Valentine's Day 1

For a long time I thought Valentine's Day was a silly holiday, but 3 years ago I caught the fever, and have really enjoyed it ever since.  3 years ago we had this breakfast with our friends (J wasn't even there, he was at a school competition in Reno).  2 years ago I think I was still traumatized by having P so I didn't post anything, and I'm sure we didn't do anything.  Maybe had crab or something.  Last year we were in California, and since we weren't in our own house, I know I didn't decorate anything, but I know we did something because I have a huge pop-up Valentine's Day card from J.  I also did this and this last year.  Needless to say, I did not do a Valentine's Day card swap this year.  BUT, I would like to have a Valentine's Day-a-Day each day until the Big Day itself!  Just a little something to give you ideas for what to do.

This is a blog I just discovered and absolutely cannot get enough of, and this heart cake tutorial is absolutely aDORable, so enjoy!

Heart Cake Tutorial

Finally!!  Is that what you are thinking?  Its ok.  You can admit it.  We are all friends here. 

Do you remember this little thing?

 

Well it turns out some of you daring bakers want to make this yourselves.  Yeah you!  I cant wait to see and read all about it... send me links girls! (and boys... if there are any boys)

Well. In order for me to do a tutorial I had to make another one.  So, forgive the less then stellar decorations, but here is our 'tutorial' heart cake.

 

But you didnt come to see the outside right? 

Here goes.

Start out by making four eight inch pans of white cake.  (If you want the actual recipe, just click here)

Make one 9x13 (you can do whatever shape and size you want) pan of red velvet cake. (recipe here)

For more continue here...

See you tomorrow for our 2nd Valentine's Day!

Spa Party

While at home for Christmas, we had a Kesler Girls Winter Wonderland Spa Party.  I was in charge of food, decorations, & music, Rachel was in charge of facials, & Callie was in charge of mani-pedi's.  It was a blast! The above were our invitations. I tried to do the macaroons, but they were an absolute disaster, so I did other things instead.  I made sugar cookies, and had some leftover cream cheese from another dish, so I made cream cheese frosting.  That only covered a few of them, so I also used the leftover whipping cream I had from the lime mousse topped with blueberries to make whipped cream frosting which I piled high to make it even dreamier.  I made cream cheese rolls which consisted of cream cheese (that I put blue food coloring into) spread on tortillas with chives & olives sprinkled on it before I rolled it up & cut it like sushi.  I also made chicken salad sandwiches that I cut into snowflake shapes.  They were great.  I froze blueberries into ice that we put into our water (that we drank from goblets), but I should have done steamed milk instead because we were COLD...next time.  I decorated with Martha Stewart's crepe paper pom poms that I didn't make into balls but left as halves that looked like lily-pads.  I also downloaded spa music on the computer and we played that during the whole thing.  We started out eating and then my sister gave us facials (divine), and we ended up running out of time, but we did our nails later that night at home on my parents' bed.  It was fun for it just to be all the girls together.  The bathtub shots are us washing & exfoliating our feet.  It was great!

pictures edited

p just woke up, so this will be short, but i keep seeing pictures that are not that well photographed, but the editing just makes it breathtaking.  cross process is my favorite, so i added it, and some vingette and i just love these!  sorry they're photos you've already seen...i can't bring myself to get up and get the camera...

Baby Videos!

We went for our first doctor's appointment today, and our doctor couldn't find the heartbeat with just the regular sound one, so he did an ultrasound for us and we got to see the baby!  This isn't in order of recording, but mostly by clarity.  This first one we can see the baby's legs so clearly!  I loooooove it!  It was so fun to see!  We're still due July 13th, and get to find out the gender Feb 23rd (what a great post-birthday present!)!  Yay yay yay!

Birthday Day

We had a great time on his birthday.  I think he really enjoyed everything we did that day.

This first picture is a NOT a birthday picture, but one I took a couple of days ago that I'm just in love with.  He lined up the cars himself, and I just like it so much.  I couldn't help but share it--all the rest are of his birthday.

We made mini green pancakes that we put candles on (we put candles on every meal...even the pasta)

We played with shaving cream (rubbing it on stuff like the balloons), and had fun throwing water on the balloons to make there be a sound.   

This is just a crazy picture I couldn't help but put in.

He requests his Buzz shirt (he has 2) everyday, so I made SURE it was clean for his birthday.  Yummy hungry boy! (elbow macaroni, corn, hamburger, spaghetti sauce & sometimes cheese)

After lunch he requested some captain crunch (the Walmart kind, of course...), so I told him "Ok.  Go sit down & I'll get it for you."  In which he sat right where he was on the floor.  He did the same thing in the airport when we got ice cream and I told him he had to sit down before we ate it.  He sat right in the middle of the airport.

Opening presents.  You can't see it, but there are tears on a couple of them already from when he saw them in our room a few days before and tried to open them.  He was very happy it was finally time to open them.

With all of his loot!

Blowing out the candles.  He did a great job.

Some friends came over to eat cupcakes & ice cream with us & brought him two cars that flip!  P was also very happy to have other people to play with besides Mom.

It was a great birthday!  Yay for 2!

2 Exciting Things

We have 2 exciting things going on.

#1: Today is Porter's 2nd birthday!  We are very excited to have a fun filled day that will start out with pancakes and candles!

#2: We are having another baby!  We're 13 weeks along (14 on Wednesday) and we are so excited!  We're due July 13th (2 days before Harry Potter 7 Part 2, so if you're counting down HP you can be counting down to our baby too!)!  We're REALLY excited and will find out the gender the first week in March.  Yay!

BBQ Chicken

I need bbq chicken recipes--asap, please.

Our House=Cinderella's Castle

Every time the Magic Kingdom Castle comes up at the beginning of a Disney movie Porter says "House!"  I wish.  I dream of it every time he says it.  It's $8,000 a night to rent the suite in Cinderella's Castle, which would be $2,920,000 a year to live there.  They say that rent should be ~1/4 of your income, so we'd have to make $11,680,000 a year to live in Cinderella's Castle.  Junk Change.  The day Jordan files the tax returns and it says we've made that much the following year, I'm moving in that day.  What a DREAM.

Click here for pictures inside my future house.

Words & Matching

I get weekly emails from babycenter.com, and this week it said 22 month olds are supposed to have an average of a 20 word vocabulary, and I was trying to think how many words Port was saying, so I made a list and the words I can think of that he knows is 97!  Here is the list:
thank you
please
eggnog (i know, right? there's a 500 lb kid in the making...)
milk
chocolate milk
hot chocolate
car
truck
goose
sock
duck
shoes
horse
snow
ball
hello
hi
baby
Dad
Mom
Grandma
Grandpa
Garrett
movie
tv
elephant
popcorn
Christmas
Will
head
shoulders
knees
toes
eyes
ears
mouth
nose
belly button
back
up
toilet
pee
poo
tree
muddy
yuck
hot
hat
mouse
house
home
book
airplane
block
computer
phone
Porter
cold
warm
wash
blanket
nap
bed
uh oh
no
yep
yeah
moose
bang
deer
bird
cow
chicken
cok-a-doodle-do
star
moon
Jesus
Monson
Eyring
Uchtdorf
water
ice
juice
bike
ride
Bryce
Zippy
rice
more
red
blue
black
white
green
yellow
purple
sun
bubble
boots

I can't believe how many it is!  

I also notice the other day that with these kinds of puzzles where the image in is in the background that he can put them in the right place which means he notices when two things are the same, so I made a Thanksgiving matching game where he picks a picture and can find the other one!  It's so fun to do!

Hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving!

Porter Picture Update

I'm not writing descriptions for all of these--you can just enjoy them.  

P.S. He's drinking eggnog out of the carton and I was NOT the one to teach him that.

Fact: There is an outhouse in the back.  We DO have indoor plumbing (thank heavens...), but just in case we needed to use it, it's there.  It's a little fallen, but wouldn't be impossible to use.

There IS a paved road in front of our house, but our driveway is NOT paved--it is a dirt road, just like the WWW.  Porter thinks this is wonderful.  He could play in the dirt for the rest of his life.  We sit, pick up handfuls of dirt, and pour them on each others arms & legs...for hours (not really, but 45 minutes at LEAST).  He loves it.  I think it has something to do with erosion, but for some reason the dirt in our driveway has the consistency of powdered sugar, so it's very fun to draw pictures and make shoe imprints in.

We have a beautiful view from our house.  We have a HUGE window in our living room which spends the whole day open (we don't have to worry about people seeing us dancing to our record player because there aren't very many people (and by not very many, I mean 112) in the valley.  Something that's nice about where we live is how open and beautiful it is (I might not feel this way in a couple days when there are 3 feet of snow in our lawn).  In Newsies, Jack Kelly said the sky is bigger in the west, which the girl (Jess?  Sarah?  What is her name?) didn't understand--she said it was the same sky as NYC, but it certainly is not.  This isn't a nostalgic thing, it's because there aren't as many trees or buildings, so the sky isn't blocked by those things.  It's like being on top of a mountain at all times.  Actually, that's a pretty good description because the altitude of our town is a whole 1,000 feet higher than the tallest mountain in NY.  So, we live on top of a gynormous mountain, I guess.

I'm a little short on pictures lately, and I haven't taken ANY since it's snowed.  I just got the Halloween pictures back from our friends so I'll scan those hopefully today and have them up soon.  I'll make sure to take pictures of the snow, too.  It's pretty crazy.

WWW Wood Stove

We have a wood stove, and it isn't for decoration or only on holidays. We use it everyday, just like in the WWW. It's a great stove and it keeps the house SUPER warm (it doesn't hurt that the house is a log cabin that's had siding put on it...a foot of solid wood is great insulation). Porter's really careful about it--we've given him warning about how super hot it is, and from being around bonfires he understands fire is SUPER hot. While he's careful, he also loves to start the fire with Dad. He'll sit and blow on the fire until the very last second that you close the doors.

I don't know if they did this in the WWW, but before we could use our wood stove, we had to sweep the chimney. Yep--like Mary Poppins. Chim chimenee, chim chimenee, chim chim cheree, a sweep is as lucky as lucky can be! It was REALLY cool. Kinda scary, but very cool. We (and by we, I mean Jordan) put a ladder up to the house, tied a rope around a tree on the other side of the house, and threw it over the house so I could use it to pull myself up to the top of the roof. I then used a...I don't know what it's called--whatever you use to clean the chimney, it's a huge wire brush, shoved it down the chimney until I thought I had gotten to the bottom, Jordan checked to make sure it was all the way down, and then brought it back up. That was done a few times until we felt it was enough to get most of the gunk out. We didn't need to cover our furniture like in Mary Poppins (which when I asked Jordan the question he thought was hilarious, because there are doors on our furnace, and not an open fireplace like in the movies.


We also have a great view. I used Autostitch (google it) to put it together. It isn't as perfect as doing it yourself on photoshop, but it also only takes like, 13 seconds to get done, so I feel like it's worth the lower quality.

We Finally Have Internet & More WWW

We have been waiting and waiting and WAITING for internet and we finally have it!  So, if you want to gchat or Skype--we CAN!

Update:  Jordan officially has a job working at the courthouse in Soda Springs.  His title is "facilities management" which means he's in charge of the courthouse and everything that goes with it.  He is in charge of security, maintenance, remodeling, & his boss says there are some things coming up at the beginning of the year that are the main reason they hired him.  He's excited to really modernize the building, because it seems like no one's cared about it for a long time.  He's going to install a keypad instead of having keys and they're doing a $250,000 remodel starting later this month (or the beginning of the year....I don't actually know if they know, either).  He starts tomorrow and is pretty excited about it!

WWW (Wild Wild West):

In the Wild Wild West, they didn't have hot water, and sometimes no water at all.  This is NOT us now, but for the first two weeks this WAS us.  We did NOT have hot water, and it was tough.  I'm thankful to not be a homesteader's wife because I would have showered even less than I do now.  Cold water, no, not cold; fridged.  32 degree Fahrenheit water that is not ice soley because it hasn't gone through the phase change, but is still an undoubtably 32 degrees is COLD COLD COLD, which brings us to cold water showers--they are horrible.  They suck the breathe out of your body, and you get done still not really feeling clean because your pores didn't have the warmth to open them up.  I only took one cold water shower, and then went to Jordan's Grandma's house to shower after that until we got hot water, but I've gotta tell ya--that one I took sure made an impression in my mind how thankful I am for hot water.  Jordan took two cold water showers, and you could hear him making noises that you were sure he was dying in the bathroom--his body probably thought he was.  Anyway, it was just one more WWW adventure that I'm thankful is over.

Something else they didn't have in the WWW was refridgeration.  Again, we do now, but at the beginning we did NOT.  We thought our fridge was working, but what we actually had was a fridge that kept the stuff inside at a regular consistent temperature, but it was not even close to refridgerated.  After a few days of not keeping anything cool (not unsafe stuff like milk, but stuff like soda),  our landlord brought a spare fridge out from his garage.  It was very much appreciated.

I'm going to post pictures, but we've moved the rooms around and put pictures up, so it doesn't actually look like this anymore, but it's a general idea of what the home looks like.  It's a really old home, and you can tell, but we're happy to be in it.