beach bums

There's one thing to be said about living in Florida and that is you gotta love the beach! Either way you drive (other then north-ha ha) you are bound to hit sandy goodness. I guess it's only natural that Maribel loves the beach as much as she loves blueberries. I mean she's a Carlberg and it comes with the name.

On Saturday I loaded up the car and my little onion for a little trip to our family favourite, Cocoa Beach. We love this beach with all of it's natural beachy goodness of shells, sea weed, sea foam, jelly fish, crabs and feathers. And I can't forget to mention the perfect sand for turning anyone into mermaids.

Luckily we never got hit with any rain so we were able to catch some decent waves and sand time. Even if it did rain nothing was going to spoil our special mommy/daughter date. We had a nice picnic on our blanket. I filled the Tiffen box with sandwiches, crackers, pretzels and some delicious strawberries and grapes with yogurt for dipping.

My niece Sherry sent me her little Flat Stanley for a little vacation so this is him enjoying what Florida has to offer. So naturally you can't go to Cocoa Beach, Florida without paying a little visit to Ron Jon Surf Shop.
This lucky fella gets to accompany me everywhere I go like the beach,church,  my place of work, I even have a little Disney planned for his visit which will be fun to document.

I only wish that when it came time to send him home that I could go with him. I'm running out of Canadian Smarties and yes, I do eat the red ones last...

Happy Earth Day

For Earth day I thought it would be fun to make some reusable bags from old tees since I can't seem to throw anything away. Hoarder? Possibly. I found this super duper easy tutorial on Martha Stewart that shows you how to make them. They were soooo easy to make. If you can sew a relatively straight stitch, then you can definitely make these!!!

I even made one from one of M's old t shirts that is too small and too stained to donate or give away. She loves that she has one too.

Of course we had to take them out for a spin. Maribel used hers at the beach to hold her select beach toys. She kept asking me if she could get it dirty or wet and because they wash like any old tee it didn't matter what she did with it. She liked that answer.

I used mine at the grocery store. The cashier and bagging associate loved them and kept asking about them and how to make them etc. After quick instructions I overheard, "What a great use for all those old t shirts I have." Cool! Now I feel all close to Mother Earth and green and stuff which reminds me, I forgot to pick up some granola, ah nuts...

On another note...
Tomorrow I am beginning my journey of documenting our everyday life for the Week In The Life with Ali Edwards. I did it a couple of years ago and really enjoyed the journey. It can be viewed here. Last year I only managed to snap a few photos so I never did finish creating the album. This year I have my album all set up and the journal pages printed so all that I have to do this week is be snap happy and have fun.Yay!

There's nothing like having a plethora of pictures to get my scrap mojo going. I just hope I remember my camera tomorrow morning since I have a tendency to forget little things like that...

natural

There are times when I look at this girl and I am in awe that I was chosen to be her mother. When ever I am glum she brings sunshine with her and knows just how to perk me right up. She really makes the best friend a mommy could ever have.

That's all I have for today, short and sweet just like she.

superhero t-shirt cape

For the Superhero activity the kids were instructed to come dressed as their favourite superhero. Maribel doesn't have any superhero dress up stuff so I went web surfing and found this uber easy tutorial on how to make a super cape from an old t-shirt. If you don't have a sewing machine don't worry, this one is no sewing necessary.

I already had tee that I picked up from a thrift store months ago and all I had to do was snip and sew on the lightning bolt and mask. I also hemmed the edges for a cleaner look but it's not necessary. You don't have to but my snipping skills (or lack there of) were showing and I wanted clean edges.

When she was asked which superhero she was she would tell them that she was Superman and Supergirl's kid.

The mask I just used a leftover Pin The Bow On Hello Kitty blindfold from her birthday party (that we forgot to play-oops) as the template and just sewed the two pieces of felt together. But I cut out the eyes of the top colour first becuase I wanted the bottom colour to show through. I reused the elastic from the blindfold since it was already measured out. Hey, it's just one less step.

This is her trying to smile after crying. I guess this super girl's weakness is shrub thorns. Poor thing, her legs got all scratched up playing in the bushes or the "woods" as she calls it but still had a smile for me...well, sort of. Okay, now I just want to go and give her another hug...and poke her dimple. ^.^

I can't help but recall the line from The Incredibles where Edna says, "No capes. Do you remember Thunderhead?"

I also created a movie for this activity. You can check it out here if you haven't seen it yet. It was a high budget film *sniff* totally.

superheros are righteous

Saturday was our church’s primary activity celebrating superheroes and how they choose the right. I was asked to help with one of the activities and because I love primary so much I jumped at the chance to assist. I was given a story to reenact about choosing the right and instead of trying to round up a bunch of friends I went another route. Take a look...

Of course there are outtakes…that's half the fun of film making isn't it?

Thanks to my awesome sister in law, the video was a hit and I haven’t laughed so hard in so long. I mean, the soccer ball never moves during “game play” but their feet are going a mile a minute. It makes me laugh everytime and the kids loved it too. After Maribel's group watched the video she said,
"You're awesome Mommy!"
Gawsh!

Naturally I think she's pretty awesome too.

Brownie points if you can guess who my ALL TIME favourite superhero is. Your clue is in my costume...

one more day

I figured since it’s Easter Monday back in Canada I would carry the Easter celebrations over one more day with a bunny inspired bento that I made for Maribel last week.

For the top some yummy grapes ripened for nibbling along with some cherry Jell-O in a flowered cupcake cup.

And for the bottom box a little bunny cut from a classic pb&j with a few fruit leather carrots surrounded with bunny tails-aka mini marshmallows. 

Funny tale about these fluffy little balls of confection…when I went to add them to M’s lunch the bag was nowhere to be found. I mean NOwhere. I searched high and low quite literally and even in my #1 suspect’s room while she still slumbered only to come up empty handed and a little defeated. So when the little sneakerella woke up I had to ask…

Me: Maribel, do you know where the marshmallows are?

M: No

Me: Are you sure? I wanted to put some in your lunch today

M: Oh wait! Maybe they are in your (bed) room.

(after a brief moment and some rustling coming from under my blankets at the foot of the bed)

M: Oh here they are. How did they get in there?

M'yesss how did they get in there???

As pictured here we had a similar instance with the parmesan cheese that mysteriously disappeared. I still haven’t found the empty container.

surprise Easter egg

Happy Easter! 

Last night while walking and talking with her Grandpa about Easter then Maribel said, "Grampa, Easter candy and stuff is nice but Easter is really all about Jesus".

It brings my heart so much joy to know that she gets it. Lately we've been talking a lot about my mother and how she's busy doing the Lord's work on the other side and how we all will be reunited again. Such peace that knowledge brings. 

Of course she had fun with the Easter tradition of hiding/finding eggs scattered about the lawn and enjoyed the pleasures of her Easter basket. It's amazing that she ate her supper after filling up on copious amounts of jelly beans...that's my girl! 

After returning home from our Easter feast it appears that we haven't had our fill of eggs just yet, only this one didn't come from the Easter Bunny...

It looks like our turt Eloise had been hiding one last egg for us to find. I couldn't help but laugh while watching Joe scramble around setting up the incubator all giddy and hopeful. Eloise had already laid her eggs (that were unfortunately unfertilized) so this came as a complete surprise. In about 30 days we'll be able to see if it's a fertile one or not so I'll keep you posted if we're going to be grandparents or not.

I couldn't help but wonder after watching Joe walk in and out of each room muttering to himself and forgetting why he went into the room in the first place, obviously distracted, that this is just a glimpse of what he would be like if I'd ever be in labour and need to be taken to the hospital. It made me giggle. Out loud. 

I hope you had a wonderful Easter!

for the love of icing

I have always enjoyed baking whenever I did it but I secretly wished I knew how to decorate my baking better. For the longest time I wanted to take cake decorating classes so that I could make pretty edible things versus just edible things. My first real effort at decorating a cake was for Maribel's birthday, only for hers I used fondant. It was fun, and I was overall pleased with the results but I still wanted to learn how to make roses and borders and all that fun stuff.  

For my birthday I received Wilton cake decorating classes and I could not have been more excited!!!!!! <<< Hence all the exclimtion marks. There were 4 lessons (once a week) and in each lesson we got to learn a new technique, fun tips, and if you were at my table, a whole lotta laughs....

Lesson 1 was more or less an introductory lesson and we had a little hands on with some prepared icing. We practiced filling the cloth bags with icing and played with couplers and tips. We also practiced on cookies but I ran out of time so I only left with 4 semi decorated cookies. Not worth photographing, I thought. Only 2 made it home....

But I did practice with the star tip and filling a cake in between lessons on this Super Man cake for my SIL's BF. It was a learning process for sure, like make sure you outline the details of the cake after adding the dirty icing or else you won't know where the cape ends and his arm begins. Now he looks like he only works out one side of his body like, a science experiment. 

Lesson 2 was to bring in a cake to ice and decorate. We learned how to ice the cake all pretty and smooth-ish and practiced with some round tips. I chose the cupcake pattern because in the book it looked super cute and fun...um yeh....not so much with my cake. After adding the carefully squeezed confection goodness it ended up looking like a pile of icing intestines or a nest of baby mice...you pick.   

Sooooo I should have paid more attention when picking my colours for my icing..... It wasn't until it was too late that I realized what I had done. Of course Joe got excited when he noticed and asked, "Ooo you made me a cake?" I was starting to feel like my goal of making "pretty edible things" still needed some work.

Lesson 3 we got to decorate some cupcakes like flowers. Yay, right? I actually felt like I was making some progress. Definitely a step up since the boobie cake from the previous class.

Can you tell which one Maribel had her eye on? Yes, I totally let her have a cupcake before bed.

Lesson 4 was the final lesson where I learned how to make ribbon roses from icing. As a kid I always favoured the corner pieces of cakes because that was where the most icing was with some flowers. Since my final cake was round I made sure that my piece was from the left side of the cake...

So now that the classes are finished I received a lovely certificate showing that I now have some mad skills with an icing bag and I'm not afraid to use it! I loved this class and would recommend it to anyone who wants to take their cake decorating skills to the next level above  just smearing canned icing with a butter knife, which was me last month.

Next up is the Gum Paste and Fondant class. Stay tuned as this should prove to be interesting....