Cake pops

I love to make Cake Pops- but it is time consuming..
So I do not like the cake pop makers or the pans- even though that is the easiest way to do cake pops!
I want mine to be a little more moist and yummy. I bake it separate and then crumble it, add more fixins!
I am not southern, but sure do like that word! I also have a great idea to use a meatball roller/scooper to make them round, then you freeze them & dip them in your melting chocolate.
So I have to admit, I was a little lazy here! I am not sure if you call it lazy, as much as lame! I printed these labels out on regular paper and then double taped it to the bag! I also punched it out with a circle whole punch.  I let Hailey pick out the color chocolate she wanted. She did purple and the white with colorful sprinkles in it!

Edible Crayons

 This was a project I have been planning for months. I wanted to do it for back to school, but it did not happen. That is ok, because I printed up the ones that just said Crayons on them. I might have had to thick of card stock. I had to use the hard reusable slurpee straw the girls keep for no reason at all but to take space up in the drawer.

The girls had fun & LOVED to eat them. It was the prepping of the card stock- Hailey & I rolled it out and put it in this glass bowl you see.
I had to cut them down. What I saw online was they
had gotten the big rod pretzel sticks and broke them in half. I just happen to stumble across honey what already this size pretzels. I could not pass that up! They tasted really great.. I wasn't sure since you only dip the end in chocolate. But it was nice with the sweet chocolate taste and the salt on the pretzel.

Making a 1st grade learning binder for Home

I started this binder for my daughter, because I feel like she needs more help on school. I took some pictures, but they are very blurry- so those are to come.. I just searched for 1st grade work & got a lot of information for teachers or home schooling. I am very excited! I also just google things that I know she needs help on, as in telling time. Due to budget cuts last week my daughter was out of school for a week & since it was so close to the beginning of the year & she is focused on learning, I did not want to lose momentum.
My mother watched her during the day and they had lessons that they did. It went well, we have been really practicing the "frequency"/"sight" words.

~Sorry it seems to be so long~ I added some pictures and her binder is NOT 100% the way I want it, but we can still have her learn and that is all that matters..

 Days of the week- I cut this out and laminated it!

 Counting quarters and the letters and tiles.. need to be cut out and make words with them..

I will have to add more photos of more pages..And add links

Making Candy Buttons

 Making Candy Buttons:
Very easy to do, this recipe makes a lot!
I only used 4 colors: green, yellow, pink & lavender.
You can find tons of recipes online for this, but I really like the following blog:

 I like that they have a dotted sheet. I started one & I get to "perfectionist" on it.
We had so much leftover that I was doing their names, stars, hearts, etc..
I really like all the pastel colors that What will we do today had on their site! After awhile the girls were done. They just could not wait to eat them. We had to lay it out in the office and wait 24 hours! I added flavor to 2 colors, a raspberry and vanilla. Both were ok, the raspberry was not that good.

INGREDIENTS

• 2 Tbsp meringue powder (or 2 egg whites)
• 6 Tbsp water
• 1/4 tsp almond extract (use vanilla, lemon, peppermint, coconut for different flavors)
• 1 pound confectioners' sugar (1 pound = 7 cups)
• decorator bags or sandwich bags (1 for each color)

Make sure when you cut the tip of the bag off, it is still small, not too big.

TEMPLATE for the DOTS

Organizing the Office

Mainly, I moved all my items from storage to my new home. It drove me crazy to see the mess,  but it also motivated me & excited me to organize. I had to take a huge bedroom and down size my craft gear to a 5 shelf area. I got rid of quite a bit of stuff. I have one area that is for the kids crafts as well. I had to get rid of at least 1 1/2 boxes of kids crafts also. Mainly just odds and ends. Some of my office stuff that I was going to get rid of went to my daughters school. I had binders, colored paper & border/textured scissors.

BEFORE PICS:

 AFTER PICS:

I need to still work on the 5 shelf so that it flows with your eye. For now, it is all organized and put away. Very niiice.. I also need a new way to organize my stickers, they are in the purple plastic carrier. The 2 pics on the bottom are the girls craft things. The vacuum is next to the cabinet where the girls things are organized and neatly put away. I should have taken a picture with the door opened. The over the door organizer is  a 24 pocket shoe over the door organizer that I found at Storables. I found the idea online for anything and everything in the house. Target and Home Depot carry different ones, and colored ones.. But I really wanted the clear one to see what is in each pocket. My girls are 6 and 9 and I wanted to keep it simple. I did label a couple of pockets, since one is sticker and the other one was tattoos.

Hair Flower

So we all know my favorite site is Tip Junkie and all there she has a blogger I love:

This is where I found another blogger, who is amazing with little girls hair..
This is where I found this idea!! She has great ideas and she shows you in YouTube.. It is amazing! This is the 2nd time I tried this, but the first time does not count, we were in a rush and so I had no time to do it. This 2nd time, I relaxed and understood it better and only put 1 hair flower in her hair:

With a little more practice, I will have it down. Next time, I am going to do a couple on her head.
I think it is so cute!!

IF you click on the above image, it will send you right to the making of the Hair flower. It is actually really easy as long as your daughter stands still. That was half my battle! 

What's to come...

So, I have been trying to organize EVERYTHING at once in my house & life.. What a mess!!
I moved in with my boyfriend almost 10-11 months ago, just recently in the last 3 weeks I emptied my storage & brought it all to the house. *sigh*
The house I lived in before I think I tried to fill every drawer/closet/cabinet I could & that house was really big! LOL  So now I look like a hoarder with my craft supplies, kitchen appliances & dishes. Unbelievable what we keep and buy, yes, I say WE as woman! hee hee
My craft supplies have to be condensed, I had enough for a huge closet (the closet was really the size of the wall in the bedroom) and now it has to all fit into a 5 shelf rack. Ohh goodness. I have been looking online at all the different ideas on how to organize my supplies. I have to narrow it down by pricing and the room I have. It is so great to have the internet. OG would be to buy magazines or watch tv to see and probably never get something that works well for oneself.
My other organizing I am trying to get together and prep is dinner- I work full time & get off at 5pm, I have to drive in 30 min of traffic to get my kid from daycare, drive 20 minutes back home. If I do not prep our dinner the night before, then we eat at 7pm, which I prefer no later than 6:30pm. My daughter goes to bed by 8:30pm and she needs a shower before hand, don't through in any homework if that needs to be done!

A couple of things I am doing or learning as I move through my life. I love to wake up early- 6am to do a load of laundry, so I don't have to do that when I get home. If I am going to use ground meat for dinner (I don't eat red meat, so it will 98% of the time be ground turkey or ground chicken)- I will cook it the night before, this saves me about 20 min at night. I cut up any vegetables, needed or measure out dry stuff if needed.. I am now looking at making breakfast muffins also. My boyfriend usually eats his sandwiches at breakfast and then buys lunch. I understand that sometimes, but why waste the $$ if you don't have to.

I have to share my stuffed Zucchini recipe:
I made my ground turkey the night before because I was going to make an enchilada pie. So I put a taco/fajita seasoning pack into my meat, I added chopped jalapenos. Needless to say my stuffed zucchini was a mexican style. I love HOT/SPICY things and so does my boyfriend, unfortunately he gets heartburn, so I have to mellow on the hot stuff sometimes. Of course, our girls can handle a little bit of heat, but not much.. Since this was going to be a mexican style stuffed zucchini- I added spanish rice, salsa, garlic, sauteed onions, shredded mexican mix cheese,  & cotija cheese. It was amazing! I can not tell you the measurements, because I just did  a dash of this or that, I go by how it looks. Really the salsa was maybe 1/2 a cup.

That is it for now. Thank you for hanging in through all this!


TO COME:
Hair flowers made out of hair
Organized Office/Craft room
Craft area for the girls in the above room
Organizing scrapbook paper
Organizing my recipes for my menu board-the try and the i love already.. :)
Recipes
Edible Crayons for Girls back 2 school treat

Just a little lunch time note

I found this online, and once I can find it again. I will make sure to give credit where credit is due.
I printed up the apple with the writing on it, got a pipe cleaner, apple jacks & punched a whole in the apple.

It is cute and sweet!

I made my own Grocery & Pantry Lists

As we all know, I love Tip Junkie! I get weekly emails and I love it all, they always have free printable and such. The one thing I keep finding,  but have not found something that fits me is the Grocery List and the Pantry List. I never take inventory of what I have, so I end up buying more and that is a waste of money to me. So I decided to make up my own Lists.. As much as I like to write what we need, there is time I would rather circle it and move on. So, I thought of a cool idea with our normal staples in our house.  What I did, is just take a regular word document and used images from Google and put this together. There are things I can add & delete as time goes on, that is the nice thing about it. You can print these at the bottom of my blog, there are links attached.

I did 2 versions of the pantry inventory: 1 is the way I see it a lot, where you check off each box for every one can of item you have. Which is great, but didn't really work for me. It was taking up to much space. I also used pictures like my grocery list. Everyone LOVES pictures! So the second one that is horizontal, is the one you can fill in the number of cans/bottles in the circle. That seemed more logical to me. Let me explain something, if you notice on the soups it has 4 circles- well that is for the different soups I have int he pantry. The picture is cream of chicken, but I didn't want to have 6 different soup pictures, so I added circles and I can fill those in with the numbers of cans. Same with Pop Tarts, Hamburger helper, Jell-O and spices..
The spices, may have to change up- I have many spices to choose from!

Print Grocery List (Print Here)
Print Pantry Inventory List 1  (Print Here)
Print Pantry Inventory List 2 (Print Here)

Making Headbands

I saw several ideas online. I started buying different supplies for this, several months ago. I love this one bidding site called Tophatter, most sellers are from etsy. So I bought these silver metal headbands, twine, flowers, buttons, hello kitty clips, strands of beads, etc.. I had promised the girls that Thursday night we would make headbands. But, the only problem I was having was I had to put the twist the twine on the headband before we could put anything on it. That takes time & patience. So, we did the mini hamburger cookies & they took showers as I twisted twine.. I used hot glue & honestly do NOT recommend using it. I then moved on to gorilla glue, which I would recommend or some other tacky glue or something.

These are the items I used and how we started....

              

Danika did not get to pick her color because her mom (ME) just grabbed a color and started twisting the twine on there. She got to chose her beads. I should have taken a picture of all the string of beads I had. I will add those later. So we made 2 headbands for her. She got the bottom one with the Hello Kitty. 

This one is my favorite, because the way it came together. This is the way I had it in my head. Hailey loved it and she picked her own color. What a goofy face. :)

 

I may have to redo the beads on this one. They started popping off a little, I think the string got broken. But the concept is cute. I love this one, but it really frustrated me because a couple of the beads started popping off. And I have to admit, the Hello Kitty is a clip and I clipped it on and then hot glued it on the bottom with tons and tons of glue. Then got distracted and grabbed under the Hello Kitty, so guess what? I got a glump of glue on one of my fingers and burned the heck out of it. I had to put it under cold water... ugh

Next times, we are adding flowers. We will be making our own & then adding button some how. Need to use my imagination. 

Mini Burger cOoKiEs

I saw a picture online & had to do this with the girls. So adorable, so easy & very quick. With hardly any mess.  They look so cute!!

Nilla Wafers

Keebler Grasshopper cookies

coconut (dyed green)

tube of yellow & red frosting

          

      

 Hailey's creations above

   Danika's creations


We did not use a lot of coconut, because only my boyfriend likes it. He is not going to be eating all those...