Valentine's Day 2018

Over the past several years I've had fun making valentines for my older daughter's daycare classmates. 

All of the ideas that I have used have been non-candy ideas because between Halloween and Christmas I feel like kids are just saturated with candy.  You can read about the sock valentines here and the gold fish valentines here.

This year I had two set of valentines to make with two kids in daycare.  I also decided to make a little something for the teachers too. 

I made these cute teether valentines for the baby room at daycare.  I love a good pun when it comes to Valentine's Day if you haven't noticed.  I found these adorable silicone teethers on Amazon.  They come in packs of 5 so I needed two for the 9 babies in Ana's room.  That means that Ana got one too and she loves it.  It is so easy for her to hold and she loves chewing on it. 

They are food grade silicone and can be put in the refrigerator to get them chilled to help with sore gums.  I used my Silhouette Portrait to make, print, and cut the tags that I tied to the teethers. 

The teethers are supposed to be fruit shaped and it says on the package that this one is supposed to be a pineapple.  I don't know about you but to me this looks like an ear of corn ha ha!

For my two year old's classmates I made these play-doh valentines.  I just bought the party pack of play-doh (found in the party aisle at Target).  I made the cards on my Silhouette of course.  The holes ended up being a little small for the play-doh containers so I just snipped around the circle to make the opening a little bigger. 

Finally I made some heart cookies for the teachers and attached this cute card to each box.  I got the boxes from work.  Someone had brought the teachers at my school chocolate covered strawberries from Edible Arrangements and they came in these boxes.  I covered up the Edible Arrangement logo on the front of the box but didn't realize there was one on the inside lid too.  One of Ana's teachers said "I didn't know Edible Arrangements made cookies."  So funny. 

The cookies are chocolate sugar cookies that I made using this recipe from the blog Baking a Moment.  These cookies are fantastic.  They don't spread and you don't have to chill the dough because the recipe calls for chilled butter. I used a scalloped heart cookie cutter to cut them out.  For the frosting I used this recipe from the blog In Katrina's Kitchen.  This was my first time using the recipe and I really like it.  The flavor was good and it was easy to pipe.  I added a couple of drops of red food coloring to get this nice pale pink color which ended up matching my little pink pearl sprinkles perfectly.  I love to bake but I am not the best decorator in the world but this frosting made it easy to make a pretty finished product.

That's all for now.  I've got to get back to sewing now.  I think my next post will be another installment of my Sewing for Baby series as I have been working on a ton of baby related sewing projects lately!

Pumpkin Spice Lactation Muffins

Happy February!  It is crazy to me that it is February already and that my littlest one just turned 4 months about a week ago.  The last few days before she turned 4 months were not very fun as the stomach flu hit our house pretty hard.  The girls and I both had it and it was a pretty nasty strain of it.  No matter how much water I try to drink when I have the stomach flu I still tend to experience a little bit of a dip in my milk supply and this time was no different.  When Lyla was a baby I came across these delicious pumpkin lactation muffins and made batches upon batches of them.  I struggled a lot more with my milk supply in general with her.  When Ana was born I decided to make a batch of these right away but was dismayed to see that the recipe and post no longer existed.

I found a couple of other recipes for pumpkin lactation muffins but they just weren't the same.  So I decided to see if I could recreate the recipe myself and I am happy to say that I was successful.  I am writing this post more for myself to preserve the recipe but they are quite tasty so I'm sure others will appreciate this recipe as well.  Now I am not a food blogger so my pictures leave a lot to be desired.

Trust me they are much better than my not so great photos lead you to believe.  These muffins are perfect.  They taste like good pumpkin bread and are so moist.  I love to load them up with dark chocolate chips and walnuts.  They are seriously my favorite and if you leave out the brewer's yeast and flax they could be some tasty regular old muffins as well.

Here is a link to the recipe if you want to print it.  Next up for the blog: I have a few sewing projects, another idea for non candy homemade Valentines, and someday I will finally share all of the updates to out living room because it has come a long way from the dark purple room from when we moved in.