Creating Kris ~ a young mom blogs…

Canada Day and Patriotic Blinkies

I hope everyone had a great weekend, and I heard somewhere it was it a long weekend for some people? I guess maybe in the States since the 4th of July fell on a Sunday this year. It’s always been kind of nice to kick off the first week of summer holidays with these patriotic celebrations that fall so conveniently soon after the end of the school year.

We enjoyed our Canada Day celebrations, but although we are lucky to live in Canada’s capital (where there are always a ton of things to do, especially downtown in and around Parliament Hill), we just stayed local for the events we attended. My son loved visiting a park that had all sorts of games and “bouncy” air-inflated rides set up. He went on a small one with an obstacle course and slide, then on a very tall slide, then got his face-painted and tried some of the games. My daughter was very aloof about the experience (as preteens can often be), but when she saw her friends there, she was running over to say “hi” to people.

We finished off our holiday day with a yummy BBQ at home, complete with some freshly-baked Canada Day cupcakes that I’d made that day. I’d tried to do a layering effect, but the recipe I was using was a little on the small side and I didn’t have quite enough batter. I think they still came out great though, and the icing (also red – or at least as red as I could make it without dumping in a full bottle of red food colouring, which my hubby and likely also my son are sensitive to) added a lot to the top “layer” to get the red-white-red look that I was going for (like our flag).

Also on Canada Day, I worked on creating some blinkies for both our celebration and started some for the US holiday a few days after on the 4th of July. I finished those ones off yesterday (the 4th), so it’s not likely they’ll get much use this year, but hopefully in years to come they’ll be handy for anyone wanting to show a little patriotic love in their message board posts, siggies, blogs, etc.

Summer Patriotic Big Blinkies

Our family had a very busy first week and weekend of summer holidays so I’m looking foward to a slower pace for this week! My daughter is taking a trip with her grand-parents to southern Ontario, and my son has settled in nicely into his daycare center’s summer program (full-time instead of part-time!) so I’m really eager to get caught up on all the work around the house (both in slowly plodding through some housework interspersed with lots of resting as well as some much-needed paperwork and overdue phone calls), work on my websites, and work on my health (like more regular and less cut-short-noisy-interupted naps)!!!

KITK: Banana Bread, Banana Cake, and a new Banana Icing recipe

For this “Kids in the Kitchen” baking adventure, I made the actual cake and the kids helped with the icing when they got home from school…

Avery ices our banana cake!

I have actually been baking the exact same Banana Bread since 1998! I was given the recipe at a parenting program way back when I was pregnant with Harmony. It’s a really super easy banana bread to make, and over the years I’ve added other ingredients to mix it up a little and experiment with new tastes. It tastes so fabulous with blueberries, strawberries or chocolate chips! It’s a very “kid friendly recipe” and kids of any age can help with different parts, like mushing up the bananas (they can’t really mess that up other than being a bit messy!), mixing it all up, or tossing in some of the extra ingredients.

Even though we’ve relied on this “stand by” recipe for over a decade, I was still tempted to try out this new recipe for Banana Cake that I found on a new Live Journal Community, “Amanda Bakes”. I loved that it was more of a cake than a bread, because I’d tried to turn my banana bread into cakes over the years with limited success (even with chocolate chips and chocolate icing, it was not quite cakey enough).

So this week, I tried out the Banana Cake and it was delicious! I think the cinnamon really helps add to the cakey flavour.

New banana cake recipe - mmm, cinnamon.

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Scrapbooking Layouts: Nov & Dec 2008

Our “Family 2008″ album is now complete!

And now I can safely say that I’m caught up to a year ago as far as regular family photos go. I’m also mostly caught up on the kids’ school albums, but still needing to “fill in the blanks” as far as their birthday albums go. I’ve even recently discovered that my Family 2006 album is missing a title page (how did that happen!?), so I must go back sometime to put a little something together.

Here are pics of the two (traditionally) scrapbooked layouts:

November 2008:

December 2008:

One thing I feel like I’m really getting the hang of is doing 2-page layouts in a style such that each page could stand alone by itself, but also coordinates well with the one beside it. I definitely recommend using this technique if you have photos from, say, two separate events but are devoting a 2-page spread per month or something like that.

What’s Next?
Well, I did decide to go ahead and digitally scrapbook all of our 2009 Family photos. It not only saves me the money of buying a new scrapbook (I’m a keener on Creative Memories’ beautiful but expensive albums), it saves me sitting up at craft tables for hours and sticking by my usual laptop instead. This fits in much better with my current chronic-pain-filled life (that I’m still adjusting to…). Digital scrapbooking is one of the many activities I have managed to learn to do with one hand on the mouse, the laptop on a little table beside me, and the rest of me on the couch. And then there’s always the option of printing out the digital layouts and slipping them into 12×12 albums later down the road if I’d like to.

The only thing from 2009 that I will be scrapbooking (and have started already) is the pictures that go into my specialty albums: the kids’ birthdays and school pictures as well as Christmas. Time to get back to work on those soon (I really haven’t been scrapbooking all that much these days: even the two layouts in this post were done quite a number of weeks ago).

Happy scrapping and stay tuned to see more new hand-stamped cards and new digital layouts soon!