A Little July 4th Awesomeness...

Easter Fun

I always have so many great ideas for things to do around Easter time, and somehow it sneaks up on me every year and I'm left scrambling at the last minute (hah...scrambling...Easter eggs...OK I'm pathetic). This year was no different. We did manage to fit in a few fun crafts in the days before Easter, but a lot of things - like dyeing Easter eggs - just didn't happen this year.

Amanda and I did make these super-cute tissue paper chicks:

I got the idea from a website and we modified it a bit...stupid dollar store was completely out of all pipe cleaners except red and black and we could only get small egg-shaped styrofoam balls. It still worked great, though. I was a bit dubious as I wasn't sure the tissue would stick well to the styrofoam, but it did, even as we rotated the balls to cover the whole area. Amanda did hers pretty much on her own, and added a few embellishments as well (hers is on the left) - lovely pom pom belly button, ears, and tail, as well as a crinkled up pipe cleaner "hat".

We also put together these great cards for family to give out at Easter dinner:

The idea for these ones came from here. (As you might have noticed, I mostly steal craft ideas from other people since I'm not great at coming up with them on my own!).

We had a lovely dinner at my mom & dad's place with both sets of parents and my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew (as well as little peanut niece/nephew-to-be!), plus my aunt and cousins. We were also celebrating Mike's birthday at the same time...he was an Easter Sunday baby which means that his birthday often falls right around the holidays, this year on Good Friday. The kids looked adorable in their Easter outfits (courtesy of Grandma):



This meant that we were on our own for Easter dinner, which doesn't happen very often! We picked up some rack of lamb and put together a pretty nice dinner: roasted rack of lamb, oven-roasted tomatoes with a bread crumb, pine nut, and feta topping (I made these up), steamed broccoli with lemon (even though I always forget that lemon juice turns the broccoli kinda brown!), and buttery rice. Yum! It was delicious if I do say!


And for dessert, I was actually organized enough to make something in advance. I always love lemon for Easter, and lemon roll is one of my favourites, so I decided to try the recipe from Best of Bridge. It was fantastic! If you're looking for a super-lemony dessert, this one definitely fits the bill. It was actually better a day or two later once it had sat in the fridge for a bit. I will admit that I didn't use real whipping cream...I'm one of the few people on the planet who doesn't love whipping cream, and after a heavy dinner I figured we could use something a bit lighter (as in sitting in the tummy lighter, not calorie-wise...that was already a lost cause). So I used Dream Whip instead and I thought it was delicious! I also doubled the amount of Dream Whip and used half to mix with the lemon filling and half to ice the outside. Mmmm...I wish there was still some left!



I am far too lazy to type in this long recipe, but I found it online (this site does not credit the recipe, but it's from Best of Bridge, The Best of the Best and More, Volume 1.

And so ends this long Easter post! Belated Happy Easter everyone!

Lest We Forget

Doodle by Lee. The code for this doodle and other doodles you can use on your blog can be found at Doodles.

Remembering 2008

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Originally uploaded by JenJeff

Wet, Rainy.. and a day off... Sometimes we forget to thank those who gave their lives so that we can live the way that we do.

Amanda and I were able to head down to the local cenotaph and place a poppy onto a wreath. There was a pipe band and a marching band as well. The highlight of the day was the WWI cannon.

I think that the day is special to us as Amanda and Sam's great grandparents were both in WWII and their great grandad on the other side was also in the war. It was also a great chance to remember and honor them as well!

Enjoy the day off.. but remember why we have it.

Birthday Portraits

Here are the portraits we had done for Amanda's 3rd birthday (we cheated and got them done several weeks ago so they'd be ready for her birthday):










And, just for fun, here is another photo we had done a few weeks ago at Ikea! Bopomo Pictures did a special promotion where you could get free pictures done for Mothers' Day. I decided to have both of us in the picture since there are so few photos of the two of us together, and I'm quite happy with the final result:


I quite like the photos on their site - maybe we will go down and have a real portrait session one of these days!

Valentine's Fun

This was the first Valentine's Day that Amanda really seemed to "get"...they did a lot of special crafts and activities at daycare, and she was pretty excited by the time the big day finally arrived. Of course, the day before, she learned it was "only one more sleep"...when I got her up the next morning and said "Happy Valentine's Day", she told me it wasn't "Ballentine's Day" yet, that there was still one more sleep. So it's obvious she didn't QUITE get the whole time thing, but it was cute nonetheless.

The evening before, we made some heart-shaped Rice Krispie treats for her to take to her daycare friends. It was interesting...I used gel food colouring, which I haven't used much before, and I guess I used too much. I was anticipating a nice pretty pastel pink, but ended up with dayglo neon! Hopefully the other kids didn't have too much diaper fallout from all that food colouring!!

A few pictures of us making the treats:

I love how Jeff always takes kitchen pictures when the kitchen is a mess...




Jeff playing with the "macro" settings...looks kind of cool!