I have been planning in a non-planning type of way for Lily’s 3rd birthday for weeks now. Stalking Pinterest and pinning things that I think are fun ways to celebrate, making mental notes of things I want to do with her, all while not really trying to think too hard about it. Since we moved to Idaho a few months ago I knew we wouldn’t do a big birthday party because we only have Waldo’s brother and his family here, so I knew I didn’t have to go too crazy.

On Pinterest I saw a lot of great ideas for birthdays that involved balloons. Lily isn’t overly fond of balloons so I wasn’t sure I should try any of them. After much though I decided to give some of the super cute ideas a try.

I something similar to the above on Pinterest, but I took it a step further.

I had 8 balloons left so I knew it wouldn’t cover our bedroom floor (like I saw on Pinterest) so I decided to put them on the bed and started on my wake-up-by-way-of-annoying-the-daylights-out-of-her routine.

What the what…

Oh balloons, but what?

Whatever, I dig it.

After I made Lil’s breakfast I had to make her cake. Usually I would have made it the night before, but I wasn’t that organized. I frosted it while Waldo had lunch with Lil.

After she was done with lunch I wanted to take some pictures of her with her cake before everyone got here. Lily really got into the pictures.

I asked Lily to show me how old she is now.

She is having trouble getting those little fingers to stay down.

Waldo’s brother, his wife and three of their kids came over for cake and ice cream.

We sort of rushed the whole thing so Waldo could get back to work. Lil opened her presents first.

Lil’s little cousin Bryce helped with the wrapping paper a lot. It worked out great because Lily wasn’t happy with all the attention on her so she wasn’t to into ripping the paper.

Then we moved on to cake and singing.

Oh with the attention again.

Waldo blew out her candle for her because she just gave us blank stares when we tried to get her to do it.

Everyone tried on Lily’s really cool crown. This is Brock, he’s about 6 months older then Lil.

And Bryce, he just turned two a few weeks ago.

After everyone had their fill of cake they left. Overall it was a very successful birthday party, short and sweet. Lily had a great birthday even if there were a few moments of total overwhelmed-ness.

A wolf ate Kitty for Christmas this year.

We only bought Lily a few things for Christmas, but our families went crazy so she got a ton of stuff.
Like this really nice jacket from Waldo’s parents.

And an owl cuddly backpack from my Dad.

My sister Jolene got her a million piece magnetic dress up doll collection.

My Dad also got her this really cute little Mickie Mouse snow globe that Lil just loved.

It was broke by the end of the day.

My Mom got her a really sweet little porcelain tea set.

Hmmm, apparently I didn’t take any pictures of Lily with the things we got her. Imagine her with a couple of additions to her Thomas the Tank collection. Lil and Waldo spent a lot of time building the biggest track they could. It took me forever to take it apart and get it out of the middle of the floor.

We had a really nice breakfast of french toast and eggs before we crashed played with Lily’s new toys and after nap time we spent the rest of the day with Waldo’s brother and his family. We had a great time. I really missed my family, but I spoke to them so it took some of the sting out.

I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday.

Christmas has come early to the house of Jinx this year.  I don’t know exactly where it all started but I think it was when my Sister-in-law Katie said something on Facebook about putting up her tree already and it kind of snowballed from there.  I mentioned to to Waldo and he said that it was a great idea to put the tree up now, that way we’d get more time to enjoy it.  I told my Mother-in-law what we were planning and she loved the idea.  Now we have our tree up in our family room, my MIL has her tree up in the livingroom and Katie has all of her other decorations up (her house looks great) and her tree will be up any day now.

The tree was just the beginning though.  I’ve already spent one afternoon baking and gifted our new next door neighbor a lovely box full of Holiday Cheer.

I made two different cookies and rice crispy treats all with a mint theme.  Here are my chocolate chip cookies with a hint of mint.  I cut up Andes Mints for these.  I also made Triple Chocolate and mint Crinkle cookies.  I added chopped up Candy Cane Kisses and Andes Mints to the crinkle cookies. I can’t believe I didn’t get a picture of those. And now I can’t even find the recipe online. I got it from last December’s Food Network Magazine and it is amazing.

These are the chopped up Candy Cane Kisses that I put on top of the rice crispy treats.  I loved them.  Waldo informed me he’d rather have semi-sweet chocolate then white minty chocolate. All the sudden I have no idea who he is anymore.

Lily got to enjoy a little cookie after her lunch and she thought it was the greatest thing EVER.

Here are my finished packages. One to my Sister-in-law Katie and her family and the other two to neighbors.  We tried to give the neighbor’s theirs tonight, but only one of them was home.  We might be forced to eat the other box,  you know I can’t give away 3 day old treats, it would do. Forced I say.

Hey you can see the Triple Chocolate and Mint Crinkle Cookies in the box, they are covered in powered sugar. Yay I did sort of get a picture of them.

Happy Early Holidays Everyone!  Enjoy!

All of these pictures were taken with my phone in less then stellar light. Sorry.

And the lucky winners of the Shutterfly giveaway are:

I can’t figure out how to past the random number image. Number 3:

Amy Horn

Jolene Wyatt

not sure if I’m doing this right but here goes….. Lily, Olivia misses you everyday! Aunt Christy Olivia misses coming over and playing with your homemade play dough, it isn’t allowed at our house..my criteria is also flat cards, and just choosing the best pictures or picture to put on it, and hopefully I send them out, I am very bad about sending them out, I guess I like keeping them all for myself lol…

And lucky number 7:

Jody
11/02/2011 at 12:10 pmI like very colorful cards. If they have a country theme it’s even better.

Congratulations!!  And Happy Holidays

I know I’m a week late, but I wanted to get my Halloween post up before I let time get away from me.

Lil painted a pumpkin last year, she loved it and I loved that I came up with something new. I had never heard of anyone painting a pumpkin. This year you can’t hit a random blog without seeing a painted pumpkin. I take full credit for it, you are so welcome.

I knew that I wanted to have Lil paint pumpkins again this year since she loves painting and I thought it would be a good tradition. She and I picked a few little pumpkins at the local grocery store and she couldn’t wait to paint them.

We knew that we were going to go to a pumpkin patch, but we went ahead and bought a couple of large pumpkins at the grocery store because they were on sale, and I can’t pass up a good sale. These pumpkins didn’t even get out of our car till the weekend before Halloween. They just sat in the back seat floorboard for weeks, going shopping with us and the library and everywhere we went like little pets. Pets we don’t have to feed or clean up after. The perfect pets really.

I read in the paper that there were three pumpkin patches around our little city and I choose the smallest sounding one for our trip. It was at a small family farm. They have an organic pick your own apple orchard. It was so quaint, I loved it.

We were the only customers there. We climbed aboard the hayride that was going to take us to the pumpkin patch. We were escorted by the 3 year old granddaughter of the farmers, she was a hoot. We were told that because there hadn’t been a frost yet the pumpkins were still on the vine, it was so neat to see them in their natural habitat.

At first Lil was scared of the hay ride, but then she spotted the turkeys and everything was good after that.

The turkeys are the white dots at the end of the pumpkin field.

See our little friend?

She was so cute. You could tell that she likes to be with the pumpkin patch people.

Her grandpa called her to help him with some un-named task after this picture.

One of our pumpkins. I decided that we needed some white pumpkins to paint.

The TURKEYS!

I loved the pumpkin patch, but I didn’t get the pumpkin photos I wanted from this place so I planned on going to one of the other more commercial patches in the area the next weekend.  I’ll let you know right now that we never made it to any other patches.  I don’t want to keep anyone in unnecessary suspense.

We did however go the the zoo the next day and they had just had their “Boo at the Zoo” so I was hoping to get some good pictures there.

I was shocked to see that they had mostly cleaned up all the Halloween stuff.  A few hay bales, the 1 fake pumpkin display and some scattered pumpkins were all that remained.

And while I did get some great pictures, I still didn’t feel I had “The Halloween Pictures” yet.

Lily really wanted her zoo ice cream at this point.

I really wanted a few more pictures.

We went to get ice cream after this. Who can resist this face?

After we got home Waldo and I carved our pumpkins and Lily painted hers.  It was so fun doing this all as a family.

I let Lily paint my pumpkin after I was done carving.

Halloween morning I had a brilliant idea. I grabbed Lily, my camera and my phone and we headed to the front porch.

I finally got “The Halloween Pictures” I wanted, I couldn’t be happier.

Of course the major fun was still to come.

I made the wand. I was quite proud of it. So of course I carried it around while we trick or treated. Isn’t that how it always works out.

Lily had been playing with her bucket all week and Halloween day I noticed it looking at me all sad and boring so I grabbed my silver sparkly glitter glue paint stuff and a couple of cotton swabs and fancied up the face. Lil loved it.

This was our first house to visit. We had been telling Lil all about how Halloween and trick or treating worked and she was pumped to say trick or treat to the neighbor. That was all in theory, because as soon as the door opened all she said was “I’m a little shy” when we encouraged her to say “trick or treat”. We went to probably a dozen houses and on the next to last house she whispered “trick or treat” and “thank you”, we were so proud.

My plan was to let Lily had a piece or two of her candy over the next few days and give the rest away to the kids that came to our door, but we didn’t really have that many trick or treaters. I totally wasn’t surprised when she played with the candy after we got home, but never asked for any of it. She was treating it like any other prop in her toy collection and we loved it. Waldo and I thought about offering her a piece that night, but we talked ourselves out of it because she is so used to not having candy that it wasn’t weird for her to not have any. We did promise her a piece the next day and we fulfilled that promise. After breakfast I let her pick from the small selection we left in her basket. She choose a long tootsie roll and I gave her about a third of it while eating the rest myself. She loved it.  That was the end of halloween candy for Lily Bean and we are all fine with that.

During my twenties when people would ask me what I was doing for this holiday or that I would tell them “nothing, I don’t really DO holidays. I assume that when I have kids that will change”.  It totally has. I had so much fun planning halloween for Lily and can’t wait for next year.

Last night when we got home from trick-or-treating Lily played with her candy haul, but never really showed any interest in eating any.  This didn’t surprise us since she has probably only had candy once or twice and that was just a small bite of some candy Waldo or I were eating.  She loves ice cream and we share one every time we go to the zoo, but candy just isn’t a part of her life and I like it like that.  We did tell her that we’d let her have a small bit of candy for a snack today and wouldn’t you know it, she remembered and asked for it first thing this morning.  I told her she had to have a good healthy breakfast before she could eat any candy so we headed to the kitchen and she fueled up.

I had planned to give away most of her candy to our trick-or-theaters but wouldn’t you know it, we didn’t have very many, so her basket had a good bit of candy in it.  While we had breakfast Waldo took most of the candy out and hid it.  When breakfast was over I handed her her basket and let her pick one.  She choose a long tootsie roll.  I broke off about a third of it and handed it to her and ate the rest. You know I have to do my part for her health.

After she was done and I was washing the sticky off of her hands I reminded her that candy is tasty, but isn’t not healthy for our bodies or our teeth.  “But my tongue likes it.” she replies.  Kids!

The pictures are pre-trick-or-treating and she was pretending to eat CARROTS.

I’m usually such a procrastinator that it seems almost unrealistic that I’m thinking about holiday cards at the end of October. I guess the fact that I had such a good experience with Shutterfly last year for my holiday cards helps, and since they offered to do a giveaway with me that really gets me to move.  I love everything about the whole process of making and sending out holiday cards. I love finding Lily the perfect outfits, I love setting up a great holiday backdrop, whether it be a tree and presents or something more outdoorsy.  I love getting Lily to play and have fun, especially in a way that makes for great pictures.  I really love finding my favorite pictures and then finding the perfect card to show them off.

I have some criteria for a great holiday card that I use: For one, I prefer a flat card over a folded card. Flat cards are easier to put on the fridge or hang on the wall by my desk. Since that is what I like, I assume everyone likes that too. 

I also like cards that have a number of pictures on them. I guess I just like being able to see a lot of Lily pictures.

I try to stay away from cards that say “Merry Christmas”. My Mom celebrates Yule, so she doesn’t really like getting Christmas cards and for me the card is more about the Holidays as a whole more than Christmas anyway.

I think those are pretty much my rules for cards, they aren’t hard and fast, but they are my guidelines.  One of the things that I love and hate about Shutterfly is that they have such a huge selection of cards that it’s hard to narrow them down to “the one”. For right now I think I this is “the one”, but we’ll see how things look tomorrow.

(Photo credit: Shutterfly.com)

Now for the giveaway:

Shutterfly was very generous and offered 3 Jinxyisms.com readers a certificate for 25 free Holiday cards of your choice.  To enter just leave me a comment answering the following question:

Do you have any criteria for holiday cards that you use?

Or just tell me Hi, or what you are making for breakfast. What ever floats your boat.

The giveaway ends on I will use random.org to select the winners on November 11, 2011 at Noon.  I’ll use random.org to select the winner and email them.  Please be sure to leave me an email address.  If the winner doesn’t get back to me in 3 days I’ll choose another winner.  Open to US residents only. Sorry everyone else.

Disclosure: Shutterfly compensated me for this review, but all opinions expressed are my own.

I know I’m a little late to the Easter post party, but better late then never.

We aren’t religious so we treat Easter pretty much the same as we do Christmas, it’s just something fun to do.  We also don’t give Lily much sugar so she got no candy and didn’t miss it.

I bought Lil a little Easter basket and the color dyes for eggs sometime in early March, I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything. The day before Easter around 7pm (nothing like waiting till the last minute anyway) I got out a bunch of leftover birthday party cups and the vinegar and set to work activating the dye tablets. Waldo put Lil in her chair and put her art smock (one of my old t-shirts) on and as I grabbed the first batch of dyes to take to the table I spilled one. We knew this was a sign of things to come. Waldo dropped a egg in a cup and right then and there we decided this sucked. I grabbed all the cups (after cleaning up the pink dye from the white counter) and tossed them in the sink and went to my art box and grabbed the new Crayola paint I bought. I put some paint in a few of the leftover party cups and I showed Lily that it was okay to paint the eggs. While I was getting the paint Lily and Waldo tried using crayons to color the eggs (bust) and markers (worked good) so some of the eggs had quite the decorations on them. Lily and I had fun painting the dozen eggs I boiled.

We take egg painting seriously

The new art cover for the table needed some color - apparentelly.

Easter morning or more accurately early afternoon I went out and hid the eggs and then got Lily all dressed up in the cute dress my Dad and step-Mom bought her. We all went outside and the egg hunt began.

One of Lily's painted eggs.

I was a little worried that the paint wouldn’t dry on the eggs, but it dried very nicely.

She found her first egg.

And another egg.

The eggs that got wet did bleed a little of their paint, but it’s washable so not a big deal.

Oh look, there's one in the fern.

And in the tree.

Once she found them all (the dozen painted eggs and a few empty plastic eggs), she and I went inside and Waldo hid them again.

Kitty's helping.

There's a egg in with those rocks, somewhere.

Checking out her haul.

We went inside after this and she played and played with the eggs. It was really cute. She wasn’t thrilled when the painted eggs kept breaking, but she was a good sport about throwing them away.

I hope everyone had a good Easter, no matter how you celebrate.

Since this was our first Christmas back in Cali we had to figure out how to incorporate our love of simple quiet holidays with visiting lots of relatives and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

On December 18th we went to a party at my cousin’s house for my Dad’s side of the family.

It was a lot of fun. I spent the days before the party baking 3 different types of cookies and two kinds of rice crispy treats to give out. The cookies turned out great but the royal icing was still wet on the sugar cookies so they didn’t look quite as nice as I had planned.*

It was also really cool because our Mamaw (Grandma, Dad’s Mom) just moved back to town last month after being away for 10 years. Everyone had a lot of fun eating, visiting and wearing silly glasses.

Originally we were going to have Christmas Eve at Waldo’s brother’s house but all of his family came down with the plague the day before so we switched up plans and it worked out great. Except for the sick babies part. Waldo’s brother has 4 boys; 12, 10, 2 1/2 and 1 (I think) and I think all of them were sick. We ended up having a really nice dinner at home with Waldo’s parents and then Lily opened her gifts from them.

I spent the days leading up to Christmas baking cookies and rice crispy treats to give out.*

Waldo made us hot chocolate and his Dad (Papa) started a fire. It was so cozy.

Waldo’s Mom Rita whom Lily calls ReRe made Lily a beautiful quilt and pillow case.

ReRe and Papa got her an easel, paper and markers along with a pack of Little people to go with the house she got a few weeks ago.

Lily always asks that you draw a kitty for her and we do but none of us are very talented. After a lot of drawing and playing we went to bed with hopes of sleeping in the following morning. And what can only be called a Christmas Miracle Lily didn’t wake up until 8 on Christmas morning. YAY.

After getting ready to go Waldo, Lily and I headed over to my Memaw’s (my Mom’s mom) house for chocolate gravy. This is the thing that I have been looking forward to most of all. It is a family tradition to have Memaw’s chocolate gravy for Christmas breakfast and it didn’t disappoint. My Grandparents house was packed to the gills with family, it was very noisy and a lot of fun.

We opened gifts then took a couple of pictures.

Once we were done Waldo, Lily and I left to go visit my Dad. We didn’t get any pictures over there but Lily got a lot of nice clothes and a couple of cute dolls. Then it was home so Lily could nap and then open her gifts from us.

Waldo and I had decided long ago that we don’t really exchange gifts with each other and that we wouldn’t go crazy for our kid(s). We want the holidays to be about family and not stuff. We did pretty good this year. We got Lily 3 little gifts and one slightly bigger thing. Actually one of the smaller gifts was suppose to be for one of the nephews but he already had something very similar only way better so we gave it to Lil instead and I have already gotten rid of it.

Both of Lil’s little gifts (that we bought specifically for her) were see and says. The smaller of the two was her favorite thing ever until she opened her last and best gift.

Lily loves Yo Gabba Gabba and we weren’t 100% sure which character she loved the most but she says TooDee’s name pretty often and she looked the cuddliest so we went with her. It was a huge hit.

After opening TooDee she wanted to draw all the Gabba gang. Waldo did his best.

I hope that everyone had a wonderful and memorable Christmas and holiday season.

*I will do a separate post about the cookies.

This is the first Halloween that Lily had any idea what was happening and I was super excited because we live in the same town as a lot of our family now so I was going to get to show my cutie pie off. I mean pictures are good but the real thing is so much better. Lily loved her costume and once she got comfortable with so many people in the room she played and showed off her tutu and wand.

My Mom’s wife Cory surprised us with the tutu, wings and onesie a month or two ago. When we got it I knew what Lily was going to be for Halloween and it was perfect. I bought the wand and a tiara to finish the fairy princess look off. The tiara wouldn’t stay on her head so we just carried it around. She loved the wand and had a lot of fun waving it about and chewing on the star topper.

We don’t really give Lily candy or much sugar for that matter so going door to door to trick or treat seemed unnecessary this year. So we went to visit my Dad and Step-Mom before the real trick or treating started. We wanted to be back in our comfy home before all the ghosts and Gaga’s were wondering the streets. We would have visited more people but my Grandparents are in Mississippi visiting my Aunt, my Mom lives about 35 minutes away and the few other family members were either out of town or busy with their own lives. They will all get to see the pictures so they will survive.

Daddy taking Lily up to Grandpa’s door. Lily is still shy around my Dad (and everyone else except my in-laws) so she didn’t say trick or treat although we had practiced.

We meet my sister Jolene and her kids at our Dad’s so we could take pictures of the girls together.

Livi had just woke up and was in no mood for pictures at first.

They were both fairies and just looked too cute together.

This is a picture of my lovely little sister Jolene. She hates it so I guess it’s a good thing she doesn’t read my blog. This should teach her.

My step-niece and nephew were there too.

Brianna was a really cute cat.

The kids went outside to play after a while.

That’s my step-nephew Tristan, he’s a ninja.

I had to bribe Olivia to sit still so I could take a picture of her and Lily together outside. Lily just wanted to go down the slide again, this was the best shot I got.

We had a really nice Halloween and hope that all of you did too.