Chanukah cookies have always been a tradition in my house. When I was a kid my mom would let us put the sprinkles on them. We made these fun royal iced message cookies and had a good time coming up with something a little different. The favorite was the menorah in the star! –EW
Frosty never looked so good, even here is sunny southern California! Being the Yenta’s that we are we always seem to come up with fun sayings for our message cookies that inspire us to make more…so enjoy the snowmen! We also did some “Santa Baby” and “Ho, Ho, Ho” which could be “OH, OH, OH” if you turn them around!! Peace, Love, Joy was another holiday favorite. We sure had fun with these.
I volunteer to teach art in my kids’ school for 1st and 3rd grade! This is the perfect volunteer job for me since I love getting messy and doing art projects. My new favorite blog is Deep Space Sparkle. Her website is truly amazing with the amount of lesson plans and information she provides. I know I can always find something to do with the kids on her website. I am going to have to send her a really nice thank you note. Here are some pictures of the really cool Cardinal project done by the third graders. –Elaine
What kid doesn’t love “Super Mario Brothers”? I must admit that I think it is the only game I ever played as a kid! These cupcakes were so much fun to make and the kids LOVED them. –EW
“Gobble, Gobble” … That was the word on the street when we gave our friends the “Give Thanks” message cookies. Fall colors are our favorite. The mini leaves and acorns add just the prefect accompaniment. 
The end of the soccer season brings lots of team pizza parties! Of course, you can’t have a party without dessert. Here are some fun soccer inspired cookies. I can tell you that soccer balls are a HUGE amount of work because they are a) big in real estate (big cookies) and b) They look silly if they are not symmetrical. We were pretty proud of these! The tiaras were for my other daughter’s “Perfect Pink” soccer team! –EW
It’s not DiJorno, it’s a double chocolate cake…14 inches to be exact! You bet the kids were impressed with this deep dish Italian look-a-like, topped with hand-shaved white chocolate “cheese” and fruit roll-up “pepperoni” slices, served up in a classic pizza box. (Note: A Wilton round 14-inch pan was used for this big pizza!)
The principles of volunteerism and the spirit of “giving back” were strong and mutual themes in both the Malakoff and Waldman childhood homes. As mothers, of course we strive to instill those same principals and have long-since developed a keen interest in fundraising and other volunteer work.
At the end of the school year though, we wondered how much our children were getting from our collective experiences (not necessarily in a monetary way), but in a way that they understood that volunteering’ didn’t just mean, ‘mommy is coming to my classroom or volunteering at the temple’. We decided then to take our children to the Jewish Family Services Youth Hand-Up Food Pantry under the belief that this would be a good place to start … that they would be able to comprehend the idea of ‘hunger’ and what it means to feel ‘hungry’.
While we were there for our 2-hour shift, we learned that dollar for dollar, monetary donations mean more to the pantry than straight donations of cans of food. As such, we came up with a schematic to run a “Summer-Long Bake Sale, benefiting the Jewish Family Services Hand- Up Youth Food Pantry” with our children.
From there, we sent out an email and raised awareness for our cause through social networking and ended up having a very busy summer, where friends and family made their donations to the food pantry in exchange for baked goods. We donated our time and the cost of those goods. Our children had a wonderful time, and all summer, looked forward to going back to the food pantry in the early fall where they would present their full donation (all of our collected checks) to the fantastic youth who run the pantry. All told, they raised $623 for a cause they can clearly relate to, for families in need right here in San Diego!
Elaine and I are proud of the volunteer work and many fundraising efforts we have taken on over the course of the last few years, but never have we been more proud to lead by example and to do something like this with our children. Our families are so excited, we plan to make this an annual tradition. Read more about our children’s’ efforts here: http://blog.jfssd.org/?p=532 and by all means, sign up for a shift at the pantry, it’s a great way to spend a couple of hours with your children, giving back! — AD
