Muffin Tin Monday - Halloween

It's MTM! Yay!


This week is the Halloween theme and I've been looking forward to it for a long time now! But, unfortunately, all three of us have been sick this weekend so I didn't do the tin I really wanted to do. :( Oh well, I was still able to throw a little something together. Ashlyn doesn't have much of an appetite when she's sick (like her Mama) so it was very simple.


She had a witch-shaped piece of toast, some chicken noodle soup with princess shapes (she's going to be Cinderella for Halloween), and a special treat... a pumpkin cake pop! Not the best cake pop (it had fallen off the stick and my food safe marker was dying on me) but she loved the little surprise. :)

A Look Back

Over at Funny Days with Mommy and Maddie, Amanda is reminiscing about past Halloweens and what her cute little girl dressed up as. I thought I'd join in! I know I have pictures of Ashlyn in her Halloween costumes on my header, but I thought I'd talk about them more. :)

October 2008
Ashlyn was about a month old and we didn't want to get a "real" costume for her. One day I was walking through the NEX and saw the cutest ladybug pajamas that came with a little hat, complete with antennae attached! It was just perfect.


October 2009
Both Aaron and I fell in love with this costume the moment we saw it online. We could just imagine how adorable she would be as a little tulip fairy! We were right. :)


October 2010
I know Halloween hasn't come yet, but this is her Halloween costume for this year. She has already worn it to our latest trip to Walt Disney World (last month) and she just loves dressing up in it! She'll also have a chance to wear it to the library's Halloween party the night before Halloween. So I know she'll enjoy that. I know you can't see her face in this picture (and I like the one in the header better) but I just LOVE how she's picking up her dress to look at her shoes. SO. CUTE.


Go check out Maddie's costumes over at Funny Days with Mommy and Maddie and submit your own pictures!

Precious Paper Pumpkin Painting Project

I had been trying to figure out for a little while now what Halloween/fall crafts to do with Ashlyn. I was about to throw out some poster board that I had used for a contest type thing for Ashlyn's birthday party last weekend when I realized that I could totally have her paint on the other side! I hadn't tried painting with her recently because it was just such a pain. I didn't have a set up that worked for us.

Late last week, I had an idea! We bought an inexpensive sheet awhile back to use as a drop cloth for messy crafts. That way we can just throw it in the wash and even if it doesn't get all the stains out (which we haven't had an issue with yet) it's only used for crafts so no big deal. Anyway, so I used pushpins to put the sheet on the wall. There was plenty to lay on the floor, too, in case any paint fell on the floor. After drawing a pumpkin in pencil on the poster board (on the back side that hadn't been used yet, of course), I taped the poster board to the sheet at Ashlyn's level. Then after pulling her hair back and putting a little apron on her, I let her paint!


After the masterpiece was dry, I outlined it all in a Sharpie and cut it out. It is now up above our TV as a wonderful decoration.


It would be really cute decorated as a jack-o-lantern, but I would like to keep it up through Thanksgiving, too, so I kept it as is. We both enjoyed the experience so much more than any past painting projects just because the set up worked very well for us. We will definitely be painting more often now!

Getting Into the "Spirit" of Things

Wow, I've been neglecting my blogs lately (this one and my Disney one)! Things have been a bit crazy lately, but it's settling down and we're getting back to a schedule. I'm going to be diving back into Muffin Tin Monday this coming Monday and am starting to decorate for Halloween today! With that comes searching the internet for cool projects to do with Ashlyn as well as inspiration for decorating.

While searching for great Halloween ideas I came upon this simple but fabulous idea at Redberry Barn.


Framing a napkin! How cool is that? It gave me one of those "why didn't I think of that?" moments. But it also gave me one of those "I must do that NOW!" moments. :) I'm going to go find a frame... see you all later!

Happy Halloween!

Have a spooky, eerie, scary (and most importantly, safe!) HALLOWEEN!!!


If you're looking for a last-minute Halloween treat, I made this cake last night and it turned out pretty cute (even though the picture doesn't show that very well, haha).


All I did was make a cake out of chocolate cake mix and covered it with chocolate frosting. The tombstones are Hershey's tombstone-shaped cookies-and-cream candy. I used green sprinkles as grass to kinda make it look like freshly dug graves. (This looks better with less tombstones, but I made this particular one for hubby's work so wanted to make enough individual pieces.) If you have Oreo cookies or something like that lying around you could crumble those up and put beneath the tombstones to make it look like freshly turned up dirt. Anyway, it was a super quick and easy last minute dessert!

Tonight will be the first time we take Baby Girl out trick-or-treating. She was 1 month old last Halloween so we just stayed home. Have fun tonight!!

Book Fan Friday

The weekend is almost here! And that means Halloween is tomorrow! I didn't have a Halloween themed book to read to Baby Girl but I made it work. She just got a new book the other day. Blue's Clues A Visit to the Firehouse by Lauryn Silverhardt.


I've always thought Blue's Clues was one of the cutest children's programs. Baby Girl has a DVD (we don't have Noggin' or anything here that plays it) and now this book. It teaches kids about what a fireman does. It is a little advanced for Baby Girl, of course, but she loves the pictures (she really likes Blue's Clues) and I know she'll like it more and more as she gets older. And I never knew Blue had a brother, so we both learned something. lol

Since this book had nothing to do with Halloween, I got online and looked for a picture for her to color. She just started actually coloring instead of trying to eat the crayons. :) It is very exciting to watch her scribble. I got down on the floor and colored with her. She would hand me different colors to use and she'd change her crayon all the time. It was too sweet.


You're darn right it's up on our fridge right now. :) I'm so proud of all those little scribbles. We colored for a little while until she felt the picture was done and crawled away.

As always, if you have found a great book, children's or otherwise, I would love to see what it is and what you thought about it! I will leave the link-up open all week so feel free to join in at any time.

Getting in the Halloween "Spirit"! (Get it? Spirit? *ahem* Moving On...)

I'm finally starting to feel like Halloween is near! We were so busy this month with our trip back to the states and all that we didn't do much to get ready. But just in the past couple of days we did some decorating and some baking. Monday I baked some sugar cookies, cut them out into spooky shapes, dusted them with purple sprinkles, and used some chocolate chips (regular for the pumpkins and ghosts and mini chips for the cats and bats). They were really good and hubby took some to work. I hear they all liked them, too.


I am also going to be baking another Halloween treat tomorrow, so stay tuned for pictures of that. :)

While we were in the states I got some spiced pecan and pumpkin pancake mix from Williams Sonoma and was so excited to try it out. I made them this morning and they were really super good. Baby Girl liked them, too. I would have saved them for Halloween morning, but hubby works the mornings all weekend, so this morning had to do. I wasn't too sad that I didn't have to wait a few more days. :) Next time you wander by a Williams Sonoma I really recommend grabbing a can of this mix. We got similar pumpkin bread mix, too, but we're going to save that for Thanksgiving. I could spend a fortune in that store, but anyway...

We bought four pumpkins for Halloween this year. Two stayed just pumpkins and two were transformed!

I saw this next idea over at Living Locurto. She has awesome ideas so definitely check out the rest of her site, too. I turned a small pumpkin into a vampire bat!


I traced some wings onto cardboard and black construction paper, glued them together, and glued that onto the back of my pumpkin. Some googly eyes (my craft item of choice at the moment) and a black Sharpie mouth later and voila! A cute little vampire bat.

We carved our first jack-o-lantern as a couple this year! Only took us 4 years. :) We found a stencil book that gives you two stencils per pumpkin. The back carving casts a shadow onto the wall and it just looks really cool. We chose the rats with a cat shadow. I am so excited about it.


I will be taking pictures of the front of our house on Halloween night and will definitely share those, too!

Muffin Tin Monday - Halloween

I was pretty darned excited about this week's MTM theme ~ HALLOWEEN!!! I didn't go all out like I would have liked to. I'm still doing the last little bit of laundry and unpacking from our trip, Baby Girl is trying to get back on a good schedule (which she seems to be doing pretty quickly, thankfully!), and I'm kinda worn out. haha I'm also hoping that I can find some cute Halloween tins and accessories on sale after Halloween day. I love doing that.... buying decorations for any occasion when they are on sale and use them the following year. Anyway, you came for MTM, not random ramblings of a tired (and putting off laundry as long as possible) mama! :)


This week Baby Girl had a ooey, gooey, spooky pb&j bat, pumpkin and pear witch's stew (baby food - which I'm starting to give her less and less of but we're finishing up the rest of what's in the cupboard), ghost juice (milk), and a last minute addition of baby ghosts (mini marshmallows - totally stole the idea from my friend over at Momma's Playground!).

Go check out all the really cool tins that others did for this Fall Harvest/Halloween theme over at Her Cup Overfloweth. And please go vote for Baby Girl as The Cutest Fall Baby of 2009 over at Mama's Notes (she is picture #1).

Halloween Cards

I've seen quite a few sites that show putting paint on your child's hands and putting handprints on a pumpkin to make it look like a spider. Well, craft paint isn't sold on island but I thought the spiders were just too cute. I love finding new crafts to do with Baby Girl. So I figured I could use paper and make Halloween cards to send to family instead!

First I traced Baby Girl's cute little hand (minus the thumb) on black construction paper and cut it out.


Then I used that as my stencil and made a whole bunch of them!


Then just take two of them and overlap the palms. Tape/glue/whatever them together. I used photo squares because, well, that's what I had lying around and they are quicker than glue. :)


Put some googly eyes on them and you have a cute little spider!


I put them on a plain white card (again, just worked with what I had) and wrote "The itsy, bitsy spider crawled up the water spout..." On the inside it says "... to wish you a Happy Halloween!"


I also made an extra spider that we can use to decorate from year to year and I plan on adding a new spider each year to show how much she's grown. I'm not sure how I'm going to display them yet, though.

Super Cute Halloween Craft

I have another cute Halloween project for all of you! This one is from Amanda's blog over at Funny Days with Mommy and Maddie. These Halloween felt puppets are so cute and what makes them even better is I feel like they aren't completely beyond my crafting ability. Have you ever gotten frustrated by crafts that look really nice but you just know you would completely screw it up and give up before you even try? Hmmm, maybe that's just me. But Amanda makes these seem super easy and just look at how happy her daughter looks with them! :)


I am totally ordering some felt online (or grabbing up some next time I'm in the states) and making these for Baby Girl!

Mini Pumpkin Pies

In my last post I mentioned wanting to make the way too cute mini pumpkin pies on Bakerella's website. It was so easy and so good! I didn't use the pie recipe she has up, though. We had some leftover evaporated milk from a quiche we made for dinner the other night and we wanted to go ahead and use it up (waste not, want not!) so we just picked up some pumpkin pie mix and went even simpler. I really want to try out her recipe one day, though.

I wasn't sure whether or not to do the little chocolate faces at first. I knew they were just too adorable, but I didn't know if hubby and I would like the chocolate on it. But I couldn't not try it out, right? It is definitely not enough chocolate to even taste. It just makes them look even more irresistible! We absolutely love them and can't wait to share them with friends!

Halloween is Coming Fast!

I can't believe it is October already! Hubby and I are going to be starting to decorate today. I'm so excited to get everything out of storage! We also have some leftover evaporated milk so I am going to be making some mini pumpkin pies, as seen on Bakerella (and if you've been around my blog at all, you know I just adore the things she makes!), to get us in the Halloween mood! I'm going to be switching my blog to a Halloween theme, also, and will feature lots of Halloween crafts I do or see around the internet. So please pardon any construction you may see. :)

Halloween Is On Its Way!

Hubby and I decided on what costume to get Baby Girl for Halloween...


... she'll be our little Tulip Fairy! I can't wait to see her in it. She'll be way too cute! We ordered it from Halloween Express and let me tell you, they are awesome! They have super cute costumes for all ages, plus cool decorations, and the prices seem pretty decent! The above costume (everything included) was $24.99. I was definitely going to order from them since, well, they actually ship to military addresses! Then at checkout it said that shipping is free to APO/FPO addresses! That is unheard of! Usually we have to pay an arm and a leg in shipping because we live overseas. So this was definitely a breath of fresh air and very much appreciated. So if you live at an APO/FPO address, totally look into it! Even if you don't, I don't think their regular shipping is expensive at all, so check them out. I just wanted to share my find!