Valentine's Day

I figured that since Valentine's Day was nearly 2 weeks ago, I'd better post some pictures.

Here's the card that I helped Kaylin make. The bunny is made from her thumbprint and the ears are the side of her thumb. I got the idea from Family Fun.

Here's the valentine I made for Eric. I got the idea here. It's made from envelopes that are glued together to make pockets for coupons.

Here's what it looks like when you open it up.

I made my first ever sugar cookies. I found the recipe here. The picture is of the ones I took to Eric's work on Friday. Some of the cookies are already gone, including an "X" which is why the cookies spell "XOO" instead of "XOXO".

On Valentine's Day Eric and I went to the Stake Valentine's dinner and dance at church. We had a good time, we got to hang out with good friends, eat some free food, and we even danced a couple of songs before we needed to go get Kaylin.

Felt Food

Kaylin and Macey each got a kitchen from my parents for Christmas. Both girls love their kitchens. There's even a picture of Macey hugging the box the kitchen came in. I decided that the girls needed some food to play with.

I made each girl two eggs, I made sure that each egg fit in the frying pan that came with the kitchen:

Each girl also got two pancakes and two pieces of bacon, they all fit in the frying pan too:

Each girl was going to get 2 sugar cookies, but I thought that 4 was better. So Macey got 4 sugar cookies and Kaylin has yet to get any:

This is the pizza I made for Macey. Kaylin will get one later.

I got my ideas from looking at pictures on various websites.

Kaylin loves to carry the pancakes around in her mouth. I'm not sure why she does that, but it's pretty cute.

Plea for Tickets

This is a message to all of my LDS friends. Eric and I will be in Utah over Conference weekend and we really want to attend the Saturday morning session. Our stake doesn't have tickets for that session. If anyone has the ability to get us 2 tickets for Saturday morning, PLEASE let me know!

THANK YOU!

Reusable shopping bags

I've thought for awhile now that I should start using reusable shopping bags. I feel so bad throwing the plastic ones away. I know you can take them back to the store, but I just never do it. I use paper bags when possible and recycle them, but it's still wasteful. I looked into making my own but it seemed so expensive. It was cheaper to buy the ugly ones from the grocery store. Until now.... I found a pattern online that had handles as part of the bag. Other patterns I'd seen you have to sew handles on, which is expensive if you use webbing and also doesn't seem to be as strong to me since you're sewing the handles on. For the fabric I bought a queen sheet for $4 at the thrift store. I was able to get 5 bags and pouches (see picture below) from it. So that's $0.80 per bag with pouch for you non-math people, cheaper than you can get an ugly grocery store bag for. Plus it has a pouch that the bag folds into for easy carrying, bonus!

I did encounter a slight problem, I really needed to use a serger for the handles. THANK YOU Kristina and Sis. Mellor for letting me use your serger!

Here's the first finished bag:

I also learned how to do a french seam and a flat-fold seam for this. Below is the flat-fold seam, bad quality, sorry. The flat-fold seam is just a french seam sewn down. I love the french seam because there are no raw edges inside the bag (there's no liner) and each seam is sewn twice, making it sturdier. It's more time consuming, but I love the finished product.

And here is the bag in its pouch. The pouch is sewn into the side of the bag making it really convenient.

Now hopefully they're sturdy enough for my groceries, and hopefully I remember to take them with me to the store. I'm going to try to keep one in my purse at all times.

Color matching activity

We're going on a road trip soon and we will be in the car for a long time. We're really hoping that Kaylin will be able to ride for 3 hours without a break, we'll see how it goes. She can normally get to Bellingham and back pretty well, but this last time she cried the last 20-30 minutes there and whined another hour or so home. It's just under 2 hours each way. I have been gathering ideas for activities to do in the car. My grandparents got her a cool tray for her carseat and I'm hoping she'll be able to color and play on it. I got an idea for a color matching activity from one of my favorite blogs. I tweaked it a little bit to work better for Kaylin.

I grabbed a pair of a few different paint chips and cut one of them up into the individual colors. I put magnets* on the back of the individual colors. The idea is to match the colors, it's kind of hard because the shades are so similar. I like that it teaches that there are different shades of the same color. Kaylin always tells me that anything that is dark pink is red. She is very adament about this. I'm hoping this game will help :-).

I thought I'd try it out. I put one strip on a cookie sheet and let Kaylin go at it. She got half of them right. I put a second strip on, and once again she got half right. Then she wanted all of them on. That was a little overwhelming and she didn't even try to match those ones up. But she loved it. She was so excited the whole time.

*For the magnets I used magnetic business cards that came with one of our phone books. I cut each one into 6 pieces and then used a glue stick to attach the paint chip piece. Total cost of this activity: FREE. Well, unless you want to count the little bit of glue I used and the wear on my paper cutter and scissors ;-).

Back to the real world

This past week I've been a little out of my routine. Last weekend we were in Bellingham with my family and Monday night - Thursday evening we were babysitting three kids at their house. I was able to bring my laptop and use their internet which was great. It was weird living at someone else's house and taking care of their kids for 3 days. Luckily the kids were really good and we had a great time. Kaylin loved playing with the 4 year old all day. This morning she kept asking where Jon was, she also wanted to know where the cat was. She liked looking at their cat and always wanted to know where it was, but if she got too close, Kaylin would get upset. I don't have any pictures due to the fact that I'm lazy and didn't want to clear my memory card (remember, it currently holds 14 pictures).

What am I planning to do with my hard-earned babysitting money, you ask? Well... I am planning to buy a bookshelf for the computer room (nothing too fancy, either Craigslist or Ikea probably), and I'm going to organize my craft room! If I can ever get it to look good, I'll post pictures.

Headband

My sister and her daughter were in town from Utah (more on that later) and my niece had a cute headband that I knew I could copy and make myself. Here's my version (please forgive the unmatching thread, I was in a hurry and didn't want to rethread my machine):

Kaylin took the headband off half-way through sacrament meeting and didn't want it back on. I think it's cute, so we'll try again.

And thank you Kelsey for the picture of the girls. My memory card died and the one that came with my camera only holds 14 pictures. Ugh. Plus Kelsey has a really good SLR camera and I have an okay 5 year old, slow camera. Needless to say, I just let her take the pictures.