After spending the morning at the blueberry farm, Tuesday night I was excited to bake some blueberry muffins for the next morning. I went to Tasty Kitchen, did a search and found a recipe that sounded like what I was looking for:

Best Blueberry Muffins Ever

I was right! These turned out so good! I doubled the batch and I’m glad I did because we still have four left and I’m going to hide them, then eat them when everyone has already poured themselves cold cereal!! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! 😈

Just kidding … sort of.

They are nice and moist inside with a really yummy sweet and crunchy topping! If you can find tall cupcake/muffin liners, you’re going to want them for this recipe! You make a generous amount of the crumb topping and having a tall liner keeps it on top of your muffin, instead of falling out on the pan or in the oven. I picked mine up from my favorite local cake supply but you may be able to find some Wilton brand liners at your local craft supply (Michaels, JoAnns, etc).

This recipe is definitely a keeper! Don’t be surprised when these disappear before you get seconds! 😉

Yesterday the boys and I got to participate with our Ward’s playgroup activity. It was a trip to the Temecula Berry Company and it was worth the drive!

The boys had a little bit of a I-don’t-wanna-go attitude as we were getting ready, but it quickly faded when they saw the blueberry farm! They each filled up a medium sized bucket with yummy plump blueberries! Mr. P even commented, “I thought this was going to be lame, but it’s FUN!” 😆

I admit that I let them go a little overboard on the picking because I love blueberries! In other words, I wasn’t thinking about what I was actually going to do with them once we got them home, I was just thinking “YUM! BLUEBERRIES!!!” Hahaha! Thankfully, Don really likes blueberries, too.

Tomorrow I’ll share some pictures and a recipe link to the first thing I baked – Blueberry muffins, of course!!

Happy Wednesday!

Last week a friend of mine shared a list of things that her family wanted to do for the summer (Thanks, Kimberly! 🙂 ). I loved this idea and Sunday evening we sat as a family around our kitchen table and took turns listing things we’d like to do together for the Summer of 2011.

I simply used stickers to spell out our name and to include the year in the bottom corner. As activities were listed, I made a square to check off and listed the activity. The boys and I went to Michaels to pick out star stickers to mark the completed activities and I got an easel to hold the list. I keep it displayed in our piano room with the star stickers behind it, making it easy to mark them off and to keep us reminded of fun activities to do!

I don’t know if we’ll get them all completed by the end of summer (August 9th for us) but we’ll have fun filling up the page with stickers! We’ll be marking more of them off this weekend and I have plans to make fun get togethers out of a couple of them!

I hope I shared this early enough for any of you who like this idea! It took us a little bit of time to fill up the paper, but it was fun to listen to everyone’s ideas and the boys liked that they got to be included on deciding activities for the summer. PLUS it will give them visual proof that we did something during our time off! 😆 Hahaha! 😉

on Saturday we had a “small” family gathering to sing to the boys and enjoy some cupcakes. I say that with quotes because it was only three of Don’s siblings with their families and his Dad who were able to join us. He comes from a big family so our small gatherings are always a good size. LOL

Mr. P picked the classic (now a standard) Chocolate Buttermilk Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream frosting. We always add chocolate jimmies sprinkled over the tops! Yum yum!

Mr. O picked Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese frosting. We thought it would be cute to add an individual heart sprinkle to the tops of each one.

They were quite delicious and we had a nice evening with some family!

I’m excited to be making some very special cupcakes for this weekend! I think I’m finally get back to my cupcake groove! I feel like I haven’t done much baking since we moved. It’s fun to have reasons to experiment with baking again!

We started off the Summer with a weekend full of Birthday fun! My boys are two days apart and sometimes we like to have a big family day by going somewhere fun. This year we were able to surprise the boys with a weekend trip to Disneyland and wore ourselves out. Hehe!

With the boys getting bigger, we try to trick them on to the bigger rides. Sometimes they catch on and that’s when we resort to bribery. It’s been 12 years since we’ve been on some of the rides so we get pretty desperate to experience the faster rides our boys. This year we got them on Matterhorn and Splash Mountain. They had a return trip to Space Mountain, which I was excited about since I had to sit out the ride last time with Mr. P who didn’t want to go on it AT ALL.

We had park hopper passes and spent a day at California Adventure which has added some fun rides since the last time we were there years ago! The Toy Story ride became a quick favorite, trumping the Buzz Lightyear ride at Disney by a long shot! I’d buy a ticket to California Adventure just to go on the Toy Story ride all day long! LOL!

I think the boys’ favorite present this year are the Nerf guns they got from their Uncle. It pays to have a super cool Uncle who likes to buy them the bigger guns! Since they got their gifts the downstairs gets set up as a Nerf shooting alley.

So far we’ve had a good kick off to Summer break! I have several projects I hope to complete during the time off, beginning with drapes for downstairs and completing my current knitting project. I got a fun idea from one of my friends to make a summer list that I hope to complete as a family this weekend and share on here next week.

Happy Friday!

We had some excitement a couple of weeks ago when Mr. O finally lost his first tooth! It was then followed by tooth number two a few days later.

He was very excited to finally have some teeth come out. Being one month shy of his ninth birthday, he’s been waiting a long time!

The day that he lost his first tooth I made him this Tooth Fairy Tin. I made one for Mr. P when he lost his, and have been waiting to make Mr. O his. I have a small stash of these tins that are perfect for Tooth Fairy Tins.

He was specific in wanting a tooth on his. So I free hand cut the simple tooth shape and backed in on coordinating cardstock to make it pop. The googlie eyes and smile were a must, if you ask me. 😉 For the rest of the stuff, I just went thru my scraps since I only needed a small amount of paper and cardstock to complete the project. The inside is lined with black felt, making it easy for the Tooth Fairy to find his tooth inside the tin!

Now we just have to wait for the next wiggly tooth. Hopefully it’s not another eight years of waiting! hehe

Been a little absent because I’ve been enjoying the late afternoons with my boys. It’s quite a delight to have us all riding bikes now and taking advantage of the long hours of sunlight.

I finished this scarf about a week ago as a surprise for my Mom. It’s a late birthday present since I didn’t get it done in time (March) due to all the rib stitch. Basically my right arm wanted to fall off. LOL! I had to take breaks because I spent too many hours one week working on it and was pretty sore. I’m a slow knitter right now.

The pattern can be found in this book: Vampire Knits

I confess I bought the book solely for this pattern. Had I been a more experienced knitter I could have realized what a simple pattern it is and winged it, but in the end I am glad to have the whole book. There are some fun patterns in there and I already have a few more projects from the book on my “to do” list. You know, for the “spare time” I’ll have after I finish two hats, another scarf, get some curtains sewn, finish a quilt, attempt a watercolor … Haha! Hopefully this summer is a productive one! 😉

Anyway, it always feels good to get a project completed and this one was a hit with my boys. I’m not saying I’ll be knitting another one anytime soon, but I can see myself making some slightly shorter ones for the boys for this winter. It is a pretty cool scarf!

Quick post to say “hi”! I’ve been on a bit of a blog break, working on projects, trying my best to get them completed before moving on to something new (I’m not the only one with this problem, right? haha).

We recently had the upstairs painted, which means all the rooms have paint on the walls now! I’ll be sharing a color tour of our home once I take pictures this week.

Mr. P has started soccer, Mr. O is currently obsessed with learning In the hall of the Mountain King, and Mr. Mister has been working on the plans for our backyard. Enter our friend Toad. He was hanging out in the corner by the water spout and sat nicely for some pictures before Don placed him in a safer spot in the backyard.

I promise to be back later this week with a family post. I don’t want my Mom giving me a bad time for only posting a picture of a toad. Haha!

So glad we’re on Spring Break this week!

(Sammy couldn’t stand it any longer and jumped in hoping to catch a duck!)

2010 is over. It ended much quicker than we wanted it to, but days always go too fast when you spend your time being sick or taking care of whoever is currently sick. This was the reason for the unexpected blog break for the last few months of the year. It was much needed and before the year was out we were all healthy and even got to spend a couple of days out of town visiting friends.

I hope to share some pictures from the missing months. For now, I’m going to concentrate on the house while I have boys home. Or maybe we’ll go to the dairy and get some chocolate milk.

I’ve been having fun baking in the kitchen this weekend! At church, about a month ago, we had a Service Auction. One of the items I donated was one dozen brownie pops and the person who won them requested them for yesterday. So Sunday I had fun baking, dipping and rolling the brownie pops! It was my first time making them and they turned out quite yummy! Definitely making these again … soon!