Easter Table Favours for Children to Make

This years Easter table favours were created from items purchased at the dollar store and permanent markers from our craft room.

Easter Mugs

Items required:

• 1 white mug for each person attending your Easter dinner
• permanent markers

Directions:

1. Have the children draw what they want to draw on the mug on a piece of white paper
2. Next they draw the same picture on the mug. 
3. The mugs can be personalized or a general picture placed on each mug.

Note:  The mugs need to cure for 24 hours and should be hand washed.

Seed Pot Table Favours

Items required:

• enough small starter pots for every guest at your Easter meal
• A seed packet for each guest
• a cloths peg for each person
• Easter coloured ribbon
• Easter coloured plastic grass
• Candy Easter eggs

Directions:

1. Using paint or permanent markers colour each cloths peg and write the name of each guest on each peg.
2. Cut the ribbon to wrap around the pot with a 1/2 inch over lap.
3. Run a bead of white glue around the edge of the ribbon
4. Using the cloths peg with the guest name facing forward hold the ribbon closed
5. Stuff the starting pot with the grass
6. Place some of the Easter candy in each pot
7. Now you can either balance the seed package in the middle of the cloth peg or you can place a bead of white glue on one inside of the cloth peg and hold the seed package on the glue until it is held firm

Grandma Snyder

©2013-2016 twosnydergirls

Fennel Cream Sauce

We have not cooked with fennel often and recently it has appeared in a number of the healthy food magazines we follow.  

Our research places the fennel plants origins in the Mediterranean and it is deemed to be one of the world healthiest plant, Longfellow included the fennel plant in his poem The Goblet of Life “The Fennel with its yellow flowers; And in an earlier age than ours was gifted with the wondrous powers”.  

Fennel is high is vitamin C, fiber and potassium,

As is it a Mediterranean plant we choose to use it in a white sauce over pasta and we have called this dish Fennel Cream Sauce

Ingredients:

• fennel bulb sliced thinly
• 1 onion sliced thinly
• two tablespoons olive oil
• 1 1/2 cups coconut cream (refrigerate canned coconut cream for at least 24 hours)
• 1 cup frozen peas
• 2 hand-fulls of baby spinach
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic crushed
• 1 cup fennel fronds
• salt and pepper to taste
• Favourite pasta or stuffed pasta

Directions:

1. Clean the fennel bulb set aside the fennel fronds, discard the green stalks and the core.  Slice the fennel bulb into thin slices.
2. Slice onion into thin slices
3. Sauté in oil in a large frying pan until the onion is translucent – you do not want to brown either the fennel or the onion.
4. When onions are read add spinach and place lid on your pan to begin to sweat the spinach
5. Add the coconut cream to the pan and stir well (we keep two cans of coconut milk with as high a fat content as possible in the refrigerator at all times.  Coconut cream is the solid white coconut milk that results.  Carefully without shaking open the can and spoon out the solid)
6. Add peas and garlic stir and lower heat
7. Prepare your past as per package directions (we used gluten free ravioli stuffed with mushrooms)
8. Add pasta to the frying pan and fennel fronds stir to incorporate and plate.

From our Table to Yours

Grandma Snyder

©2013-2016 twosnydergirls

Azalea

Grandma Snyder

©2013-2016 twosnydergirls

Parent Gently

Parenting is not about being right. 

It is not about having the right answers. 

It is not about being obeyed.

Parenting is about guiding the young lives we have taken responsibility for.  

Guiding them to participate in the success of the communities they belong to.

Parenting is about providing your children with what they need to feel safe, loved and encouraged to become themselves.

Parent gently.

Parent by giving your time to your children.

Parent humbly.

Parent knowing that your children will be different than you and this is a good thing.

Grandma Snyder

©2013-2016 twosnydergirls

There is a new creation

We are the new creation, beloved by God and redeemed through love. 

God does not desire us to be robots following his laws because we can do nothing else, neither does he desire our faithfulness motivated by fear.

God is not a dictator nor a tyrant!

It is our creative ability, our free will offerings that honour our Lord and it is this that God desires from us. 

From the beginning God understood that we will fail in achieving our potential, that we will embrace sin in small or large dosages as we exercise our free will and we will seek to create something that is uniquely our own.

In this knowledge God still created us.  

God instructs us moment by moment through the voice of a loving parent. 

Patiently stands with us as a parent stand with a child allowing both exploration and natural consequences.  

Walking beside us along the paths we have chosen and God stands ever vigilant for the moment we call out in need to set our feet on path of righteousness.

All of heaven rejoices when we acknowledge our waywardness and with God celebrates our return to the family of God.

As new creations our faithfulness is motivated by love not fear and we need not be perfect in-and-of ourselves, we need only voice where we have lost our way and the perfect love of our God is sufficient and we are redeemed as many times as necessary to see us through the gates of Heaven.

Grandma Snyder

©2013-2016 twosnydergirls

Lectionary scriptures Joshua 5:9-12, Psalm 32, 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, 
Luke 15;1-3, 11b-32