Shamrock Chocolates

 The girls and I made some pretzel chocolate treats on Friday....the plan was to make them look like little shamrocks!  I'm not exactly sure if we succeeded with that...but they sure were yummy!

We knew we need 3 M&M's for each treat, so we counted out all our green M&M's (yup, we had to sort them from the rest of the bag) and we ended up with enough for 27 treats!  Together we counted out 27 pretzels and 27 Kisses.  The girls unwrapped the the candy and put them on the pretzels.  In the oven they went for about 5 minutes at 200 degrees.

Then we pressed 3 M&M's into the chocolate.

 To speed up the chilling process, we just stuck them outside in the snow.  It didn't take too long, but for a four year old, it was kind of like watching paint dry.

 The real kicker in having these look like real shamrocks, was to use a little green line of frosting for the stem...but honestly, I was just too cheap to spend the 2.50 at the store for a tube of green frosting for a silly little treat.  But can you picture it now? Fun, huh?  And pretty yummy too!

Special Delivery

 Dot has been making all kinds of notes and pictures, wrapping them up in some construction paper and delivering them to us.  It doesn't matter where we are....we could be in the kitchen, living room, laundry room, and she'll make a little "peep" sound and disappear.  We are now trained to look inside the crumpled paper to find our treasure.  Since she enjoys playing "mail" so much, we decided to make some envelopes for her special deliveries. 

Pretty simple...we took some 8x10 sheets of felt, folded and glued the sides, cut the edge for the flap just a bit.  I thought about sewing the edges, which would look pretty cute, but lugging out the sewing machine just seemed like a big task, so we'll see how the glue holds up.  I cut some small squares of white felt so she could decorate her "stamps".  She also wrote her name for her "return labels".  She did all of the gluing and deciding where everything should go, but I did most of the cutting.  For the recipient we used some paper we cut out of her reusable wipe away coloring books.  Now she can write with her dry erase marker and change the name of the recipient.

 The back of the envelopes needed help staying closed so we added on a button to secure 

the treasure inside.  Dot loves this part!  All evening we have been getting 

very "special deliveries" in their new envelopes.