4 down 8 to go!


Oh my oh my goodness where did April go!? To start with, I would like to wish my parents a very happy 30th wedding anniversary! They are celebrating in Aruba (without me) and I am so proud to say that they have stuck it out for 30 years. Through everything they have been through, they are in inspiration to me. They never gave up and they always fought through the ups and downs.

So April is almost over and I've done a few new things this month. I attended a marriage conference (even though I'm not married) and we learned some tips and tricks to hopefully help have a great marriage if that ever happens for me! I led the Sr. Highers on a Reverse Photo Captioned Scavenger Hunt, which was epically awesome. My favorite photo? This one:

Yep that's right. One of my kids doing a back flip off of my car, over another kid,while the girls looked on holding their breath. Fear not, he practiced before hand so we knew exactly where the kid on the ground would have to be in order to not get hurt. The Caption they had to adhere to in this one was : "All the onlookers could tell how this one was going to end"   The kids had a blast and when we were done, we went back to church for a pizza party. Great night.

JD and I also took Skidamirink hiking! She's been asking for a while now to go camping (something she has never done) but the weather has not been in our favor on that one. Although we did pick her up a PINK (gross) Princess sleeping bag this week so we are ready to go. We are hoping to go in May sometime. Instead of freezing our dupa's odd camping, we decided to take a day trip and go hiking with her. She was so excited, and we were not even 5 feet into the trail when she started saying "oh my gosh! Mom! This is so cool!" :) She did great. We stopped at Subway on the way up and had a picnic on a rock overlooking the river. Beautiful.

That's where we ate. She loved looking at the river. The whole time we were walking I kept repeating to her, "watch you feet. Always look where you are going to step" she insisted on taking the hard way on every path and up every rock. Totally Fearless and adorable. After a while as she climbed I could hear her saying "I watch my feet, always watch my feet." It was priceless. 

I watch my feet

We had a great time all day. We stayed and hiked for a couple of hours, and ended up leaving just in time as it started raining. We packed the day pack with lunch, snacks and water, a fist aid kit (just in case) and of course the camera. The first aid kit ended up being very helpful, as Athia for some odd and inexplicable reason, touched dog poop, so we were able to sanitize her hands right away (ew). After we got done, she looked and me and said "Mom! Why would I touch that poop?!" I answered "I have no idea...why did you?" Her response? "I don't know..that just gross" ahahahaha Hopefully that will be the last god poop touching incident we have to deal with.

What about anyone else? Any good hiking or camping tricks you want to share when it comes to bringing toddlers along? I'm nervous about taking her camping, mainly because I haven't been in over 10 years. So tips and tricks are welcomed!

Easter is a Lovely Time!

Greetings and salutations!

  Life has been a whirl-wind! Between work, school, skidamirink, JD, and the rest of life I hardly know what day it is at this point! This past weekend, however was Easter weekend. It was a blast. Despite the ever looming deadline of my prospectus presentation that was due yesterday (Monday) I managed to take the weekend and have some needs time with my family. We decided to have a family Easter dinner on Saturday with my family and then we went to Easter lunch at JD's grandparents (who are so adorable I can only hope to be in love like they are when I am their age!)
 
   I found myself wondering on Thursday what exactly I could do to decorate for Easter on Saturday. I had purchased an adorable EASTER wood carving thing on sale at Walgreens:

So that was cute and all, but I felt it needed something more. Being the Pinterest addict that I am I decided to do some looking and found the perfect craft! Neglecting my homework in the name of arts-and-crafts-bonding with skidamirink we went to Michaels and bought lots of colors of embroidery floss and a few packages of balloons. We made our own Easter egg decorations! How you ask? The inspiration came from Crafty Endeavor and immediately caught my eye. It was a titch more messy than I thought it would be (skidamirink actually wouldn't touch it because she didn't like the way the liquid starch felt) but it was initially easy and fun! 

So obviously balloons were the first place to start. The original blog said to use water balloons because of the smaller size and I should have listened. I used regular balloons and blew them up smaller but they were still a little big in the end to work with. I made the liquid starch with corn starch an water which proved a little more difficult to do than I thought. In fact I am still not sure that I did it quite right but it all worked out in the end. I wish I could give you the recipe for it, but I pretty much improvised so I'm not sure what I did! I let it cool and filled pie pans with the liquid starch.

I picked the pie pans because you have to wrap the floss in a circle around and I figured that the pie pan would work bestt as it is not too deep or too large. It worked great. 

From here we (JD did a whole 2 for me...thanks dear) wrapped the floss around the balloons however we wanted! The idea is that you then leave them to dry, pop the balloons and have beautiful eggs to make an Easter garland or however else you chose to display them. 

Once they were wrapped we let them dry.

Now I don't have pictures of the next part because I was alone and a little frustrated. After I popped the balloons the next night, I was surprised to find that the balloons did not deflate. The blog I was following said nothing about this, so I am wondering if this is because I may not have done the liquid starch exactly right, but I do not know. So...I popped the balloon and nothing happened. I laughed a lot while attempting to pry the balloons away from the hardened floss mainly so that I wouldn't cry do to stress and lack of sleep (it took over 1.5 hours to get all the balloons out of the hardened eggs, which as far as I can tell is not typical).  I worked and worked and finally......

Success!!! Now they were a little misshapen due to all the prying to get the balloons out, but they were incredible easy to re-shape so that was a blessing. I then took a thin metal stick we use to test if cakes and what not are done and I used that to scrape off the dried liquid starch that was left on the eggs. Then we hung them up! 

I then took the bags of starburst jelly beans I bought, and the Gerber Daisies and made a centerpiece: 

Easter dinner consisted of bacon wrapped pork loin, bacon wrapped sweet potatoes, a green bean feta salad, cheddar filled corn meal biscuits (all thanks to Kraft.com) and my sister made her cheesy hashbrown potato thingy that I don't eat. Over all it was a very successful Easter and I am so glad I got to spend it with family. 

On a side note, literally while I was typing this and skidamirink was playing with magnets in the kitchen (or so I thought) I noticed she got too quite (parents you know what I mean). So I asked her what she was doing and when her response was "I don't know" I knew I was in trouble. That being said, my beautiful girl with long (almost to her waist) curly hair....

This was Sunday

She is now my beautiful girl with incredible short hair....

I have cried for over an hour now....and I know it's just hair...but I can't help it. She keeps telling me that "it's ok mom, I'm still a princess" but it is so different! I know it'll grow back, but she looks like a new person and I can't get past it yet. I'm sure by tomorrow I'll be better but I'm pretty traumatized at this point. I was bawling in Great Clips trying to ask them to fix it,  fortunately for me I'm not the first mom to have this experience, and so when I asked "can you fi..." and started sobbing, they knew what I needed. The stylist was great and helped calm skidamirink too who kept telling me "I don't want to be a boy!" and now she keeps telling me how pretty she is. So I'm sad this is how her first true haircut had to come about, but I guess it could always be worse. 

What about you? Any awesome kid-cutting-hair stories to share?