Celebrating {six}

On Friday, the not quite as tiny person got even less tiny...she turned six! :) There was a great deal of excitement in our house ~ in fact the first thing I heard that morning (aside from my very rude alarm clock) was the voice of the tinier tiny person saying, "Sister! Sister! Happy birthday, sister!" Pardon me while I {melt} just a little.

The 6-year-old requested princesses on her cake, and my mom and I debated long and hard about how to accomplish that without having to pay someone else to do it. We scoured the toy department and the cake decorating aisles at the store and found {nada} that we felt would get the job done. And then, my mother had a moment of genius. Goodie bags...

The goodie bags we found came in a pack of 8 ~ we simply cut the picture of the princesses off of the front of one of the bags, frosted the whole cake, then placed the picture where we wanted it and piped some frosting around the edge. Obviously, it's not edible, but the birthday girl was {thrilled} with how it turned out, it was super easy and way inexpensive. Sneaky, right?

I Could've Cried...

And I would have if I had thought for even one second that crying would've been helpful. But when the pipe that runs underneath your bathtub decides that it's {d.o.n.e.} and can no longer resist the urge to grow a little hole....during bath time....and the water seeps through the drywall and the ceiling tiles in the finished part of the basement near the guest bed....yeah, crying doesn't do much good. This is part where I declare how glad I am that I married a man with handy-type skills ~ he went right to tearing down the tiles and ripping out the drywall. He located the problem, and starting taking stuff apart.

It sat like that over night, he got to work right away this morning and had the tub officially {fixed} before tiny person 1 got home from school. {Whew!} Thank goodness he's confident enough in his abilities to go ahead and at least {try} to do something that he's never done before rather than go straight to the yellow pages & call in a plumber. He totaled the receipts to right around $40. I don't even want to think about what the total would've been for someone to come out and do it for us.

Of course this is going to lead to other projects ~ installing an {access panel} in the ceiling (which should've been done by the people who finished the basement...) and probably tearing down {all} of the ceiling tiles and replacing them, or painting the drywall. I've been wanting to paint the walls down there for years, but was always told that we shouldn't bother to mess with it ~ I wonder if I'll get to paint them now!

So that's the excitement we've been dealing with here. Try not to be jealous of the glamour. ;)

What's for Lunch?

Ahhh, packing the school lunch. Trying to find options that are healthy, liked by the tiny people, not messy and can be consumed in 30 sec. flat....as it seems there's not a lot of time set aside for actual {eating} during lunch time. Apparently recess is so much more important.

In an attempt to switch things up a bit, I decided to try something different - sandwich rolly-things. So far it's a big hit, so I thought I'd share it with you lovely peoples.

Step 1 - Smoosh the living daylights out of a slice of bread. Now, you could use a rolling pin, but I find that using a flat-bottomed casserole dish does the job just fine. Smoosh....Press down hard....Flatten that sucker. {Enjoy} it. ;)

See? Pretty flat. You can press down again if you notice any spots where it might not be as flat as you'd like.

Step 2 - Cut off the crusts. For most of us, that's a step in the lunch-making process anyway, right?

Step 3 - My tiny people don't care for mustard or mayo, so I butter the bread before putting the lunchmeat (1 or 2 slices) on the bread. Cut up a cheese slice into smaller strips and set one on top of the lunch meat. If you have mustard/mayo/ketchup lovers, you can run a single line of it along the cheese so you don't go overboard, if you prefer to do that rather than slather it on the bread.

Step 4 - Roll it up...

It'll end up looking like this.

I can fit 4 of these in the not quite as tiny person's sandwich box, but I usually do 3 and a side of some sort of snacky-type food.

I usually round it out with a serving of fruit and something to drink, and call it good. The teachers at our school have implemented a policy that makes the kids bring home what they don't eat (unless it's horribly messy - like a partially eaten yogurt cup or something) and I can tell you ~ the not quite as tiny person eats these babies up. She even told me that she likes it when I make these b/c they're so much quicker to eat. {SCORE!}

Works great for PB&J, too - with PB over the whole slice and a line of jelly (or honey...that's a good one, too) placed about where I put the cheese on these.

So there you have it! Go smoosh some bread!