Blueberry-Peach Cobbler

Yummo! That's all I can say about this warm, juicy, scrumptious dessert!!! (Or breakfast the next day, whatever the case may be....!) When blueberries were on sale for crazy low prices a few weeks ago, I was buying them up like mad - both because all three kids LOVE them and because I can't get enough. And the rest of the year? I refuse to pay, um, like $.25 per berry, or whatever the crazy-ridiculously high price is.

This was super easy to make. Start out with a 9x9 (or 8x8) baking dish. Spray lightly with nonstick spray. Pour 4 C. fresh blueberries and 2 oz. canned, diced peaches (drained) in the dish. Mix in 2 T. lemon juice, then sprinkle with 1/2 C. sugar and 1 tsp. flour. Stir in 1 T. melted butter, til the fruit is all mixed well, then set aside.

In another bowl, mix 1 3/4 C. flour, 4 tsp. baking powder, and 6 T. sugar. Cut in 5 T. cold butter with a pastry blender until the mixture is crumbly. Make a well in the center, and add 1 C. milk and 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract. Stir quickly, mixing just until moistened - do not over-mix. It will be a very thick batter or wet dough. Cover the bowl and let the batter rest for 10 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Spoon the batter over the fruit, leaving just a few small holes for the fruit to peek through. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until it is golden brown on top and a knife inserted into the batter comes out clean (blueberries notwithstanding!). Let cool until warm before serving.

I highly recommend some vanilla soft-serve over it!! Enjoy!

(Recipe adapted from Very Best Blueberry Cobbler by FriendlyFood @ AllRecipes.com.)

Oodley-Noodley Baby Playdate

There was great anticipation...they knew SOMETHING was up, but weren't quite sure just what. They saw me putting something into their little inflatable swimming pool - in the playroom! But they couldn't get to it.


So, then, what do you get when you mix 5 toddlers and 20 pounds of cooked spaghetti noodles? A whole lot of fun, and a great sensory experience! I asked each mom to bring 5 lbs. of cooked noodles, and then I added some plastic utensils, plastic cups, plastic containers, etc., to let the kiddos play in the noodles.



Mackenzie was not willing to sit in the noodles, but preferred to take the noodles OUT of the pool and play with them on the table - which is actually sort of what I figured she would do, given all of her issues.




Makayla got in the pool for a while, and scooped some noodles with the spoon into a cup and a plastic container. But she didn't stay for long, and spent most of the time reaching in with her hands to grab a fistful of noodles.




Layla and Phoebe, two of our little friends, were, by far, the bravest, and spent the most time in the noodles, though even they didn't spend nearly as much time as we all thought would happen. We all laughed at how much time we spent sitting around the big pool of noodles with no kids in it!


There was plenty of eating involved, of course. Yum, noodles!



Noodles between your toes, however, can be a problem.


And while I personally thought it would be a GREAT idea to re-purpose the noodles (you know how I'm always re-purposing items, right?) for dinners for the next month or so, the other moms insisted on taking the noodles out to the trash before they left, for fear that I actually WOULD serve them to my kids.


All in all, we had a great time, and I would highly recommend this to all of you mamas of crawlers and toddlers out there!!

(Though I have to warn you that my husband did give me a rather sideways glance last night at midnight when I was setting up the kiddie pool in the playroom and asked me what on earth I was doing. I said, "Tomorrow's our spaghetti playdate." "Your huh?" He's sort of gotten used to my crazy ideas and all, but I think he was secretly relieved to come home and not find noodles plastered to the walls and ceiling!)

My new purse

Well, I'm a bit frustrated with Blogger today. I have emailed all the photos of today's spaghetti playdate to my Blogger Dashboard, so all I should have to do is add the text and post them...but as luck would have it, Blogger seems to be having issues, and my pictures have not come through. I've tried again and again...which means when they finally DO come through, I'll have several "drafts" of the same post...oh well.

In the meantime, enjoy these pics of my new purse which I made this past weekend. I am totally, 100%, head-over-heels in love with this red fabric - it's from the Flight of Fancy line by Paula Prass (who once upon a time actually left a comment here, on my blog - imagine - l'il old me!). She just came out with a gorgeous new line, and many shops are no longer carrying the old line - and I'm so upset about it. I'm going to have to buy an entire bolt of this gorgeous fabric once my sister and I get our wholesale license before it's all gone!! The turquoise fabric is from Lila Tueller's Soiree line - also beautiful. I just LOVE these colors together - something about them just makes me so happy!!

And the buttons - oh, the buttons - can I just tell you how thrilled I was to be able to use them??? They are from a plentiful stash of buttons my grandmother gifted me with when we visited her farm in Illinois on our roadtrip in June. She had oh-so-casually inquired of me, "Would you have any interest in having some buttons?" WOULD I????? Um, let me stop jumping up and down, and say thank you.

Oh, and the flower - it was SO easy to make! (I know - it looks hard - but really, I promise, it wasn't!) My sister found THIS tutorial, which is on an adorable blog, by the way - I need to add her to my blog list for creative inspiration. Super easy and super cute. I actually just safety-pinned the button to the purse, so that I can remove it in case I want to need to wash it.

And...remember how I mentioned that my sister and I will be opening a business? Watch for MORE of these purses...perhaps there will be one in YOUR favorite colors popping up soon!

Self-feeding with twins - do you dare?

So...a few weeks ago, Mackenzie's Early Intervention teacher did her quarterly (or was it annual? I lose track...) evaluation, and one of her questions was whether or not Mackenzie is feeding herself with a spoon. My response? "Um...well...I haven't exactly let them try yet."

It's not that I'm intentionally holding them back, or trying to delay their feeding development, you see...it's just that, well...it seems like we're always in a hurry in the mornings to get to a playdate or a bible study or a doctor's appointment or some other activity, and the idea of cleaning up not one, but TWO messy girls, after a first trial of self-spoon-feeding...it just seems a bit overwhelming.

Alas, a week later, we had no where to go one morning, they were still in their jammies, the kitchen floors already needed to be cleaned anyway, and so I decided to take the leap. A while back, with the best of intentions, I had picked up these little scooper things that act like spoons, but make it a bit easier for little hands to hold and scoop with. So I gave each girl a bowl of oatmeal - made extra thick that morning - and a little scooper. Mackenzie was, remarkably, much more amenable to allowing me to assist her in placing her hand properly and moving the scooper from the bowl to her mouth. Makayla was all about doing it herself and would not let me help her AT ALL, and thus got very little in her mouth...which just ended up making her very mad.

In the end, Mackenzie thought the whole process was pretty cool - and as you can see - actually seemed to enjoy playing with the abundance of oatmeal which ended up on her. Makayla, on the other hand - not so much.

I am somewhat ashamed to admit, with my head hung low, that I have not repeated this adventure yet.

HOWEVER, we are hosting a "messy" baby playdate tomorrow. Really. I'm putting painter's plastic down in the playroom, then a big comforter, and then I'm bringing our kiddie pool inside (empty, of course). And then we're filling it with about 40 lbs of cooked spaghetti noodles. And 6 little ones, between the ages of 6 months and 2 years, will get to go at it. I'm looking forward to it - we'll see how the girls do with it!! I'll be sure to post pictures!

Pardon the dust...

I'm doing a bit of work on my blog this weekend, so please pardon the dust! If you find a different background, or a wonky header, or something that looks different every time you click - please just know that I'm playing around and trying to figure out how I want it to look. So please be patient - and if you see something you LOVE (or hate) - please feel free to leave me a comment on this post and make sure you let me know exactly which thing it was! Thanks!!