Fun with Hannah's Lunch

One thing Hannah requested this school year was for me to make her lunch a couple of times a week. She has been a vegetarian now for over 3 years, so sometimes the lunch options at school aren't particularly pleasing to her. The school almost always has something she can eat, but they are not always very exciting. There were a couple of times last year when she called me to say that there were no vegetarian options.

I have been trying to think of fun and healthy items for her lunch. She's had hummus and pita, sliced cucumbers with veggie dip, and fresh spinach with ranch so far this year. Today I decided to make her a peanut butter and honey sandwich. After buying no bread all summer, I did recently purchase some whole grain bread for the family.

I flattened the bread, then lightly spread the peanut butter and honey. Hannah doesn't like too much of either on her sandwiches. Then I cut out little shapes out of teeny tiny creative cutters (by Pampered Chef).


Here are the little cutters. Just like cookie cutters, but really teeny tiny.

 I got 6 little sandwiches. It was just the right amount for her. Hannah has never been a big sandwich eater. Whenever I have made her a sandwich in the past, at least half of it is left in the baggie at the end of the day.

 Snickers (our keeshond shelty) ate the scraps. She was quite the happy dog!

 Rounded out the lunch with celery sticks, spinach & artichoke dip, grapes, yogurt and one of my special Creme' Brulee chocolates that I wrote about the other day.

She was so happy with her lunch! She asked me how to show her how to make her own teeny tiny sandwiches when she got home from school. 

Plants vs Zombies

 About three weeks ago when we got back from our trip to Jekyll Island, you  may recall that our router/modem thingy was fried. That meant no tv, no internet, and no phone service. I couldn't play my favorite Blitz games - Bejeweled and Bingo.


During this time, I could have finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird, but I didn't. Instead I decided to save the world from the zombies. I discovered the successful Pop Cap game of Plants vs Zombies on my smart phone.

Plants vs Zombies is a tower defense game. I had never heard of that term before. So I went looked online and found this:

From Wikipedia: 
The goal of tower defense games is to try to stop enemies from crossing a map by building towers which shoot at them as they pass.

In Plants vs Zombies, you are protecting your house by planting different types of plants. There are lots of different plant varieties and they all have special zombie fighting powers.



I like to arrange my rows of plants in a particular order. It's kind of calming in a strange way. This image below I found online. It does not calm me. I want to dig up the plants and change their placement!

If  you are not successful in keeping the zombies at bay, then you get this message:

I have had my brains eaten by the zombies on a few occasions. It's not a pretty sight.


Plants vs Zombies is a totally addictive game. It has had the "Tetris" effect on me. (click on Tetris effect to read more about it on Wikipedia). The Tetris effect is when you play Tetris for long periods of time, then when you are doing other things you are trying to arrange the tetris shapes in your head. (I can't believe there was a wikipedia page for the tetris effect - I thought it was a term I had made up myself!) So anyway, I have been trying to arrange plants in my head when I am trying to go to sleep. It doesn't help! In fact it has the opposite result.

I have completed the whole game twice now and I am about half way through my third time. I wonder if Pop Cap has targeted 43 year old moms with their games? They make Bejeweled Blitz, too, and I have logged in a lot of time playing that as well.

You all should be able to rest at night knowing that I am saving the world from zombies, one house at a time.

Date Night - German Bierfest

Due to scheduling complications, this month's date night turned into a date day.  We weren't sure what we were going to do for our daytime date, so when we found out that the German Bierfest was scheduled for that date, we immediately decided that was going to be our destination.

Sue is not a fan of beer, so she was happy to become our designated driver for the day. She proudly shows off her "x" indicating no beer for her.

The way it works at Beirfest is that we paid a flat $30 per person (except for Sue), then we were given a small glass and it was filled at the various beer tents. They supposedly had larger glasses for sale earlier, but sold out before we arrived.

There were many different brands and flavors of beers. One of the more unusual flavors was a smoked beer. I have a limited experience with German beers, so most of the ones available were unfamiliar to me.

There were samples of beer flavored ice cream. It was actually quite tasty - the beer taste was very mild.

 

There was German music playing. The first song we heard was the 80's classic, 99 Luftballons, the German version, of course. 

Many of the people in attendance were dressed in lederhosen and dirndl.

After a bit of beer sampling, we had to get some food. Chris & I shared a Black Forest sandwich and some German potato salad.

Chris & I taking a break in the shade.

 

Giant beer bottle

 

An view of the set-up.

We had a fun time and may try to hit it again next year.

Scrapbooking Goal {Week 2}

It's only Friday, but I have already met my goal for week 2! In fact I completed 12 pages.  Here are the scrapbook pages I finished this week.



This first layout is from a kit by Scrap in a Snap. Scrap in a Snap was an in-home party business such as Tupperware, etc. SIAS went out of business in 2004.

This next layout is also from a kit by Snap in a Scrap. I'm not sure when I bought these kits, but as you can see, they have been sitting in my scrapbooking room for quite some time. I'm glad to finally put them to use.

 I love this third layout! It is a kit from Out on a Limb scrapbooking. I so love the retro school prints! One thing I love about Out on a Limb is that they mix and match different printed papers. That is something I am not very good at, but I love they way it turns out.

 

 Here is another layout using a kit from Out on a Limb.

 This Halloween layout is also from Out on a Limb Scrapbooking. I love using purple in my Halloween pages!

  

I am running low on photos - I need to order more prints, so I decided to start on Hannah's "Portrait" album. It will be an album filled with all of her professional pictures such as school, class, team, and dance pictures. I did these two layouts for that album. 


This page is of Hannah's 3 month portrait. I used some printed paper and felt flowers that are retired Stampin' Up! items.

 I love how this one turned out. Hannah is 6 months old in this photo. I used supplies from a Best Occassions (Wal-Mart line) - Blue Jean Floral kit.

Goal update: 20 pages/288

What am I Reading?

Okay, first of all, I am still working on Danielle Steel's Big Girl and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. I have made no progress on those books since I last blogged.

I read Tanya Michael's A Mother's Homecoming while at the beach earlier this month. Tanya belongs to my book club (and she probably reads all of the books on time! I still feel badly for not finishing the last one before we met.) and I have enjoyed reading her other titles. It was a sweet story of second chance love. The characters were realistic and the story line was believable. It had a happy ending, but it wasn't sappy.

 

I read Kristan Higgin's The Next Best Thing.  I liked it, but not as much as her other books. It could have been because it was about a young widow (not window as I first typed) and a bit sad at times.It did have the happy ending that I so require!

I read My One and Only, also by Kristan Higgins, while on vacation. I felt that the story line of this book was a bit too similar to other books I have read. I was entertained by it, but I liked her earlier books better.

Once we were back from vacation, I read A Hopeless Romantic by Harriet Evans. It was a charming story that takes place in England. I was a bit intimidated by the number of pages, but it ended up being a fairly fast read. 

Now one thing I found "interesting" and maybe a bit confusing for me, was that all 4 of these books had a character named Nick. In the Next Best Thing, Nick was the son of the leading man. In the other three books, Nick was the "hero". While reading the third one to have a leading male named Nick, I had to go back to the other books to make sure that their leading males were really named Nick, too. I really thought it was confusing.

The last book I read this past week (or two) did not have any characters named Nick. (or at least I don't recall any Nicks). Cold Vengeance by Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston is the 11th book in the Pendergast series. And it is so not my usual genre of books. The Pendergast books are Crime/Mystery Thrillers with the occasional Science Fiction twist. Relic, the first one, came out in 1995. The next one, Reliquary came out in 1997. I read them both around the time they originally came out. Then a couple of years ago, I picked up Book of the Dead by Preston & Child, not realizing that it was book 7 in the Pendergast series. I just remembered enjoying the other two books I had read by the same authors. I didn't read the Book of the Dead until last summer or fall. As soon as I finished it and was fully aware that there were more books in the series, I tracked down the others at the library. Cold Vengeance just came out in July. It took me about 2 days to complete the book. As with their other books, I couldn't put it down easily. And when I got to the ending, I was a bit unhappy - it was one of those big cliffhanger endings. Cliffhanger endings are fine with me WHEN the next book is out and available. But that is not the case with this one and I have no idea when the next one will be out. 

I am currently reading The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes.

 

Happy Reading!

Caramel Cupcakes

I think I have mentioned before that we eat dessert twice a week - on Fridays and Sundays. Sometimes I whip up something special for dessert, other times the kids just select a Skinny Cow frozen treat or something like that. This past Sunday I decided to do something with some leftover cupcakes I had from last month when I was preparing for my friend's cupcake battle. At the last minute, I had been doubting my Butter Beer cupcakes, so I made a batch of caramel cupcakes as a backup. In the end, I decided the Butter Beer ones would do, so I froze the un-iced caramel ones.

To create the caramel flavor cupcakes, I made a basic white cupcake batter and added a lot of Tastefully Simple's Creamy Caramel Sauce to it.  I had tried this the very first time I had played around with different flavors and it had been one of my husband's favorites. Chris was picky about the cupcake flavors and textures, so because he had liked it was the main reason I had it as my backup cupcake. Since I didn't end up using them, I tossed them into a freezer bag and stuck them in the back of our spare freezer.

It was so nice not having to make the actual cupcakes this time. All I had to do was make some butter cream frosting. I didn't even follow directions this time. I just combined some butter and powdered sugar. Instead of adding milk, I added caramel ice cream topping (not the Tastefully Simple one this time - it would have been too thick).


Here are the finished cupcakes. I drizzled more caramel on top.

This was so easy! I think I may freeze more plain cupcakes in a variety of flavors.

Scrapbooking Goal

I love to scrapbook. However, I don't often make the time to do it. Last school year I completed 42 pages. Most of those were 2 page layouts. 42 pages wouldn't be so bad if we weren't taking more pictures! I might actually be able to make some progress if that was the case.

The kids just started a new school year. I thought if I set a goal and blogged about it, I might actually follow through with it. There are about 36 weeks of school. I have set my goal as a minimum of 8 pages per week. I chose 8 pages because that it was I have done this week - if I made it bigger, then I would already be failing my first week! I have tons of scrap kits, so it should be an easy goal to meet. If I complete at least 8 pages a week for the school year, I will have a minimum of 288 pages finished by the time school lets out in May.

I make one (or sometimes two depending on how many pages) album for each year. I am currently working in summer of 2007. Once I have the yearly albums under control, I want to work on some other albums. I want to do one for each child of all their professional portraits and team pictures, a Scout album for each child, and then I still have baby albums to do, too.


Here are the pages I did this week.

 This first one is using a kit I ordered from www.outonalimbscrapbooking.com. I blogged about them this past spring as "one of my favorite things".

This one is from a kit by TLC/Top Line Creations. TLC was a home-based scrapbooking party biz that went out of business in 2008.

 This one is a kit from Lott's to Scrap About. It is a company that is a lot like Out on a Limb scrapbooking. This particular page kit is a religious mission page. I just used my own title to create a general page. In fact, I have purchased several of their mission type pages because they do work nicely for those basic, no-theme pages.

And this last page is another one from Out on a Limb Scrapbooking.


With all of the kits I already have, I think my goal is pretty reasonable. The only expense I will have are printing out my photos and ordering more adhesive. That should make my husband happy! And I will be happy if I can get caught up a bit!

One of My Favorite Things

It's no secret. I have a thing for chocolate. I've already posted about another favorite chocolate. But that was until I found this chocolate. It's my new favorite. Don't get me wrong, I still love my Sea Salt/Dark Chocolate. It's just moved down to the number 2 spot for the time being.


The new favorite chocolate is by Choxie. Choxie is a Target brand. I've been buying their dark chocolate meltaway truffles for a while, but on a recent trip to Target, they were out of my truffles. Instead, I grabbed a box of the assorted milk and dark chocolate meltaways.

It has a trio of flavors - espresso, raspberry lemon with bits of biscotti and my favorite, creme brulee. The creme brulee is absolutely sinful! I wish they sold a box with only the creme brulee! The raspberry lemon ones are also good. The espresso ones are fine, but just not as good as the other two.

Yummy!

Pony Hair Streamers

Last fall I became obsessed with Pony Hair Streamers for Hannah.  Those are the cute ribbon pony tail thingies. I like hair bows, too, but I just can't make a bow to save my life. That's one of reasons I fell in love with the pony streamers - there are no bows involved! I picked up a few at a booth at a local school's fall festival. Then I started searching online. I bought a few on Ebay. I even got to choose my own colors for some. Then I came across an Etsy shop that sold a "No Sew" pdf instruction e-book. I knew that this was my calling. I purchased the e-book and got started making my own pony streamers.

I bought some ribbon. Then I bought some more ribbon. And more ribbon. My new obsession wasn't pony hair streamers, it was collecting ribbon! A girl can't just have one pony streamer, right? She needs different colors and themes to go with different outfits and seasons!

Here are a couple of views of my ribbon. I really need to organize them a little better.

I made a few last year, but probably no more than 10. My enthusiasm for the pony streamers quickly faded.

Well Hannah's dance starts up this week. Her dance company was assigned the color light blue. Last year's pony streamer isn't going to work this year! It's time to get out the glue gun and the ribbon.



Here are the supplies I used. The lighter is to heat seal the edges of the ribbon to keep them from fraying.

 And here are the finished pony streamers that I made this week.

Maybe I will be motivated to make some more this fall.

Homemade Granola

This summer, I stopped buying cereal and many other processed foods and encouraged the family to eat more fruits, veggies, and proteins. To add a little something to their yogurt, I made homemade granola for them to sprinkle on top. I tried a few different recipes with Alton Brown's granola recipe being our favorite.

I made a few changes to come up with my own version. I use sliced almonds instead of slivered. I don't put in cashews. I use half maple syrup and half agave nectar. The main reason for doing this is that real maple syrup is expensive! I just paid nearly $8 for a 12 oz jar of store brand maple syrup!The first time I used both was because I ran out of real maple syrup and didn't want to ruin things by using regular syrup.   I use a mix of dried berries (cranberries, cherries, and blueberries) instead of raisins. And I add flax seeds.

Ingredients:
3 cups old-fashioned oats
1 cup sliced almonds
3/4 cup shredded, sweetened coconut
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons dark brown sugar
1/8 cup plus 1 tablespoon maple syrup
1/8 cup plus 1 tablespoon agave nectar
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup dried berries
1 tablespoon flax seeds


Combine oats, almonds, coconut, flax seeds, and brown sugar. In a separate bowl, combine syrup, nectar, oil and salt.
Combine both mixtures.

Spread out onto 2 jelly roll pans. Cook for 1 hour and 15 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes.

 

 Remove from oven and pour into an air tight container. Add dried berries and mix.Using dark brown sugar makes the granola a nice, golden color.

I usually double or triple the recipe. The kids love to eat it straight out of the container!

Mostly Mutts

Recently Hannah had the chance to volunteer at Mostly Mutts Animal Rescue. There are not a lot of local volunteer opportunities for kids to volunteer with animals, so Hannah jumped at the offer.

We met the others that we were working with at a McDonald's near the Mostly Mutts facility. While we were there, the Mostly Mutts van stopped by on their way to the Kennesaw Petsmart for adoption day.

 When we arrived at Mostly Mutts, we were greeted by some of the residents.

 One of the first things that the girls did, was take the dogs on walks. This was definitely one of the highlights of the day. There was a nice wooded trail behind the facility to walk the dogs. Many of the dogs were at Petsmart hoping to find their forever family, but there were enough dogs left for each girl to walk one.

Hannah was paired with a 3 month old puppy who didn't walk well on the leash, but he sure was cute!

 

After they did the fun part of walking the dogs, they had to go out and clean up any dog messes, then we moved inside.


The girls washed all the food and water dishes.

 They put fresh water in all of the cages.

 They cleaned out the cages.

 They swept the floors.

 The facility was small, but made very good use of space.

The cubbies in the back were constructed by some Boy Scouts. The girls took all of the crates out of the spaces and scrubbed all the cubbies. 

Taking a break from cleaning to pose for a picture. 

 

While the girls were cleaning, the dogs played outside in the fenced area. After all of the chores were finished, the girls brought the dogs back to their cages. Hannah and Callie say their goodbyes to their puppies. 

 Here are all of the volunteers and the dogs.

The girls want to go back and volunteer again.