Happy Friday Countdown

Mr. Pear left for a business trip Tuesday morning at 5AM. He will be back tonight landing in precisely 5 hours as I sit and type this. Yes, I am counting. It has been a long trip with both girls feeling yucky with the heat wave and dry weather here. I am not certain how dry it got, but at one point yesterday our thermometer read 43C.

We got through the week by the grace of God, and with the help of 2 Curious George DVD's, a new coloring book and a new texture book.

When the girls were both acting like they had a touch of the flu yesterday (except for the fever part) I set Miss Pear up to watch George while Baby napped and canned 4 quarts of tomatoes. Then while they girls were taking forever to eat supper I chopped up pears to make homemade pear cups (like the fruit cups you buy in 4 packs in the store), and I think they will be a hit.

Here is a picture of the fruit of our labors:

The fruit cup jars are the little 4 oz ones that are used for making baby food. I tried canning mango puree for Miss Pear when she was about 8 months old, and it worked fairly well, but Baby would rather feed herself and there is no seasonal fruit she inhales that I would feel the need to save a massive amount of....except for pears...both girls adore pears, and think canned pears are better than candy!

So as this business trip draws to a close I realize that the reason this is so hard for everyone is that we are one of those unusual families who just love to be together. Which means we are going to have a great weekend!

Tylenol Recall

While I do not usually talk much about stuff like this, I do talk about being a mom and stuff like that, and this is part of it.

I just heard that Tylenol is doing a recall on some of the products in their infant/children's line. You can find the information here. I know that I have to go through our medicine cabinet because this is my go-to medicine for teething and fevers!

A Project for Miss Pear - Can you help?

The Post Office Book: Mail and How It Moves

(this is the book we will be using...)

Mr. Pear is on a business trip, and we need a distraction because Day 1 (yesterday) did not go great. So I decided to try to move up a homeschooling project I had been planning for later in the fall. But to do that I need your help!

Miss Pear has a very active curiosity, and once something piques her interest she keeps coming back to it to explore it until we have taken it as far as we can. She has an ongoing fascination with the mail. She loves getting mail, and if the postman has to actually come to the door to deliver a parcel, that is the best! (I blame the grandparents for this as they send her lots of cards and stuff). The funny thing about Miss Pear is that she does not actually care what comes in the mail, just as long as there is a piece for her! Recently she discovered that not everybody gets their mail the same way we do (a bank of boxes down the street), and this was very curious to her. So we are looking into it.

I was wondering if you could please help us look into this by leaving a comment answering a few questions for us:

1. Do you live in an apartment, house....? (If you could include the region or state you live in - whatever you are comfortable with - that would be fun too because I can show her where that is on a map...she loves maps)
   
2. Where is your mail delivered to? (Box at your house, post office, etc.)
3. Are letters delivered differently than packages?
4. Where do you mail a letter from? (do you have to go to the post office or do you mail it from somewhere else.)
5. Where do you mail a package from?

Some of these questions might seem the same, and in some situations the answers will be the same, but in polling our family we discovered that there are often very different answers!

Thank you so much!

Saving and Stockpiling

It has long been my method of grocery shopping to shop the sales to stock my pantry, fridge and freezer. (Rather like this post about the Buy Ahead Principle.) So when I am planning my menu I try to make it almost exclusively with what I have on hand, then with what I can get on sale. In a perfect world my grocery money is devoted to buying fresh stuff and sales. This means that my shopping cart can look kind of funny...like the time I had the flu and my husband and oldest daughter went shopping and bought 15 boxes of pasta and 10 jars of pasta sauce! But I am okay with that.

I recently discovered the Prudent Homemaker, and she takes preparing, planning and stocking her pantry to a whole new level! While I don't have the room for that kind of stockpiled pantry in my little California house, she certainly gave me some excellent ideas and re-energized me to get back to it!

She also recently wrote an excellent guest post on "What Are The Gaps in Your Stockpile" which is also very interesting and challenging.

These two pages really got me thinking about just getting to the next sale to really thinking about how I can build a stockpile and really use it to cut our grocery bill, and be better prepared for life's unexpected surprises, rather then just using it to make life a bit easier.

What tricks to you use for saving on your grocery bill? Have you discovered any new must-read posts about this? I would love to hear your thoughts as we are always learning!

Baby's Thank-You Notes

After making the invitations, the decorations, the cakes (and here) and the goodie bag cookies it seemed silly to buy thank you notes, so I made those too.

I used the same red paper and ribbon as in the the invitations (as well as a different designer paper from the same package) in addition to a nice matching orange paper. I also used the same stamp for the lady bug as was used for the decorations.

Here is the front of the card - the lady bug is actually peaking out from the inside of the card.


And here is the inside view...


Our company just left on Saturday morning, so writing the thank you notes is a top priority this week!

The Goodie Bag

I never know what to put in goodie bags that find that balance between fun and not breaking the bank. So this time I opted to bake sugar cookies and decorate them like ladybugs. I used made enough icing from the first cake to also decorate the cookies.

Here are the cookies all wrapped up to be handed out - adults too, of course!

Here is what the cookies looked without the wrap...or right before being devoured:


And here is the basket of cookies just waiting to thank our wonderful guests!

And, of course, there is the ribbon from the invitations and the lady bug from the sandwich picks making additional appearances!

The Decorations

The decorations for Baby's party were simple because she has a big sister who REALLY wanted to help because this big sister loves her Baby.

The first part I had to sneak in during nap times: Sandwich picks to decorate the homemade rolls for the sandwich bar (at first I was going to make the sandwiches and then decided that because we had picky eaters it would be best to let everyone assemble their own!)



Then Miss Pear helped me make ladybugs to decorate the windows:



We used the foam sheets you can get at the crafting stores for about $1, and each sheet of red was good for 2 bugs with a useful remnant for another project for Christmas, (So 3 sheets of red and 1 sheet of black), some google eyes, some glue, and a sharpie marker for the line.

It was such a bright sunny day that we could not get a good picture of the lady bugs above the two windows, so you might have to squint to see them! And I somehow neglected to take a picture of the buffet to show you how cute the sandwich picks looked in action. Oh well. And the sandwich picks were in action because the children LOVED them!

Birthday Party Cake

In some ways Thursday's cake for Baby's actual birthday was a trial run, it was just for family, so if it ended up looking funny or something it was not going to be a huge embarrassment! So that gave me lots of confidence to just try some things. I was really happy with the way it looked, but I thought that the icing in the lady bug did not taste great because of all the coloring paste used to get the colors that dark. It still tasted good, but I felt that I needed to work on it a little bit more, so for Saturday's party I played it safe and just used simple chocolate and cherry icing (the cherry icing is made by using the juice from a jar of maraschino cherries to flavor and color your icing). The results looked like this:



I was THRILLED with the flavor, but liked the way the other one looked better. So next time I would make a cherry icing and then tint it red, and I would make the icing very chocolaty and then tint it black.

And the cake must have been delicious because at the end of the party we had 2 pieces left!

The baker was very happy....

Birthday Cake

This is the birthday cake I made and decorated for Baby. All things considered, I am pretty pleased with the results because I think you can actually tell it is supposed to be a ladybug...it was my first attempt at really decorating a cake and not just icing it and putting stuff on top.

The cake is a banana cake from The Cake Bible. I iced it first in a white icing and then made red icing, and chocolate icing which I then tinted black. The round shape was achieved by finding an appropriate sized bowl and placing it upside down on the cake to get a nice outline to work with.

Baby's Birthday

Baby's birthday and birthday party were wonderful! We still have company all this week so I thought I would just share some of the birthday fun with you. As always the pictures won't actually show you our family...at least no faces...but it will show you some of the fun things we did.

I thought I would start with Baby's Birthday invitations that I made.


The stamp set is Love Bug from the current Stampin' Up catalog (it is one of the hostess sets). The paper is also from there and is Real Red, Whisper White and Summer Picnic Design Paper. (The ribbon is from Michael's)

Here is a close up of the bugs.


The stamp is just the outlines and then I colored them in.

(I cannot find a link to the stamp set because you can only order it if you host a party, but you can see other examples of cards using this stamp set here.)

Happy Birthday, Baby!

Today is Baby Pear's first birthday!

It seems almost impossible that she could be 1 already! And then when we think about all that has happened with her it seems hard to believe she is only 1! We are so blessed by her, and so thankful for the healing the Lord has already brought into her little life!

Between her big blue eyes and her huge smile she is a real sweetie! She is curious and interested in everything, and loves her big sister very much.

We are celebrating in fine style today, just our family, and are then having a party with 2 other families on Saturday!

Tomatoes, tomatoes everywhere!

A few weeks ago I was sure we were going to lose most of our tomatoes to blossom rot. But, in a true gardening miracle, we lost about a dozen tomatoes and the rest are beautiful! But HUGE! So today I took a bowl of tomatoes, some green peppers, some jalepenos and some other assorted odds and ends and tried my hand at making salsa for the first time.

I used the recipe from Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving: 400 Delicious and Creative Recipes for Today called "Simple 'Home' Salsa". I will let you know in about a month if it is good, and if it is, then I will type up the 2 page recipe for you!

For those of you who wonder such things, I needed 10 cups of coarsely chopped tomatoes and got 3 quarts of salsa.

And there are so many large tomatoes out in the garden that there are probably another 2 batches of salsa out there! So I will be harvesting them as they ripen and freezing them as I will not have a chance to can them for the next 2 weeks. My MIL who has been canning all her life said that this works fine with tomatoes.

Happy Long Weekend

Our long weekend started this morning with friends coming over for a play date and lunch. It was a wonderful way to start a 4 day weekend, and Miss Pear is very excited that daddy does not have to work tomorrow!

Next week we will have company and be getting ready for Baby's first birthday! There is still lots to do even though we are keeping it small and simple, so let's just assume I might be blogging much next week!

I hope you have a wonderful long weekend filled with rest and lots of fun!

ChristianBook.com Coupon Codes

If you have been reading here for any amount of time you pretty much know I LOVE books, and love getting a deal, and if there is a coupon to sweeten that deal, even better! You also know that I love Christianbook.com Home because their prices are always great!

I just placed an order with them and used one of 2 coupon codes that I have for them and it occurred to me that I had neglected to share them with you!

So here they are:
289109CE gets you 10% off your order of $35 or more until 9/8
289018AADYGW gets you free shipping on your order of $35 or more until 10/31

Unfortunately you cannot use (combine) both codes on one order, and you can only use each code once.

As always, I would appreciate it if you would click through my links if you are ordering. If you click through my link anything you put in your cart and order during that session sends me a credit.

Butter Tarts

Last week I posted about Butter Tarts and was sad to see that my American readers had not tasted these delicious morsels! As it is impossible to invite you all over for tea to introduce you, I decided to do the next best thing, although it is a distant second, and share the recipe with you.


Butter Tarts

12 Pastry lined tart shells (You can buy these, but I just make a pie shell, roll it out, cut it and fit it into my well greased muffin tin, with the tart shells coming approximately half way up. A recipe of pie pastry to make a double pie shell will make 24 nice tarts with enough dough left over for pat deux soeurs.)
1/3 cup raisins (although I don't measure I just put some in the bottom of the tart shells)

1 egg
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
3 tbsp butter or margarine softened
1/4 cup corn syrup
1 1/2 tsp vinegar
1/4 tsp vanilla
1/8 tsp salt

Divide raisins amongst tart shells

Beat egg with a spoon in bowl until smooth. Mix in next 7 ingredients in order given, one at a time, mixing to incorporate each time. Spoon over raisins. Tart shells should be 2/3 full. bake on bottom shelf in 375 F oven for about 12-15 minutes until pastry is browned and filling rises up but does not break the surface.

Cool.

These freeze very well...should they last that long...I usually double the recipe.