Baby Loving Mama and Wilton Giveaway

I am so excited for Valentine's Day this year!! For those of you that do not know... my wedding anniversary is also February 14. This year happens to be our 5 year wedding anniversary! It doesn't seem like we have been married 5 years already. This year, I wanted to do something special for my husband. He is a very patient man, who puts up with a lot from me. Between taking care of him, our 2 boys, the house and being 5 1/2 months pregnant with baby number 3, I tend to be very tired, grouchy and stressed out at times. What is a better way to show him how much I care than with some home made baked goods? That is why I was so excited to find this giveaway!!

Baby Loving Mama and Wilton have teamed up again for a SWEET Valentine's giveaway!

The giveaway includes: not 1 but 2 Heart Shaped Whoopie Pie Pans, You Bake Me Smile Candy Bar Wrap Kit, Text Message Icing Decorations, You Bake Me Smile Combo Cupcake Box, You Bake Me Smile Cupcake Box, Love Potion Sprinkle Set.

(Picture is thanks to Baby Loving Mama's giveaway)

I encourage you to check out Wilton's Valentine's section. Even if you do not win the giveaway, Wilton still has some great products for every occasion! The giveaway ends on 2/3/2012 at 11:59CST. Good Luck to those who enter! :)

Mount Carmel, PA - Family Fun Day

On Saturday, January 7, with the beautiful weather we were having, the hubby and I decided to go have a "Family Fun Day". We went for a drive to the pretty little town of Mount Carmel, PA.  We have visited a few times before, but only in the cold weather. It was nice enough outside to be able to walk around town. We went to the Mount Carmel Area Public Library website and found a Walking Tour of Mount Carmel, PA. How cool is that? This town has it's own walking tour to show people some of it's historical building and teach about the town's history! That was the perfect way to spend our Family Fun Day! The library's web page also taught me something that I did not know.... there is a Mount Carmel native who is pretty famous! Have you ever heard of Ellen Albertini Dow? What about the rapping grandmother from The Wedding Singer? I was shocked when saw that! I have always loved her part of that movie!

Anyway, I have included some pictures that we took of our favorite parts of the Walking Tour of Mount Carmel, PA. There are 22 places to see on the tour and about 7 of them are churches. We only took pictures of 1 of the churches, but I didn't include it. The kids were getting a little tired of getting in and out of the car. (The tour is too spread apart to walk with a 17 month old.) We drove around and looked at the places highlighted in the tour and then decided what we wanted to capture pictures of.

# 7 American Legion / LT. Gavin Memorial & Marker

We started with the American Legion building. This picture was taken in the car, but I plan to get out next time we are there. There is also the LT. Gavin Memorial & Marker located in front.

#  8 Old Borough Hall & Lockup

This building was built in the 1880s.  It has been used as a police station (the police lockup was in the basement) and borough council chamber (until the 1960s), the first public library (in 1961) and is now a cute little store.

# 9 National Hotel

This building (built by Thomas Scott) is one of the oldest buildings in town, having been built in the late 1860s. His descendants still live in Mount Carmel.

A close-up of the front door of the old hotel.

# 10 Home of William Schwenk

This has to be one of the more unique buildings in town. It is a single family home on the main street through town. Mount Carmel was the 8th town in the country to have electricity. This was the first house to have electricity installed, on January 22, 1884.

A close-up of the front of the house. In the space to the left, you can see that there are actually windows on that side of the house! Isn't this house neat?

# 11 William T. Montelius House & Store

Located on the same block as the Home of William Schwenk, is this home / store built in 1873-74. A fire wiped out the block on July 24, 1873, and this was one of the houses built after the fire. The store used to showcase trendy fashion.

 

One of my favorite doors in town.

This building is not actually on the tour. I just really like this building! It is the former Guarantee Trust & Safe Deposit Co building.

A close-up of the sign etched into the building along with a clock that doesn't appear to work.

This is another building that was not on the tour. This one was my son's favorite. He thought it was really neat that the building had not 1 but 2 different advertisements. The original one was for Ivory Soap and the other one is for Cubanola Cigars. As time passes, the cigar ad fades and the Ivory ad shows through.

This is another reason I love this town... the original roads show through! It's only in a few spots, but it is super neat!

This is a larger section of original road that can be seen. This isn't a very busy part of town - to the left is an alley.

# 15 Judge Lincoln S. Walter House

This is the side of the house. While it is not in the best shape outside... but I think it is beautiful!

Check out the detail work of this chimney!! They do not make them like this anymore!

This is the front of the house. It could definitely use some landscaping work, but in it's day, this was a big, beautiful home! 

Another view...

Looking at the front door from the sidewalk. There was a cat hiding in the brush. I'm not sure which one of us was scared more!

We had a wonderful time walking around the town of Mount Carmel. We will definitely go back... hopefully when the weather is warmer.

Happy 9th Birthday to Big K! :)

On this day, 9 years ago, we welcomed Big K into this world!

Where has the time gone?

We have decided to start a new tradition to celebrate all of our birthdays this year. We are going to start visiting the local bakery and let the special birthday person pick out whatever dessert they want to have on their special day. I think that works out nicely for nicely! The bakery has pies, cupcakes, muffins, turnovers, doughnuts, along with a few other things. With this being the first time we have tried this, our birthday boy picked out a small cake. I do not think cakes will be allowed in the future - we never finish them. Even a tiny one like this won't get finished. For $6.50, a cake is not worth it when you can get the same thing in cupcake form for $0.99 each.



A picture of the cake our birthday boy picked out.

A cool picture of the one candle that I took. He took a long time to get out the kitchen, and the candles were melting pretty fast.


Happy Birthday, Buddy! :)

Another Kraft Food and Baby Loving Mama Giveaway...

So, it has been awhile since I have entered a giveaway. I think that the last one that I entered was the time that I won the Kraft Foods Picnic Basket, offered by Baby Loving Mama. She still has one of my all time favorite blogs!

Emilie at Baby Loving Mama has another great giveaway thanks to Kraft ! She had the opportunity to attend the Kraft Foods Blog Eats Conference in October and got to have a lot of fun with other bloggers - taste testing Kraft foods, learning new tips and techniques to better her blog, and she even got to ride in the Wienermobile ! How cool is that?

Of course, they were kind enough to give their attendees a box full of goodies to take home! How could that get any better, you ask? Kraft and Baby Loving Mama are giving away a box of the same goodies to one of her readers!

Check out the giveaway and all of the cool stuff in the picture below. The picture and the description below are thanks to the Baby Loving Mama's giveaway post.

Kraft Foods Food & Family Holiday 2011 Magazine, 20th Anniversary edition Halloween OREO cookies, Chips Ahoy! Chewy Gooey fudge-filled cookies, Ritz Bits Kickin’ Cheddar sandwich crackers,Snackwell’s Fudge-drizzled Caramel Popcorn,Wheat Thins Smoky BBQ snacks,Wheat Thins Sweet Cinnamon snacks,VELVEETA Cheesy Skillets Dinner Kit,Kraft Sizzling Salads Chicken Caesar Dinner Kit Planter’s Peanut Butter creamy and crunchy flavors,JELL-O Halloween Brain Mold,JELL-O Jigglers Halloween Mold,JELL-O Jigglers Holiday Mold,Assorted flavors of JELL-O gelatin dessert and JELL-O instant pudding including NEW Candy Cane and Gingerbread pudding flavors,JELL-O Halloween Recipe Booklet,JELL-O Holiday “Treat Explosion” Recipe Booklet,Holiday JELL-O Jigglers recipe JELL-O Jiggle-It app download,Crystal Light mocktail drink mixes,Kool-Aid Scary Blackberry Ghoul-Aid drink mixes,Coupon for one (1) package of any OSCAR MAYER Selects Hot Dogs,Coupon for one (1) package of any OSCAR MAYER Carving Board Meats

This giveaway is open to US residents 18 and over. It ends on 1/5/2012 @ 11:59 CST. The winner will be drawn using random.org. 

RoseArt's Create and Color Enchanted Castle Review

For Christmas this year, we decided to get our youngest one of the RoseArt 3D things that you can play in and color. We saw the Rocket Ship when we stopped at a CVS one day. Our oldest seemed to really like it, but he was too big to play in the Rocket Ship. We thought that they had to have another design, so the hunt began to see what we could find. As it turns out, they also have a Play House and an Enchanted Castle. We decided to go with RoseArt's Create and Color Enchanted Castle (It can be found about half-way down the page under the category: Large Environments.)

Assembly was pretty easy, and it is much BIGGER than we thought it would be! I thought it was a little flimsy.... but we decided to let the kids see what they thought. To let our boys know that this was for our 16-month old, my husband titled it "Cutie-Castle". Here is a picture of it from Christmas morning... before the kids came down.

It was a huge hit with both of the boys! It does stand on it's own, but it is very easy for the kids to knock it caddywhompus. Little K tends to forget that he has to duck in order to walk in and out of the door, but he is getting much better about that. We have even started coloring it. He hasn't done a whole lot of coloring yet, so I am doing most of the work. He does sit there with me and play with his crayons. :) He has left his mark in a few spots, which makes him very proud!

Overall, I think this is a great gift for kids. You do need quite a good bit of room for one of these, but my kids have had a ton of with it so far. I think if they had more options, we would end up with quite a few of these in our house. My favorite features are the doors and windows.