First Time Mom and Losing It

I can not say enough how much we love to celebrate the holidays. Things are so much more fun when you have a child that truly enjoys getting treated extra special. Our holidays always starts with a special breakfast, something fun to wear in our hair and something fun on our t-shirts. Later on we will have a festive snack and then for Easter, the opening of the baskets starts.

I love starting every holiday with a festive breakfast. It almost always includes a decorated pancake. I thought it would be fun to bake the pancakes in the oven using these silicone egg shaped trays. We added fresh strawberry puree to make the pancake eggs pink and then drizzled on some melted white chocolate. My daughter had fun decorating the pancake eggs with Easter sprinkles and candy.


We always dress for the holiday and the easiest way is to decorate a t-shirt. I love using wax paper as stencils to quickly paint on a cute design. You can do a search for whatever you want and the word "stencil" and the possibilities are endless. Since my daughter loves glitter I decided to use glitter glue and glitter in place of the fabric paint. A cute little pompom completed the design.


To go along with the shirt I made a super simple bunny ear headband. I made the headband black so that it would blend in with my daughter's hair. She loved how fluffy they were. It was so comfortable that she left it on all day.


Every toddler & preschooler I know is obsessed with those Kinder surprise eggs. Since they are banned in the US I decided to make my own with some safe toys inside. It was amazingly easy to do and my preschooler thought they were the real thing.


Since my daughter is old enough to craft with me she helped me decorate some pudding cups. We made them look like little girls dressed in Easter dresses.

I love making my daughter a special breakfast on any holiday like my heart and love shaped pancakes. Since I got those silicone egg molds to make my DIY Kinder Surprise Eggs, I decided to put them to use again and make some pancakes out of them.


I wanted the eggs to be pink so I took about 3/4 cup of chopped fresh strawberries and placed it into my mini blender and blended away until I got a nice puree. I took some cheesecloth and placed it into a strainer and poured the puree through to catch all of the seeds and chunky bits.

Since I used a complete pancake mix I used two thirds of the strawberry puree and one third water for the liquid. My box instructions called for 3/4 cup of water so I added 1/2 cup of strawberry puree and 1/4 cup of water. Mix and let the pancake batter rest for at least 5 minutes.


Take the silicone mold and place onto a metal sheet pan. Spray the egg molds with some oil and pour the strawberry pancake batter in. Place in the oven at 350 degrees and cook until the pancakes are cooked through. Mine took about 25 minutes.


While the pancake eggs are cooking I melted about 1/2 cup of white chocolate chips. Place the melted chocolate into a plastic baggie and cut the tip of one of the corners. Take the pancake eggs out of the oven and let cool slightly for about 5 minutes. Pop out the egg pancakes out of the mold and place flat side down on a plate. Drizzle the chocolate on top to decorate the pancakes like an Easter egg. Add some Easter sprinkles and bunny and carrot candies. (optional)




Sprinkle some unsweetened coconut flakes to the bottom of the plate and place the eggs on top to serve.

My daughter loves dressing up and I especially love to buy her Holiday themed bows and headbands for her to wear. I wasn't satisfied with the bunny ears I saw in the discount or big box stores so I decided to make my own. I wanted them to be fluffy and sturdy. I also wanted the headband part to be similar to my daughter's hair color so that it could look more like ears and less like a headband. I originally wanted to get a black or dark brown headband but couldn't find one so I opted to wrap a green headband I had with black ribbon.


I went on a search through my craft bins and found some left over marabou boa from the Christmas skirt I made my daughter and some pink and white felt to detail the ears. I wanted the ears to stay upright so I took out some pipe cleaners and then took out my hot glue gun.


First you need to cut two pieces of marabou boa that are eight inches long. Take two pipe cleaners and cut them both to be eight inches long too. Hot glue one of the pipe cleaners to the middle of the one of the marabou boa strips. Repeat for the second one. Cut two pieces of pink felt to look like the inside of the bunny ears like in the picture below. Fold each of the marabou boa and pipe cleaner strips in half. Hot glue the felt pink inner ears onto the front of the ears.




Hot glue the ears to the headband making sure to put lots of hot glue on the back edge and bottom of the headband so that they stay secure and upright.You can also dress it up by adding bows to the ears of some rhinestone and glitter.

Finally let your little bunny prance around on Easter.


Does your little one like to dress up on the holidays other than Halloween?

If you have a toddler you probably know what Kinder Surprise eggs are. They are these hollow chocolate eggs that have surprise toys inside of them. My daughter discovered them on YouTube and had been hooked on watching them. I have to admit that I get caught watching them too sometimes!

I wanted to find some for my daughter but then realized that they are banned in the US. The reasoning is that the US has a ban of toys being embedded into candy. My creative gears started turning and I decided to attempt to make some for my daughter as a special surprise on Easter.


I bought some silicone egg molds, semisweet chocolate chips and white chocolate chips. I purchased some really small toys to go inside the eggs and got some foil to wrap around the eggs. I wanted the eggs to look legit to a toddler so I created a printable that you can wrap around the eggs.

The first step is to melt the semisweet chocolate and the white chocolate in separate bowls. I used a double boiler to melt the chocolates. I took a silicone brush and brushed a layer of semisweet chocolate onto the egg molds. I put it into the fridge and let it harden. Then I repeated the steps one more time for a total of two layers. Repeat the steps one more time with the white chocolate.



While the eggs where hardening for the last time I took out some aluminum foil and cut it into  "9 by 7 " rectangles. I printed out the wraps and cut them out.


Then I took the eggs out of the fridge and popped them out of the molds. I took a small frying pan and heated it up a little and turned off the heat. I put the toy in one of the halves and then took the other half and put it cut side up in the pan so the edges could melt a little. I took the two halves of the egg and placed them together to seal. I put them back in the fridge to harden the seal.



Finally I took the foil and wrapped it around the completed egg. Then I took the printed wrap trimmed the top bottom and sides to fit perfectly and taped it around.

My favorite way to dress up daughter during the holidays is to make different t-shirts for her using iron-ons or stencils. It's so easy to buy a plain shirt for a couple of bucks and just print out a stencil to paint with. I have done tons of shirts for my daughter by printing out a stencil and tracing it onto some freezer paper. Then I take the freezer paper and iron it on and then use some fabric paint to color it in.

I wanted to try something different so I decided to experiment with some glitter glue and fashion glitter in place of the standard fabric paint.

First I printed out the printable. Then I placed it on a table and taped down some freezer paper, paper side up. I used a pencil to trace the outline of the rabbit. I took an exacto knife and I cut out the rabbit and trimmed around the stencil. Next I ironed on the stencil to the middle of the shirt and brushed on a nice coat of the glitter glue.



I quickly sprinkled on the glitter until it was fully coated. I placed some wax paper on top of the glitter and used the glitter tube to roll it on top to make sure the glitter was stuck onto the glue well. Then I and let it sit for about 5 hours.


After that I poured off the excess glitter into a piece of folded paper and put it back into the glitter tube. I carefully peeled off the stencil.


I took a white pom pom and used fabric glue to glue it into place where the tail would go. Allow the fabric glue to try completely before putting on the shirt.


I am not sure how well the glitter will hold up to washing so I recommend turning the shirt inside out and hand washing, being careful not to agitate the part with the glitter. I would also allow it to air dry.

Will you be DIY'ing anything this Easter? 

This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #SnackPackMixins #CollectiveBias


Now that Valentine's day is over I see Easter decorations and basket goodies all over the place! I decided to get started on my daughter's Easter basket so I headed out to Walmart to see what decorations and fillings I could find. I am not the type to fill her basket with lots of candy so I have to get creative with different toys and snacks like pudding cups. My mom would always make us these huge Easter baskets that were so much cooler than the store-made ones so I learned from the best for my daughter.

While I was browsing around Walmart I saw the Snack Pack pudding cups and thought that the Honey Maid grahams would be a perfect #SnackPackMixins to create a cute treat for my cute toddler!


One of the things I love most about Easter is dressing up my daughter in a beautiful Easter dress. Now that she is older I got her a Easter hat and little white gloves too. Since I love to dress up my toddler so much I decided to dress up the pudding cups too! I wanted to make it easy on myself so I left the pudding in the container and mixed in some crushed up Honey Maid grahams.


To make the Snack Cup into a cute little girl with an Easter dress and bonnet I took  about 10" of ribbon and hot glued some tulle, pleating as I went to make the "skirt" fuller. I wrapped the "skirt" around the Snack Pack and hot glued it into place.


Then I printed out the printable and carefully cut out. I added a black and white girl topper just in case your little one wanted to be creative and color it in. Then I hot glued some tooth picks and placed the topper right in the middle.


I sprinkled some more Honey Maid grahams and some sprinkles to decorate the top of the "skirt".


Not only was is fun for my daughter to look at but she also loved the pure vanilla taste of the Snack Pack. I loved how effortless it was to open the Snack Pack with their new Easy Open Lids and how it had the same amount of calcium as an eight ounce glass of milk.



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What festive Easter treats do you make for your kids?