Make a tiny garden with your tiny tot!

I've been trying to come up with activities that will get the kids outside and keep them occupied. This idea is super easy, fun, and really not very expensive.  You can create an adorable garden that your child can nurture all Summer for less than $20.

He picked a nice pinwheel to finish the decoration.

First we picked up a fence at Home Depot.  Then I let the boy pick whatever color of spray paint he wanted and we decorated the fence.  (Mom did the painting part)

I then had him pick out whatever flowers he wanted in his garden.  This time of year you can get loads of sturdy flowers for $1 each.  You don't need a lot, since you are just making a tiny garden.

I let him pick out his own watering can at the store.  I wanted it to be something he picked and small enough for him to handle, because my plan is to have him water his plants every day as part of our routine.

It took us a few hours of playing in the dirt, and I let him pick where the plants went.  In the end we have a very sweet little garden that he can take care of all on his own this Summer!

Can I have S'more Peanut Butter Quesadilla

Sylvia wanted something sweet, so I looked around the cupboards and came up with this dreamy little treat with stuff we had on hand.

Melty yumminess!

Ingredients: Tortilla, mini chocolate chips, Peanut Butter, mini marshmallows, cinnamon

Spread Peanut butter on tortilla

Sprinkle a few mini chips

Crumble on graham cracker

Add a couple of marshmallows

butter hot pan (medium heat)

Fold and cook

Finish with a sprinkle of cinnamon and watch them disappear!

The first thing Sylvia said when she finished hers was "Can I have some more??"

Holy Yum! 

Happy 14th Birthday!!

My baby turned 14 yesterday! I can hardly wrap my mind around it. The time has just flown by!

We had a wonderful party, and lots of fun family time. She had Ladro pie instead of cake. We are big fans of Cafe Ladro pie. We even had it instead of wedding cake at our wedding!
She got a Wii fit game, so we have all been playing on the balance board today.

Yesterday, the girls made "Haunted houses" out of chocolate graham crackers and candy. That was great fun.

Here are some of their wonderfully creative creations:





It did turn into a frosting mustache and mono-brow contest, which was also fun, but too close to my brand new couch as far as I was concerned. Luckily, the chocolate stayed on the faces and in the tummy's and off of the furniture!

Now, I am ready to sleep for a week.

Here is a funny photo from when Darian was less than a year old. She was sad because her friend had just left with her mom. I always thought it was an adorable photo.

Let me tell you about the time my heart stopped.

My daughter and I have a few routines that we enjoy. One of them is our weekend movie/bookstore routine.
Every few weeks she and I will go see a movie together and after the movie we will go to the book store. She is an avid reader so she tears through books really fast. She already has a pretty impressive bookcase in her bedroom for being as young as she is.
Generally how it goes is; we go into the bookstore of our choice that day, she goes to the section with the books she likes to read and I go over to the section with the books I like to read. I usually already have in mind exactly what I am going to pick up, so it doesn't take me very long to decide. She likes to flip through each book and read the backs, or open it up and read a few pages in the middle to see if it is what she wants.
Most of the time these book stores will have some form of a coffee cart or a cafe so I will go over and buy my Latte and her Chai and will meet her back by her books to tell her that time is up and we need to go pay. (If I didn't do this, she would be looking all day.)
On this particular trip I went and purchased our drinks and meandered back over to where she is always standing and she was GONE!
I didn't panic right away. At first I said her name and peeked around the high bookcases. I said her name again a little louder this time running a full circle around them. Then I saw a man briskly walking out of the store who I remembered seeing looking in the same section as she was when I left her there, I also noticed an emergency exit to the store right next to the shelves that I had not ever noticed before.
At this point my imagination has imagined this man having something to do with why I can't find her. In my mind he had shoved her out the emergency door to a waiting villain in a windowless van and was rushing to meet them out back.
At this point I start shouting her name really loud, I feel like I am going to throw up and I am just about to go running after this man when I hear, "Mom! I'm right here! Gaawwwd! You don't have to shout!"
And there she was, standing right in front of me looking both seriously annoyed with me and pretty embarrassed. The most beautiful person I have ever seen, all pissed off and everything.
It took me every ounce of strength to not throwm my arms around her and burst into tears right then. The adrenaline rush had already started, so I felt almost the same as I did the last time I was the passenger in a major auto accident where no one was hurt. We had to sit down for about five minutes so I could regain my composure.
It turns out she already knew what she was going to get, so this time she decided to go find me. The bookcases are really high so we passed each other on opposite sides and didn't know.

So, this time it was OK. This time she was safe and I was just an overreacting mother, and I am OK with that.
It ended up being a good thing though, because it made us revisit the topic of stranger danger and why you should always keep your cellphone on and charged and "What to do if..."

That was the longest couple of minutes of my life.

May your soda always be fizzy and may your Doritos never be soggy.

Confessions of a 7 year old. (sorry mom) ;-)

When I was little my mom and dad told me I was not allowed to eat my father's Doritos or drink his Coca Cola because it would ruin my dinner and my teeth.

They used to buy the Coca-Cola by the suitcase full, so every now and then I would sneak one out of the fridge in the middle of the night and hide it under my bed. Sometimes I would even take two.

Eventually I had quite the stockpile of soda squirreled away. I would drink the sugary and caffeinated goodness while everyone else in the house were sleeping. Then I would sneak into the kitchen and steal the giant bag of chips. I would eat as many as I thought I could get away with without being noticed and then I would suck the cheese off more of them one chip at a time and carefully line them up on a plate to dry.

When I had my fill of nacho cheese goodness I would dump the cheeseless chips back into the bag and shake the bag to "recoat" the chips with the cheese from the other chips. Then I would put it back where I found it, no one the wiser.

True story.

So, the burning question is: Do you really know what your kids are doing while you're sleeping?