Pinterest Project: Brownie Batter Cupcakes

It had been awhile since I made any new cupcakes, so one afternoon last week when I got bored I decided to try a new recipe I saw on pinterest.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of these cupcakes after I was finished, but let me tell you, they were amazing. They looked super cute and they were delicious!! I used a yellow cake mix to make the cupcake but modified the recipe by adding some sugar, sour cream, and vanilla. The cake turned out moist and full of flavor (much better than the simple box cake mix by itself). In the middle of these cupcakes is a bite of brownie, yum! I accidentally made more brownie bites than I needed for the cupcakes so we kept some of those in the fridge to eat as a bite size treat. That is the first dessert I have found that I cannot keep Tony away from. Those brownie bites inside are DELICIOUS! You could make that as a treat all on it's own.

I sent a dozen of these to work with Tony (because we don't need to be fatties and eat 18 cupcakes all ourselves) and they were devoured by the end of the day. Definitely a hit. If you like the taste of brownie and are looking for a good cupcake, I suggest you try these.

another pinterest win.

Pinterest Project: Sunbathing Towel and Pillow

Last weekend Tony, Michelle, and I planned to take a day trip down to the beach the coming Friday. A few days before, I was playing around on pinterest, and found this awesome tutorial for a beach towel with a pillow that rolls up into a tote bag.

I knew I had to make one before our beach trip at the end of the week. I made one important change from the original. In the tutorial they stuffed the pillow part and sewed it together. This seemed like it would make washing it extremely difficult. So instead, I bought a full size pillow (on sale at Target for $4!) and made a pocket with velcro to slide it in. Now when I want to wash the towel I just slide the pillow out and throw the thing in the washing machine.

This project was really simple. You don't have to measure anything and the sewing does not have to be perfect. Check out the link above for the tutorial if you are interested in making one (though I highly recommend making the pillow part a velcro pocket instead of stitching it closed for ease of use). I used mine at the beach yesterday and it worked wonderfully! With the added length the pillow portion adds, my feet no longer hang off the end of the towel when I lay down on it. It was so much more comfortable to lay on a long towel with a pillow than the regular beach towel. Michelle was jealous of how awesome it turned out, so we've decided to make her one during our craft day next Tuesday (we'll be making a number of pinterest projects that day so stay tuned). I just love how this turned out. It took about 30 minutes from start to finish and I have a great beach towel for laying out. yay!

another pinterest win!

Pinterest Project: Weekly Menu Board

After a very long hiatus from blogging, I'm back! haha

Summer is in full swing and I am greatly enjoying my time off from work. Since my sweet boys moved to London about a month ago, I am not working this summer. I thought I would be miserably bored, but I have found the break has actually been wonderful.

With all this time off, I have plenty of time to play on pinterest (my latest obsession). I've already made something like 15 projects for my classroom next year. As some of you may know, not everything you see on pinterest turns out exactly like it looks when you make it haha. Sidenote: one of my new favorite blogs to read is _______. She blogs about different projects she tries from pinterest that turn out as total failures. It's sort of hilarious if you are bored and want to check it out. Anyway, since I've been trying out projects and tricks learned from pinterest I thought I might blog about some of the successes (and failures, though I haven't had a major failure yet).

First up: my new weekly menu planning board. Here is the original I saw on pinterest:

This looked like something cute and simple that could actually be used in my house. I am really trying to be more diligent about menu planning each week so we end up eating less fast food and I can better budget money for weekly meals. The only problem I have is I tend to forget half of the yummy meals we have had before.  My solution: this menu board. I color coded the cards by different types of meals, soups/stews, pasta dishes, casseroles, meat dishes, and misc. I have also marked them with symbols to show healthy meals and crockpot meals. This way I can plan a variety of meals each week. To use this, all I have to do is flip  through the meal cards and clip my choices next to each day of the week. Another great thing about this, is on the back of each card I have listed the ingredients needed for that meal. That way when I plan my weekly meals, to make my grocery list, all I have to do is flip each card over and record what I need from the store. Easy!

The original I saw was thin and could be clipped to the fridge. I wasn't such a fan of that idea because things are forever falling off my fridge if it bumps the wall at a weird angle. Instead, I found these great wooden plaques at hobby lobby for just a couple dollars. I used a cute piece of scrap paper and some modge podge to add color, then glued on mini clothespins for each day of the week. This fits perfectly in a cookbook stand and doubles as a cute kitchen decoration. One change I'll probably have to make soon is adding bigger pockets for meals. For now, all the meals we have made and eat regularly fit in the small pockets, but as we try more meals I'll need a bigger space to keep them like the original.

There you have it, my weekly menu board. Pinterest win. :)

"The Skanks"

Today we read a book called Aliens Love Panta Claus. It goes along with the book Alien's Love Underpants. The premise of the story is the aliens are helping out Santa, but keep using underwear for everything. They use them as a hat on the snowman, exchange the stockings for underwear, use them as ornaments on the tree etc. After reading the book, I wrote the following sentence on the board and the kids had to finish the sentence in a creative way and illustrate. Then I put all the pages together to make a class book:

"The aliens might use the underwear to______________"

One little girl brings me her paper and it looks beautiful. Her handwriting is perfect (better than mine, I swear haha), her picture fills the page, and everything looks fantastic. I read her paper to discover this gem:

"The aliens might use the underwear as gifts and deliver them to the skanks."

no. freaking. kidding.

The picture is of a house, and on the house it says "The Skank's House". Next to the house are the gifts that have been delivered by the aliens and they are labeled with tags such as "To Mrs. Skank".

I couldn't even bring myself to ask her what it said because I was laughing so hard tears were streaming down my face (not in front of her of course, this happened when I immediately ran to show Michelle haha). Best I can figure, she either has some friends with a similar name and sounded it out wrong, or she might have been trying to write "The Skunk's House" because a number of other kids had the brilliant idea to write things about skunks and thought it was funny.

Either way, this one is a keeper.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

So many things to be thankful for ... here are just a few:

- I'm thankful that after last years group of hellions, I have a small class of perfect angels this year
- I'm thankful for my AMAZING team that I work with. It is not possible to have a better group of ladies to spend my days with. They are truly my friends and I look forward to seeing them each day at work.
- I'm thankful my whole family is able to spend Thanksgiving together this year (and I'm thankful they are coming to Houston so I don't have to spend my break traveling!)
- I'm thankful for my wonderful best friend who came home from China early to cook a turkey for my family. He's so good to me!
- I'm thankful for my naughty kitten, who as we speak is climbing the Christmas tree, yet again!
- I'm thankful I didn't move to Colorado after all last year, because life turned out pretty damn good here. :)

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving surrounded by friends and family!

Christmas Stockings

When my brothers and I were born, my grandma made us each a quilted Christmas stocking. Maybe it's because I grew up only ever seeing these homemade ones, but these are really the only ones I like. Whenever I go to other people's houses, or look at stockings at the store, none of them seem right to me. Last year when we put up the Christmas tree, we bought some cheap stockings from Target just to have something to hang, but I really didn't care for them. So, this year I decided to make us some! I found a pattern (via pinterest, LOVE that site!), picked out some fabric, and got to work yesterday morning.

The first few steps were easy. Cut the outer pieces, lining, and batting, using the pattern, make a quilt sandwich, quilt the pieces together however you want (I did straight diagonal lines on mine, and followed the pattern of the squares on Tony's), put the pieces right sides together, sew a 1/4 seam around the edge, and flip right side out. Around this point I was feeling so proud of myself because this project was turning out to be pretty simple. Then I got to the band at the top and got incredibly frustrated because the directions were not very clear and I could not for the life of me figure out how to get these pieces sewn together. I had to take a long break and come back to it later. Once I googled directions and saw a picture of what the directions were asking I realized how simple it was. Took me just a few minutes to finish them up from there. yay!

Here are the finished products. All I have to do is add our names to the top. Hopefully I'll be able to finish that up tomorrow. I think they turned out pretty nice if I do say so myself! :)

 My stocking

Tony's stocking

Wonderful Evening

Last night I had such a wonderful evening with the sweet boys I nanny for in the summer.  Their mom messaged me a few weeks ago asking if I could take some pictures of their family. Of course I said yes! We met up at Pecan Park at 4 and took some pictures of the whole family, the three boys, and some individual shots as well. I'll edit those in the next few days and you'll be able to see a few posted on my photography blog.

After the pictures at the park we drove over to the new fire station by their house. It just opened a few weeks ago and Jennifer had asked me if I would mind taking a few pictures of Quinn in front of the fire truck in his halloween costume. Quinn is obsessed with firemen and wants to be one when he grows up. She bought him this awesome costume for halloween that looks just like the real thing. Well when we got to the station the firemen there were so friendly. I took some pictures, they let the boys play in the truck, and gave us a tour of the whole station. The boys were ecstatic. it was so much fun!

When we were getting ready to leave the station Matt asked me if I would like to join them back at the house for dinner. I had such a nice time with them! Jennifer and I sat outside and watched the boys ride bikes (they can ride on 2 wheels now!), and tossed the football with them as it got dark while Matt grilled some delicious steaks.

I love that sweet family so much! And those boys always manage to make me smile :)