Oh hey! Did you remember that I was doing this Project 365 thing? I’ve been taking the pictures pretty faithfully, but I’m just a leeetle behind on posting them (only 8 weeks or so).
Little known fact: it’s often really hard to remember what was going on in a photo 8 weeks after you took it. I’m going to do my best to recall the significance (or lack thereof) of these photos, but I’m not sure I’ll get it right.
November 5, 2009: I read about this nifty trick for giving Augie applesauce without making a humongous mess on Parent Hacks: have him drink it with a straw. Utter genius and he thinks it’s fun.
November 6, 2009: I upcycled a couple of shirts for Wyatt using this Betz White tutorial. I already blogged about it, but frankly, there wasn’t much that happened in my life in November that I didn’t blog about so you’re going to see some repeats, in this very post even.
November 7, 2009: Hooray! Hooray! We finally got a new battery for our camera! It was so nice to have it back and working properly again.
November 8, 2009: Wyatt takes a break from playing Mama Kitty, Big Brother Kitty and Baby Kitty with me and Augie.
November 9, 2009: Scrubbing the muck off the baby.
November 10, 2009: You can’t name one of your children “Wyatt” without accumulating a certain quantity of cowboy paraphernalia. Augie is old enough now to experience the joy of riding the rocking horse and wearing the baby cowboy hat.
November 11, 2009: This was the day I baked the Watergate cake that my family always made when I was a kid. I don’t make cakes very often and when I do it’s hardly ever something I do on a regular old day so it’s an understatement to say that Wyatt was excited.
Monday’s snack box had some crackers and a half banana in it. Yawn. He didn’t even eat it.
Tuesday:
Tuesday’s lunch had a winter wonderland theme: Garlic toast cut into tree shapes, Christmas tree tofu and a little snowman pick with some grapes skewered on to it. The idea was that the grapes on the pick would look a little snowman-y, but that didn’t really come across. Isn’t that pick cute though? I got it out of a pack of cupcake decorations (cups and picks) that I picked up at Target.
Snack was a half baby baguette, dried cranberries and two spritz cookies.
The lid on this box came home broken (drat!) so I’m going to have to get a new one. I’ve found that the lids on these Daiso and Ichiban Kan bento boxes are always what gets broken first.
Wednesday:
I busted out the big lunch box on Wednesday and packed it with: turkey meatballs, grapes, a rice ball, catsup (for the meatballs), peaches with sprinkles, a catsup sandwich made on garlic naan, and some carrot sticks.
Thursday:
Lunch on Thursday featured a clementine, some grapes, baked tofu decorated to look like a gingerbread couple and a half a baby baguette. I think the gingerbread man came out pretty well, but the gingerbread lady…well…she looks a little bedraggled, doesn’t she?
The snack box had the other half of the baguette, a little jam for the bread in a monkey box, some dried cranberries and a few jellybeans.
About that monkey box — a few people have sent me emails asking about it. I got it at Daiso, a Japanese dollar store chain with a hand full of locations in the U.S. (they unfortunately only sell wholesale online). The outside is just terribly cute.
And the inside has space for a small amount of a condiment. It also comes with this little spoon/spreader with a banana handle. I usually use these for catsup, but I sometimes pack butter or jam like I did today.
Friday:
Friday’s snack box had graham crackers, a clementine and a some grapes. I wrote words on all of the crackers with food safe markers so Wyatt could practice his reading.
Would you look at that?! That, my friends, is the result of the money and diapers that you donated via the diaper drive I held for Help a Mother Out.
In the first two weeks of November, friends, family, and my darling blog readers brought me diapers and donated money via Pay Pal to help this fine organization. Tuesday I met up with Lisa from HAMO and passed along 1701 diapers! That translates to 20 boxes of diapers, 6 packs of pull-ups, and 3 shopping bags of single diapers. Because most of the donations were cash-based, I ended up buying the bulk of the diapers. This allowed me to shop around a bit and get the best per diaper price. It also allowed me to be picky about sizes when I shopped so I could purchase diapers in the bigger sizes — pull-ups and size 4, 5 and 6 diapers –which are more urgently needed. (And in case all you bargain shoppers out there were wondering: even when I took coupons for other brands of diapers into account, Target’s Up and Up brand diapers were the best deal by far. Good job, Target!)
When it was time to deliver the diapers, they completely filled the back of our station wagon and I had to pack some into the back seat with Augie. (He helped me deliver them and even dressed to match the diaper boxes.)
Melissa, the person I randomly selected for the thank you gift chose to forgo her prize and together we decided to use the money I would have spent on it to buy more diapers. Isn’t Melissa sweet?
Many thanks to the following generous donors:
Amy K.
Beate K.
Bethany K.
Bryan and Erin B.
Catherine B.
Celest
Celeste K.
Dennis M.
Elaine E.
Gabrielle H.
Lia L.
Linda K.
Melissa S.
Robert and Karen T.
Sara B.
Sue S.
Tawana H.
Tom C.
Whitney M.
I also want to give a special thank you to my brother-in-law, Bryan. Bryan kindly sent out an email to his co-workers and collected diapers from them at his workplace.
Monday’s snack was dominated by a dinner roll. Do you see it? I do. I also put in some dried cranberries (in the red container), a couple of spritz cookies and the cutest little apple in the entire world.
I saw these lady apples at the grocery store and I had to get some for Wyatt’s lunches this week. He seemed really enthused about them when I brought them home, but he only ate one one day. I kept taking them out of his lunch box after school one day and putting them back in the next day. One would think I would have figured out that they weren’t going over so well sooner in the week, but no — I put one in his lunch every day, hoping he would eat it.
Tuesday:
Tuesday’s lunch was deli ham, an undesirable apple, carrot sticks and a dinner roll.
The snack had dried cranberries, a half banana and two spritz cookies.
Wednesday:
The primary component of Wednesday’s lunch was a thermos full of spaghetti and meatballs leftover from dinner the night before. The rest of his lunch and snack was garlic toast Christmas trees, an undesirable apple, pretzel sticks and dried cranberries.
Thursday:
I packed the laptop lunchbox with another stupid apple, carrot sticks, pretzel sticks, peaches, part of a whole wheat hamburger bun, baked tofu (cut with cookie cutters and colored with food markers) and two spritz cookies.
I put Christmas-y sprinkles on the peaches and the coloring on the green ones started to run immediately. Appetizing. Wyatt didn’t mind though so I’ll keep it up until he asks me not to.
Friday:
I don’t usually take pictures of the lunches I give Wyatt at home, but this one was cute, so I thought I’d share it. Wyatt asked me to make him “Christmas tree tofu” (probably because we set our tree up the day before), so I cut and colored it with food markers
Snack was another dumb apple, pretzel sticks and a strawberry cereal bar (cut in half and stacked).
I broke out the cookie press this weekend and made my first batch of Christmas cookies. This recipe for cream cheese spritz cookies has been in my family for years and years. We’ve been making them since…oh, let’s see…2006! OK, so it’s a new family favorite, not an old family favorite but these little guys are tasty.
You don’t have to do too much to make me want to eat a cookie but, truth be told, I was never all that hot on spritz cookies until this recipe came along. They’re so pretty and I always wanted to like them, but most of the ones I tried seemed a little bland. When my brother-in-law gave me a cookie press for Christmas a few years ago, I felt like I needed to try a few recipes so I could get some use out of it. This was the first recipe I tried and I’ve never even bothered to look for any others.
The original recipe, called Butter Snow Flake Cookies is from the All Recipes site. I’ve modified it a bit by doubling the cinnamon, dropping the orange zest and substituting almond extract for half the vanilla extract.
Enjoy!
Cream Cheese Spritz Cookies
Ingredients
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup butter, softened
3 ounces cream cheese, softened
1 cup white sugar
1 egg yolk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Sift together the flour, salt, and cinnamon; set aside.
In a medium bowl, cream together butter and cream cheese. Add sugar and egg yolk; beat until light and fluffy. Stir in the vanilla and almond extracts. Gradually blend in the dry ingredients. Fill a cookie press or pastry bag with dough, and form cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet. Sprinkle the cookies
Bake for 8-9 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the cookies are golden brown on the peaks and on the bottoms. Remove from cookie sheets at once to cool on wire racks.
A few weeks ago, Wyatt and I were invited to a wreath-making extravaganza by our friends Whitney and Heather at Rookie Moms. Heather and Whitney threw this crafty party along with the folks at Underwriter’s Laboratory to spread some holiday cheer while passing along safety tips about holiday decorating in general and light safety in particular.
While I knew that Wyatt would like running around with the other kids and eating pizza, I wasn’t sure if he would be all that into the actual wreath making. But he surprised me and worked his little fingers to the bone punching circles out of patterned paper and directing me to add a string of lights, ribbon, a funky gold pine cone and letters to spell out his name to his wreath. I placed everything exactly as he directed me to and this is the final product:
Not too shabby! We will be hanging this in our front window when I get my act together and put up the Christmas decorations some time in the next few days.
The high point for me was when the photographer, Erin Nelson, pulled Wyatt and me aside to take a few pictures of us together. As the family photographer, I’m almost always behind the camera and very rarely in front of it. I’ll occasionally manage to take a self portrait that I like, but it’s really rare that any photos are taken of me with the kids. So when I saw this photo in Erin’s gallery, I about died:
What mom doesn’t want a photo like that with her boy?
And this is totally unrelated to wreath-making, holiday lights or brilliant photographers, but you have to check out this turkey frying video from the UL folks. Jeebus! I can assure you we will never be frying a turkey at our house!
Disclosure: I received wreath-making supplies, safety advice, 2 slices of pizza, a slice of sweet potato pie, a print of the photo above, and the pleasure of spending time with crafty people and a slew of cute kids at the Safe and Bright holiday party. And then I wrote this blog post. Hopefully the FCC won’t throw me in the big house now that I’ve told you all that.
Comments
daily life · photo · project365
for Christmas a few years ago, I felt like I needed to try a few recipes so I could get some use out of it. This was the first recipe I tried and I’ve never even bothered to look for any others.
