Scones for Mother's Day

Hello, loyal readers! These past couple of weeks have been super busy, so we're putting our post up kind of late in the evening... but it's still technically Friday! Still, we apologize for the lateness of the hour.

As planned on our Spring Bucket List, we made our mom breakfast for dinner on Mother's day. Katie made turkey bacon and scrambled eggs, and Sarah baked three varieties of breakfast food, all of them chocolate. (We're linking to some recipes further down in the post.)

The baked goods were huge hits. Our family managed to polish off all of them within less than two days, if you can believe it. The chocolate chip muffins even received the compliment of being "better than Panera's." Click through for some amazing recipes:  scones  donuts  muffins 
They are all relatively easy to make, even for the inexperienced baker. Take Sarah's word for it, baked donuts are infinitely easier than fried, and way less mess. The only special equipment needed is a donut pan, which is cheap and worth the investment.

In addition to the food, we gave our dear mother some small gifts, which are pictured below.

Flowers from Angie (our little sister)

Tea from Katie

Card from Sarah

Our mom is a fantastic human being, and it was wonderful to spend some quality time with her on Mother's day. How she put up with us all these years we'll never know. =) Tell us in the comments what you did with your mothers (or children).

Happy belated Mother's day to all you moms! We sincerely congratulate you on your patience and perseverance. 

Schedules and Clothespins

Hello, lovely people! Today we're going to be showing you a fairly easy craft you can make to help organize your schedule. All you need are clothespins, paint, and a sharpie!

Here's the finished product:

Sarah's ↑

Possibly you have a family calendar at your house, with everybody's basic work hours, appointments, etc. We have one of those, but having a place to map out your personal schedule is incredibly useful, especially if you don't want to call your family's attention to the fact that you're setting aside time to watch Gilmore Girls and write your novel. :)

We've tried planners and the like, but these attempts ended in failure. For some reason, we have a hard time actually putting plans into action unless they're right up there on the wall staring us in the face. Also, we find it helpful to focus on just a few days at a time, otherwise we start going crazy and trying to plan out every minute of our lives for the next five years. (Yeah, we've got issues.) Anyway, when we saw this craft on Pinterest, we thought it might be perfect for us.

Katie's ↑

Going into the project, we were feeling a little bit cocky, thinking that we'd whip through it in, oh, half an hour or so. It ended up taking a little less than two hours to complete. Granted, a lot of that time was spent trying to get our paint colors mixed exactly right.

That being said, this craft is very straightforward. In a nutshell, the directions are: Paint clothespins and write the days of the week on them in sharpie. However, if you read these instructions, you'll get some useful tips for how to go about the painting process.

Our own procedure deviated a bit from the original. We were slackers in that we didn't bother to sand our clothespins as the directions suggest, and we were overachievers in that we painted the entire clothespin rather than just the side where the day of the week is displayed. This all could have been avoided had we actually... uh... read the instructions beforehand. However, we think it's for the best; this way, we can flip the clothespins around to the blank side if we ever want to use them for something else, like story outlining, recipes, etc. Also, it was a bit of an exercise in patience for those of us (aka Sarah) who do not have the longest of attention spans when it comes to crafts. (There have been a lot of unfinished knitting projects and Christmas ornaments over the years.)

Our completed clothespins:

Sarah's ↑

Katie's ↑

Side note: The schedules pictured were thrown together on the spot so we could take the pictures. Our actual schedules look a bit different. ;)


We're pretty happy with how this craft turned out, and we're hopeful that it will help us make better use of our time. Will they be more successful for us than the planners were? Only time will tell. But for the moment, at least, we're feeling enthusiastic about this new idea. Let us know in the comments about your own crafting and scheduling endeavors! And on that note: happy organizing!