A Fish Tail

Last week was the Great Kern County Fair. As always happens, we went on one of the last weeknights of the fair to avoid the pressing crowds and weirdos and we were pretty successful. It was busy of course, bit not near as busy as it could have been had it been a Friday or Saturday Night.

The kids enjoyed corndogs, lemonade, and a few rides (are those things REALLY all that safe?) and while Hubs and Logan went off to enjoy some of the “big Boy” games and rides that Caleb was too little for, I took him around by myself for a few kiddie rides and games.

One of the games was the an obvious dollar drainer; for $5.00, you get a small bucket with 30 ping pong balls and have to attempt to land one in a teeny tiny goldfish bowl to win… well, a goldfish.

Believe it or not, Caleb sank a ball after about 8 throws. In an attempt to just keep him busy for a few minutes and avoid a melt down at not being able to join Hubs and Brother on some rides, we ended up taking home a goldfish, complete with mobile home.

If I had EVER thought that he would have been able to ACTUALLY win a goldfish, I probably never would have taken him to that game booth. Dime store stuffed animals are one thing, but a $0.29 goldfish you paid $5.00 for screams SUCKER!!!!!

He named it Helicopter.

After Caleb won his goldfish at the fair on Thursday, Logan was bummed that he didn't have one. So Saturday we loaded up the family and made a trek to the pet store to get Logan his own goldfish and a tank.

Sunday night, Fire Flame (Logan's goldfish) bit the proverbial dust and we "buried" him at "sea" IYKWIM. He was fine with promises of a replacement when he got home from school, Fire Flame 2.

Thank goodness he wasn’t scarred for life.

Then Monday morning, Helicopter, Caleb's goldfish also had to endure the same treatment.

Unfortunately for Helicopter, the damned fish started flipping around in the bowl of the toilet as it was flushed.

Oops.

Caleb's new fish is named Choo Choo Train. Lets hope this one puffs along longer than Helicopter.

Potter Party Planning Part 2: Chocolate Frogs and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans

One of the more distinctive things most people remember about the Harry Potter movies are the treats associated with different scenes. The Butter Beer, Pumpkin Juice, Treacle Tarts, Pumpkin Pasties, and all of the yummy candies on the trolley on the Hogwarts Express train between London and Hogwarts.
To recreate this for Logan's birthday party, I turned to Google to search for ideas for fun party treats. I knew I wanted to do something creative but easy, and cute and memorable.

First up? Chocolate Frogs!
Remember the first time Harry saw a box of Chocolate Frogs and the thing jumped right out?

(image from http://harrypotter.wikia.com)

I knew this had to be one of the yummy goodies to include for the kids, and here is how I did it!

I first bought a candy mold from Amazon in a frog shape. The mold tray arrived, but I thought for sure it would have included instructions on how to do this! So again, I Googled it!

I found that I could just melt down a huge bag of chocolate chips, spoon it into the mold, refrigerate and PRESTO! Done!

After all the frogs were made (I think I've made about 30 or so, but I've lost count!) I set out to see if I could find a cute packaging idea; boy did I find one at ChicaandJo.com.

On their site, they offer a free printable box and the directions to cut and fold them on your own. It was remarkable easy to do myself and really makes for a cute addition to the Honeydukes candy buffet I have planned! Each frog was individually wrapped and put in it's own box for each of the kids. The rest will be individually wrapped and put out for anyone to eat or take home with them.

The completed Chocolate Frog and Box!

Next up was how to tackle the task of Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans. I remember a few years ago when Jelly Belly came out with a merchandise tie-in for the movies of selling their beans in the flavors, of snot, vomit, earwax, etc.
Yeah, not gonna go there...
Instead I decided to use the Starburst dual flavor jelly beans and package them up in a cute way too. Again, Google to the rescue!

I found the printable down load here and followed the directions to cut and fold provided. These were much more time consuming to do, as each window was hand-cut using an Exacto knife. I had seen the suggestion somewhere of lining the windows with acetate from the inside, but decided that with so many of these (10) it would be easier to just make individually packaged bags of jelly beans and seal them up inside.
Here you can see the process, and my little helper.

For the jelly bean boxes, you will need to cut a square piece of matching card stock to seal the box once the jelly beans are inside. The pointed top of the box was hole punched and tied shut with skinny red ribbon before putting the jelly beans in the box and sealing off the bottom.

Both of these projects were made easier by the use of sharp scissors and the scoring blade on my paper cutter. Just make sure the card stock you are printing these on is heavy enough to NOT be cut by the scoring blade... Trust me... learned that the hard way

More Potter Party Planning to come!


Did you Miss Potter Party Planning Part 1 or Part 3? Check it out HERE!

Potter Party Planning

It's Harry Potter mania in this house over the next week! Logan's 5th birthday party is coming up and I really wanted to do something special for him. I've been working on a few projects for the party, one of them being these Gryffindor ties.

Here's how I did it!

(click picture to make bigger)

Come back tomorrow and I'll show you how I made Chocolate Frogs and the boxes to go with them, as well as how I made boxes for Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans.



Mommy's Little Spiderman

At Christmas time in 2007, we took Logan to see the holiday lights at CALM, a local zoo here in Bakersfield. I remember how freezing cold it was that night, like the snow would start at any minute and just come floating down from the sky. But it rarely ever snows here. 

They have a cute little gift shop near the exit and as we always do, we stopped to look through before leaving. We decided to let Logan pick one thing from the gift shop before we left as a cute souvenir of his first time seeing Christmas lights.

He was instantly drawn to a small display of stuffed animals like the ones they had at the zoo, Snakes, frogs, mountain lions, bears… the display was stuffed. His eyes immediately zoomed to one in particular; a Mexican red-kneed Tarantula.

From that point on, Logan and Spider have been inseparable. We’re on Spider 2.0 now. The original was lost about a year later somewhere between our car in the Toys R Us parking lot and the store’s entrance. We just told him that Santa brought Spider new clothes. 



Devious? Perhaps.

 

But absolutely necessary.

Since then, spider has undergone countless washings, limb reattachments and loss of stuffing, which we dubbed “spider poop” around the house.

Now that he’s almost five, Logan is still as attached to spider as he was the day we brought him home.