baby alexa

I'm starting to think I could devote an entire blog to just baby gifts!

Yes it seems that many of my friends are having babies these days. And it's wonderful.
I love making things for children and new babies. 

Alexa is the second baby girl in this family and mom wanted something with baby's name on it to hang on the wall above her crib.

This is another project inspired by the Art to Heart: Winsome Baby book by Nancy Halvorsen, but I chose to use fabrics with a lot more punch and impact.  

homemade soup and bread

I also like to give the gift of food when a friend has a baby. I've been there and really appreciated those homemade meals the most. It's like giving the gift of time. New parents don't have to worry about cooking for one night and can just focus on themselves and of course baby.

apple pie

With the recent cold weather, I find myself wanting those Fall-type comfort foods. 

You know the ones. The kind that fatten you up for those cold months ahead. 

There's something about the changing of the season that brings about that nesting / baking thing in so many of us. We can get into the kitchen and start warming the house with baked goods once again.

The start of school has also played a role in my recent baking hobby. A new school year brings new commitments and high expectations of packing healthier, more homemade lunches for my kids.

Well, at least more homemade anyway.

What do you do with that little bit of pastry left over from your pie?

airplane-themed party 2

This little man turned 4 recently.

As you may have seen here, we were going for an airplane theme for Evan's party. 


I got lazy and wanted a simple party with very little work so I rented out the child drop-in centre that we frequent. It is closed on the weekends and is very affordable for half a day. It was SO worth it because I didn't have to clean up my house before and again after the party!

The room is a giant play space so all the play activities were taken care of. There were tons of toys, a big play structure with slides and climbing things and outside there were ride on toys, a sandbox and picnic tables. So I really didn't have to do all that much.  Yesssssss.

I did set up a couple of tables as work stations - in keeping with the theme. The first was the 'Customs' area where the children got to stamp their own passports. I couldn't find actual country or flag stamps but the kids didn't mind. They stamped away, and the ones who were old enough to write, printed their names or the names of countries. It was a hit.

The next station I made was for making paper airplanes. I supplied paper, scissors and instructions for creating different types of planes (readily available on the internet).

Again, I was going for the easy route the whole way so I made cupcakes instead of a big cake. I made vanilla cake with white frosting (which may or may not have been from a box) and put marshmallows on top to look like clouds. Then topped them with mini paper airplanes made by big brother Malcolm -thank you very much!

 

The last station I set up was the 'luggage pick up area' where the kids could assemble their own loot bags with an assortment of plastic planes, Styrofoam gliders, candy, parachute men, and pin-on pilot's wings. I didn't get a picture of the wings but I basically printed off pictures of them (also from the internet), laminated them and taped a pin to the back.

The table also doubled as place to put the gifts.
The party wasn't too structured but when I wanted to mix things up a bit I broke out the parachute for a bit of fun.

And there were squeals.
All in all a pretty fun day for my lil man :)

star wars birthday party - the finale

We had a successful Star Wars birthday party for our 8 year old son, Malcolm, so I thought I'd show you how it all went down. In case you missed the previous posts: here are the invites we sent out, and here are the Jedi robes I whipped up for the kids.

We started the party off with some Jedi training - which really just ended up being light saber battles more than anything. So we quickly moved on to 'pinning the light saber on Yoda.' Don't judge the artwork (it did the trick)!

The kids could have played over and over again if we had let them!

Then we moved on to the treasure hunt - Star Wars style. 

We bought some trinkets like little bouncy balls and light up toys from the dollar store and wrapped them in foil so they would look like asteroids. Then we hid them around the house and wrote up some clues of where to find them.


I found that 8 years old is just old enough for riddles and word play games, but they did need a bit of guidance along the way. It was great fun watching them search all over the house.

mini LED lights that fit on your finger

We bought blue glow sticks and wrapped the ends with foil to make them look like mini light sabers too.

The part that I had the most fun planning was the menu. 
Did you know there's even a Star Wars Cookbook available?! Too funny. Some of the menu ideas were our own, but most we picked up all over the internet. One of the best blogs I used for inspiration can be found here.

menu item cards

For drinks we served Yoda Soda (Mountain Dew because it's green) and Jedi Juice (Orange Crush). No real reason behind the Crush except that my youngest son Evan had never tried it and had to get it when we were at the grocery store.

I made some chocolate covered pretzels - or edible light sabers. The red ones turned out kind of pink but it's just as well because the girls actually outnumbered the boys at this party!! Also kinda funny.

I combined two different colours of tortilla chips to represent the dark side vs. light. Served them up with Spicy Hutt Salsa and Cheesebacca Dip of course.

Although not pictured here, there was also jello (aka carbonite) with Han Solo inside, Galactic Pizza and Bobba Fett-iccini and Darth Maul Balls.

The cake was made up with one layer of vanilla and one layer of chocolate - again to portray dark vs. light. I covered it with black fondant icing and got these really neat candles where the flame is the colour of the candle; like for example, the blue candle has a blue flame. We tried to capture them here but they don't show up very well.... 

I didn't have time to bake Wookiee Cookies so these were just store-bought oatmeal chocolate chip.

We finished off the party with a pinata mission to destroy the Death Star.

 

I tried making my own pinata with a balloon but found that it was too oval shaped. So I picked up a soccer ball pinata at the store and covered it with gray tissue paper. It worked out perfectly. Then my husband and son put on the final touches.

The Death Star was too solid to use the toy light sabers to destroy it, so in true Canadian fashion, the kids used a hockey stick instead. Once destroyed, each child received their Jedi certification. I don't have a picture of it but you can easily Google these or create your own.

In the end, all our efforts were worth it... just to see this:

a very happy birthday boy

be mine

Happy Valentine's Day!

Valentine's day vanilla cupcakes

Just a little peak at what we made today.