Some Halloween Muffins

We are going out to a Halloween party this afternoon and so one of the treats I have put together to take are some choc chip muffins with a little Halloween twist : ) These gorgeous muffins cases are from a great online store called sweet themes, they have so much great stuff for all sorts of holidays and parties throughout the year- If I want a cookie cutter this is where I go. http://www.sweetthemes.com.au/

Here is the recipe

Ingredients-

2 cups flour

1/3 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup sugar

2 ts baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

2 eggs

125g melted butter

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 cups chocolate chips

1. In a large bowl mix together flour, sugars, baking powder and salt.

2. In a separate bowl mix together milk, eggs, butter and vanilla.

3. Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and add the milk mixture.

4. Stir to combine, then fold in the chocolate chips.

5. Spoon the batter into prepared muffins pans and bake at 200 for 15-20 minutes.

Then just to add some extra spook I added some cupcake toppers : )

Bubbles

I am not sure about your house but bubbles provide hours and hours worth of entertainment in our home, so when I found some little Halloween bubbles I thought they would be perfect to add to the theme of the week : ) Watching Flynn try to learn to blow bubbles was priceless!!

Look out for some yummy Halloween cooking tomorrow : )

Decorate for Halloween

I like to make an effort to put up some small decorations for the Holidays. I have mainly done Easter and Christmas in the past but this year I started doing Halloween. You can start small and just add to your decorations each year.

This year I just bought a few things like the hanging pumpkin from my post a few days ago.

I love to add bits and pieces to this wooden tree each season as well !!

Even some special serviettes will get you in the festive mood : )

Recent POTD

Whilst I am waiting on some extra Halloween stuff to photograph and post for you tomorrow I thought I would post some of my recent POTD. I am still loving this project so much. I cannot believe how much it has changed my everyday POV of what a want to capture for us to be able to look back on over the coming years as a family.

I was really excited to read on Becky Higgins blog last week that she will be doing some sort of kit again next year Yay!! I am so excited as I was getting a little worried about what I was going to do for next year.

http://www.beckyhiggins.com/blog/2009/10/q-friday.html

As soon as I hear/read anything more about this kit I will let you all know as I know a lot of readers are interested in doing something similar for next year.

Flynn and mummy watching a special movie together over the weekend with popcorn-

A family dinner on a typical weeknight

Flynn going a little sticker crazy

Man's best friend

Flynn after 3 year old Kindy open day trying to eat his balloon dog!!

Halloween Painting

There is no need to pretend we all like painting with kids !! Lets be honest it is messy, there is a lot of set up and clean up and it generally only entertains my 2 year old for about 20 minutes. So why even do it? Well I like to give Flynn as many great/ educational experiences that I can at home. I work full time and so I do not have as much time as I would like to do things like this but whenever we can we are cooking, making play dough food, doing some craft or painting. I decided early on that I wanted to be a part of this fun stage of his development and that I was not going to leave it all up to daycare and playschool.

Although I love Flynn's daycare and he loves going there twice a week I also think they miss out on a lot of one on one time there as they have 15 toddlers in the room who all want to paint !! And so those are the reasons why I take the time and put up with the mess to be able to provide Flynn with those extra experiences at home which are also great fun for both of us : )

I have done Potato stamping a few times we make up some great gift tags for our Easter treats this year using Flynn's stamped Easter bunnies !! He seems to really enjoy the painting and creating different shapes. We just use cookie cutters we already have at home. This time I decided to lay out some long paper and let him go crazy outside- that way I did not have to worry about any mess !!

And this was the finished product : ) I drew around the spiders with a black pen and then gave them little faces. I then attached some orange popsticks to the back. Flynn can now give these out to his little friends for Halloween.

Mini Banana Muffins

Care of my wonderful friend Naomi is this fabulous recipe for banana mini muffins. These are so great for little kiddies, they are just the right size for them to hold in the palm of their little hands. They can also have more than one without getting in trouble. Flynn helped me make these yesterday morning.

Ingredients-

1/2 cup light margarine

2 eggs

2 medium bananas

1 tsp vanilla essence

1 tsp bicarb soda

50ml warm milk

1/2 cup caster sugar

1 1/2 self raising flour

Instructions-

1. Cream butter sugar and vanilla together.

2. Add eggs separately, beating well.

3. Mash bananas and add to mixture.

4. Disolve soda in milk and add flour and milk alternatively.

5. Bake in mini muffins trays at a 180 oven for 15 mins until golden brown.

Halloween

Wow this really crept up on me and when I realized I only had a week until Halloween I knew I need to swing into action to get some of the things I wanted done !!! We did some Spider potato painting outside this afternoon and I hung some pumpkins in the living room, that's a start at least!!! I will be sharing our cooking and craft creations throughout the week : )

Annoying Spice Containers

Hands up if you find those annoying little spice containers, jars and packets really hard to keep tidy !! So that's probably a lot of you. I agree I found it incredibly frustrating to find spices and keep them fresh in the pantry, and looking neat as well!! I found spice racks to be over priced and they really limit how many spices you can store in them. So when I looked under my second sink I decided this was the perfect place to store those annoying containers !!

You could use any small cupboard/shelf and achieve the same result. After I decided where I was going to store all of my spices I set about replacing them all with the large Tupperware spice containers. This way they were all the same size and shape so they would stack easily and neatly in the cupboard.

I have labelled these on the spine with the actual spice name and then just the starting letter on the top to make the correct spice easy to find. They were in alphabetical order (very anal I know!!) but once Flynn discovered this cupboard those days were over !!

Pre-make a salad

So it is finally spring !!!!!! And coming with spring and summer is all of those great foods we have been waiting all winter to eat- namely BBQ's and salads. I have been pre making our weekly salad for awhile and it has been working so well I thought I would share it here : )

At the start of the week either Sunday or Monday night I chop up our salad for the week. We are then able to use either all or pieces of this salad for all different things like- an actual salad, stir fry, sandwiches/wraps, tacos etc. We use bits and pieces depending on what we are eating that night. I top it up throughout the week when it starts to run low and then clean it out on the weekend to start again.

I use the Tupperware Serving Centre which is absolutely love. These will set you back about $50 but are worth every cent in my opinion as they last forever and have so many different uses. Almost every party we have I pull a few out and fill them with different snacks.

Another great use for these which is something a girlfriend of mine does is she she chops up snacks for her daughter on a Friday night like cheese, polony, fruit and dips etc and puts it on the bottom shelf of the fridge. Then her daughter can access this over the weekend whenever she wants to have a snack. I love this idea and will definitely be using it once Flynn is old enough !! What a great way to help your kids to make healthy snacks choices whilst still controlling what they are eating : )

How does your garden grow ?

We are very new to gardening especially planting to eat. We decided to have a go at strawberries and we have been amazed at how easily they have grown in our garden and how many fruits we have !! It has been such a great experience for Flynn as well to not only watch them grow but also to help water/tend for them and then explaining to him when they are ready to be eaten.

We have planted a large fruit tree orchard in the backyard and hope next year to start seeing lots of fruits from these as well. And the vegie patch- well we want to get that done in the backyard as well- eventually, but for now we will just enjoy these sweet strawberries- lovingly grown by us. : )

The cutest teddy bear cookie ever!!!

I bought a new cookbook today and this is one of the recipes : ) Is this not the cutest teddy bear cookie ever? I will be giving them a trial over the weekend and if they turn out you will see the recipe up sometime next week. For now I am off to catch up on the last few weeks of my Project 365.

Christmas present idea

Every year I make something for our mums for Christmas, they love getting a hand made gift and having extra photo's they might not have seen. I have started duplicating these little books as I found that I also wanted one to keep and making 3 is not much harder than making 2.

Last year I found these gorgeous books at a craft store called 10 things I love about my mother. I thought it would be perfect for this project. I filled the mums albums with photos on them with Flynn, myself and Simon from the last year and mine was photos of Flynn and me.

I did the scrapbooking for all of them and Simon wrote in his mum's and mine and I wrote the journaling for my mums. The things that Simon wrote literally had me in tears on Christmas day and this little book has now become something I will always treasure.

I hope this inspires you to make something for those you love this Christmas, they will surely treasure it.

A Crafty week : )

I have decided that this week will be a bit of a creative/crafty week. I will be sharing a few different things I have made throughout the last year.

First of all as it is ending the year and everyone is starting to think about new calendars for 2010. I have starting seeing them on sale at the shops. Last year instead of buying a calendar for the wall and desk I made them. I bought blank calendars and then decorated them and added photos. The benefit for me is that I know have a great keepsake of the things we did throughout

the year and it forms a little book to leave on the coffee table for next year. I will be spending some time in December going through and adding things from my diary into the calendar pages.

The small desk calendar is made my Kaiser and you can get it from scrapbook stores and the large calendar is made by Making Memories and you can find something similar here-

http://store.scrapbook.com/mm-31084.html

The front cover of the calendar-

The inside cover-

January Pages-

May Pages-

July Pages-

This is the last page-

The answers to some of your questions

Warning- really long post ahead.

Thank you so much to those readers who have taken the time to email me their questions or just to say they love the blog, it is so great to hear that some of my household ideas are actually helping some of you improve your home life : )

I thought I would dedicate a post to answering some frequently asked questions so that other readers may benefit for the answers. If you want to ask any additional questions or have any organizational/other things you want to see on the blog please email me and let me know, I would love to hear your suggestions.

1. Also seeing your so wonderful at it, how do you store cards? eg: bday, wedding, christmas ect

For cards I use a few different things. I am not sure if you mean cards we are given at birthdays etc or if you means cards I pre buy for events throughout the year and so I will post both.

I buy cards all throughout the year when I see then cheap or they have a bulk buy deal going on. And so when I saw this card holder/divider by Phoenix Trading I was sold. It is such a great size and keeps all of my cards together. There are monthly dividers inside so when you buy the card you can slot it into the correct month.

For the cards we are given throughout the year I use 12x12 plastic pockets at the back of my ring binder scrapbooks, these store cards and also any other memorabilia from the year that I want to keep but I don't want to scrapbook like maps, tickets, cards, letters etc. The bottom photo is the back of Flynn's current scrapbook and I store our family stuff in the back of our family scrapbook. I purchased this particular pocket as part of a scrapbook kit but you should be able to purchase them from most craft stores.

2. I have stumbled across your blog and I am addicted! Please help me. Where do I start? Everything seems so overwhelming I just can't find a starting point and It seems like a huge task organising my house and life!

I live in chaos. I can't keep up with cleaning, washing and cooking. I am a stay at home mum and my son is in kindy 2 days a week yet my house is so bad I can never have people over!

Thanks so much for an amazing blog!!

Thanks so much for your question Jen- for starters know that you are not alone we all feel the same overwhelming sense of not knowing where to even start!! I think this is such a hard question to answer and organizing and taking charge of your home is such an individual thing. The first thing I would do is identify what absolutely bugs you the most and start with that. Allocate yourself 10 minutes at a time to deal with that one thing ie- kitchen and start small, one cupboard, one garbage bag, one drawer. You will feel so inspired at what you can get done in that 10 minutes that you will be able to start to make headway.

My other suggestion is when you are organizing find a permanent home for things as apposed to just putting them somewhere to get them out of your sight (except your junk basket) This process will take slightly longer but once you work through each room and everything has a place you will be surprised how little it takes to maintain!!

3. I was wondering where you got the padded liner for the car seat that Flynn is pictured asleep in?

The car seat liner that was pictured here is made my Goldbug and you can find it at the below link. We love it as it protects the car seat and we are able to pull it out and wash it when needed.

wttp://www.goldbug.com.au/product_view.php?prod_id=389

4. Your toddler meals are a great idea but doesn't your toddler eat normal family meals?

Yes Flynn does eat normal family meals as I explained in my first post there are a few reasons I still cook bulk meals up for Flynn.

1. Simon likes to cook a lot of curries we eat these at least 1-2 times a week and as these are way too hot for Flynn to eat, on this night he would have one of his own meals.

2. Sometimes if one/both of us is working late we like to get Flynn fed early at 5:30 so that we can sit down together alone at 7 and have dinner with just the 2 of us.

3. Sometimes I am just starting dinner and we realize Flynn is way over tired and it not going to be able to hold out for 30 minutes while we try and get dinner cooked- on those night we just pull out a pre cooked meal to avoid a melt down.

This system is just something that works for our family it might not work for you. As we have more children it also may not work as we will want to all eat together, but for now it is a great system for our family and helps to reduce a lot of the stress surrounding meal times.

Just the 2 of us

It was just Flynn and I this weekend as Simon took of on a boys road trip with some friends. It was a quiet one at home mainly and I was looking forward to Simon getting home last night so that I could have a break!!!

Our weekend in photos-

Modeling some new summer pj's

A special weekend breakfast of cancakes (pancakes) with pear and mango

When I couldn't find Flynn this is where he was, having a "sleep" in the guest room- he is such a funny boy!!

Kids bathroom storage.

When we moved into our house with a huge bathroom for Flynn we thought we would have plenty of storage with 3 bathroom cupboards. Oh how wrong I was !! I quickly identified that I needed additional open storage for toys, extra towels, toiletries etc.

There are a few things I have added into the bathroom to make life easier-

This open bathroom storage is from Freedom as is great as it has a really small footprint in the bathroom. I use the bottom for extra towels as we always seemed to need extras for mopping up spills etc. The round tubs are from Ikea and they hold extra small towels and flannels for the bath. The idea was that everything we needed for bath time was in here so we didn't have to go out of the room for anything.

The Boon frog pod is what I chose for toy storage as it is huge and holds all of our bath toys. You take off the back and it acts like a scoop so you can collect all of the toys at the end of the bath. I also got a basket for the counter to keep all of the washes/shampoo's etc we like to use which keeps them all together nicely.

Such a cute idea

I took Flynn to a local Fete today and bought Flynn this gorgeous little tea cup cookie from the baking stand. They were iced biscuits with marshmallows stuck on the top with a freckles topping and little handle on the side to make a little tea cup. Such a cute idea !!!!!

I will be posting tomorrow on kids bathroom storage : )

Link for the Take Away binder

Sorry I forgot to add the link to the binder in my previous post, here you go-

http://www.kikki-k.com.au/catalog/category-My_Series_Organisers-product-My_Take_Aways.html

Takeaway Organization

I thought I would share this recent system I came across for organizing our household takeaway menus as I was finding that when we did want to get take away we could never find all the menus !!! Do you have that problem at home ??

Well if you do this binder may work for your family as is does mine. This great plastic binder from Kikki.k it was only $30 and is soooo handy around the house. I am planning to get the Receipt one for this Financial year for tax time this year today when I go shopping : )

This is what the front looks like-

There are several sections in the binder for different types of Take Away's.

The plastic pockets allow you to slip in any menu.

Making your own flash cards

I made these awhile ago and as we were playing with them on the weekend I thought the idea might be worth sharing. We have a lot of flash cards in this house, I find them great for Flynn's language and recognition skills- but they can get expensive.

So I bought this sheet of wrapping paper for $1 and backed it in black card and made up some flash cards of my own. Flynn loved them as they were a change from our usual ones and they are just the right size for him to hold. They would also be great for older kids if you found some times tables paper etc. I also contacted mine for extra durability !!