'Twas the Night Before Valentine's Day

It's Valentine's Eve--not that it's an official holiday, but you get the idea--but there's still one creature stirring in this house.  I'm indulging a bit in my inner night owl and preparing some things for my family in preparation for tomorrow's day of LOVE. 

Halloween 2011

This year our little gang went trick-or-treating as the peanuts gang: Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus.  Unfortunately they weren't posing very well.  All three of them at least. 
I shared these photos on facebook the other day, but I know that not all the blog readers out there are FB friends with me.  So I thought I'd share them here as well.
The actual costumes were fairly basic and I like how easy they were for the kids to wear and move in them.  They were all tee shirt based.  The boys just needed simple embellishments: a black zig zag for Charlie and a scrap of blue fleece tacked on for Linus.  Even Lucy's dress was made out of a tee shirt--two actually.  The top of the dress is a small shirt and the skirt portion is the bottom of a large shirt.  I cut the large shirt just under the arm holes and attached it to the bottom of the small shirt--no hemming!  The scallop around the collar was cut out of the chest and sleeve part of the large shirt.  And since it's knit and a costume, I just left the scallop edges raw.  Four quick buttons and Lucy had her dress.  Throw in a black wig that we gave a haircut and her look was complete.

Happy Birthday, Big Boy!

I recently noticed that of the four categories that I sometimes label my posts with, the recipes category has an overwhelming lead.  (Those four categories are listed in the right side barof my home page.)  So I guess that means I better get busy with posting in the other three categories.  I'm planning to add to the other categories a bit over the next few posts.  To start things off, I've got a post on a recent celebration to share with you.

Just a few weeks ago, our Little Man celebrated his 4th birthday.  We all had a great time hosting a party for his friends from Bible class.  I usually don't like to have party themes centered around tv characters, but sometimes it happens.  This time, however, we came up with something that we were confident we'd both be happy with.

Remember this photo from June?

Something I ran across on a  party planning website, made me think of this picture and our Little Man's love for camping.  A few weeks before his birthday he had started frequently asking me a series of questions.  This is usually how our nearly daily conversation went...

LM: Momma, when did we move to this house?

Me: Before you were born.

LM: Wow, our house is getting old. We need to move to a cabin, because the cabins are really nice.

 

We Have a 1 Year Old

Well actually we have a 13 month old now but I still wanted to post pictures of our celebrations to mark the first year of our little babe.  The actual week of his birthday was CRAZY busy for us since his big day fell on the first day of our VBS (Vacation Bible School) and yours truly was the coordinator.  So since he really doesn't know any better, we kept things simple and had some homemade peach ice cream for a treat on the day of his birthday.  Then a few days later we celebrated with a barbeque at the beach with some friends.  It was a fun time.  The kids enjoyed playing and our little babe enjoyed eating--anything we'd give him.  The weather was cool, but not rainy so that classifies as a good day of weather.

A Festive Fourth

We had a great 4th of July and have been going like crazy ever since.  Especially this past week with sunshine and warm summer temps.  It's officially against all rules to do any housework, watch any TV, or spend exorbitant amounts of time in front of a computer on days like that, ya know.

On the morning of the 4th, I finished up some sugar cookies that I made for the annual picnic with our church family.  This was my first attempt at decorating with royal icing.  The results were about as I had expected except that is took a LONG time to decorate each cookie.  If I decorate cookies like this again, I think I might be able to shave a little time off and get them done quicker, but I'm sure they will still take a while to complete.  This is the recipe/tutorial that I used in case you're interested.  I'll have to post my sugar cookie recipe sometime.  I know everyone has a recipe they prefer, and well, so do I! :)  So I'd like to share mine with you too.

Once the cookies were done, picnic things packed up, and we had ourselves ready, I loaded up the kiddos and headed downtown to the parade.  This always ends up being a highlight for my kids every year.  They love seeing all the entries walking by them.  The little miss said her favorite part of the parade was a supped up car that had fire shooting out of it's exhaust.  The little man says his favorite part was when float riders threw candy.

 

 

The little babe enjoyed the parade just like this...the entire time.  He really never moved--just sat there in his stroller peeking his eyes out from under his hood.

 

The Juneau Volunteer Marching Band
always a good performance

more peeking

My friend, Beth,

and her husband, Andy, with the Green's Creek Mine parade entry.
Andy isn't known to be much a smiler (especially in pictures), so I'm a little proud of myself for catching his smile in the picture.  Just wish the rest of the photo wasn't overexposed.  I was having a hard time keeping up with the changing light conditions with sun playing peek a boo with the clouds.

And we also got to see our favorite police officer.  A nice treat for these parade watchers.  Actually this was what our little man said was his second favorite part of the parade.  I'd say it was my favorite too.

Hope you had a fabulous 4th too!

Easter 2011

My recent blogging hiatus had an extra reason that I didn't mention before.  Shortly after returning from our trip "down south" we got a new computer--well new to us.  Shawn got a bare bones computer at a state surplus auction and worked to get all the programs on it that we needed.  And I must say, it works great and I'm so thankful for his skills to do something like that.  That's not an area I feel confident in at all.

Anyhoo!  New computer means new photo gallery program, not to mention that our camera is pretty new to us as well.  So it took me a while to make time for it, but I finally just made myself sit down and download all 1200-some odd pictures from my memory card that I've taken over the past 6 or 7 weeks.  I'm still figuring out the "ins and outs" of this new program, but so far I like it and am glad I can navigate it so well already.  I mean hey, last night I was downloading and tonight I'm blogging.  Not too shabby.

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So 'tonight I'm blogging'....about Easter.  Last year, I went all out and made the little miss's dress and a coordinating neck tie for the little man. This year, I just knew I'd be pushing it to get that much done, so I compromised and just made matching ties for our boys.  I used a pattern from the Make It and Love It site.  I'm really pleased with how they turned out and hope to make more of them. 

Necktie = teether for the little babe.

Not making a dress this year for the little miss seemed logical enough since my mom recently passed down some dresses that she'd been saving.  My little girl now has a whole bunch of dresses her grandma made for me and my sister when we were that size.  So she picked out this one to wear for Easter.  That hat and gloves actually came from her kindergarten teacher.  When I picked up the little miss from school on the Friday before Easter I was a little surprised to see 12 girls walking around with pink Easter hats and white gloves.  Yep, she gave them to all the girls in her class.  Apparently the boys got two card games of some kind.  Let me just say that this teacher is officially my kind of lady.  I really like that she thinks hats and glove are a basic necessity of reasonable Easter celebration.  Not only does her act of kindness encourage her student's families to at least consider the connection between Easter and going to church, but it also gives these girls a special dress up feeling.  Just another reason to be thoroughly pleased with the little miss's teacher this year.

 Crocuses in our front flower bed.

As with many of the holidays we are in Alaska for, we did much of celebrating with our church family.  After a church potluck, we met at a member's home for an Easter egg hunt.  It just worked out that the little miss was the oldest hunter this year.  Wow!  You mean I had the oldest kid there?!  That doesn't seem right...but it is true.  Being the oldest kid has it's perks I guess since she did find the golden egg.  Folded up inside was a cold hard $5! 

And to end the afternoon...a group picture attempt.  Well, at least we tried. 

Hope you had a blessed Easter too.

Be My Valentine

We had a great time celebrating Valentine's Day this year.  I think it is quite possibly becoming my favorite holiday.  It's definitely one of my top three: Christmas, Independence Day, and Valentine's Day.  We're also starting to have a few traditions with Valentine's Day.  For me it's all about showing love to my family.  And one fun way to do that is to make food in the shape of a heart.  For breakfast this year, I made heart shaped pancakes with heart-ish strawberry slices for the little miss before school.  And after I got her off for the day, I made the full meal for my valentine who was still snoozing away.  I think he enjoyed waking up to the smell of bacon and coffee. :)

We also made some time for reading valentine's from our friends and family.

For lunch, we joined the little miss in her kindergarten class for a valentine party.  We dined on hotdogs and root beer and had some valentine treats.  Then we watched and helped her open her valentines from her classmates.  That was a really fun time and we're glad that all 5 of us were able to spend it together.

Here she is with some of her friends from her class.

For dinner, I continued the heart theme but branched WAY out from previous years.  For the last two years now, I've just made a pizza in a heart shape.  But this year, I challenged myself by making homemade heart shaped cheese ravioli.  The kids loved it.  Of course, they love cheese and spaghetti so it's not too surprising.  And I was pleasantly surprised that, albeit a little time consuming, making homemade pasta isn't all that hard.  I do think that I'll need a pasta maker/sheeter attachment for my kitchenaide mixer the next time I want to do this though.  Making it "by hand" really made it a "labor" of love.

After dinner, we sent the kids on another valentine tradition of ours--a photo scavenger hunt.  Earlier in the day I went around the house taking pictures of different spots in our home.  We then printed them on our home printer and set up the hunt.  Some of the pictures were pretty obvious like this one, 

But then others I tried to make trickier.  Like this one,

They truly know our home, because they only hesitated on one picture.  When they got to the last hunt spot, they found three little packages, each with a valentine treat.

We hope you had a great Valentine's Day giving and receiving love to those you hold dear.

This Christmas

Christmas was good.

Christmas was sparkly.

Christmas was busy.

Christmas was crazy.

Christmas was white. (Fresh snow on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.)

 Christmas was magical.

Christmas was exhausting.

Christmas was exciting.

Christmas was a work day for my husband.  (Boo)

Christmas was giggly.

 Christmas was delicious.

Christmas was fast.

Christmas was relaxing and a wee bit lazy.

Christmas was cozy.

Christmas was a beautiful melody.

Christmas was goofy.

Hope you had a good Christmas too.  Ours is still "out" and will probably get packed up shortly.  With the end of this busy but fun season, I'm feeling the desire and time to blog once again.  Hope there's still a few of you out there to read along and enjoy the ride.
Blessings to you all as 2010 comes to a close and 2011 is just around the bend.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving 2010 was great...in fact, so great and so delicious that this turkey leg is one of the last few things in our fridge left over from that day.

And yeah, you should have seen the look on Shawn's face when he came into the kitchen and found me setting the turkey leg up for this shot. I just figured that having it on a cutting board with one of my furoshiki's behind it would make a much better backdrop than the rest of the turkey carcass awaiting the stew pot.  My sister who is having a baby very soon and has an aversion to raw poultry can thank me later. :)

Oh, and do you have turkey still sitting in your fridge?  Then I highly recommend Pioneer Woman's Leftover Turkey Pot Pie.  We had it tonight for dinner and it was delicious.  As with most of her recipes, it's full of good buttery flavor.  I suppose you could make it low-cal.  Just jog in place when you stir the pan!

Anyway, back to Thanksgiving.  The day was good, busy before the meal, but relaxing after--just about how Thanksgiving Day is supposed to go.  We ate our meal with several others from our church family over at the church building.  One of the perks to that arrangement is that I didn't have to make the whole meal.  But I did cook one of the turkeys and I'm so glad I did.  The smell that filled our house while it cooked was so wonderful.
I did so much relaxing after the meal that I didn't get very many pictures, but I did get a few of the kids enjoying some post meal time playing with friends.

I'm sure it's no surprise, but I'm very thankful for my family--my three fun and beautiful children and my wonderful husband.  I'm also thankful for the Christian families here in Juneau that have children that my kids can grow up with.  That's a great blessing.