching a movie, eating ice cream and snuggling under a big fuzzy blanket sounds like the perfect ending to our year.
We're so thankful for all the ways God has blessed us this year, and are looking forward to seeing what 2014 will bring for our family.

Happy New Year! 

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!

Happy Belated!

Happy belated Canada Day! And 4th of July!  :)

Canada Day was on Monday of this week. We didn't do anything special. Well, I didn't do anything special. Kyle, on the other hand, did. He came home from work that afternoon and walked straight into the kitchen and closed the door. I assumed he still had some work/phone calls to take care of, so I stayed in the living room where I wouldn't bother him. But when I went out a little later to get dinner ready, this was what I saw on the table...

He had been out there working on this as a surprise!

He was disappointed that he didn't have time to finish what he had planned, but I thought it was super cool that he accomplished what he did! Wasn't it sweet of him to remember my holiday?  

Each letter had something different. These two have the provincial capitals and abbreviations.

...some of the national foods of Canada. I noticed he forgot puffed wheat cake on the list.  :)

Kyle had written out the entire poem "In Flanders Fields" on this letter.

This last one has the names of Canada's Prime Ministers. He said he forgot one, but I would never have known.

We're keeping the letters and we decided that next year we'll pull them out and continue decorating them with more Canadian facts. We ended the day by reading some Canadian trivia questions to some friends. I learned that 3/4 of Canadian households have clothes dryers. Which makes me imagine the other 1/4 of the households having wet clothes and underwear hanging around the house to dry.   :-D

Then, of course, we celebrated July 4th on Thursday. What could I do that would be as cool as what Kyle did for me? Hmmm.... nothing really came to mind. So I went out and got him coffee and donuts for breakfast! His donuts were a little drab looking for a holiday, so I tried to embellish them.  :)

I wanted to make something with Parker this week and decided that this would be a good day for it. I had recently picked up supplies to make chocolate dipped pretzels. And we had planned to go to a friend's home for a bbq later so this would be a good treat to take.  I pulled out all the supplies needed and sat Parker in his booster. He was ready to help!

The chocolate was kind of thick and needed to be spread onto the pretzels. I wasn't sure if Parker would be able to do it, so I did the 'dipping' and he did the decorating. It. Was. Hilarious. I had set out two bottles of red and blue sugar sprinkles, which Parker wanted to use first. But he didn't really understand how to 'sprinkle' them on the chocolate. His idea of sprinkling was to hold the bottle upside-down in one place. Needless to say, he only had enough for a couple pretzels!

We made most of them white. However, Kyle isn't a fan of chocolate, so for the last few I melted half a bag of Reece's chips and used that for dipping. Those ones turned out really good--wish I had done a few more like that! They turned out pretty cute and Parker couldn't wait to try one. 

We ended up canceling our plans for the evening and staying home. Kyle wasn't feeling well and both kids were having a really rough day so we figured it was better for everyone if we stayed home instead. So we had dinner and then Parker picked out a pretzel for dessert. 

I had no idea someone could get so sticky from one chocolate covered pretzel! I used two wet wipes and I still had to take him to wash his hands to get it all off.  But he thoroughly enjoyed it, so that's all the matters, right? :)

Cookies!

Looking for simple entertainment? Bake with a toddler! :)

I couldn't decide what to do with Parker last week so I let him get his little hands into some cookie dough! I mixed up a batch of sugar cookie dough one morning and put it in the fridge for a while to chill.

After lunch I pulled it out, along with a rolling pin and a few cookie cutters. I kept them simple, using shapes he would recognize--circle, square, star and heart.

He was so excited to help!

I rolled out a piece of dough on a cutting board and set it in front of him. He needed a bit of help pushing the cutters all the way through, but after making a couple shapes I let him try it on his own.

He was somewhat distraught when I pulled out the first couple cookies, but once I explained that I had to put them on a tray and bake them he went back to work.

His toddler technique was great to watch! Each time I gave him a freshly rolled piece of dough he would cut the first cookie from the middle. Then he would work his way out, either cutting around or overlapping that first one. When I pulled up the cookies to put on the baking pan I was finding some unusual shapes!

At one point I was busy cutting out some cookies and checking the ones in the oven so I wasn't paying much attention to what he was doing. When I looked over, I saw that I hadn't been quick enough at taking out the ones he had cut. So he just kept cutting...and cutting...and cutting!

This poor piece of dough was shredded! I don't know how many times I re-rolled it for him, but I'm pretty sure the cookies turned out a little more, um....chewy than usual.  :)



After they were baked I let him try one and asked him to take one to Daddy. He proudly handed one to Kyle and told him that "Parker made it!"

We had plans to go out that night so the decorating waited until the next afternoon. I mixed up a bowl of icing and got out a couple plastic knives and two kinds of sprinkles--big chunky sprinkles that he could pick up easily. I started icing a few cookies to show him how. The first thing Parker did was pick up a plain star cookie and inform me, while taking a bite, that he needed to eat that one.

I guess he wanted to try one to make sure they were still okay...?

When he finished eating, we were finally ready to start decorating. He put a little glob of icing on a cookie...

then got distracted by the colorful sprinkles and decided to play with them for a while.

I kept asking him to help me decorate the cookies, so he finally picked up his knife again and put another, bigger glob of icing on his cookie. Then he began decorating it, one sprinkle at a time. Yes, we were there for quite a while...

Here is the one he made all by himself!

 Although they took a little longer to make this time, I have to say.... these turned out to be the cutest cookies ever!  :)