Easter Egg Scavenger Hunt

Hello my friends!! Hope you are all enjoying the first week of spring!! With Easter coming up this weekend I’m trying to get all ready for the all-important Easter egg hunt! Our kids are totally spoiled – they do an Easter egg hunt at home, one outside with all the neighbours on the stoop, another one with each set of grandparents and yet another one at church!

This year for a something a little different I thought I’d get my kids to work a little harder to find their Easter rewards – a scavenger hunt! After a quick look around the idea galleries on Pinterest, I managed to find a bunch of clues that will work for our house. Basically, when the girls get up in the morning, where normally there is a couch full of chocolate and treats from the Easter bunny, this year there will be a clue… leading to another clue… and another!

I found many of the clues for the scavenger hunt on these two sites (Storypiece.net and Melissa and Doug) and then just changed some around to fit with our home. It would be easy to do the same for your house!! Once I made my list of clues, and the corresponding order of answers, I printed them off, cut into strips and placed inside the eggs. Then I numbered the eggs 1-10 so I’d be able to have them ready in advance.

At each clue spot, the girls will find a little pile of chocolate eggs and a plastic egg that will contain the next clue. The final clue will have the destination of their Easter treats!! At our house the Easter bunny tries not to leave too much chocolate because all of the grandparents and aunts and uncles always buy chocolate – our bunny this year will be leaving each of the girls a big box of sidewalk chalk, a new skipping rope, a new book and a chocolate treat.

I am going to try to attach the clues that we used for our hunt at the bottom of this post, so you can print them off for your own Easter Egg Scavenger Hunt! In the meantime, I've taken a screen shot of the clues below! Enjoy, and happy Easter everyone!!

   

How to Host a Successful Christmas Cookie Exchange

One of my favorite Christmas traditions is coming up next week! This year will mark the 10th Annual Christmas Cookie Exchange that I will be hosting at my house! It’s a day for us ladies to get together over tea or wine and have appies and catch up, all while trading our new or favorite holiday cookie recipes!!

If you have never been a part of a Christmas Cookie Exchange, let me tell you how it works!! It’s surprisingly easy and a LOT of fun!! Basically, each person who attends the party brings six dozen of their favorite type of cookie, then we make the exchange and everyone brings six dozen different cookies home!!

Ten years ago when I hosted my first cookie exchange, I wasn’t really sure how it worked, so I googled, and found this page . This site gave me a very specific set of rules that, for the first couple of years I was very specific about following… and honestly some of the rules were a little too much for me, so I have relaxed them into the rules below and things have gone much more smoothly ever since!

Recipe for these beauties

Before the rules, a few tips to make your life easier as the hostess of the cookie party!! First of all, give LOTS of notice! I usually send out my invitations (usually as a facebook event) about a month or so before the party. People have very busy social calendars, and if they know about this event well enough ahead, they can also plan to make time for the baking part of the party!! Although some people get stressed about having to bake 6 dozen cookies, remember: that usually just means two batches of a single recipe, since most cookie recipes make 3 dozen cookies!!

Second: Don’t stress!! This is supposed to be a fun event!! I usually have my Christmas tree up mid-November, so my Christmas décor is the only decorating I do for the party, well aside from the beautiful cookies all my friends bring along!! I buy or make a few easy appetizers, open a few bottles of wine and make a pot of tea and we just sit and chat and catch up with each other!

If you have the time, ask your friends to provide you their recipes ahead of time and put together a Cookie Book. It sounds like a lot of work, but it’s super easy and your friends will thank you! When I hosted my first cookie exchange, I asked people to bring copies of their recipes, so if someone LOVED a cookie, they’d be able to bake it! Inevitably, people would forget, so I try to collect everyone’s recipe the week before and print them all off into a little booklet for my guests to bring home! Voila, ten minutes of copying and pasting into a Word document and all of our new favorite recipes in one place to share!!

Finally, I know that people are busy, but busy people still want cookies!! I allow people to bake their cookies and drop them off to me before the party and I will do the exchanging part for them. Last year I had one participant in labour, and another working and one more that had a different party to attend… but they all wanted to bake and exchange cookies, so they brought them over before the party, prepackaged and ready to go and I exchanged their yummies for them! One last thing that may make your life as Cookie Party hostess a little better… and by no means is this necessary, it’s just my OCD coming out to play… if you have an odd number of participants, and you won’t be able to evenly divide cookies (for example 11 people x 6 dozen (72) cookies = 6.54 of each recipe per participant) whip up an extra batch of cookies.

See how amazing having twelve different types of cookies can be????

As the hostess, you are likely already a baker and have a ton of recipes in your arsenal. In addition to making it easier to divide and package cookies (especially when many of the guests pre-package their cookies), if you bring two entries to the party, you LEAVE with double the cookies!!

So, without further ado, and using guidance from Robin’s Rules to Hosting a Cookie Exchange, here are my…

1. All cookies should be homemade, baked and main ingredient must be a type of flour. This means your guests will bring COOKIES. Not Rice Krispie treats, not meringues, COOKIES. After all, this is a Cookie Exchange!!

2. No plain chocolate chip cookies, cookie mixes, no-bakes, meringues or bars. Anyone can open a package and add an egg, this party is for cookies made with love. We allowed bars one year, and they didn’t cut well, they weren’t evenly sized, and they didn’t package and stack like cookies.

3. Please bring 6 dozen total cookies… well maybe a couple extra to share… but really, six dozen cookies. One recipe baked twice, 72 cookies. It makes it easier for sorting and separating when the actual exchange part of the party, and means that no one is shorted cookies because someone only managed to bake 60 cookies.

4. Email a copy of your recipe before the party (or bring recipe to the party). In addition to putting together a Cookie Book like I do, having everyone provide their planned recipes in advance means that you won’t get duplicates. Not that having four kinds of shortbread is the worst problem to have, but variety is the spice of life!!

5. If you don't have time to bake, or have burnt your cookies, but still want to attend, you must go to a real bakery and buy 6 dozen yummy cookies. This one is pretty self-explanatory! In all of my years, it’s only happened on time that someone had to bring bakery cookies!!

I am so so so looking forward to this year’s festivities!! This year’s Cookie Book already has recipes for Oreo Peppermint Crunch Cookies and Salted Caramel Stuffed Snickerdoodles. I. Can’t. Wait!!!!!! Thanks for stopping by today! I really appreciate it!!

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Happy Thanksgiving friends!! This weekend we have so much to be thankful for - a healthy family, beautiful children, turkey dinner with my parents, siblings and beautiful niece and nephews!! I managed to put together a Chocolate Eclair Cake for our Thanksgiving dessert, and it was delish!!

I am thankful for my husband - also known as the Laundry Fairy. He works hard for our family and will always make sure we have everything we need (before he turns on the football game).

I am thankful for my children - these two gorgeous girls who test and challenge me every day to be a better mother, teacher and friend. Every day I learn something from them, and I hope they know that I love them to the moon and back.

Seriously?? I took 14 photos and this is the best one!!

I am thankful for our family - parents, siblings, nieces and nephews. I know that they are always there when we need them and can be counted on for everything - fixing a leak, emergency babysitting, sharing a cuppa and some chocolate digestives. Our moms pick up the girls from school and are always around to spend time with the girls for which I am eternally grateful.

I am thankful for turkey dinner. This is the first year my side of the family didn't have our traditional dinner for 50 (yes, 50!!). Although I miss seeing my aunts, uncles and cousins, my dad cooked us an amazing turkey and ham dinner this year. And I got the leftovers for Turkey Pot Pie. Life is good.

I am thankful for my friends. We are so lucky to be surrounded by amazing people. Friends who live next door and pop in for a cup of tea and a design consultation, friends at work who can tell when I need a hug or a cup of tea (I'm sensing a common theme here... happiness is a cuppa tea...and sometimes a glass of wine).

As the sun sets tonight on my 36th year, and I celebrate Thanksgiving and my birthday with my favorite faces, I am thankful for all of the gifts in my life. I hope that this coming year is as amazing as all those before. Cheers!!

Thanks for stopping by for a read today, I really appreciate it!

Christmas Eve Gift Box

I know we’re cutting it close to Christmas, only a few days left, but I’m back with a quick post with one of our Christmas traditions.

Ever since I was little, Christmas Eve always meant new pajamas for my sister, brother and I. When my girls came along, I always made sure that we had new jammies all wrapped up and ready to go for Christmas Eve.

This year, I decided to go one better and put together a Christmas Eve box filled with fun things for my girls and their little cousins to do after Christmas Eve mass. 

I found a box in the house and wrapped it in Christmas wrapping paper and then got to work filling it up! 

I hit up my new favorite place – the Dollar Spot at Target!! There, I found some adorable little craft fun packs and some new pencils for the girls.

Also into the box went some packets of hot chocolate and a bag of marshmallows (we use marshmallows as a hot chocolate topper and as a bribery tool for good behavior!!),

and a few Christmas mandarin oranges. I'm sure the girls are going to love having an extra present to unwrap at Baba's this Christmas Eve!!

Thanks for stopping by my little corner of the internet today!! Merry Christmas!!

A Countdown to Christmas, Part One (Basket of Christmas Books)

I love Christmas. L.O.V.E. it. I can't wait to do the shopping, the baking, the wrapping, the visiting, the pictures with Santa, I love it all.
Last year I made a Advent Calendar for the kids, so that each day we could do something fun in the month leading up to Christmas. I am updating the advent calendar this week, when it's done, it will be Part Two in this Christmas Countdown post.

My girls love books, and we read three or four books every night before bed. We have a few Christmas/Winter books, but I needed a few more to finish this project. I ordered a ten pack of books through Miss E's school to round out the stack.

I asked my little sidekicks for help with the wrapping (which is hard for me... I can't handle it when the paper isn't crisp and the wrapping nice and neat...).

The girls picked two books each and wrapped them in last year's Christmas wrapping paper.

Each night before bed, one of the girls gets to go to the Christmas tree and pull a wrapped story book out from the basket. I have numbered the books 1-24 so they can pick the appropriate book each night. I made sure to have stories about the nativity and the First Christmas in the week before Christmas.
I hope the girls enjoy this new tradition as much as I have enjoyed putting it together for them.


I will hopefully be linking this recipe up to A Bowl Full of Lemons, Delightful Order, Doodles and Stitches and Joyful Homemaking

Unplugged - August Hiatus

Can you believe summer is almost over?!? I promised myself that while I was on vacation that I would try to “unplug” from online life and spend more time being present with my family. 

Aside from the post about Miss A’s 6th birthday, I did not even turn on my laptop the whole time I was on vacation!

Uncle Robert with my Mom :)

We had some wonderful family visitors from across the pond – My uncle Robert and cousin Ciara came to visit from England for three weeks.

We went to the waterslides, to the beach, to the water park, to the trailer,

we watched a movie outside,

ate some home grown veggies,

oh, and there was party in the mix!

Eighteen little girls, 100 cupcakes and a candy buffet!

Miss E got training wheels and a two wheeler to ride around on… Miss A learned to ride her two wheeler without training wheels!

On her last day in Canada, we did a fun photo shoot with cousin Ciara, she’s such a doll, we are going to miss her!!

I’m working on the recipe for some amazing cupcakes I made on my Quest for the Perfect Cupcake, it should be up tomorrow!

I have so many things on my list to do this week, so many blog posts on my list to post, so many photos to edit and add to the blog for the projects we completed in the past few weeks, and a good few easy recipes to put up here too – I’m actually looking forward to September for Back to School, and all of the early bedtimes, routines and normalcy it will bring!