our valentine dinner

For our Valentine dinner, we decorated the table with pop-up love napkin rings (created with this Lifestyle Crafts die) and ate heart-shaped mini pizzas with heart-shaped pepperonis and heart-shaped parmesan breadsticks with red (marina) and pink (creamy marina) dipping sauces. If it can be dipped, Liv will eat it.

Then after dinner for FHE, Adam gave the girls books, iTunes gift cards and jelly bean jars...which were really just my excuse for buying the large container of JellyBellys from Costco. And now after consuming more jelly beans than anyone should, I'm remembering why I tell myself the large container of mixed flavors is never a good idea. I end up eating them all when in reality I only really like a few of the flavors. Adam, stop me next time I'm flashing the $4 off coupon and remind me it's not worth it.

valentine's party

Last Thursday, Elle threw a Valentine party. While it was definitely filled with chaos, I think everyone also had fun! (thanks to Laura for the photos)

THE PARTY DETAILS

Attendees:

10 3-year-olds

9 moms

6 younger siblings

2 older siblings

Activities:

Photos on the chalkboard wall with sequin heart hair clips (girls) and felt heart pins (boys)

We taped die cut hearts to the chalkboard wall and drew white chalk designs around the hearts. Each child got a hair clip or pin to wear and their picture taken in front of the wall.

Musical Hearts

We put several die cut hearts on the floor and played music while they danced and moved around. Once the music stopped, they had to find a heart. Each time we took away hearts until we had a winner.

Valentine Exchange

Each child brought valentines to give away. We found metal mailboxes at Target in the dollar section for everyone to collect their valentines.

Snacks

It was mid-morning so we wanted a healthy snack. Heart shaped granola bars with fruit leather embellishments, grapes, apples, yogurt and a mini bottle of water.

Decorating Cookies

We rolled out sugar cookie dough on sheets of parchment paper for each child to cut out heart shaped cookies. We baked their cookies while they molded and played with the remaining dough. After the cookies cooled, the frosted and decorated their cookies to take home.

Balloons

We bought mini 6" heart shaped balloons and filled with helium for the guests to take home.

3-year-olds (minus Ayden and Nate who came a little later)

Chalkboard wall photos.

Musical hearts.

Passing out valentines for the valentine exchange.

Collecting all of the valentines.

Snack time.

Heart shaped granola bars with fruit leather embellishments. We made homemade granola bars and then cut them out with heart-shaped cookie cutters.

Yogurt with wooden spoon and fruit for dipping. We put vanilla in first and dropped spoonfuls of strawberry yogurt on top to make a heart.

Cutting out sugar cookies.

Frosting sugar cookies.

Playing with balloons.

christmas kick off party

Last year I heard about a family who let their kids sleep under the Christmas tree the night they put it up. I thought it sounded like such a fun tradition so this year I decided to start our family's annual Christmas Kick-Off Party. My hope was to create an event just for our little family that

- gave us time to be together before the start of such a busy season with friends and extended family

- let us talk about our plans for the season and how we wanted to make it special for ourselves and others

- gave us a chance to learn and remember the real reason we celebrate Christmas

Overall, I loved how the party turned out and can't wait to continue the tradition. (i only took video of the party so don't have many pictures - these are just images saved from the video file.)

This year for the party:

- Elle and I made invitations for everyone in our family, and she passed them out to everyone at Family Home Evening a week before the party.

- We planned the party for the day after Thanksgiving so we'd have the day to put up Christmas decorations. We spent that Friday putting up and decorating our tree and setting out other basic Christmas decorations.

- For food, we ate appetizers: sourdough and pumpernickel bread with hot artichoke dip, veggies and dip, sparkling cider and cranberry juice

- During the party, we ate, planned, read the story of Jesus' birth from the scriptures, and opened up one present (pajamas - traditionally my family always opens pajamas on Christmas Eve, but I wanted to use pajamas as part of our kick-off. For Christmas Eve, the girls got to open a book which we read before bed.)

- After the girls put their pajamas on, we all watched a Christmas movie together. This year it was old Christmas cartoon classics.

Other things I envision for party but didn't incorporate this year:

- Sleeping out under the tree

- Hot chocolate/popcorn during the movie

- Talking about memories/looking atphotos from past Christmases

- Writing letters to Santa

Here's a few pics of our Christmas decor - thanks again to my sis-in-law Julie.

Thanksgiving menus/placecards

This year I wasn't very motivated about creating the Thanksgiving table decor so instead of focusing on the entire table, I just created the Thanksgiving menus for each place setting. (Thanks to my sis-in-law Julie for taking these pictures!)

I designed and printed the menu on Lettra paper in dark brown and orange. I also printed the name of each guest and then used an oval die cut to cut out each name with my Epic Six. The die cut name was adhered to the menu with foam tape for dimension.

On the top third of the paper, I printed Happy Thanksgiving and folded the paper so the menu/placecard would sit off the plate and the guest sitting across the table would have something visually interesting to look at.

We also used the traditional "go around the table and say what you're thankful for" as a fun way to announce to everyone that we're having a boy. Adam went first and said he was thankful for his girls. I went next and said I was thankful for our girls too but also thankful for little boys!

turkey cookies

Elle and I made these turkey cookies for the kids Thanksgiving table. You can find a variety of how-to's and images online. For ours, we used oreos, fudge stripe cookies, candy corns, reeses peanut butter cups and chocolate frosting.

pie crust handprint turkeys

Elle and Liv both had a great time making and eating these. I think it would also be fun to make decorated pie crust leaves. You could use leaf cookie cutters or collect and trace leaves from outside.

Trace outline of hand on piece of paper and cut out with scissors. Place on piece of rolled out pie crust. Use knife to cut around hand template.

Color sanding sugar in desired colors with food coloring. Simply drop a few drops of food coloring into a bowl of sugar and stir until color is evenly distributed. We made red, yellow and orange.

Spread melted butter on top of each handprint pie crust and decorate with sanding sugar.

Take obligatory photo for mom with handprints ready to bake. Bake pie crusts in oven until lightly brown. Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures of the final product.

Native American headbands

Native American Headbands - Strips of dark brown paper plus paper die cut feathers = hours of fun running around the house together.

party favor sneak peek

Elle and I have started making one of the party favors for her Valentine party....sequin heart hair clips for the girls. I came across this post at Grosgrain Fabulous and loved the idea.

Lifestyle Crafts - Love Release

Here is the latest die release from Lifestyle Crafts...everything you need for the perfect Valentine's Day! It's a great collection of all things hearts and love. Elle and I are planning a Valentine's Day party and using several of the dies for invitations, decor and party favors...I love that she loves to plan, throw parties and craft!

If you think die cuts and die-cutting machines are just for scrapbooking, thing again...my continuous push at Lifestyle Crafts is creating products that are great for all types of creative projects.

[project e] mr. or mrs. holiday man

This project is designed and created by Elle. I love this little crafter.

I have an app on my iPhone from Michaels which has craft project videos. She loves to watch them. The other day while I was working, she sat on the couch next to my desk watching these videos. Later she asked me if we could make a heart with arms and legs (one of the videos she watched was a bag for collecting Valentine's Day cards decorated with a heart that had a whole cut in the middle for a mouth and legs and arms attached). She told me what she needed, and I helped her with the cutting and gluing. She carried her "Mr. Happy Valentine's Day Man" around for the rest of the day. She loved the project so much she decided she needed to create an Easter egg man and another Valentine girl the next day.

To create:

1. Cut a shape out of cardstock. Draw a face with crayons onto the shape.

2. Cut strips of paper and fold accordian style.

3. Glue accordian strips to shape for arms and legs.

4. Cut clothing accessories like shoes, ties, hats, flowers, etc. and glue to shape.

5. Spend the rest of the day carrying your new friend around the house involving them in all important activities like dancing, putting together puzzles and snacktime.

[project] ABC eggs

For any QuicKutz crafters, here's a great way to use alphabet dies and any leftover vinyl scraps to dye Easter eggs. You see this egg dyeing technique all over the place typically using stickers or craft punches to create shapes.

Pick an alphabet die (I used Moonlight) and die cut the letters you need out of vinyl or contact paper. For our Easter eggs, we decided to make ABC eggs with the capital letter on one side and the lowercase letter on the other side. This gave Elle a great chance to practice finding both versions of the letters in the alphabet.

Stick the vinyl letter to the hard-boiled egg. Make sure you really rub the letter securely to the egg. We found that if we didn't the dye would seep in and ruin the image of the letter.

Place eggs in dye and wait excitedly to see what they'll look like (see Elle for example). We just used the basic food coloring drops from the grocery store with water and a little vinegar.

Remove the egg from the die and peel off the vinyl sticker. Place the egg back into the dye to color the letter or just leave the letter white if you want.

[food] heart hashbrowns

While I'm posting about Valentine's Day, I think our new family tradition will be heart hashbrowns for breakfast. Hashbrowns are one of Adam's favorite food so this year we surprised him with heart shaped hashbrowns and pink milk (another favorite of his). He loves ketchup. I do not. Lucky for him, ketchup is red and added the perfect finishing touch.

[project] mini cookie matchbox

Elle and I made these for Valentine's Day to give to her cousins and friends. I think mini or tiny projects are perfect when you need to create several...it can be faster to put together and mini always seems to be cute.

For these, we die cut and assembled the matchboxes several days before we made the cookies. Because the matchbox has an inside piece that slides in and out of a cover, we were even able to tie the ribbon around the box and still access the inside later. Valentine's morning we made small sugar cookies (they were less than 1 inch in diameter) and put two in a mini cupcake wrapper. We placed the cookies in the box, slid on the cover, and they were ready to deliver.

Overall, I really like how they turned out. I tend to prefer soft sugar cookies but thought a crisp cookie would work best for this project. Next time, I think I'll experiment with other crisp sugar cookie recipes to find one I really like.

cranberry cosmo

In my perfect blog world, I took the time to remake these drinks in a variety of flavors and took amazing stylized photos to accompany exciting text on how to create a fun Valentine's day drink. In my reality, this will have to do.

The picture is of a cranberry cosmo drink I made in December for a Christmas party. Cranberry definitely seems seasonal, but I think you could also easily make it with other fruit flavors (any red fruits like strawberry or raspberry would be perfect for Valentine's day.) I found the basic recipe on the Food Network and modified it for my needs. Of course, my version needed to be non-alcoholic so I tried a few different sodas until I found the taste I liked.

Here's my version of the cranberry cosmo:

scoop of cranberry granita (see recipe below)

ginger ale (I also tried club soda but thought it was too bitter)

splash of fresh lime juice

Place granita in glass, cover with ginger ale and add splash of lime juice. Serve immediately. The frozen granita acts like ice to keep the drink cold and easily melts into the ginger ale. I also added a toothpick skewered with frozen cranberries to help keep the drink cold.

Cranberry Granita

2 cups water

1 1/2 cups cranberries

3/4 cups sugar

Place all ingredients in sauce pan over medium heat until berries start to pop (approx. 7 minutes). Remove from heat and puree. Pass the mixture through a fine mesh strainer into a freezer safe pan. (I don't have fine mesh strainer so I used a thin white dishtowel. It worked great, just turned my dishtowel pink.) Place pan in freezer until frozen. When ready to use, scrape with fork to create shaved ice texture.

stockings

I only have 3 stockings and this year we need 4. I tried to explain this tragedy to Adam, who wasn't very sympathetic. The problem is that I have a hard time finding stockings I really like. And, what I like really depends on the year and the basic design theme I end up with for my holiday decor.

If I had more time this year, I'd love to try making these stockings from Made. With the right sweaters, I think they could be fun.