Scottish Short Bread

I love cookies, but if I eat more than one or two the eggs in them make me feel like I've got a dagger sticking in my belly. Not the most pleasant experience! I really wanted to make valentine's cookies with the kids and we found this amazingly simple and delicious recipe for Scottish short bread. I added some vanilla to the small list of ingredients (flour, butter and sugar). We used salted amish farm butter, organic flour, sugar and vanilla. Archer and Eleri actually helped a lot! They both used the mixer and stirred in the flour. Archer got a bit more flour on himself than the dough. :) Lyra cooperated by toddling past us numerous times looking cute. My house smells soooo good. I think there may be a danger to being able to eat more than one or two cookies.....

Bird Necklace

I really love this necklace, I am trying to decide whether to just keep it for myself, or include it in the grand (re)opening of Adora Boutique. All links are hand made in solid sterling silver wire. The heart clasp latches on to a handmade and hammered silver loop that features a fresh water pearl.

a sweet end to the day

after getting lyra to sleep, i went in to put archer and eleri to sleep, eleri has been such a stinker all night i was so shocked to see this. archer was reading sweetly to eleri, and she was loving every minute of it. it was such a craptastic evening, this makes it all better :) <3

random pics from our day

today is brought to you by the letter 'K'



isn't this a strange creepy picture of eleri???? i had the shutter set too slow.

almost a walker! she'll take a few steps and flop :)

eleri being sweet

math on a cold day

today ended up being a cold and rainy day. normally i dread these days, no outside play makes archer and eleri a bit on the crazy side. it was after lunch and time for us to do 'math'. in this case, learning our numbers. i had an idea, that worked brilliantly, to get them moving and recognizing and ordering numbers! on the front door i put post its with 1-15, scattered randomly. then i had them stand at the back door. they took turns running as fast as they could, and had to grab the next number in order. then they ran back and stuck it in on the back door in order. they had a blast, and we played it twice, switching who was odds and who was evens.

a few of the things i accomplished today

since austin took the babies to his family's house, i had some time to actually make things, and clean unhindered! i love the babies, but they're not the best helpers quite yet. i cleaned about half the downstairs and mopped, and even scrubbed the wood floors on my hands and knees, and then i decided i was done with cleaning! i made a few things for my first stocking at Creatively Serene, it's going to be Feb 1st.

the reason it takes me so long is i hand sew each and every layer before gluing. this insures the bow isn't going to fall apart or come loose :)

these are to match the newest gymbo line! it's so cute. i'm secretly hoping these don't sell so i can have an excuse to buy some clothes :)





and finally, i started making something for ME. i can't remember the last time i did that. i've had this pendant forever and i finally decided to start a necklace with it. the stones are rose quartz, sodalite, amethyst and there is also some freshwater pearl. it takes so long to make each link by hand out of silver wire i didn't get to finish tonight, i wonder when i'll actually finish, lol.

bathtime and photoshop fun

thanks to discovering the amazing site http://thepioneerwoman.com/
i am finally venturing in to the other side of my camera's dial! i have a lot to learn, but my easily confused brain finally gets what aperture, shutter and ISO settings are for! however, with these pics i completely forgot about ISO and they were shot in 1600! so they are miserably grainy. the pic of archer was so bad i just can't seem to do anything with it. here's my girls, in various states of graininess. and cuteness...