Don't miss this!

So my brother has finished his annual Christmas light display and it's up and running for all the world to see. He had a grand kick-off last night and it's fabulous! Anyone who wants to see a great show of lights & music you better head to his place in Meridian.
4468 Blue Creek St.
He is also collecting food & cash donations for the Idaho Food Bank so don't forget your canned food to drop off in a barrel on his porch. Happy watching!!

Happy Birthday Papa!

We love you for the owies you fix,

the pretty pictures you take,


and the hugs & kisses you give!
Happy birthday to our favorite Papa!

Happy Birthday M&M!!

Today is M&M's special day and we're putting SIX candles on her cake! Lucky her she gets to spend it with family in Utah at Snowbird. She has been excited about this for months! Our original plan was to take her skiing for the first time for her birthday, but the snow isn't cooperating. Not enough snow to ski on the kid's slope. Maybe later this season! So far today she has played Dominos, stacked pyramids (with the dominos), watched a movie, went over to the Cliff lodge and played arcade games at their gameroom, and played unlimited games on Nana's computer (luckily it's only for today). She got to choose what's for dinner. Her pick:

Pork roast (what kid picks pork roast??)

mashed potatoes

mixed veges

orange jello w/ oranges

confetti tinkerbell cake

I hope I always cherish these years I have her at home. I'm happy to be her Mom and hope I can always make her birthday a special day for her! Happy Birthday M&M!!

TSO

Monday, my Mom called me and asked if I wanted to join her to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra. The flu is going around and my Dad caught it and so I was my Mom's date. Thanks Mom!! Sorry Dad :) It was an awesome show of lights, music, and fire! If you have a chance to hit up this show..do it! I also found out you aren't supposed to have a camera. The guy checking my purse looked right over it! Whoops :)

The best cupcakes!

In honor of my bro's birthday, I made him some yummy cupcakes to celebrate! Chocolate chip cookie dough cupcakes to be exact and they were good! I ended up just making the cookie dough (with some oatmeal) instead of buying store-bought due to Little A's allergy. Happy birthday!

Wedding cake.

My FIRST ever wedding cake. I don't like to brag, but I think I did ok! We had Young Women in Excellence so I was able to use my skillz to make a cake for our "wedding reception" decor. It was fun to do, but a little time consuming.

Don't mind the 2 flowers that fell off. :) We used some hymn books to prop the cake up and those two flowers got pushed off. I used my emergency frosting to do a quick fix but came back later to find they weren't sticking (I think because there was so much frosting on it already). Thanks to Sheryl for the pics! I, of course, forgot my camera to take any of the finished product.
A side note: I'm sad because our ward just went through new changes on Sunday. Our ward was split and so I'm no longer in the YW! Cross my fingers they put me back in. I'll miss everyone who was split to go in the other ward!!

Weekend getaway.

Last weekend we were able to get away and stay in Park City! My cousin got married on the 1st so we were able to spend Halloween with a lot of our family. We ate yummy soup, yummy cake (Happy Birthday Nate), and lots of candy! The girls loved dressing up as pirates, but loved trick-or-treating even more. M&M could have gone all night!


On Saturday we went to the SLC for their sealing. It was a beautiful day with a few clouds & 70 degrees! You would have never guessed it was November.


My cousin T & his new wife J. Sorry, this is the best picture we got of you two. Isn't her dress gorgeous!

On Sunday we were able to have dinner with some old friends. My Dad & his best friend growing up are still friends and now his kids & us still keep in touch. They had some awesome "Cafe Rio" burritos for us and some sweet entertainment on Rock Band. That can get addicting :) Little A was on photo duty that night so you can guess the quality of phots we got. Here's one!(Hi J!)


We were able to see my sis too!

CJ's favorite way to sleep!

On Monday we went shopping! Park City outlet mall. I forgot how many cool places there were. So many places and so little time! No pics, but who wants to see pics of us shopping anyway :)

Tuesday, we hit the road back home. James had flown back on Saturday night so I was solo for the drive home. It was quite the experience that I don't wish on anyone else! Taking all kids to the bathroom was the funnest! *input extreme sarcasm* Imagine the 4 of us parading into the gas station bathroom whilst M&M is whining for candy, Little A is asking every "why" question in the book, me trying to carry CJ while scooting (ok pushing)the other two (who are in their own little candy & question world) into the bathroom. When we got in, there wasn't a changing station for CJ so I had to change him on the floor. But I had left the diaper bag in the car ( I just brought in one wipe & a clean diaper) so I had to put paper towels on the floor and change him there...gross! So of course while I'm doing that I'm trying to get M&M to go potty and Little A is dancing around asking all those why questions. Got him changed, now Little A's turn on the potty, M&M washing hands, and me fumbling around trying to help Little A on the tall potty while holding CJ. Little A is done, pass off CJ to M&M (who is hilarious at holding CJ since he's growing bigger these days). I'm going potty (sorry more info than you probably care to know, but Mom's do go potty) while trying to contain Little A from sticking her hand in the small garbage can asking "why do they need 2 garbage cans" (all you ladies know which garbage can I'm talking about) and watching M&M strain to hold CJ and hoping she doesn't drop him. Hurry to wash mine & Little A's hands and get CJ from M&M. Whew! That was just going to the bathroom! So you can see why my journey from Park City to Boise was 9 hours!! The best part was at one point M&M spilled her root beer in the car. I asked her to clean it up (when we stopped) and she just kept YELLING "It wasn't my fault Mom, YOU were the one that made me eat my lunch in the car, so it's your fault!" I didn't even get mad at her, ask her whose fault it was or anything and she's yelling this at me. If you know M&M, you know she is d-r-a-m-a! So to say the least it was a LONG trip! Sorry for all the typing but I have to cherish these memories, right?!?

Saturday...pancake Day!

OK, James has slacked a little on the pancake day. We were in Park City last Saturday and this Saturday we had all sickies in the house and didn't want to even think about eating pancakes. So we'll cross our fingers for NEXT Saturday. I know you're waiting for it! :)

Happy Halloween!

happy halloween (a little late)!

Crafty

So I decided to kill some time on a Sunday (that didn't involve sitting at the computer) and whipped up these cute hair clips! I did not realize how easy they would be once I actually attempted them. I bought flowers from Walmart (cheap!) took them apart and used some of my scrapbook supplies to finish them up. Whala! (is that how you spell that??)

For Aunt Aimee!

My "new" jacket!

Saturdays Pumpkin Pancakes

This recipe is actually a pretty popular one with our little family. Typically one would seperate the egg whites from the yolks, whip the egg whites to stiff peaks, then fold them into the rest of the batter. Well, I managed to skip all that and added eggs with no folding or seperating. In fact M&M can practically whip pancake batter into stiff peaks if you don't calm her down so there was no folding of anything into the batter this time.
I also added salt this time which is something I usually omit in all pancake recipes. Needless to say they didn't turn out how I remembered but they were still ok.
Lesson learned - seperating egg whites from yolks does have an effect on how the finished product turns out (And I always thought it was something to just kill time in the kitchen).

The Pancake ticker:
James: 3
Charise: 2
M&M: 1
Little A: 3

Saturday...pancake day!

Every weekend I make pancakes with my girls. Regular pancakes are starting to get really old so we're changing things up a bit and we'll be trying new and different pancake recipes and blogging about them. This is my contribution to the blog!
Whole Wheat Buttermilk Pancakes
adjustments: brown sugar for regular sugar, wwf (whole wheat flour) for regular flour.

The Pancake ticker:
James: 2
Charise: 2
M&M: 3
Little A: 4
CJ: 1/1000th (better known as a crumb)

The Verdict:
These pancakes are heavy duty. I usually eat at least 3, but 2 seemed to be enough. Still not sure how Little A downed 4?? Texture: fluffy & spongy
It holds its form well with lots of syrup on it. Will make again!

Woo hoo!

We have recovered the pictures!!!! I can't tell you how excited I am. Thanks Eric for the cd of six recovery programs! One of them worked and I can stop being sick about it. Stay tuned for more to come!

Giggles

Sorry for the bad video (lighting), but we had to take it quickly while he kept up the giggles.

4 months!

CJ had his 4 month check-up last week.
weight: 15 lbs, 10 oz (75th percentile)
length: 25 7/8" (50th percentile)
Head: didn't get the actual inches but he's still in the 90th percentile :)

He's growing like crazy and is full of smiles.



BTW, he is wearing a nightgown for BOYS in this picture. We just returned from driving home from McCall and to keep CJ from screaming while we unloaded I had M&M start to change him into his jammies. You would have thought I asked her to bake a cake or something :) Her eyes got wide and she gave me the biggest smile, really? She ran upstairs & grabbed her favorite jammies (the ones she has tried to convince me to put on him for the past week). She took EXTRA care in taking off his clothes, changing his diaper (ok, I jumped in to help a little with this), and putting on his nightgown for boys. While doing this she explained every step to Little A with the utmost care. It was really cute and I even had a small video but alas, it was lost. Lost to the dark side with all my other pictures & videos. I'm really not even sure how these pictures survived!

Annoyed...

OK, so it's almost been a month since I last blogged. I can't begin to write all that I'm feeling. I've been delaying blogging due to our Mexican vacation and other adventures we have had only to come to realize that our pictures have once again been "corrupted"!!!! I realized this a little bit ago when I sat down to take off all the pics that we had crammed on our camera. I had tons of cute pics of the kids, ALL of our pictures from Mexico, small video mpegs, McCall pics, etc. To say the least I was SO SAD/MAD/ANNOYED and everything else at myself for waiting so long to get them off. It's taken me almost a week to simmer down and face reality that I might not ever see these pictures again. I did fork over a small amount of money and download a photo-saver program to see if it can recover them from their corruptness. It's been reading/fixing the card for days now and I'm really losing all hope that it will come up with anything. So while I wallow in my own stupidity I promise I will return again. Pictures or no pictures I guess our life will move on :)

Little A funny...

This one is for Papa :) Yesterday I was burping CJ while watching Little A dance/play in front of us. I think CJ was mesmerized by her too. Anyway, all of sudden Little A stopped, walked up to me with wide eyes and said "Gooseball!".
Huh?? She said it again "Gooseball Mom!" pointing to CJ. I looked at him and he had snuck out some major spitup all down his arm, down my pants and a good size pile on the chair. "Don't you mean looseball?" I asked Little A.
"uhhh, yeah!" with a big smile.
Heh, I had to laugh.

Dogsitter?

I know...lame post, but is there ANYONE out there who wants to watch our little Brutus while we leave on vaca? He is a way fun dog, pretty chill (after first meeting you wears out), and house-trained! He also does really well around kids. Any takers? Email or post a comment and I can give you more details. Here's a couple pics if you forgot what he looks like ;)






You can probably tell who loves our little "brutey"

Preschool days!

Can you tell I'm playing catch up? Little A started preschool last week and is loving it. Her favorite part is snack time & circle time. She says all the boys are mean so she doesn't play with them. Sounds just like what M&M used to say. She must be passing on good info to her sister! She picked out her first day outfit too :) Now that the girls are both in school, it seems like all they do is play pretend school. So warning any friends that come over, they have school on the brain! If school is not your thing, come another day :)

A new tip.

I bought a new tip for my cake decorating repertoire and had to put it to good use.

Banana cupcake frosted with chocolate buttercream (had to use up the ripe bananas on my counter!)


Milk chocolate cupcake frosted with vanilla buttercream & fondant flowers (not the best looking flowers, but hey..I'm learning)

Fondant cake

Here's a dabble at my first fondant cake. I think it turned out pretty good. Don't pay attention to the hideous green piping on the sides. The class I did this at didn't have any real tips, thus the awesome green "squiggly".



Little A looking oh so excited! (Notice the nice battle wound on her face-the swing won)

My next cake challenge...stacking a cake!

8 blissful years!

I'm a little behind. What's new? :) Last month, James and I celebrated el numero ocho! We of course took no pictures, but had to at least document the fun. We ditched the kiddos and headed to the hills. We went mountain biking! Harris, Mel, Clarissa, & Brian sweated with us. We shuttled up to Crestline trailhead, rode it over to upper Hulls, dropped down to the freeway, and hit red cliffs the rest of the way to Camel's Back. I'm guessing 10ish miles. We caught some good air, but no major drops :) We invited a few more to come, but maybe next time. Afterwards we hit the bird for grub. Yum! Happy 8 years hon!

Hair!

So the girls could probably care less about their hair, but having an OCD Mom about nice hair and clean clothes, they let me have my fix :) I ran across a sweet blog with all kinds of rad hair-do's. Turned out cute. Of course, Little A had hers pulled out by the end of the day, but I enjoyed it while I could.







Have to document CJ's sweet hair too! He's got a little curl in it and it's fun to spike up (what he does have).




Little A took this picture. She's OCD when it comes to the camera. She's got to turn it on and take a picture of everything when the camera comes out. :) Good thing it's digital!


Oh and now Little A's new hair cut. Trying to make it a little easier to do so she doesn't always pull out my masterpieces!






Another pic by Little A!