There's snow day like a snow day....

This morning I woke up to the most beautiful scene! Snow was everywhere and I was energized. This is the perfect day for this post, which will be kind of a mish-mosh of things.

FIRST, what do you want on a cold day like this? In my house we love something hot to drink and warm soup to eat. This week has been pretty busy and I haven't had a chance to go to the grocery store. Luckily I had about 5 lbs of potatoes left from a 10 lb bag that I scored for $.99! SO I decided to make potato soup for dinner tonight. You can follow this link to get the recipe http://www.food.com/recipe/crock-pot-style-loaded-baked-potato-soup-301754

Make it as healthy or yummy as you like. Healthy version would of course be to use a skim milk instead of the cream, light sour cream, etc....

Now for the something hot to drink...After marrying my wonderful hubbs I learned how to make his family's Wassail. Sort of a requirement of sorts :) It is the perfect recipe to warm you up on a cold day and is super easy to boot!

      

Wassail

1 gallon apple cider

Pineapple juice(as little or as much as you want...I have started using half a can of frozen pineapple concentrate per recipe because it's cheaper!)

1 bag of red hots

cinnamon sticks or just powder cinnamon if you don't have sticks

1. Put it all in a large stock pot

2. Heat over medium heat stirring occasionally

3. Pour a cup, curl up, and enjoy!

NOW for the second part of this post.....

This weekend we had one of my sweet friends, who has recently moved away, come visit with her beautiful little girl. We had a blast letting the kiddos play and catching up. One of the projects that we undertook was one of my "Pinteresting Pins". We made adorable and EASY snowman shirts for our kids. They were gender neutral which was great since we had to 2 rowdy's and 1 princess. Quick tutorial on how we made them.......

1. We began by buying white shirts to fit each child, and 3 different fabrics. One darker black patterned fabric, a lighter black patterned fabric(we used black gingham) and an orange patterned fabric. To make 3 shirts we only used about 1/8 of a yard of each fabric PLUS had enough leftover to make a tutu for the princess of the bunch. You will also need a needle, black thread, and orange thread.

2. Make your patterns. We found four different circles(You decide how big or small you want them...my 3 yr old's were slightly bigger than our babies) to trace onto cardboard to make the pattern for the mouth and eyes. Cut them out to trace onto your fabric.

3. Using the 2nd largest circle trace 2 circles onto the lighter black patterned fabric(our gingham). After finishing that go ahead and trace all four circles onto the darker black patterned fabric. Cut out each circle.

We traced the circles onto the back of our fabric. Ha, and we used what we had (lots of toys!!) to make our patterns!

 4. If you can find a triangle in your house to make a pattern out of then great, but if not you might try free-handing it OR find a triangle you like online, printing it, and cutting it out. Naturally, we used one of my son's triangle blocks and rounded the edges while tracing it to give the effect we wanted.

 5. After cutting out everything we arranged them on the shirts the way we wanted and pinned them in place.

 6. Now, if you are the fancy type you can use your sewing machine and secure each piece down. We wanted the raw look so we doubled our thread, knotted it at the end and just did a hand sewn running stitch around each piece (it will fray slightly in the wash).

We were extremely HAPPY with how they turned out. Inexpensive, easy, and adorable.




Our cutie pies were pretty good sports for us as we tried to get pics of them in their shirts!

Yep, they're getting married some day ;)



Loving this snow day and  loving our little snow cuties. I hope you are having a great day as well and hopefully can enjoy the next snow day like I have!