Life Moves On…

I am finally able to think about my dog Maggie without bursting out into tears – but just barely.  Especially when I saw this picture my 4-year-old daughter Emily drew all by herself (I didn’t even realize she drew it until I found it on the table yesterday):

On the left is Emily WITH a dog – notice she is smiling and happy and her dog is next to her.

On the right is Emily WITHOUT a dog – there’s an “X” where the dog was and in the picture, she’s frowning and crying. 

That pretty much sums up how we all feel around here – sad with no dog.

But…life must move on, I guess.  Tomorrow is my son Matt’s second grade ‘Spring Party’ and I am the room-mom. 

 We are going to make flower and bug T-shirts using fabric paint, our thumbs and markers.  These are really easy and turn out to be adorable – plus, they hold up really well.  I made them at my daughter’s birthday party last year and I still wear mine to bed as a nightgown at least once a week! 🙂

Here are the sample shirts:

 

The top one is one the girls can make (it’s really white, not pink like the photo looks) using thumb prints to make flowers and a butterfly.  I drew in the leaves, stems and grass with a green fabric marker.  The bottom shirt is for the boys – I thought they’d prefer bugs to flowers.  I drew in the antennae, legs and stripes with a black fabric marker.

I also made up some gifts for the teachers.  These are not my original idea (I saw them on SCS and am not sure who is the originator) but they are so cute and easy to make:

The ingredients in the jar bake up to be a s’mores type dessert, but in Easter colors.

In the jar (layered from the bottom up) are graham cracker crumbs (one sleeve, crushed), 8 Peep bunnies, 1 1/2 cups of Easter M&M’s and 1/3 cup brown sugar.  These fit nicely in a quart-sized canning jar. 

The instructions to bake are as follows:   Empty the jar contents into a bowl. Snip the bunnies into bits with kitchen sheers or cut up with a knife. Return the bunny bits to the mixture and mix well. Melt ½ cup butter, add 1 tsp vanilla. Pour this over the dry ingredients, mixing well. Pat into a greased 8×8 baking dish. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes. Cool and cut into bars.
*Option: leave the bunnies whole; combine remaining ingredients and place the bunnies on top; then bake as directed.

I printed out the recipe and attached it to the jars with a pretty ribbon.  I also added a little stamped and embossed Easter greeting to the lid of each jar – I made 7 jars altogether.  I thought I had enough supplies to make more jars, but the M&M’s go really fast  – I could only get about 2 jars from each bag.

Hopefully, the teachers will like the jars and the kids will enjoy their T-shirts too.