Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Fun at the Park..

Several parks around here have "splash pads" for kids to play on. It is a fun and FREE way to spend some time. I was not sure what IE would think of it, but he loved it. He played more than I have ever seen him play. He even 'almost' interacted properly with other children. Here are some pictures from our day.

The kids with their Grandmother (J's mom)

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Just having fun at the park..not many pictures of IE because he did not really want to get his picture taken

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Couponing

There will be some couponing posts off and on, but not as many. It actually does take up time and I do not have as much of it with the kiddos out of school. Also, it has not been easy to coupon around here lately. The reason : shelf clearers. Shelf clearers are those people who make sure they have 100s of the same coupon and hit the store as soon as it opens (or in the case of 24/7 stores) at midnight. They use their coupons and buy everything the store has of that product. That leaves nothing for the rest of us. Stores are taking measures to stop this by limiting coupons to 2 per manufacturer per person per day..and that prevents shelf clearing, but it also keeps people who might just have bought 4 or so of each product from doing so. They are also no longer allowing more than 1 internet printed coupon per day. The reason for this being that not so honest people copy the coupons and use more than their share. The bar codes are unique as you print them, so even if the store does not catch this right away..the manufacturer will and the store will not be reimbursed (which means the person copying the coupon essentially STOLE the item. Maybe sometime I will sit down and right a post on couponing etiquette as I see it. Would anyone be interested?

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Cake making..

S's birthday is coming up and she wants me to make her a Paris Poodle cake. I decided I would practice before I made the actual cake. I am going to post pictures of my first attempt..it is not perfect, but it is better than I thought I would do on the first try. I did not try to go all out with a lot of colors. I just kept this one simple. I used a butter-cream fondant that I made myself and a box cake mix. I mixed red and blue food coloring to make the fondant purple. (Next time I am actually going to use the food coloring color I need, instead of mixing colors.)

Here is the fondant recipe (it is very sweet) - http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/rolled-buttercream-fondant/Detail.aspx

I used 2 different sized heart shaped cookie cutters to cut out the heart shapes from the fondant.

I used Duncan Hines Decadent Triple Chocolate cake mix. (This is seriously one of the best cake mixes I have ever used!) I made 2 eight inch cakes and stacked them, putting Duncan Hines butter-cream icing in the middle of the cakes.

Here are the pictures:

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Thursday, May 12, 2011

House Party

House Party is an awesome website! It allows you to apply to host parties. Companies send you lots of free stuff to have a party with. There are big gifts for the host, and smaller gifts for the people invited.

http://www.houseparty.com/


I am lucky enough to get to host one of the Expo Marker parties! I am so excited! I am going to use it as the theme for S's 7th birthday party next month! I will write more about this later. I just wanted to share this awesome site with you (and let you know it is for real). I can't wait to start planning the party! Now to start preparing for the 14 kids (limiting it to 15 kids besides her - and one has to be her brother!) I told her she could invite to come to my house...