January 23

Today marks the beginning of

Chinese New Year!

Today marks the beginning of the year of the Dragon.

The FamilyFun magazine has some great ideas for celebrating Chinese New Year

with your kids.  Check out the post for Party Ideas &

the one for Crafts.

And if you aren't prepared for today, don't worry!  Chinese New Year

lasts for 15 days, so you have a little time to 

take care of business.

And I'm thinking that these Baked Egg Rolls look delicious!

I love Chinese food, and always want an eggroll when

I go out for Chinese, but just am not willing to pay the price.

But if these turn out to be as good as they look, I will be enjoying egg rolls a lot more often for now on!

Today is also

Pie Day!

And one of my favorite cookbooks has a recipe for Pie in a Jar - it's from

Our Best Bites.

I haven't tried it yet, but I think Pie Day would be an excellent time to start.

I think it's one of their most popular posts, and I'm pretty sure you can freeze the pies before they're 

baked, which allows you to save yourself a pie for a rainy day.

Or a snacky mood.

Special Holidays

I love to celebrate out-of-the-ordinary holidays.  I have friends who throw John Deere birthday parties every year.  I love the idea of doing that, although not for John Deere, and since I haven't found a different birthday to celebrate, I'm sticking with the different types of holidays.

I am starting a blogging series on here, which will coincide with different holidays.  There are several sites that have daily holidays - my favorite is THIS one, which has a ton of different ones, in an easy to find format.

My plan is to include posts of what holidays we celebrate this year, as well as different ideas for other holidays that sound like fun but maybe we didn't get to them.  That's where pinterest will be very helpful...I love, love, LOVE pinterest, and I'm sure I will find too many ideas to include for each holiday.

And just a warning, in the beginning, the holiday postings will probably all be from pinterest, since we're in temporary housing and I don't have much more than clothing with me (and our spice cupboard consists of salt, pepper, and cinnamon).

Enjoy!

Welcome!

It's great to have you here, at the new site.  I'm hoping that a fresh start will help inspire me to continue out of the blogging funk that I've been in.  

We'll see. 

Why Mary Poppins?  Since we've been dating, my husband has occasionally talked of things being 'Mary Poppins perfect' - which, if you're familiar with Mary Poppins, you know that it means things are 'practically perfect in every way'.  

Which is fun to strive for, especially when doing crafts or fun things with the kids.

I certainly don't expect or require perfection in myself or others,

but I like the idea of aiming for it.

So that's what we'll be doing here.

I hope you enjoy the struggle with us!