A New Doll Bed and Quilt

My Grandpa Park is amazing.

Grandpa with Hailey (6 months) at my cousin Aubrey’s wedding.

He has a woodshop in his garage and loves working in it. As a wedding gift when all of the grandchildren get married he makes them a wooden bench, which he designed himself. It is a very anticipated and cherished gift.

Grandpa recently designed and has started making doll beds for his great-granddaughters. I got a call from my aunt Leslie one day who said she wanted to stop by our house with Grandpa to deliver a doll bed for Hailey. I didn’t even know he was making one for her. What a great surprise!

Isn’t it great? The wood is unfinished, so we have full reign over what we’d like to do with it. I think we’ll probably just put a urethane coat over it and keep the wood light.

Hailey loves her doll bed. She has been so motherly recently, so the timing has been great. Hailey loves to wrap her baby up, rock her and then put her to bed when she is sleeping. She will close her playroom door because baby is sleeping and we need to be quiet.

I told Hailey to kneel down by her bed so I could take a picture of her. Next thing I knew she started praying. She asked that baby would “grow big and be healthy”. I thought that was funny.

And then she decided to read baby a “special bedtime story”.

Since baby now had a bed, she needed a mattress, blanket and pillow to sleep with. I made the mattress using this tutorial from Ana White. It was easy peasy and quick to put together. I made a quick pillow case and used an existing doll pillow we already had (that used to be mine).

For the quilt I decided I wanted to try out making a small herringbone quilt. I think they are fun. I used this tutorial from Bijou Lovely. And I butchered it. Ok… I didn’t really butcher it, but I didn’t put enough thought into what I was doing. The quilt blocks on the tutorial are 12.5 x 12.5, which is great if you’re making a full sized quilt. The doll quilt is small and I didn’t want it to be made up of just a couple of blocks, I didn’t think it would show off the design enough. So, I wanted to do a small scale herringbone quilt. But, I also just wanted to do it quickly and be done with it. So I made the first half of the quilt block and cut that in half. And then I made the second half and cut that in half. When I put it all together it didn’t line up right and it really bothered me. But, I had already cut out my fabric, so I reminded myself that Hailey won’t care and continued on to finish the quilt. When I had all of my mini blocks cut out, I laid them out and really didn’t like the look of it. So, I rearranged them and added white borders to the blocks to space them out enough that the seams didn’t clash. And here is the result:

Despite turning out totally different than I had planned on, I really do like the quilt. I plan to try again, but this time I’ll think through my strategy better so it actually is a herringbone pattern.

But who cares what I think- Hailey loves it, and that’s all that matters.

Thank you Grandpa Park for all of your hard work! We love you!

Making a Fruit Loops Necklace

Ellie came over to play one day. We decided it would be fun to make a necklace out of Fruit Loops.

I used yarn for the string and taped the ends with scotch tape so it wouldn’t fray and would be easier to thread.

The girls had fun. It kept them entertained for a good 15-20 minutes. Which in toddler time is a decent amount of time.

The best part of making a Fruit Loops necklace?

When you’re all done you get to eat it!

Color Sorting

One morning, while I was busy in the kitchen, Hailey got into one of the drawers and pulled out our corn on the cob trays. Next thing I know she tells me she is playing a game.
She decided, all on her own, to lay out the trays and sort the skewer thingys by color.
Totally caught me off guard. It kept her plenty entertained. I could finish what I was doing and Hailey was happily occupied. Score. No complaints from me!
As difficult as the toddler years are, I’m loving what Hailey is becoming. She has gained so much independence- it’s great! The other day, while I was in the shower, Hailey decided she wanted to color. All on her own she went into the basement, grabbed a few sheets of computer paper and brought them back up to her room and colored. After I got out of the shower I opened her door to check on her. She was happily coloring away. She told me that no one was around to help her, so she went and got paper all by herself. I was so proud! (And so happy that that was all she got into.) Yay for entertaining herself!

[Recipe] Lazy Cake Cookies from I’m a Lazy Mom

I have a love/hate relationship with baking cookies with Hailey. I love the idea, and I want to enjoy it. I love that Hailey loves helping me bake and gets so eager and excited. Which is why I also dislike it. Hailey wants to do it all, makes a huge mess, doesn’t always listen to my instructions, and isn’t ever patient enough to wait for me to help her. (Really, I shouldn’t expect any different. She’s 2 1/2, that’s the story with everything we do.) So, when I find a simple recipe, I’m all over it.


Hailey and I tried out the Lazy Cake Cookies recipe from I’m a Lazy Mom (found via Pinterest.) All you need is 1 cake mix, 2 eggs, 5 T. melted butter, and chocolate chips or M&M’s. Mix it all together, spread in a 9x13 pan, and bake at 350 for 20 minutes. Easy peasy!


It was totally the perfect recipe for toddler baking. Minimal mess and Hailey can do most of it herself.


The bars are perfectly soft and so good. We’re keeping this one. Yum!

Cutting Paper = Toddler Fun

Apparently cutting paper is super fascinating and fun. Hailey loved it! I think we need to invest in her own pair of scissors.

Letter Lunch

I never know what to feed Hailey for lunch. Or myself for that matter. I get pretty bored with lunchtime. To spice up an otherwise boring meal, I pulled out my letter cookie cutters (Look Holly, they totally came in handy! :) ) and cut up Hailey’s sandwich. She thought it was fun and devoured it.




I’m a little behind on blogging. These pictures are from October. Better late than never, eh?

Christmas Treat Making

Along with Christmas comes baking. I have been doing way too much of it. Seriously. It makes me a little sick to look at all of the treats sitting on our kitchen counter.
I had Hailey help me with some of my baking. We made Holiday Pretzel Treats. Hailey loved it. She had so much fun unwrapping all of the candy kisses. She even did a great job sorting the wrapper from the chocolate. I’m not gonna lie, I was very pleasantly surprised with how well Hailey did with making these treats. She didn’t try to eat a single kiss. And she did a great job putting kisses on the pretzels. I put the kisses on the pretzels all in order in a line, but Hailey chose to be random. Even stretching to the very farthest pretzel from her. Cracked me up.


After the pretzels came out of the oven, with the chocolate soft, I let Hailey try to smash an M&M into the chocolate. Can you tell which one she did? After that I decided that wasn’t the best idea. It wasn’t long before I heard Hailey complaining about her eye.

Hailey had gotten chocolate on her hand, and then rubbed her eye. She also couldn’t wait the 4-6 minutes for the chocolate to soften and began eating M&Ms. Actually, sucking on them in her hand and making a mess. So, things went pretty smoothly until it was time to bake. Which was still great. This was definitely the least stressful and messy recipe we’ve made together. I’d totally do it again.

Kids | ROYGBP: The Colors of the Rainbow

ROYGBP. 

Isn’t that how you spell rainbow? ROYGBP totally equals rainbow. Or it should. Because that’s what I taught Hailey.

Ok, that’s not really what I taught her, but it kind of looks like it.



I quickly made some activity pages (download here) for Hailey with outlined letters on them. One for each letter of the rainbow. ROYGBP. Get it? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. 

Ah, yes. ROYGBP does equal rainbow!

Anyway, we ripped up our construction paper into little bits of paper, rubbed glue all over our letter and pressed on our pieces of paper.

I’ve seen this activity done in different ways all over the internet. Thank you Pinterest. I’ve seen moms using different small things that can be glued onto paper, glitter for the letter G, sprinkles for the letter S. I don’t have any fun things like that immediately on hand, but I do have an abundance of construction paper.

I thought this would be a fun activity to teach her about the colors of the rainbow and some letters. Hailey already recognizes all of the letters, so we focused on what each of these letters say. We did this activity way back in October. And she still knows what sounds the letters r, o, y, g, b, and p say.

Using a glue stick was also a fun way to help her get a feel of how to write the letters. With my help, she traced the letters while applying glue to the page.

Hailey wasn’t super interested in decorating her letters. I did most of it, and tried to encourage her to help. Hailey was focused on coloring with the glue stick. She totally missed the point of the glue. In hindsight, I wish I had bought the glue sticks with the colored glue that dries clear. That way she could see where the glue is on the page and then maybe it’d be easier for her to figure it out. 

I saved up all of the ripped paper that we didn’t use, thinking I’d use it for something else sometime. The other day I came up with another way to use that paper.

I took my small muffin tin with 6 spots and placed one piece of paper, each a different color, in each spot. 

I then spread out other ripped up bits of paper and had Hailey sort the colors. She did surprising well with this. She even got a little silly and put the pieces in the wrong places on purpose. It didn’t keep her attention super long, but it’s an easy activity for us to pull out for a few minutes every few days.

I’m thinking about doing this with other objects. Letters, numbers, shapes, pictures… you name it.