This stuff is amazing!

After sobbing that I can no longer find Peppermint ice cream in the stores.... last night I was browsing the Ice cream aisle and picked up some of this...



And it's as YUMMY as it looks! *drool*

April Fools Day: FOOD

I found this website today and must post it for all you moms out there!
http://familyfun.go.com/recipes/family/specialfeature/aprilfools-food-pranks-ms/

Foods that look like other foods that they're NOT.

For instance there's a "Grilled Cheese". It looks real, but it's really icing and 2 slices of pound cake!


Then they have one that looks like "Cupcakes" but it's really meatloaf topped with mashed potatoes that have been dyed.



Such a cute website. Great idea to fool your husband and kids on Wednesday! I will be definitely making the "Sweet Sushi" with Chayce!

SLUGS and snails and puppy dog tails...

....That's what little boys are made of!

Chayce discovered a *new* creature today. The SLUG! He found it on the back porch and was so amused by it. Though after letting it crawl in his hand he said, "I think this slug has a runny nose". LOL!

Finally, some RAIN!

I don't honestly remember the last time I saw it rain for this much of the day. It's not even 1pm yet, but it's been raining since I woke up at 7:30am.


And.I.Love.It!


We've had the worst drought. Ridiculous. Days like this do make me want to curl up and take a nap, but knowing I have to babysit tomorrow, I definitely want to take advantage of having the hubby home from work today and maybe attempting to get out of the house this afternoon.


We DID go to church so atleast Im already dressed and ready, LOL.


2 days ago we had a small handful of new members join at Coffee Shop Moms and let me tell ya', these girls are simply AMAZING. Some of the nicest, most down-to-earth and FUNNY girls I think we have on there. It warms my heart a bit to know we all have a little place we can go and chat and have a few laughs without any other outside worries. I seriously love those girls. And I seriously love my board.

I've been on quite a few *Mommy boards* and I've been on some with THOUSANDS of members. Some with 10 members. And I've determined I'd rather have a small amount of wonderful, good friends on my board than thousands of people who drop in just to say "hi" once a year. We have about 20 solid members right now that are just wonderful women! What more can I say?!

Mission Easter Basket: ACCOMPLISHED!

Whew! Done! And I stuck with the green theme!

I found the cutest little soccer ball shaped plastic eggs...You can see 1 peeking out of the basket. Easter morning the "Easter Bunny" will scatter the soccer ball eggs from his bedroom door to the living room where his basket will be. We got an egg-dying kit to dye real eggs. Those will be the ones the "Easter Bunny" will hide in the yard.

The basket in all it's glory.

Inside his easter basket is...
-Peeps
-White Chocolate Bunny
-Reese's Peanut Butter Cups
-An egg shaped cookie
-A giant lollipop
(ALL are Green!)

And the soccer ball eggs are filled with...
-2 have Cadbury eggs inside
-1 has a Yoyo
-1 has a ball
-1 has a mini slinky
-The rest have chocolate eggs

Here are the eggs I bought for the church's egg hunt.

They're filled with miniature yoyo's and these little spiky animal ball things. Like this, but smaller!

Glad to have Easter preperations out of the way.

MY Cinnabon Clone

So mine are fresh out of the oven, and I thought I'd share! This recipe is PERFECTION, guys! Seriously give it a shot. It IS time consuming. About 3 hours to complete the full process. Making the dough from scratch, waiting on it to rise, forming the rolls, waiting on THOSE to rise. Baking time is only 15 minutes. But it's totally worth the effort!

Here's the cinnamon rolls before they went into the oven.



And fresh out of the oven.





Iced!

This recipe ended up making 18 cinnamon rolls, though the recipe says it only makes 12. Wrong! It made 18 HUGE rolls. So happy baking!

Clone of a Cinnabon

I'm on another cinnamon roll kick this week. I made some 2 days ago, and today I found the "best of the best" cinnamon roll recipes online and I'm making them now! The dough is rising. I will take pics after they're done of course.

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Clone-of-a-Cinnabon/Detail.aspx

Thankful Thursday

It's been SO long since I've posted a "Thankful Thursday". Guess I'll do one today!

THANKFUL THURSDAY

1. My new SUV: My Saturn Vue is seriously the newest HUGE blessing to us. I love it so much!

2. Easter Sales: For procrastinators like myself, I'm SO grateful for places that already have Easter stuff marked down! Woo Hoo!

3. My Dry-Erase Calendar: I Have a magnetic dry-erase calendar on my refrigerator. Without this thing I swear I'd be so lost and scatter-brained. It really does keep me organized!

4. My glasses: I don't realize how blind I am unil I forget to put on my glasses in the early mornings. YIKES! Why I took so long to schedule and eye doctor appointment in the first place? Who knows.

5. Frozen white bread dough: I tried making my own bread dough a while back to make cinnamon rolls, and it was a disaster. I'm soooo glad I can find it already frozen. Yesterday I stumbled across a frozen ball of dough I'd forgotten about so I made cinnamon rolls with it.

Wildflowers: DAY 7

Just a week ago today, Chayce planted his wildflower seeds.

On day 7 we have SPROUTS!

He was quite thrilled to say the least!

Easter Cards

We seriously need to take some Easter photos SOON. I want to do an Easter card this year that's collage-style. Something like this......

Those arent the photos we'll use of course. I just threw this together. But I'll print the photos/quote on glossy paper then the green background will be cardstock and a strip of ribbon will go through the center.

I want to stick with greens since that's what color we're wearing.

So many ideas, so little time. I need to mail these out by April 6th. Yikes!

Photos from our Twilight Girls' Night

Saturday night we had a "Girls Night In" at my friend Korin's house to watch the Twilight DVD. She set it up super cute, all the food had a Twilight theme. The cheesecake is the one I made! :) I'm so proud of it. And we all had a great laugh at "Forks" (you get it if you've read the book).

Yes, Korin (far left) is still taller than me (top center) and I'm standing on her freakin' couch. LOL!!!

Just your average Wednesday.

*Yawn*

A bit bummed they cancelled Idol last night for that lame Presidential speech. So definitely looking forward to actually having something GOOD on TV tonight. Mwahaha...

Want to give a big....

..... to my Mom! Last night I was telling her about my ideas for Chayce's carnival birthday party and she went through boxes of old decor she has and gave me these!

The colors of his party are red, yellow and blue. These are red, white and blue... SO VERY close! They're balloon weights and she gave me about 15 of them, so they'll be weighing down big bunches of red, yellow and blue balloons on the tables. That totally saves the day because I wasn't planning on even having centerpieces. I was just going to put a bucket of shelled peanuts on each table. Now the tables will have a balloon centerpieces and a bucket of peanuts. THANKS MOM! [not to mention with his bday being July 3rd, we're VERY close to Independance day, so these kind of coordinate the holiday into the festivities!]

She also gave me 50 foil hot dog holders. Which I was stressing about because I have no clue where to buy them and we're inviting about 50 people.

Mom saved the day, that's for sure! ALSO she gave me a big bag of silk red rose petals for the wedding, which I'm thankful for that because I was going to have to buy some. I HATE the idea of silk petals. I'm doing all real flowers, BUT for our lanters (for the center aisle) there's 2 tiny little holes in the bottom of each lantern. With regular votive candles in there we pose a problem of wax leaking out of the bottom and onto the church carpet! So, I'm taking the red silk petals and lining the bottom of the lanterns with them THEN sitting the candle in it. That way if any wax leaks, it will get on the silk petals... Not on the church carpet ;)

So that's my task for today. And I'm going to definitely make cinnamon rolls too!

He's going to be *gulp*... 4?!

First of all I'm really having a tough time with Chayce turning 4. He's my only baby, and this means he'll be attending preschool this fall. But I swear we JUST had his 3rd birthday party yeterday! Where did the past year go?!

This year his birthday falls on a Friday. We can never have his party the next day (Saturday) because his birthday is the day before Independance Day. So we TRY and do his party before his birthday every year, not to interfere with people celebrating and leaving town.

Anyways, this year I'm throwing Chayce a CARNIVAL PARTY!

I'm pretty hyped about it, I've had my mind running 100mph with ideas galore! Here's some highlights I have so far!

I drew up invitations this morning. They'll be mailed out May 10th. The party is 3 months away! WOW!

I'm making a Ticket Booth.




GAMES: [kids win tickets at the games]
-Bowling
-Lucky Ducks [for the little ones; each duck has a # on it. They win that # tickets]
-Balloon Pop [throw darts at balloons and win tickets]
-Feed the Tiger [classic tiger face with hole in center; toss a beanbag in the hole!]
-Hoop Shot [basketball]
-Dolphin Ring Toss [inflatable dolphin, and 3 rings to try and get around it's nose!]


ACTIVITIES:
-Face Painting
-Bounce House

TICKET REDEMPTION:
-Prize Wall
-Candy Wall [marshmallow ropes, lollipops, cotton candy, etc]

PARTY FAVORS:
-Popcorn boxes (like these)

And each one will have animal crackers, cracker jacks and circus peanuts inside!

FOOD:
-Veggie Hot dogs with Condiments
-Nachos and Nacho cheese sauce
-Popcorn Machine
-Shelled peanuts
-Lemonade

THE CAKE:
-Popcorn Cupcakes

-Chayce will have a small cake of his own of course to blow out candles!

....Let the Countdown begin!

Bridesmaids: It's Time!

All of my bridesmaids got confirmation tonight to go ahead and order their gowns!

I can't wait to see them all in the gorgeous gowns!

***

My wedding gown is already purchased (since September!)

and the Flowergirl dress is already purchased as well.

Here's Leighton's dress...

In the Mailbox...

....The Save-The-Date cards are finally going out!

They're in the mailbox and will be going out tomorrow,

so keep your eyes on your mailboxes!

Here's the actual card

And the photo that's inside of the envelope with the card...

Each envelope has printed address labels and are sealed with silver heart seals.

Girls Night: TWILIGHT

My wonderful hubby went out at midnight on Saturday morning and got our copy of Twilight on DVD!!!

Saturday evening I went to a friends house for "Girls Night In". We all brought desserts/snacks and sipped some cocktails and watched the Twilight DVD. A nice stress-free, kid-free, HUSBAND-free night! LOL

Mission Easter: ACCOMPLISHED!

I sucked it up today and went shopping. I knew it would be easy to find Jon's and Chayce's at TCP. Yep, their children's XL is the equivelant to an adult size Small-Medium. Sooo, as a joke 3 years ago Jon put on one of their XL shirts and it FIT! Perfectly! So now everytime you see Jon and Chayce match identically, you know our little secret. Hahaha...

It was the most difficult to find MY outfit because I could find NO green. NONE. Then the last store I went into they had this adoreable top on the window display. It was the only one in my size left too, so I grabbed it. They had it paired up with some light wash denim jeans and it looked super cute, and the model photo at The Children's Place had the sweater vest paired up with denim. So I figure instead of being too "formal" this Easter, we're going to dress nice yet casual by all wearing denim! So we're all wearing green tops, light wash denim jeans, and white shoes.

Here's a sneek peak at our look!

Close-up of Chayce's... I got him the tie! :)

Close-up of my top.

Easter Outfits

So every year I make sure we all match for Easter & Christmas. 2 years ago we all wore blue (Which was HORRID because I look awful in blue, but Jon insisted)... so last year we wore PINK. It actually ended up looking really good! This year Jon wanted to choose, but it's been 4-6 weeks since I told him to decide on a color and he didn't.

So I seriously need to get this done! I don't look good in blue. Period. Jon and Chayce both can pull off just about any color. Right now i'm thinking green. I love the shade of green they have the The Children's Place right now too! So I'm thinking something like this for Chayce...



This shirt isn't solid green. It's checkered with green and white.

He BEGS for a tie everytime we're there, and he doesn't have one yet...

So I may get this one to match his outfit ;)

The hard part is finding MY outfit to match Chayce's....

Wildflowers

Today Chayce and his friend Leighton planted wildflower seeds together!

Publix Preschool Pals is a little thing we signed up for last year and every month we get a newsletter and some sort of little gift for Chayce. This month we got a strip of recycled paper with wildflower seeds inside! They instructed us to soak the paper in water for a few hours, then plant the strip of paper with the seeds. Leighton got the same thing in the mail so she brought hers over and they planted them together. They loved it, and I took some time to plant some more basil.

Chayce's Wildflower Seeds: DAY 1

What a ripoff.

So on March 1st we decided to take Miss Reese for her first grooming. I hesitated about it because buying the clippers, scissors, and being taught how to do it YOURSELF is a much better idea for such a small dog. The clippers are around $30, and just for 1 grooming was $20. But we went ahead and did it. Here's Reese AFTER her 1st grooming.



I was a bit upset when I got her. She looked like NOTHING had been done. The only visible difference to her was her nails were clipped. I paid $20 for a NAIL CLIPPING?!

So, I went out Saturday, bought the clippers.. followed an wonderful online tutorial and step-by-step video process from someone who has a Yorkie and grooms her dog herself. I did it just like the video instructed. HERE'S reese after my grooming!

The whole purpose of having her groomed was for her HAIRCUT. It's hot as heck in Florida right now, she's all black, and constantly pants when she goes outside. I wanted her to have shorter hair for the summer, but no. So NOW she does and she's not as nervous because Im doing it. I think she turned out quite well. And she doesn't look as awkward in her little shirts ;)

What a BLESSING!

So here's the inspiration for the center aisle of our wedding ceremony.

As most of you know, everything will be by candlelight. Well I'd planned to order the lanterns in the next few months. The price online was about $10/ea. Great huh?! Well I stumbled down Target's clearance aisle last week and guess what they had????

LANTERNS!!!!

The price? $2.50/ea.

We needed 16 and they had exactly 16! What a blessing for us!!! It looks brown in the photo because the lamp shining on it has a brown hue on the lamp shade, but they're black. We're putting white votive candles inside of them (NOT tealights. They go out too quickly) and using a silky red ribbon to tie them around the pews like they used in the photos. We also my sprinkle some red rose petals in the bottom of each lantern for the candle to sit on.

Writing

I've been working with Chayce on his writing lately. He lost interest for so long,

then I decided to make it more "Fun". We bought this cute little multi-purpose board. It's double-sided. 1 side is a magnetic chalk board with magnetic letters and numbers.

The reverse side is a dry-erase board.

So we practiced a few words on the dry-erase board.

I think he did quite well!