Valentine’s Day is just a week away! At our home, this means that Bebe and I put up various little heart-shaped decorations and start working on Valentine crafts. We also like to pull out our favorite Valentine’s Day children’s books and we start reading them at nap and bed time. It’s definitely a fun holiday that we enjoy. (Photo Credit Above: Hideki Ueha) As for celebrating on the 14th, I usually cook dinner and...

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  Happy Holidays! Christmas just snuck up on me and it feels as though the last few weeks quickly flew by. I’m a bit sad that in just another day our Christmas celebrations will all be over but it’s been a wonderful season so far. I was looking for a quick and easy treat that Bebe and a few friends could make at a little holiday cookie decorating party last week. Of course, I went straight to Googling and found these adorable...

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This weekend was full of Halloween costume parades, parties and festivities. It was definitely a busy weekend, but these are most certainly good times! As a fun craft / cooking activity for Bebe, we made these really easy spooky spider cookies. Sure, you can make your own cookies from scratch for assembling equally spooky and yummy “spiders” but let’s just say this Mama is OK taking a huge short-cut, HUGE, and be completely OK...

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The pumpkin patches are open, the leaves are changing colors, and we’re working on Halloween crafts to decorate our home. The only issue is that in Southern Cali the weather’s been in the mid to upper 80’s. Not surprising for us, but it’s certainly wrecking havoc on our Fall allergies. Bebe probably has the worst of the allergies but we’ve enjoyed the pumpkin patch on better days, as well as the park and a few...

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  Sometimes, the simple things in life provide great pleasure. Such as a bag of frozen strawberries that I found buried in our freezer. We’ve been fighting colds, sore throats, fevers, allergies, asthma, and generalized tiredness from overexerting ourselves during the weekends, but for the most part, we are still healthy and well. Given all that is going on, I’m still keeping our meal repertoire quite simple and once again, I...

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As promised in my last post, this is the second of two desserts from Bebe’s little pool party with her cousins. Along with the “fish-outta-water” jello cups, Bebe and Nene had fun making these little “clams” with pearl cookies. I saw a number of different cookies used to create the “clam shells” but I chose Nilla Waffers since they’re a favorite of Bebe’s. The “pearls” are yogurt...

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During my brief absence from my blog, I’ve become a Pinterest-addict and it has resulted in much time spent either on my iPhone Pinterest app or glued to my laptop as I scan dozens (hundreds?) of “pinned” ideas. It turns out that what I call, Fish-Outta-Water Jello treats, can be found widespread across the internet, and I can easily see why they’re popular: 1. Jello is super easy and inexpensive to make. 2. Moms (at...

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For a year in college, I had a roommate from Hawaii. She was impressionable in that she was truly the only one in our town house at the time that could actually cook something other than fried rice, curry or spaghetti. It’s been over, uh let’s just say, at least a decade, since  I learned how to make two of her dishes but I still make them. The first is corn chowder, which I modified slightly by substituting portuguese sausage...

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