Featured Friday – Greatfun4kids

Oh Friday. Sweet Friday. Oh how I love you. Another Friday to introduce you to another awesome blog I’ve come across. Simone (pronounced “Simonne” as in “on”, not “Simoane”as in “moan”) writes over at Greatfun4kids! I don’t really remember how I came about her blog but I do remember the reasons as to why I was drawn to it. Simonne has a great way of writing about life and the Roller Coaster of a ride it can be, which I can relate to.  She is Mother to three beautiful children and is married to her love. Click Here to read about her family. She lives in New Zealand, down by Australia.

Simone loves to write, paint, read, travel, take photo’s, drink coffee and planning parties for kiddo’s. I admire her for her sense of planning parties, her philosophy about that is she is creating great memories for her family, and I happen to agree with her. I love making every little holiday or special day super special or different for my daughter (and soon to be son) nothing beats seeing your children smile over feeling special or happy. She’s even designed children’s birthday party invites and made her own site for people to be able to use for FREE……..how sweet does that make her???

Check out her parties page because I love that she does that (I know I’ve already mentioned that) but it really makes me look forward to my future birthday parties for my children now that we own a home where we can host. Here is one I love! For her daughters 8th birthday party she hosted a Baking Party. How fun does that look!

Also as I was getting to know this marvelous mommy I discovered that she has had her battle with depression as many of us have. She refers to it as “The Black Dog”. I commend her for coming out with it and sharing with the world that it’s a battle some days to function. We’ve all had our demons that make their way through and not a lot of people discuss them, they are ashamed, embarrassed, or whatever, I happen to think talking, writing and reading about it helps a person. Her journey through depression is documented Here and she talks about different stages of it. Thank you for sharing Momma! I think you are fantastic and have come such a long way to be where you are!! Keep up the great work.

Of course my other favorite part of her blog is the Parenting section. We all know parenting can have it’s challenges. Simone and I seem to have the same thoughts about parenting and it’s nice to see it documented on another site! I’ve read almost all of these posts and this Momma knows how to have fun with her kiddo’s, I can really take a page from her book on days when I feel defeated and lost. Her post on “Tidying Up“, getting her kiddo’s to have fun while cleaning up………BRILLIANT!! I think my daughter is almost at this stage and I’m ready to try this idea since she’s stopped helping me clean up each day and getting her to leave the house in the morning can be quite the battle! She holds “themed” nights with her family, how fun does that sound, I LOVE IT!!! One of my favorites was her First Class Titanic Theme Night. For something this Momma threw together at the last-minute, I must say, JOB WELL DONE!! Another great one was her Canvas Night a night she camped out in the back yard with her family. I can’t wait to do this!!! Seems like such fun!
Last but certainly not least she has a Favorite Recipe Page.  Her family started a Gluten Free journey a few years back so it’s worth check out, I vowed to work on my dietary section page since I have so many friends of mine that suffer from food allergies so I was happy to try one of Simone’s recipes! It was her post that gave me the idea to have a tea party with my daughter. Madison is not really a girly girl. She doesn’t like to dress girly and she’s not one to play with girly things. HOWEVER, tea party is something she really loves to do so when I saw Simone’s post I realized that it was time to have our very own tea party at home!! So thank you Momma for inspiring me to have our very own tea party and for letting us try your recipe for Gluten Free Scones!! Madison and I had a blast making them!! It’s the first time in a long time since she’s helped me in the kitchen. We moved not so many months ago and we’ve been so busy with Momma expecting baby Drew, that I’ve been lucky to get dinner on the table. It was so nice to pick a snowy morning and pop my baby girl up on the counter and go to town with the Kitchen Aid mixer and bake something yummy to eat with our “tea”!!!
Of course she wanted to play with the jam and the “tea” more than anything else but Mommy enjoyed every bite of her two scones!! I added blueberries into the recipe at the last minute, just because I had them so I figured why not. I also used blueberry jam and whipped cream cheese for my toppings, feel free to use any flavored jams, fresh fruits, whipped cream, butter, you name it it goes with these breakfast scones! I’m proud to have made something Gluten Free and now I have leftovers to dip into my coffee/tea over the weekend. For the recipe, hop on over to visit Simone over at Greatfun4kids. She’s got quite a few Gluten Free recipes and also Dairy Free ones too. Now it’s confession time. I tried her Dairy Free Banana Cupcakes. I messed up badly LOL. Back story. I have all of my flours, baking mixes in plastic bags, due to a problem we had in our kitchen about a year ago, well one bag wasn’t clearly marked and well after thinking about it for quite some time I ended up using it not quite sure if it was flower or not…….as they were baking in the oven it dawned on me exactly what the “unmarked” bag was!!! AHHHHHHHHH!! Pancake mix!!! Yikes!!! I let them finish baking, it was an epic fail on my part, they didn’t bake all the way through and they caved in the middle…..I was so bummed because I tasted them and they were so good on the outsides! I’m attempting these again over the weekend because the banana in them tasted awesome and now that I know what I did wrong…….I can fix the mistake and I know MM will love these babies!! Oh and one more confession, Simone don’t laugh at me. I had no idea that eggs were not considered dairy!! When I first saw the recipe and thought it was a “Dairy Free” recipe I have to admit, I googled what an egg was because I always assumed it was a Dairy item!!!! I hope I’m not the only one out their that assumed that!!!!

Make sure you visit Simone and tell her this Momma sent you over!!