Minecraft Creepers & Minion Pudding for Valentine's Day (or "Friendship" Day)

Somehow, we're more than halfway through the school year. Oliver celebrated his 100th day at school last week, and now we're planning for Valentine's Day parties at school today & tomorrow.

Last year, I got to craft the valentines I liked best since the kids had no opinion on the matter (remember these?). This year, Oliver asked for Minecraft valentines. That sounds like a simple request, but, alas, stores don't seem to sell them. I appreciate a challenge, so I took to Pinterest to find an idea. This is what we came up with:

Andrew found some Creeper images online and adapted them so they could be printed and folded over a fun-sized Kit-Kat bar.

These are the tags I made (with a little help from Andrew). They aren't the greatest, but I don't pretend to be an expert at photoshop:

Then it was time for Jo's valentines. She loves Minions, and I'd seen some creative Minion ideas on Pinterest that involved making minions out of pudding cups. They looked cool, but I'm pretty busy these days and was spending enough time making those Minecraft valentines.

So, I decided just to get some simple store-bought valentines. Jo loves so many different cartoons and candies that it would be easy. Right? Seriously, that's easier said than done. The small grocery store by my house doesn't even sell children's valentines. I planned a trip to the bigger grocery store, but whatever they had was mostly gone when I finally got there last night (That's what I get for waiting until the last minute). I was looking for anything Jo would love: Frozen, Minions, Doc McStuffins, Peppa Pig, even Peg+Cat. Nope. The only things they had left were superheroes and My Little Pony.

What happened next is either serendipitous or just a flat-out lie for dramatic effect. I then stumbled into a sign from the mighty Valentine's Day gods (Cupid, I guess?). A big Price Chopper display of pudding snack packs: 99 cents for a 4-pack. So, I bought the stupid pudding to make minions. 

Now, my husband and I don't fight. We just don't. But after juggling the kids and going to ballet, finding time for school work, and prepping for the "Friendship Day" craft that I'd signed up to host at Jo's preschool, I now needed to run out to the craft store to buy supplies to make minions. Let's just say I was a little testy, and my children are going to grow up with issues related to Valentine's Day. But I got to Michael's, and I bought a package of googly eyes, a 70 cent sheet of silver paper, and some thin black tape to make some minions. (If you're reading this to actually do this craft yourself, make sure you also have a hot glue gun!)

I found something round in my house to trace 12 silver circles (one for each pudding) and cut those out. 

I stuck a piece of black tape around each, and then I hot-glued a googly eye onto a silver circle and glued that to the black band. Note that I accidentally bought glitter tape, and these minions are actually shedding glitter all over the table. I imagine they probably shed into the pudding as well, making these some sort of bio-hazard, I'm sure.

But they're cute, right? Maybe that was worth all the driving around. I kind of thought so. Andrew and I hugged and made-up, and I swore I'd buy store-bought valentines next year.

Then, this morning, I got to Jo's party. I swear to you, there was a table display of pudding robots set up by a parent of one of the students.

I called my husband and told him that these robots put my minions to shame. They have juice box bodies, lollipop arms, pudding heads, two googly eyes, and chocolate shoes & hair.

Bonus photo of Jo wearing the necklace she'd made at her friendship party. At least that went over well!

One kid gave the other kids a tub of Play-Doh. That was Jo's favorite (better than the Minion pudding, for sure). She made a robot out of it because the robot Valentine made such an impression on her.

Happy Friendship Day!

Valentines from the Kids

As the kids have gotten older, I've found it hard that we're starting to live our own little lives apart from each other. Oliver's gone to school 4 days a week, and Jo is in class a couple mornings a week while I do school practicum. It's not all negative, though. I absolutely love that we get to do fun things like plan valentines for them to give to their friends! This one is a simple idea that I saw on Facebook and Pinterest.

                         

It was easy enough to do, especially since their class size is so small. I bought a bag of cheap lollipops, and then I took pictures of the kids making a fist.

I printed out a sheet of twelve (after adding a side border), and then I used scissors to poke a hole (a hole puncher probably would have made the job a lot easier).

Heart-Shaped Treats for Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!

I love holidays. It's so much fun to hang up little decorations or plan special meals. I've always liked celebrating them, but it's gotten even more fun since having kids.

Yesterday, for dessert, I made tapioca pudding. I was washing strawberries to freeze for smoothies when I had an idea to cut them into hearts. Check out this cute pre-Valentine's Day dessert:

Today, we had friends from MOMS Club come over and help us decorate cookies. It was Oliver's first time having friends to the house, and he was excited to show them his mixer and mixing attachments. The kids were all younger than Oliver. One was mostly interested in feeling the sprinkles. Another had fun decorating, but he insisted on eating his cookies as soon as a bit of frosting got on them. After eating a number of cookies, his mom decided he'd better be done. Oliver decorated about six and then ate half of them. The rest of the 50 cookies were decorated by moms. Well, we had fun.

Hosting this cookie decorating day gave me a chance to compare various sugar cookies. Homemade cookies were vastly superior! Don't get me wrong, I love Pillsbury biscuits, crescent rolls, and refrigerated pie crusts. You can do so many creative things with those products. I've used their sugar cookie dough for fruit pizzas and was pleased. However, I discovered last night that their sugar cookies were terrible  for cut-out cookies. They expanded and puffed up and completely lost their shape. While cooling, they deflated. We were left with weird, oval-shaped, flat cookie blobs. I used the cookie cutter to try to re-cut them. It was better than before, but we were still left with flat cookies that looked icky and had rough edges. So, Oliver and I had to make an emergency batch of sugar cookies ourselves, and they turned out beautifully (you can find that Taste of Home recipe here). Bookmark that recipe! They made the best sugar cookies that tasted great and held their shape.

After cookie decorating fun, I got busy making a heart-shaped pizza!

...and then we finished the night off with a mini heart-shaped, red-velvet cheesecake (I halved this recipe from McCormick, and used a heart-shaped springform pan like this:

                                                                        

Oliver wanted to sing a song, so we sang, "Happy Valentine's Day to You," before diving into our cheesecake goodness.
I hope you had a wonderful Valentine's Day celebrating with your family, friends, or loved one.

Dinner for my little Valentine

I decided to get creative with Oliver's dinner tonight. I was making grilled cheese and soup when I remembered something I once saw on the internet (maybe Pinterest. OK, probably Pinterest). They suggested cutting sandwiches with heart-shaped cookie cutters. I decided to do it to Oliver's grilled cheese. I chopped up the remaining grilled cheese parts into bite-sized pieces for Jo's dinner. You could probably just used them as little soup croutons for yourself if you don't have a little one.

I put the hearts on one of the owl plates that my mom gave the kids last year for Valentine's Day (I believe they were from Target). I drained his chicken noddle soup and then used the noodles to make a nest for the owls. Voila!

Wouldn't this make a cute toddler lunch on Valentine's Day?

Pinterest Challenge Day 15: Chocolate Dipped Strawberries

For Valentine's Day, I decided to make my husband some chocolate-dipped strawberries and put them in the heart-shaped box that I made last week.

I had pinned the strawberries here:
http://pinterest.com/pin/216383957066131976/

But I only followed the recipe loosely because I'd made chocolate-dipped strawberries before. Rather than put the chocolate in a bowl in the saucepan, I just put the chocolate directly in the pan and cooked it over very low heat. Oliver took on the important task of stirring:

Then, we dipped the berries and set them on wax paper:

Later that night, after Oliver went to bed, I zapped a little bit of white chocolate in the microwave to drizzle over the top. Then, I set them in the box like so:

That's it! The next morning, I gave them to Andrew as his Valentine's gift.

Happy Valentine's Day

Pinterest Challenge Day 14: Eggs in Peppers

Happy Valentine's Day! My husband woke me up this morning and said to me, "I made you breakfast, and I did one of your pins for you!"

I came downstairs and saw this:

Beautiful! He completed this pin:

http://pinterest.com/pin/216383957066203318/

The eggs were very flavorful. They'd picked up a hint of the pepper flavor, and he'd topped them with salt, cracked pepper, and a touch of Swiss cheese.

I told him I was going to take a picture of them for the pin, and he told me he already had! He'd also taken pictures of the cooking process. He told me that it's important to cut the peppers as straight as possible, otherwise the eggs leak out the bottom.

He chose to do two as fried eggs and two as scrambled eggs.

To the scrambled eggs, he'd added a splash of milk. Apparently, that caused the eggs to really leak under the peppers. He used a spatula to hold the peppers down to limit the runaway eggs. Once the eggs started to cook and form a seal, he scooped all the eggs that had run out and put them back in the peppers:

I enjoyed this morning in every way. Breakfast with my family, delicious eggs, and no pin to worry about today! OK, so I already had a pin completed, but I'll post that one tomorrow and take a day off pinning for today and tomorrow.

Pinterest Challenge Day 7: Heart-Shaped Box

My husband and I don't really get each other gifts for Valentine's Day. We never have. Most years, we just exchange cards. I don't want to change that because, really, neither my husband nor I like "stuff."

Last year, I made some chocolate covered strawberries because strawberries were on sale at the grocery store. I bought and made dozens of them, and Andrew loved it. It probably cost about $7 to make three dozen. Once, I was at the mall with a friend, I was pregnant, and I wanted a chocolate-covered strawberry. We stopped into the Godiva store, and I ordered a single berry. The cost? $4. That's disgusting.

I've decided I'm going to make chocolate-covered strawberries again this year. I thought I could get even more creative and make a heart-shaped candy box to put them in. So, I looked up a how-to guide, and I pinned it here:
http://pinterest.com/pin/216383957066132005/

If you want to make your own box, just click the picture in that link, and it will take you to the guide that I used.

I used a leftover cardboard box (free!) and some red, sparkling wrapping paper that cost a dollar from The Dollar Tree. So, my gift box cost a buck!

Check out the guide for more detail, but here's a quick briefing of what I did. I printed a picture of a heart from Google Images. I used it as a template to cut out two hearts from the cardboard. I used yarn to measure half of the perimeter of the heart (from the center of the top point of the heart to the center of the bottom point) because I'm just so technical like that.

I cut out four pieces of cardboard that was the length of my yarn (fool-proof!).

I made two of those pieces 1 inch wide for the lid (giving my box lid an approximate height of 1 inch), and I made two of those pieces 2.5 inches wide for the box itself (giving my box an approximate height of 2.5 inches).

As per the tutorial, I pre-bent the side walls so they would have an easier time following the curve of the heart. I just curled those side pieces using the edge of my kitchen table.

I have to say that cutting the cardboard was the most difficult part of the whole project. I used a combo of scissors and a razor blade, but it took a lot of strength to cut through everything. I ended up with a few blisters, and I wondered why the link advertised this project for kids. But I digress.

I wanted the lid to be slightly larger than the box so that it could go on it. That makes sense, right? So, I used my hot glue gun and glued the side walls on the outer edges of one of the hearts for the lid, and I glued the side walls directly onto the other heart for the box itself. This made the lid fit perfectly snug on the box. As I applied the glue, I added tape (temporarily) to hold everything in place until the glue dried.

Once it was dry, I removed the tape and had a box! It was easy, and it felt good making something so cute out of a cardboard box.

The tutorial I pinned says to sand the edges to make them smooth and flush with each other. I love my husband, and I just made him this neat box by hand, but I wasn't going to bust out the sand paper to make it a flawless cardboard box. So he's getting the un-sanded, flawed kind.

Next came the wrapping paper. Mine was a plastic-like, slippery, shiny wrapping paper. It would not have folded over as nicely as it did in the tutorial I used. So, what to do? I decided to mimic the cuts I used to make the box and just put the wrapping paper over each individual piece. I knew the edges would be visible with that method, so I thought, "Why don't I first glue the wrapping paper over all of the edges? Then, I can attach the pieces, and there won't be any cardboard showing." Easier said than done. The wrapping paper wouldn't bend on itself at all. To do the curves, I ended up cutting out a million little strips of paper.

It took forever. When I finally finished the lid, I decided there was no way I was going to do that with the base of the box. I decided seeing a little cardboard would be just fine (sorry, Andrew!), so I only put the wrapping paper on the sides of the heart box.

Here are the final pictures. I took one of it open so that you could see that I didn't do anything to finish the inside of the box. I'll use cute tissue paper nestled in the bottom to hold the strawberries, and that will be that!

In total, it took about an hour to build the box, and it took about an hour to do a half-assed decorating job. The box I had originally been so proud of because it was just a dollar, I was now a little put-off with because it took hours of my time. Like I've said, I love my husband. If he really wanted me to, I'd make him a dozen of these boxes. But I know he doesn't care about a box, and so spending two hours making one just seems stupid (now that I've done it, of course).

I guess I get to feel a little proud when I give him the box because I can tell him I made it, but I'll be damned if I ever do this project again. OK, that's not entirely true. If this is something my kids are ever interested in, I guess I'd do it again. But I'd either skip the decorating all together, or I'd just use tissue paper instead of wrapping paper because it would be easier to bend and manipulate. Better yet, I'd just use a piece of white cardboard, and I'd let the kids decorate it with markers and crayons.