Spring Time, Flower Time

We finally got out and got our spring flowers this weekend. Want to see a quick tour?

Emily's new hibiscus in the barrel. I can't wait to show you the color of the flowers. (The blooms got knocked off during transit.) I'm loving the pretty colors of the coleus in the green pot. I need to get a closer picture of it. 

 

Going to try some begonias in the boot this year. It doesn't have drainage holes so it's hard to keep the moisture right. If this doesn't work, we might need to try some cactus or succulents. 

The green pot has the blueberry bush in it. I was reading up on blueberries last night and it said I needed more than one plant for cross-pollination if I want to have any blueberries so we'll see how it goes. I wasn't planning to have a whole blueberry farm in my backyard. 

We got a fancy hydrangea for the front flower bed. It's supposed to have evolving colors all through the blooming season. I've never had a hydrangea before so we'll see how it goes. I love how big and bold the flowers are though. 

For the pots in the front, I went with a red and white theme. I put a couple different types of trailing flowers in the urn by the front door. I'm hoping the mandevilla vine turns out to be really showy with a trail of red flowers down the side. 

I always like to have some spikes in my tall pots for height. I got some in a dark purple shade this year. 

I usually have really good luck with begonias in my big pots. I went with red flowers on the begonias to go with the red theme. I buy bigger pots of flowers for the front so that they'll fill in quicker.

I still have one more pot in the backyard to fill. Any ideas?

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Eating At Eischen's

For supper tonight, we took the kids to Eischen's Bar in Okarche, Oklahoma. It's very well-known around this area, but we'd never been there before. It's about an hour drive from our house so that's probably part of the reason we've never visited before now. 

Eischen's is a real experience. They don't have a lot to choose from on the menu, but what they do have is really good.  REALLY good.

We had a whole fried chicken, okra, cheese nachos, chili cheese nachos and a frito chili pie. That was WAY too much food. Obviously, we did not know how large the portions were going to be. We would have been fine with a chicken, okra, and one of the nachos.

Emily really liked the frito chili pie. Noah liked to eat his chicken on bread with ketchup.

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Cool Happy Smart

Noah's class made a word cloud at school. Noah wrote his name on it and then his classmates took turns signing it and putting kind things about Noah on it. I thought it turned out so cute!

Noah's classmates think he's cool, happy, smart, silly and "kute". I happen to agree!

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Teacher Appreciation - Bath Bombs

This week was teacher appreciation week at the kids' school. The school had different themes each day - Cards and Notes, Lovin' from the Oven, Meet the Need, Favorite Things. But the PTA also had different things going on for the teachers each day.

We did not participate in all the events, but we contributed several things I'm going to share on the blog.  

One of the things we did is send tins of fizzy bath bombs to the teachers. Super easy!

I found some bath bombs in tins on Amazon and just added a tag that I printed off the internet.

These are the tags I found online. So cute and so easy.

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Frontier City Field Trip

Today was field trip day for Emily's class! They went to Frontier City, which is a local theme park. I went along as a chaperone.

There were 7 girls in my group. We all had a good time. One of the hardest things was trying to keep up with everyone when some girls did not want to ride the same rides as the others. 

I took quite a few pictures, but I don't have permission to post pictures of the other kids online so I had to crop some of them out of the picture. 

One of the rides we found was The Tornado, which is the Tilt-A-Whirl!  I rode it twice. I think Emily rode it three times. I love that ride. It was a lot of fun. 

Some of the girls were wanting to ride the Silver Bullet, which is one of the big rollercoasters. We headed over there and when we got close we realized that the line for the ride was very short, in fact non-existent. It took me a second to figure out what was happening, but the ride had gotten stuck at the top and the fire crews were there rescuing people off the ride!

They were like 80 feet up in the air or something crazy like that! The news helicopters were circling overhead and broadcasting the rescue live on the TV and internet. It took them about 2 hours to get everyone off the ride.

Thankfully, none of the kids from our school were on the ride at the time and everyone made it off there safely.

Since we were not able to ride the Silver Bullet, we kept walking and eventually found the water rapids ride. We got sooooo wet! I guess that's the point of the ride, but it was cold out there today and we were very wet. But this amusement park has a full-body heated dryer that you can pay to use. We all get into it together and tried to warm up a little bit. When I got home a couple of hours later, my clothes and shoes were still very wet. 

It was a good field trip and a lot of fun. I hope it's something that the kids will remember for a very long time.

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Wordless Wednesday - Teacher Appreciation

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It's raining, it's pouring

In the last 24 hours, we've gotten about two inches of rainfall and our backyard really looks it. 

Noah wanted to go out and play in the water, but it was rainy and cold so we stayed inside.

Someone was out enjoying the weather though.  This big bunny girl was out checking out our yard. We were wondering if she was looking for a place to have babies. A couple years ago, a bunny made a baby nest under our swing set fort. We decided to give her a strawberry to eat. I was surprised how quickly she went over to check it out. I would not be surprised if the strawberry was completely gone by tomorrow morning. The internet says not to give bunnies too many sweet fruits. The internet is always right.

Several parts of our yard retain water when it rains so we have quite the pond going on by our fence right now. I think I need to make a dry creek bed over in there area or something so that it can handle the water a little better. Thoughts on this?

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Elephant Cake Pops - Let's Talk About the Elephant in the Room

Elephant Cake Pops - How to make Elephant Cake Pops

How to make Elephant Cake Pops

Edited: I edited this post to add information about how to make the grey color of the elephants.

One of the things Emily and I made for the baby shower was these cute elephant cake pops.

I definitely need to work on quality control if I ever do this project again, but everyone seemed to like them.

I followed these instructions that I found online. She had a very good tutorial on the process.

The ears are blue candy melts. The trunk is made from the same candy melt that has been trimmed down to a trunk shape.  The feet are dehydrated marshmallows. The heart on the nose is a heart-shaped sprinkle. 

The Feet

Let's talk about the feet for a minute. Back around Christmas, I'd seen some Jet Puffed Mallow Bits dehydrated mini marshmallows in a cute little container. But I could not find them anywhere in the store. And they were sold out or extremely expensive anywhere I found them online. So I found another dehydrated marshmallow product on Amazon that was cheaper. I ordered it ... and was very surprised when a 1 pound bag of dehydrated marshmallows showed up at my house. Anybody have suggestions on ways I can use about a million dehydrated mini marshmallows?

The other thing I wanted to say about the dehydrated mini marshmallow feet was that when I got them out of the bag and started working with, they rehydrated very quickly and began to stick to everything. So you might want to just get a few out at a time. You also have to make sure you adhere the marshmallow feet to the cake ball using melted candy before you dip the elephant into the melted candy. 

The Trunk 

I used a small metal decorating tip to cut the candy melts into the shape of a trunk. I was able to get about two trunks out of each candy disk. I used the exact same blue candy melt discs that I used for the ears. These are the blue candy melt discs that I used. I bought two packages and had one leftover. I only made about 24 cake pops though. Actually, I made probably twice that many balls, but only dipped 24 of them. Anyway, you will want to dip the trunk into candy melts and push it into the cake ball before you dip the entire elephant in the melted candy. 

The Heart

I think the red heart is one thing that wins these elephant cake pops. I used these red heart sprinkles. They were the perfect size. 

The Eyes

I ordered these edible markers online to use for the eyes. I had a very hard time getting them to write and so some of my elephant eyes were pretty messy and uneven. I still don't know what I did wrong there, unless the markers were not made to write on candy melts. 

The Grey Color

The grey color of the elephants was made by mixing 1 part black candy melts with 3 parts white 

Some of my elephants started to droop on the stick while they were drying. I think these were ones that did not get a good amount of candy melts between the stick and the cake ball. You should let the candy melts pool around the stick a little bit so that the cake ball doesn't move or come off the stick.

I am probably doing a terrible job explaining, but just look at the tutorials that are online and you will get the idea.

Also, be prepared to be in the kitchen for a while because it's definitely a process to get them all decorated up. But I think it was worth the effort!

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Cheater, Cheater?

This kid - what am I going to do with him? On Friday, he wanted to wear this shirt to school because it had one of his spelling words on it.

Yes, I let him wear it.

He would have spelled ROAR correctly anyway. He's a great speller. 

Smart boy.

And handsome.

And pretty silly, too.

Yep, that's my Noah.

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Baby Shower Sneak Peak

On Saturday, we went to Mandy's baby shower. Emily and I helped make some of the food. I want to share more about some of the things we made, but first I just wanted to post some pics of the sweets tables.

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Honor Choir

This spring, Emily tried out and was accepted into the Honor Choir at her school. They practiced after school one day per week.  A few weeks ago, they had their Honor Choir performance at the local high school. The performance included Honor Choirs from all the elementary schools that feed into our high school.

We were sitting up in the balcony during the performance and I couldn't get any good pictures. This was the best I could do. Can you find Emily? She's on the back row.

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Spring Break Adventure - Wild Wilderness Drive-Through Safari

On Sunday morning, we checked out of our hotel then met up with Heather and Stephen and drive out to the Wild Wilderness Drive Through Safari in Gentry, Arkansas.

When we first got there, we went through the drive through safari. This is one is different than the drive through zoos that we'd been to before because they don't allow you to feed or interact with the animals in the drive through part. 

But this camel ... came right up to my window and he was so cute and friendly. I rolled down my window to pet him just for a minute and the kids got so mad! Noah said I should use #rulebreaker again. But this camel wanted to be petted. I. Couldn't. Resist. 

This safari had a lot of interesting animals like this big boy rhino. Or could be a girl, I guess.

Also this hippo. And not a little hippo either. I don't know if I've ever been so close to a hippopotamus. And seriously, why is hippopotamus so hard to spell? 

They also had a lot of prairie dogs. I mean A LOT. And they were right out in the middle of the pasture with the other big animals. I don't know if their presence was coincidental or planned, but they were literally right along the driveway. 

After we finished up the drive through, we got to go through the petting zoo. At first, we ended up petting the animals in the naughty pen and it turns out we were not supposed to be there. But then we went over to pet the goats and baby calves then on to the kangaroos. How cool is that?!

We got to feed the kangaroos. Some of them had joeys in their pouches. 

The petting zoo area also had two giraffes that we got to pet and feed.

Those giraffes are smart. They know exactly who has the food and who doesn't. And if you don't have a treat for them, they don't want anything to do with you. 

There were really a lot of animals in the walk through and petting area. I don't even remember them all, I'm sure. But they have peacocks, giant tortoises, llamas, a lot of different kinds of snakes, several kinds of monkeys. 

Noah even touched a boa constrictor. 

 

After we got finished at Wild Wilderness, we headed to lunch at Shogun. We sat at the grill and watched the cooking show while we ate. We a had a lot of fun with Heather and Stephen.

But then it was time to drive home. What else do you have to do a long drive besides take a selfie? Silly kids!

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Easter Breakfast: Fruit Pizza

On Easter morning, we had fruit pizza for breakfast. This recipe is so easy to make ahead and is really delicious and cute. 

Here's the recipe I used.

Ingredients:

• 2 rolls refrigerated sugar cookie dough
• 8 oz cream cheese
• 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
• Small tub Cool Whip, 8 oz
• Assorted fruit
• 1 cup fruit juice
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3 tsp cornstarch

Spread 2 rolls refrigerated sugar cookie dough into a sheet pan. Bake for approximately 14 minutes until the cookie crust is slightly browned. Let cool.

In a small bowl, combine the cream cheese and powdered sugar. Add Cool Whip.  Spread over cooled crust.

Top with fruit. I used bananas, strawberries, blueberries, peaches and kiwi. You can use pretty much any fruit that you like, either fresh or canned. I used canned peaches and everything else was fresh.

Glaze: In a small saucepan over medium heat, combine fruit juice, sugar, and cornstarch. Whisk until mixture comes to a boil and thickens a bit. Spoon over fruit pizza.

Refrigerate overnight or until ready to serve.

This recipe can be customized to your liking. I accidentally picked up one roll of sugar cookie dough and one roll of chocolate chip cookie dough so I just used what I had.  It was still good.

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Spring Break Adventure - Bowling and Good Food

After our visit to The Amazeum, we were starving so we headed right over to Mellow Mushroom for lunch. Emily and I had been here before, but it had been a while.  Mike and I shared a Mighty Meaty and the kids shared a cheese pizza. Let's just say we were very please with our lunch. Mike and I both thought the pizza was better than our normal local pizza place back home.

I forgot to take a pic of our adventure until after I'd finished eating. Oops.

After lunch, we headed over to a local bowling center to bowl a couple games. I didn't do a very good job of taking pictures. Sometimes I get so caught up in our activity that I forget to pull out my phone and take pictures. 

 I don't remember who won the game, but it was definitely not me. We eventually had to go get Noah a bowling ramp to use because his ball was having a hard time making it all the way down to the end. 

During the second game, we were all getting pretty tired and I was tired of my ball rolling off into the gutter every time so I put up the bumpers on my turn. Haha. We had fun.

After bowling, we went back to our hotel to lay down for a little bit. Then we went to Compton Gardens to see if we could find some daffodils or spring flowers.  We walked around for a bit and saw some flowers, but it wasn't really the type of garden that I was expecting. It was still fun, but Noah's legs were tired.

Saturday night, we grabbed some burgers with Heather and Stephen. The kids knew that we were going to see "my friends" at some point on our adventure, but they didn't know who it was going to be. I think they both suspected that it was going to be Heather and Stephen, but I'd never say. It was really fun to see them and spend some time with them. 

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