Summer Fun and Menu Monday

We decided instead of getting Lily a bunch of toys she didn't need for her first birthday we would make her an outdoor play area. I started looking for inspiration and found a ton of ideas on Pinterest. We knew that she was going to get a little swing/slide set from my brother and we knew we wanted to build her a sand box. So we started there. I had seen several ideas about a chalkboard. I really liked the idea of having a chalkboard outside so I wouldn't have to deal with the chalk in the house. Making a chalkboard is so simple. We bought a board from Home Depot that was already the right size and simply sanded it down and painted it with chalkboard paint. I also found an idea for an outdoor finger-painting station which I thought was genius. We found a small piece of plexiglass and Daniel made a stand using a 4x4 that he cut in half. We finished out the area with a water table (another gift from my brother) and a little grill set from my parents. We decided to add a canopy over the sandbox. We have zero shade in our backyard so we definitely needed something. I found some outdoor fabric on the clearance rack at Joann's. It was perfect. We used some metal fence posts covered with some PVC pipes for the canopy. It worked out great. Here's a picture of the finished project

I love the way it  turned out. There's still a few little decorative things I want to do but all the important things are done and ready for some summertime play.


It's also Menu Monday. Here it is:

Hummus-crusted Chicken
Chicken, Bacon, Avocado Chopped Salad
Grilled Steak Fajitas
Crab Leg Boil
Grilled Mahi Mahi


I wanted to follow-up to last week's menu. We tried a few new recipes and I thought I would share my opinions. The pizzadillas were great. Daniel and Lily loved them. These were so simple and yummy. We tried grilled Mahi Mahi for the first time last week and as you can probably guess we loved it. It made the list again this week. Unfortunately, the spaghetti squash cakes that we had with the fish last week will not be making the cut. The pictures looked so good but something went horribly wrong with mine. They were a big, gooey mess. We love spaghetti squash but it just didn't work out this time. The crispy chicken fingers were great. Very simple and very tasty. They turned out nice and crunchy. We also loved the cheeseburger salad. There were several steps but overall it was pretty easy and fairly quick. I'm horrible at not fully reading the instructions before starting and sometimes the timing gets all off but it worked out. Overall, we had a great menu last week. I'm really looking forward to this week's menu as well.