So this post is all about craft instructions & food recipes. You might choose to check out now, as it might not be the post for you!
Hey there! I hope everyone had a very blessed Easter! <3
Like every other human being on the planet, we spent our weekend away from everybody else! Exciting stuff these days….let me tell you. :) I kind of feel personally responsible for the isolation AND the persistent winter:
I am pretty sure I said multiple times over the last year, "I just need one month. Just one month, where I don't have to do anything. I don't have to go anywherrrreee, and my kids don't have to go anywherrrre. But it has to be, like, a month straight." Poof. Wish granted.
And I am the fool who decided to embrace winter. I must have given winter the best hug it ever did get…because it won't leave. It takes a hiatus for, at most, a week, and then comes right on back again.
I'm really sorry about all of that, guys. But anyway…our Easter weekend was pretty chill…Below are the highlights, and below THAT are the details, if you want to go beyond our amazing list!
Main's
Pizza
Trolls
Star Wars
French Toast
Easter Crafts
Kitty Sleepover
Easter Buckets
Church
Sunday School
Garden Planting
Marvel Movie Challenge
Mains, Pizza, Trolls, Star Wars
We took a few Main's on Friday night, ate pizza, and watched the new Trolls movie, and started the new Star Wars movie. (Check out my post to get the movie reviews.) Saturday, we finished up Star Wars and had… The Best French Toast (inspiration here)
French Bread (sliced at a diagonal about 1 1/2 inches thick)
Butter (for the pan and for the finished French Toast)
Powdered Sugar (for sprinkling over your buttered French Toast)
Maple Syrup or our personal fav Lavender Cherry Syrup
Combine
3 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup of cream
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cap of Pure Vanilla extract
Soak the French Bread in the mixture (I can usually fit about 2 pieces in my bowl at a time) for about 15 seconds, then flip it over, and soak it for another 15-30 seconds. While it's soaking, sprinkle a little brown sugar on the bread.
Put the bread, brown sugar side down, in a preheated and buttered pan or skillet. Sprinkle more brown sugar on the side that is now facing up. Cook on medium heat for a few minutes (or until the first side is golden brown, and carefully flip, and cook the second side until it's golden brown. Remove from the pan. :)
Repeat with the remaining slices. (I usually make around 6-9 slices of toast - depending on how big the bread is. Some loaves are on the skinnier side, so I cut about 9 slices…if they're a little wider, I do 6.)
Add some butter, powdered sugar, and syrup to your finished toast...and wallah! It's like crème brule French Toast. The toast has a brown-sugary crystalized outer layer, and the inside is this creamy delectable gooey heaven.
Your Welcome.
After the movie and breakfast, we started…
Easter crafts
I had been unbelievably busy the last couple of weeks, and hadn't had time to do any crafting with the kiddos - not that I regularly do crafts with the kids. I know - I'm a bad mom. But honestly, they prefer to craft by themselves. Seriously. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that my kids LOVE to do crafts with me. Do they enjoy doing crafts? Yes. Do they like the IDEA of doing crafts with me? Yes. Do they enjoy doing anything that requires any effort or takes longer than 30 seconds? No.
That makes organized crafting a challenge. But I found that if I give them the chance to take lots of breaks, and have them help me with the easier stuff, they eventually appreciate the whole craft…eventually. And they usually ask to take on some of the harder parts of the craft. But I still end up finishing the craft. Anyway….
Using things I found in the super messy and disorganized "craft" room (I didn't have to buy a thing!!), we created some much needed Easter décor because I had none. I decorate for Christmas. The rest of the year, my house looks the same. I just don't care. We aren't there that much anyway (until recently). What an attitude, right? Maybe I should rephrase. I decorate our home with things that I LOVE to enjoy year-round. Is that better?
So…here's what we did to create our Easter masterpieces:
YARN EGGS (here's my inspiration)
I found some smaller balloons from my ridiculous collection of party supplies, and blew up way too many. I'm always overly ambitious when I first start a craft. The girls ended up playing with the extra balloons. But I blew them up to two different sizes. I found a recipe for the glue, and sat the cooled glue (in a bowl) on the newspaper covered table, along with the balloons. Then the girls helped me measure out and cut some yarn. I used some lighter weight yarn that I had in my large yarn stash. (A sport weight or embroidery thread will work best for something like this.) And we began the messy process of soaking the yarn and wrapping it around the balloons. It's kind of a tricky ordeal….at least to get started. But the girls took turns wrapping, and Kindrey helped me make sure the yarn didn't get tangled up! We set them out on the (enclosed) front porch to dry. We had to flip them over after Day 1, so that the underside had a chance to dry, too. It took two days for them to be completely dry, so they weren't ready on Easter. But they're ready now and sitting on our dining room table. And there they'll stay for an unknown amount of time. We're going to enjoy these eggs for awhile.
YARN WREATH (here's my inspiration)
I have so much yarn. So we used some of the oodles of yarn to create pom poms to decorate a cardboard circle/wreath form that I cut out of a pizza box. Thanks, Welsh's Pizza!
I never make my pom poms full enough to make a really poofy pom. I know I do this, but I never correct it. Glutton for pom pom punishment, I suppose. Did you guys know that the original way to say "pom pom" was actually "pompon"? That's a little piece of useless trivia for ya. So, back to my failing craft. I had to improvise, and totally change my game plan. This is pretty normal when I am "crafting". "Change of plans, folks!"
But my "change of plans craft" needed a little more oomph, so I looked to the fabric I had brought up from the craft room.
You see, I had found another Pinterest inspiration for a "stuffed bunny" that required no sewing. I thought it would be cute, fun, and easy. But now…it looked like something that would help spruce up my flopping Easter wreath.
So, I printed off a rabbit template, cut it out, and pinned it to my fabric (that was now folded over so I could cut out both sides at once). Then….I decided hot glue wasn't the way I wanted to go with this little guy. So I got out my needle and thread and started stitching him up. I used the yarn trimmings from our pom poms to stuff him (even though I had managed to find the fluffy filling in the craft room, too). What else was I going to do with all of that yarn fuzz?
I tied a yarn string around the bunny's neck (like a little bow), hot glued a button on for its eye, and also hot glued a tinier white pom pom to his little bum. Then I hot glued him on the wreath, and then cut a bit of the fabric to match the rabbit to make a "ribbon" hanger at the top of the wreath. And boom. Done.
Funny story. I sent Jake a picture of the finished wreath, and his response was, "Is that a bra?" What the heck? Is that a bra? No. What was he talking about? It's clearly a wreath! When he came in from the garage, I had to get some clarification from him. He thought the rabbit was a bra cup. Nice. Get your head out of the gutter, Mr. Robinson.
BUNNY SILHOUETTES
I still had a bunch of fabric and found another SUPER easy project. (Here's my inspiration) Fortunately, I happened to have some old picture frames, too, that I had retired from our playroom - they would work perfectly!
I found another bunny template, printed it off, cut it out, and pinned it to my fabric. I cut a rabbit out of four, different but coordinating, pieces of fabric, and here's how easy this next step is.
I took out the cardboard back of my frame, and placed it on the table picture-side up. I cut a piece of white printer paper to fit the cardboard back since the frame was 8 x 10 and well…paper isn't 8 x 10, and set the paper on top of the cardboard back. Then I centered one of the fabric bunnies on the paper. Then I placed the glass on top of the fabric bunny to hold it in place. Then I slid everything together into the frame. I just repeated those steps for the next three rabbits.
Say what?!
But with the crafts as complete as they were going to be for the day, it was time for dinner, and then it was time for the girls to go to bed. The Easter Bunny would be coming the next day, after all!
Kitty Sleepover
Another funny - the girls wanted to have the cats sleep with them that night. Our cats live outside. They don't mind hanging out inside during the day and napping in comfort, but at night when they're typically more active? That would be a different story. But we let them bring the cats in to see how it would go. They were all upstairs for about 20 minutes when one of the girls came running down the stairs, "Ginger wants out!" And the cat came strolling down the stairs, through the dining room, into the living room like he was "the king," and as I opened the front door to the porch, he followed me, and went right out to the front deck. He was on the prowl for somethin'.
We were woken up around 1:00 am to hear a similar story, "Blackie wants outside!". Of course, at 1:00 am, we're not nearly as helpful. "Open the door, and let her out," I shouted from our room. Lol!
It wasn't until the next day that we heard the funny stories about Blackie walking on the girls' faces to get to the window, and how she played with their feet. Oh dear. They tried to have a kitty sleepover. It won't be happening again for awhile, I imagine!
Oh, but it was finally Easter morning! Hallelujah!
Easter Buckets
The girls and Jake woke up before I did. Momma was tired apparently. So the girls waited so sweetly for me to wake up before exploring the Easter "buckets" that the Easter Bunny had left for them. :) And while they explored, I got the Grape Jelly Meatballs going, and mixed up the cheesy potatoes we would be having for lunch. The recipes below are lacking correct/exact quantity terms...you'll figure it out, or you can just Google the recipes! They certainly aren't secret!
GRAPE JELLY MEATBALLS
Lots of frozen meatballs :)
Big Jar of Grape Jelly
2 Jars of Chili Sauce
Dump it all in a crockpot and mix as well as you can. Cook for at least 3 hours on high or 6 hours on low. Mix occasionally to blend the "sauce". Done!
CHEESY POTATOES
Huge package of Frozen Hashbrowns (I think ours said "Family Size"...If you had a family of 30)
2 cans of Cream of (pick your poison) Soup (I like Cream of Chicken, but for our Easter potatoes, I had a can of Cream of Mushroom and a can of Cream of Celery)
1 Cup Chicken Broth (or Vegetable Broth)
1 Cup Sour Cream
1/2 Cup of Butter (cut stick of butter into cubes)
1 Cup of Milk
4 Oz Cream Cheese (cut into cubes)
2 Cups of Cheddar Cheese
2 TBL Worcestershire Sauce
2 TSP Garlic Powder
Salt & Pepper to taste
Mix all of the ingredients together and put in a large baking dish (I used my giant lasagna pan). Cover the pan with foil or a lid so that the potatoes don't dry out when you're cooking them. Bake for 1 hr to 1 1/2 hrs in a 350° oven. Stir once in a while to combine everything as it all begins to melt. It takes a long time to cook the potatoes….so be patient, but ENJOY once they're ready.
Church
Then we all got ready for church! I practiced the hymn (on the piano) we would be singing during church. I was curious what the tune was. I still didn't know by the time church started -I was pretty terrible. My sight-reading skills are a little rusty. Then, we took a couple of family pictures, and got ready to watch the service. We even used our dining room table bench as a "pew" for the girls. It was pretty sweet to have the view of their little feet swinging while they listened to the service. :)
Sunday School
After church, Jake got into his "After-Church" clothes, while I got the girls situated with their Sunday School lesson. Sunday School has been a little different lately! Normally, I help the preschool group, but it's nice to get to work with my own girls right now. We are so fortunate to have a pastor who has found ways to distribute the materials and keep the lessons going while we can't meet in person.
Then it was grub time! We enjoyed our family lunch together….and then Kamryn decided that it was time to change out of her pretty dress, but Kindrey was loving hers. So she wore it all day!
Seed Planting
I cleaned up the kitchen after lunch, and then decided to tackle planting our garden seeds in the little starter thingy I bought. I had no clue what I was doing, but I did it anyway….and now, I have a plethora of seeds in dirt germinating in the window seat. Wish me luck! (And since I planted the seeds on Easter Sunday, I already have some sprouting! YAY! I love seeing GREEN!)
I can't really remember what happened after that. It was really very taxing getting the seeds planted. So much effort. Like really. It did take a long time. I'm not just being dramatic...
Marvel Movie Challenge
What did we even do? Oh! I think we watched Captain America because we're going to watch all of the Marvel Movies in the appropriate order, and that would technically be the FIRST movie. We're an ambitious family. Who wants to join us?
I know we did other stuff, but I just can't remember. It snowed (your welcome), and the sun didn't shine...and when the sun doesn't shine, I can't function. Memory ka-pooey.
Oh - Jake did meet up with the Thurston Avenue Corner Club...despite the snow, and the fact that it was Easter!
But that was pretty much it in a nutshell! I can't wait for Easter next year...I'm sure it will be crazy different than this year's Easter celebration. :) Hopefully we will get to spend it with the REST of our family!
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