Well, preschool is officially over for this school year. No more online homework, emailed coloring assignments, or weekly classroom Zoom meetings. Although school is over for him I don’t want to lose what he was learning and I don’t want the learned to stop until school starts up again (hopefully) in August.

I bought a blue science board from Target and also picked up some fun posterboard borders from the Dollar Spot area at Target. The letters I picked up from OfficeMax when I got his flashcards printed.

I knew I only wanted to add the basics for him to focus on which included: basic colors, basic shapes, numbers 1-10, and the alphabet. I’m not 100% in love with the printouts I found so I have a feeling I will be creating my own to replace.

Lastly, I added a spare set of the flashcards. I wanted to be able to update the board as he learned so I only attached the laminated pages with mounting putty.
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Andrew was instantly interested in the board and we have been using it every day, usually just 5 minutes at a time before he ready to move on to something else. But it’s a great start!

Okay, these have been something I’ve wanted to make for months, but kept putting it off. I finally added this to my 36 by 36 List just so I would finally get this done.
Andrew is working on his communication skills, but since he isn’t talking it isn’t always easy to know what he wants. I’m not even sure where the flashcard idea came from, but I remember it being an awesome idea.

I didn’t want to overwhelm or confuse him, and I wanted to only focus on the most important things for him to know. Jack and I decided on 12 cards:  Mommy, Daddy, Mimi, Papa, Duffey, Eat, Drink, Diaper, Cartoons, Color, Ball, and Book. I took pictures for each of these words or things he could associate with them; I also found pictures of all of us. Now I don’t have any fancy picture editing system so I just used Word.

I created a table of 2X4 portrait table. I typed each word on the bottom of each rectangle and inserted the picture for that word. All of the item pictures were photographed on white paper so it was super easy to remove the background using the Word Picture Remove Background tool. The pictures of us and Duffey took a little more time to remove the background just right. Since my home printer doesn’t print on cardstock I had OfficeMax print four copies of the set. However, I took them home to cut them out and then used our laminate machine. They would have been able to cut and laminate them but would have cost $1 per cute and $2 per laminate page, which would have added up pretty quickly.
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Once all of the flashcards were laminated, I trimmed each card out and bundled them together. Andrew seems to really enjoy the cards, but he is still getting the hang of them. When someone asked him where mommy was, holding up the card of me, he went to the office door where I was inside working; at least he knows who I am and where I was!

It is crazy to think that I have never made a buttercream cake like this before! It was so simple to make and turned out so cute that I hope to make more in the future.

The trick to the cake was to crumb coat it with frosting, chill, and then put a thicker second coat of frosting on. Something I rarely do and need to do more of! I used a large star tip to create the piping border and sprinkled on rainbow confetti sprinkles to finish the cake.
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It came out so cute and looked like it came from the store bakery, but only better!

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day and I knew Jack would have been happy to make me breakfast or order and take out from our favorite breakfast place, but I wanted to make a quiche for my mom and ended up making us one too.

This is my go-to quiche recipe:

ENTER RECIPE

The meat can be changed or removed, and the same with the vegetables. This is always a crowd favorite and I like to make it the night before the holidays. I recently made my Denver Quiche for the men’s group at church and the loved it!

​*In the picture is sausage quiche.

I have a lot of stuff, a lot. My storage tubs have slowly taken all of the garage shelves and my shed is FULL. So full that it has gotten harder to get anything out. I do plan to purge the holidays' bins when I get into them, but I also have party supplies, costumes, and craft supplies I store in there that I need to get into more often. I asked Jack to build me a shelf that it would be easier to keep things organized and still be accessible. He spent $20 on five 2x4 boards that were 96 inches in length, he already had the wood screws.

The shelf was very simple 48” long, 20” wide enough to fit in the shed and hold the bins. We also made the shelves only 15” high just high enough for them to fit under. The shelf needed to be able to hold a lot of weight so he secured each board with two screws.
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The shelf fits perfectly in the shed and so did the storage bins. This will make getting into the tubs so much easier. When the weather cools back down in the fall I’ll ask Jack to make some more for the other sides of the shed and storage bins, he just doesn’t know it yet.

I am really proud of this baby boy quilt. Andrew’s Godmother is having her virtual baby shower this weekend due to the pandemic. Because of the pandemic, I wasn’t going to be able to go buy new fabric and thankfully have several plastic tubs full of unfinished projects. The fabric came from the burb cloth project that I never go to when Andrew still needed burb cloths. Maybe that is why I love this quilt so much; it all came from fabric I had picked for Andrew.

I cut the seven quilt fabrics into 5 ½” thick strips of fabric and sewed them together. I then cut the sewn together rows vertically into 5 ½” thick strips. This made a vertical row of the seven different fabrics all sewn together. I would then remove one or more sewn squares and moved it to the next vertical row and sewed in place. This created the pattern I wanted most easily, even though it doesn’t seem like it. After all the new rows were completed, I sewed them all together, creating the front of the quilt. I then sewed a thick border of fabric all along the side of the quilt.

I used temporary fabric adhesive spray to stick the front of the quilt to the back before sewing in place. I sewed lines along the seams of all of the quilt squares, making sure not to put any stitches on the border.

Once I was finished I folded and ironed the unsewn edge of the border, folding the iron edge over on the backside and sewed it down to create the quilt border.
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The mommy and daddy-to-be loved the quilt which is so awesome and the bonus was it only cost me a few hours of my time, not to forget a little less fabric in my storage bins!