Sugar and Spice Baby Shower

This was several years ago... But I never ended up posting it.  Brooklynn has become one of Emmalynn's best friends.  Here was the shower we threw her...

It is that time in my life when all of my friends are having babies (myself included), and thus I am throwing and attending a lot of baby showers.  One of my best friends is due with her sweet baby girl Brooklynn (Emmalynn’s soon to be best friend)  We threw her a sugar and spice baby shower. 
Decorations:
She loves orange and pink, so we decorated the backyard and tables with a plethora of orange and pink ribbons.  We draped them from every place we could and had them running down the tables.  We also had small vases filled with gerbera daises in pink and orange.

The food:
We had some sugar and spice food served family style on all of the tables.  We put the food on beautiful serving platters. 

The favors:
We had a candy bar set up for guests to fill baggies as their favors.  Of course all the candies were in pink and orange.  We had cute headbands decorating the containers, and little shoes and socks as decorations.  Instead of a cake, we had cake pops for people to enjoy.

The Games:
We had several games. 
Name that baby!- For one of the games, guests submitted their baby picture ahead of time and we all had to guess which guest went with each picture.
Hair bow draw- each guest was asked to bring a hair bow, and one winner was picked out of the bucket.
thank you drawing-  Each guest wrote their address on an envelope and a winner was drawn.  This makes it so much easier for mom to write her than you notes.
Gift Bingo- blank bingo sheets were given out and guests fill in the gifts they thought Lindsay would get.  As Lindsay opened the gifts, you would mark your sheet and the bingo winners got a prize.
The prizes:
We had sugar and spice candy bouquets for the winners. 

Toddler Easter Lunch Hunt

A fun idea for Easter lunch is to hid their lunch in Easter eggs and let them hunt for their lunch.  Kids want to make their lunch out of their Easter eggs anyways… so I decided to be strategic about it.  Hide things in the eggs that you WANT them to eat.  Em had a BLAST.

Fill them with any lunch items that they like (that would fit in your eggs)

Ideas to fill eggs:

• cut up string cheese
• cut up deli meat
• meatballs (without sauce)
• pizza rolls
• cut up hotdogs
• freeze dried peas or corn
• grapes
• blue berries
• black berries
• peanut butter crackers
• cheddar bunnies
• pretzels
• granola bars cut into bite sized pieces

Easter Ornaments

I made first did this project with my second grade class and they came out awesome… unfortunately I forgot to take any pictures :/  I had them make a cross and stone, then we painted them with colors that represented different things.  (Black for sin, red for Jesus’ blood, white for our sins being washed away, pink for new life, etc.) 

I decided to make some ornaments with Em to give away as little Easter gifts to my family.

First I made a salt dough. 

• 1 c. flour
• 1 c. salt
• 1/2 c. water (or less)

Combine the salt and flour, then add water a little at a time until you get a dough consistency.  It shouldn’t be tacky.  If it is too wet, then just add more flour.  Kneed the dough, then roll out about 1/4 in thick and out your shapes.

Em had more fun cutting the left over dough pieces than she did the cookie cutters :)

Put the shapes on parchment paper and use a chopstick to make holes in the dough

Now you have a few options on drying them. 

1. You can let them air dry for about a week on a wire rack (for air flow)
2. You can bake them low and slow.  This can take several hours though.  This is what I did the first time…. and it worked really well… but took 3 hours.  oy.  that was a late night.  Try 225 and check every half hour.  This may be good in the winter when you have the added bonus of heating your house with the oven ;)
3. You can microwave them!  Start with 3 min, and then do increments of 20 seconds until they are done.  Even if they are still not totally hard, they do harden more as they cool.  This is what I did this time.  Great for impatient toddlers.  Doing it this way, your ornaments won’t stay as perfect, they may rise unevenly.  But that didn’t bother me for this project.

Then you are ready to paint!

You can thread your ribbon using a paper clip

You are done!  These are super cute with a little note or poem attached.