Am I a Californian?

Whew - another long haitus - I need to be better about this...all around - although I suppose I've lost any readers that I ever had, or did I?

We did it.

This past year as been one of turmoil, heartache, and big decisions.

My job has been dwindling.  My company was aquired some time back, and since then our numbers had been dwindling.  It wasn't so much that it was a bad place to work, in fact, quite the opposite - a great place with great people and interesting work, for the most part.  But a lack of it.  We went forma 120 person company to about 20.  For the past 3 years, I've wondered every time I came to the end of a contract if I would be able to keep my job, and find a new contract.  Last summer I was faced with the fact that my contract was goign to be up the end of March, and I wasn't totally sure if I'd even have a job after that.

So we started talking.

And talking.

Matt also wasn't sure what was happening with his job.  He had also been aquired; 2x in fact since moving to the new job 6 years ago.  He evenentually turned into a 1 man shop, and pretty flexible.  We started thinking, if he can work by himself in CO, why couldn't he work by himself somewhere else?

March rolled around.  The end of my project was very near.  No work on the horizon.  I decide sorta on a whim to apply for 2 positions with the State of Montana.  2 interviews later, I had an offer.

We decided to ask, will they let Matt move the office?

No.

And we're going to lay you off.

And there we were.  Lay off was goign to happen June 5.  And we needed to make a decision.  Stay with the job that had a high liklihood of laying me off, or try something new.  Go for the lifestyle change, be closer to family.  Take the pay cut.  But be closer to MY family.

So we did it.

We sold our house, we moved to Helena, MT, and bought a house.  We closed on the house this past Monday.  I took the job.  We're here, and I just got to see my mom for 5 days.  And I see my sister nearly every day, and I'm tired but SO SO happy to be here!

Which leads me to my point....I will admit.  I lived in Colorado for nearly 15 years, and I got used to some things.  Recycling, namely.  Single stream recycling.  Who'd have thunk it was a luxury!  There isn't single stream curb side recycling in Helena!  It's 2015!  My mom said I've turned into a "Californian".  I want the lifestyle and remoteness of Montana, but I want the conveniences of a big city.  Helena has 30000 people in it!  I had recycling in Erie, CO and it's population is 20,000....  So I guess she's right, I've turned into a Califorian; is curb side single stream recycling really that much to ask for?!

GASP! What happened to May?!

Just noticed that I completely MISSED posting the photos of the biggest one's birthday cake!!  This year's theme was FROZEN, of course, which was FUN to do and fun to make!  We started out her 5th birthday celebration this year with a friend party at a gymnastic place, with cupcakes:

These guys were fun and easy to make!  I found the eyeball candies in the cake section at Safeway, mixed up some black frosting and went to town.  The blue around their bodies are supposed to be reminiscent of the little blue pants that they wear.

For her actual birthday, she let me do a "Frozen" cake, which took some convincing, because not a week before that she wanted me to make her a Hercules cake! After searching high and low for some sort of Elsa cake topper/toy, and having no luck, I tried my hand at sculpting, with also no luck.  Last ditch effort, was to find a graphic online, print it out, stick it to a stick.  Miss 5 year old was thrilled.

I was also pretty happy with the looks of this cake - I'm still working on find the perfect recipe for the INSIDE of the cake, along with a yummy delicious filling.  The snowflake cutters were the funnest in this cake - they were so cute, and fun to stamp out little fondant snowflakes.  The "ice" was a little tricky, as it was a hair humid at my house that week, so when I made the glass a couple of nights before, some pieces were crystallizing by her birthday.  None the less, it was a fun cake to make. 

iPhone shattered.

For the first time since we brought two little souls into our lives, we decided to take a "family getaway" to celebrate our oldest going to Kindergarten next week.  I know!  Kindergarten!  I'm sure lots of experienced parents out there are rolling their eyes and asking what the big deal is, but for us, it's very big!  And we needed to celebrate it.  We decided to stay in-state and go somewhere that I've been DYING to I go to for a long time - Glenwood Springs, CO.  The drive has always been a little daunting for us, but we decided to go with it.  The girls could watch a movie (or two!) on the iPad along with having a few snacks to go with.  Needless to say, they did AWESOME.  They even napped, which was unexpected.  We hit a few of the big ticket items in Glenwood Springs, one of which was the Glenwood Cavern Adventure Park that is accessible by taking a gondola/tram up a mountain to a little theme park.  Unfortunately for Littlest One, lots of things were aged 3+, so she and I spent a lot of time eating ice cream and playing in the dirt.  The bigger one had a great time!

At this adventure park, there's lots of trails up and down the mountain to get to various attractions.  We were all walking up to one of the them, when we heard "DADDY HEWP!!"  When I looked back, sweet baby girl had managed to slip and was half under a plastic fence with her leg going down the mountain.  I got over to her and helped her up, but as I stood up, my phone fell and landed on the ground, face down.  I knew it was trouble as soon as I saw it land.  When I picked it up, it was completely shatter.  Ugh.  The good news:  the phone is completely functional.  Just shattered.  So after a fair amount of web searching since the incident I decided to just have the screen replaced...I know, voiding any potential opportunity to have Apple work on it for me, but much cheaper then getting a replacement phone!  And with my contract up in December, there's a slight possibility of getting a new iPhone 6...although I'm not completely sold on that idea yet either.  Anyhoo, here in about 15 minutes I'm hoping that my phone will be back to new and be working great.  Update:  It's working great!  I'm thrilled!!!

The rest of the weekend was loads of fun; we spent a lot of time swimming in the hot springs pool, taking naps, and eating (my favorite).  The girls had a BALL swimming as much as they could...even the 2 year old, although she gets tired faster.  It was a little bit of a hike over to the pools from our hotel (Hotel Denver), but both of the girls did great.  Speaking of, Hotel Denver is AWESOME.  Granted, it's old, and has some features of an old hotel, but it was clean, quiet, and the hotel staff was awesome.  The best part was that we could buy discounted hot spring passes, and they'd let us borrow huge white towels and would throw in a bottle of water for each of us too.

We pretty much enjoyed all of the restaurant that we ate at, with the exception of the Brew Pub right at the Hotel Denver.  While they were super convenient (and you can wait for your table in your room, with beers, and they'll call you when the table is ready!), the items that we ordered weren't fantastic, and the service for us was SLOW.  Which blows my mind a little, since there were tables that got sat AFTER us, that got to order, eat, and leave before us!  So maybe it was just our server that wasn't paying attention.  We were certainly making enough noise, you would think they'd want to get us out of there as fast as possible!  Other restaurants that we dined at included Juicy Lucy's - AMAZING, and a Cajun restaurant, which was also very good, and a nice change of pace, that didn't skimp on quality or service.  We rounded out the weekend with a stop at Beau Jo's for pizza in Idaho Springs, CO.

Now we ramp up for school to start next week.  Which is thrilling but scary, and fun all at the same time.  I better take my tissues along..might be a long teary walk home for me!

Minnie Mouse.

Minnie Mouse is a favorite of my baby girl.  Every day she asks to watch "Mouse" on TV, carries around a Minnie Mouse stuffy, and often comes and shows it to us.  She even has a little Minnie Mouse dress up doll thing that she loves.  So, for her birthday this year we decided it was appropriate that she have a Minnie Mouse theme!  We didn't go crazy this year, but did manage to get my folks to come to her birthday party!  I decided to make a Minnie Mouse cake as well, although was intimidated by lots of the cakes that I was seeing online.  I ended up finding one that I thought I could pull off. 

For the cake, I decided to do a bottom up cake using this recipe, which I ended up tripling to get enough for two 8" square pans and a small 1/2 circle cake.  I also used Sweetapolita's whipped vanilla buttercream frosting recipe.  It is delicious!  The end result - (I had baby girl's name on it, but blurred it out):

 

I have to admit, I wasn't that excited about the buttercream bottom when I was trying to get it smooth, but once I started putting stuff on it, I started to mind less.  I was reminded why I am drawn to fondant, it's ultra smooth texture is so nice and clean.  I've struggled in the past covering cakes with just fondant, and didn't want to go that route again, so opted for the buttercream and struggled there too!  In the end, i thought the face ended up adorable, and I love the polka dots and decorations on the side of the cake.  

Another issue I ran into.  Beings that I work at my job during the day, I was working on this cake in stages.  I baked it Monday, and decided to save myself some time Tuesday night and buttercream it - which in total with baking probably took me 3-4 hours.  On Tuesday, I did all the decorating with the fondant, which ended up taking me another 2-3 hours.  But then it sat another day until we had the party Wednesday night.  I wasn't sure what to do - I didn't really want to put it in the fridge in fear that the fridge would completely dry it out, but it ended up being a little dry from sitting on the counter for 2.5 days.  Ideally, I suppose, "real" bakeries bake one day and decorate the next?  I'm curious what everyone else does!

Scoot over, you're driving.

So, I've mentioned this before, but I grew up a farm kid.  Well, I was a farm kid compared to city kids, so technically a "town kid" according to all the other farm kids around us.  My family lived in town, and my dad drove out every day to "the farm" to work.  We went out there a lot too; our grandparents lived on the farm as well as my aunt, uncle, and cousins.

One day, when I was like 7 and my sister was 10 and my little brother was maybe 2 or 3 (my sister says she was 10 - in my mind I thought she was a little older than that - like 12...but I can't be certain), we were heading out to the farm, but first we had to stop at the local grocery store to pick up some groceries for Gramma.  That day we were traveling in the 66 Ford F100, (ours was green) (and although I say "ours" it wasn't really ours, I think it was "the farms" but vehicles came and went often enough that we never really had 1 vehicle...except for the Cadillac, and that's a whole post in it's own).  Back to the point.  So it was a nice summer day, I think I had decided to ride in the pickup bed for the ride out to the farm.  It was 6 miles out of town.  My mom comes out of the grocery store with a bag of groceries, which btw, we were able to pick up on store credit, you could go get your groceries and "put them on the bill"; the cashier would tally up the groceries and write it down, and off we went!  So she comes out of the grocery store, and idles over to the passenger side of the pickup and says "Scoot over, you're driving," to my 10 year old big sister.  My brother, who had never seen or sat in a car seat in his life, was standing, as usual, in the middle of the seat.  So Jean, scooted over and got behind the wheel.  As I remember it, she was very reluctant to do it, but my mom insisted.  I remember it being VERY EXCITING, and had my nose pressed to the glass watching all the action on the inside of the cab.

The ride out was...slow, with my sister killing the pickup multiple times before getting it to move.  I guess I should point out that this pickup was a manual; no learning on an automatic here!  After a few times of doing this awkward rabbit hopping down the road (letting the clutch out too fast...you all know what I'm talking about), she managed to get it going.  Shifting was a little rough especially since the '66 didn't seem to have a clear path to where the next gear was.  The "stick" would bounce all over and you kinda had to guess where the next gear was.  Talk about satisfaction and relief when you actually found 3rd gear!  At the time, it was all dirt roads to the farm and you had to drive in the worn down areas for the smoothest ride.  Usually, there were 3 paths on the dirt road, left middle and right, and generally you occupied middle and right paths when driving, except when you meet a car, you have to pull over on to the gravel so both vehicles have room to pass.  The highlight of the drive, was meeting an oncoming car, making Jean panic, and mom having to reach over and pull us out of on-coming traffic!  Or, well, mostly just forcing us to share the road.  Luckily, everyone knows everyone out there, so we received a friendly wave after seeing a little kid who could barley see over the steering wheel driving.  We made it to the farm without incident...although I'm not sure that Jean volunteered to drive us back home!  She did eventually get behind the wheel again, and I remember driving became a joint venture.  She'd push the clutch in and say, "Clutch!" and I'd sit in the middle and do the shifting.  She was so skinny it took all of her weight to push the clutch down, imagine her little body practically standing on the clutch when it was time to shift!  Sometimes we'd still kill it which would cause eruptions of giggles from us.  Good memories!

Supper.

Dinner or Supper?  I suppose it's a geographical thing.  Growing up in rural Montana, we had dinner and supper, sometimes we had lunch and dinner, or lunch and supper.  It was all just relative to the time of day that it was being referenced.

Every single day Matt and I have the same conversation.  "What's for supper?" (Or in Matt's case "What's for dinner?")  And every single day I say, "I don't know what do you want?"  It got me thinking, so much of our day to day are shared decisions about what we do, eat, and the chores that we have to take care of.  For instance, who cooks dinner, who decides what we should eat, who empties the dish washer, who bathes the children, who puts them to bed.  Maybe this is the norm for all families out there; maybe it isn't, and I'm just blessed.  When I was a kid, had my mom called my dad and said "what should we cook for supper?" she probably wouldn't have gotten a response!  (Let alone actually being able to reach him during the day!)  My mom, a stay at home mom that was our world and I would never change that in a million years, did all the child rearing, cooking and entertaining us for a million hours during the day until it was finally late enough she could put us to bed.  There were times of the year that we'd get to see my dad right before we went to bed, he was gone that long during the day.  Drawing from a little experience, I realize now that a whole day with little children is mentally exhausting...maybe not in so much of a "my brain hurts" type way, but in a "just please stop fighting and crying for 2 seconds" type way.  Bless you mom, I know we put you through the ringer!  

Anyways, back to dinner/supper.  Matt and I have exhausted our ideas for dinner.  I believe my #1 question when we get together with other couples is, "What do you cook for supper?"  Matt and I are seriously tired of our entire menu, and while it tastes good when we're eating it, the idea of having naked burritos every week makes us want to retch!  So tell me, what do you eat for supper?  Would you consider leaving your recipe in the comments?  Thanks!

Oh, and I should note my criteria - I"m basically looking for a 30-45 minute meal - getting home at 5:00 and getting dinner on the table by 5:30-6:00 is my goal!

iPhone.

So I posted a while back about getting an iPhone, which was a big leap for me since I'm a through and through google user.  Luckily I've found some apps that make using Google easier and easier on my phone, which has been great.  I really like the phone and see myself using this phone until it breaks.

And break it may, because I go through cases like they're going out of style!  As with all my other phones and devices, I'm constantly looking for a case that is slim form.  A friend of mine once looked at an old phone of mine and said "doesn't it stink that we buy these fancy skinny phones and then cover it up with a huge case?"  I couldn't agree more!  In consequence, I believe I've gone through like 4 cases since getting my iPhone.  Here's what I've learned:

1. TPU cases are the skinniest, but last about 1 drop.
2. Silicon cases seem sticky to me and move around too much for me.
3. "Tough" cases are just that, but add so much weight and size to the phone.

I currently am sporting an XDoria Defense 360, which is a clear fully enclosed case that has been working very well for me for about 4 months.  The problem is that I dropped it, which caused a crack, and a few days ago I took apart the case to clean it up, and that cracked piece fell out.  Now I have an exposed corner which puts me back into shopping mode.  Ugh.  Matt is currently sporting a Luvvitt case which seems to be a hybrid of silicon and something else - it's pliable but not sticky, which is interesting to me.  It doesn't have a front cover, but I could get a screen protector - another pet peeve of mine!  I can never get them on straight and without bubbles!

Do you have any suggestions for cases?  Leave them in the comments, I would love to hear!

iPad.

This year we spent the holiday in Turner, MT with my family.  True to form, the weather managed to dip to -30 degrees (-50 windchill)!!  We didn't really go outside much when it was that cold.  We did sit around and drink a lot of wine...fun!

For Christmas this year, I asked for an iPad.  I didn't actually think I would get one, since they had just come out, but I figured it was worth a shot.  Shockingly enough, my sweet husband got me one and had it shipped to Turner for me to open there - needless to say I was shocked and thrilled!  Ever since then I've been hunting for a cover, that fulfills a few of my requirements:

1. Covers the screen - I let my kids us my iPad to play kid games, so I needed something that would cover the screen to protect it from them
2. Auto on/off - it would be nice if the screen cover could turn it on/off
3. Keyboard.  As much as I like the onscreen keyboard on the device, the fact that I don't get any tactile input drives me crazy...I can't really type with two hands with the onscreen keyboard.  And if I'm going to use the ipad as a tool I need to be able to type
4. Easy in and out - I currently don't have any movies on my iPad, but in the foreseeable future I see the need to be able to pop the iPad out of its case and put it in some sort of car case so my little darlings can watch movies in the car.  The life right?
5. I thought it would be nice for there to be some sort of hole/area to hold a stylus - I think taking notes on the iPad could be handy in some of the meetings that I attend at work (instead of having to type)
6. Slim form as much as possible - the iPad air is lighter and slimmer than it's predecessors, why would I want to bulk up with a huge heavy case?

Shockingly enough, I have been having a TERRIBLE time finding a cover that does all this - I didn't really think it was THAT tall of an order!  To get a fully enclosed cover, you can't have a keyboard.  To get auto on/off you have to have some sort of portfolio type cover.  NO covers have a stylus holder.  Easy in/out...all dependent on cover type, but definitely not an option with a fully enclosed cover.  Lots of covers cover the back, but not the front screen.  Not a single cover had all of my requirements.   

I decided then I need to re-prioritize my list.  What did I want the most?  After thinking it over for quite some time, I decided I wanted a keyboard the most...I may find that I don't use it that much, but I'm really terrible at typing on the screen...like REALLY terrible.  #2 was automatic on/off, #3 was easy in/out. #4: something that still allows my children to play with the device

I went to the mall today because Matt told me there was new store that carried covers. They had 2 options, a Griffin Cover, and a Zagg cover.  The zagg cover was heavy and couldn't fold back out of the way for the girls to play with the iPad.  So I ended up with the Griffin.  I put my iPad in it - which was tricky (it was super tight and didn't acutally sit in there completely centered), set it up on it's kickstand, connected the keyboard, moved it slightly closer to me, and BAM.  The iPad part flipped down and banged against the desk.  Awesome.  I figured I had busted my iPad right then and there.  This kickstand on the back of it for typing mode is held by 2 ribbons to keep it from folding completely out, nothing stops it from folding back in when moved, thus the iPad flops down.  AND it was a B to get it in and out.  I decided that I wasn't satisfied and took it back to the store.

I wasn't sure what to do next, and decide to check the Apple store if they had any covers.  The actually carried one cover - a Logitech cover that has a keyboard - it wasn't quite the one I was looking for (that I had seen online), but also didn't cost as much as the one I was looking for.  I ended up with a Logitech Ultra Thin Keyboard Folio - or something like that - in the only color that they had, a sorta dark orange.  The keyboard is great.  The keybard can be folded away so that the girls can still play on the iPad, and cover causes auto off on the iPad when it shuts!  It is also easy to put the iPad in and take out and the iPad snaps right up to its typing position with magnets. 

Drawbacks:  If you forget to shut off the keyboard and fold it up for iPad only mode, the weight of the iPad will activate the buttons, which was a little tricky to figure out when I didn't realize the keyboard was still on.  Another: there's nothing to cover the screen.  I'm ok with this, since Matt has had an iPad for 2 years and had had a screen protector on it for a while, but then we decided it sucked and hasn't had one since - and his screen is still beautiful.  The same goes for my sister - she doesn't have a screen "protecter" on hers either...so at the moment, I'm not as worried about the screen especially since the cover closes like a book and will cover when I transport the iPad anywhere I go.

At the moment I'm sitting in my living room with my iPad on my lap typing this post - feeling techy and pretty excited to say the least!

Flood.

So I'm sure there's a million and a half blog posts about the 2013 flood in Colorado, and here's one more!  I wish I would have been a little more with it and kept better track of the amount of rain that we got, but unfortunately I didn't.  I'm sure I was like lots of other people and didn't realize that our week of rainy weather was going to turn into this!  I'm not quite sure of all the rainfall totals - and it's hard to get an accurate count, but I think at MY house, we got somewhere in the 7" range.  I believe places around Boulder got in the range for 16-18" of rainfall.  For a girl who grew up on a dry land farm in Montana, and lived in arid Colorado for the past 12 years these numbers are shocking!

Our home fared very well, we didn't have any damage and no flooding, which was very fortunate.  We count ourselves very lucky under the circumstances.  There are many folks that have had catastrophic damages to their property.  I wish them the very best and pray that things will work out for the best for them.

So, essentially, the rain started Monday late afternoon/evening.  We were able to work and take kids to day care Tuesday and Wednesday.  By Thursday though, day care was closed, and we were hearing of flooding.  My in-laws came to watch the girls as they have been every Thursday this summer, and they said that it was getting serious out there - lots of water on roads.  I came to Boulder, saw some major flooding happening near the office park, went and got my computer and turned around and went home.  It continued to rain Thursday, and Friday morning, and we got some dry sunny weather Friday afternoon.  I believe we even had dry weather for the most part Saturday morning.  Baby girl had been playing with a plastic container outside, and by Sunday morning at 9:30 am it looked like this:

Using a crayon as my dip stick - this measure to be 5/8" of rain.  I decided to put it back outside and put a new container out to start measuring rainfall.  At 1:30 pm my new container looked like this:

This container after 4 hours of rain contained 1 3/8" of rain.  I then dumped this one, and put it back outside.

At 5:30 pm I brought the original container back inside and took another measurement - I believe this measurement is the 24 hour total from Saturday night to Sunday.  And it's reading just about 2.5 inches.  Wow!

By Tuesday, it was time to go back to work, I was excited to see the flooding around the office park.  Needless to say it was impressive!  This first picture is of a sidewalk that has turned into a river, on the east edge of the office park. 

This picture is on the south-east corner of the office park where the path makes a 90ish degree turn to the north.  A good reference with the bench sitting there - looks to be about 2 feet of flooding there.

This next picture is an underpass;  the boulder creek path normally goes under the railroad.  I would say that this tunnel is 7-8 feet tall?  Completely flooded.

I walked around and got on top of the tunnel and looked down - and was very surprised to see this, the tunnel actually has very little water on it - it's mostly filled with mud!!

And finally, just a picture of what was a parking lot and there's the Boulder Creek Path out there somewhere!!

As a reference - here's an overview map of where I took the pictures:

Image via Google Maps

It's Thursday and it doesn't seem like the water levels have changed any, maybe an inch or two, it's hard to tell.  The part that always amazes me when I walk over there is the sound - it's always surprising to me for some reason that it SOUNDS like a loud river...which duh, it is a river right now, it's just an unexpected sound coming from those areas.  I don't think I'll be out walking on the path for a while!

Let me clear my throat.

I have something that I want to get off my chest today.

First of all, back in 2011 Colorado passed a Bike Safety statute - or something to that effect - that requires/allows cars to pass bikes with a 3 foot bubble on all sides of the biker.  Fine.  It also states that: 

• CRS 42-4-1005 Limitations of overtaking on the left ...an overtaking motorist is allowed to cross over a double yellow line in order to pass a cyclist with a minimum 3 foot passing distance.

You know what?  Great.  That's awesome.  It does NOT say that you can SWERVE INTO ON-COMING TRAFFIC TO CROSS THE DOUBLE YELLOW TO PASS A BIKER!!!!  Is that enough exclamation points for you Boulder?  Seriously.  Some common sense people.  Take a frickin' downer and slow down if you can't pass at that exact moment.

Ok, thanks for that.  I needed it.  

Tea Party.

Matt's sister just got married on the 6th of July, but back in June, I offered to throw a bridal shower for her at our house.  We decided to go fairly simple and just have it be a tea/coffee type deal, so I decided our theme would be a tea party.  I made 4 types of tea sandwiches to go with our coffee and tea, and then decided to also make a cake, of course!  I've been reading this blog lately: http://sweetapolita.com/.  She has tons of fabulous sounding cakes and excellent directions on cake assembly and mixing instructions.  She has a recipe on there for a whipped vanilla frosting, that even has mixing times and speeds for a kitchen aid mixer - which I love - it's essentially fool proof!

So anyways, on her blog she has a recipe for a Vanilla Blackberry Mascarpone cake.  It sounded AMAZING, and she also has a great video tutorial on how do to an 'ombre' type swirl frosting...which I thought sounded fun, so I went for it.

What you can't really see in the pic is that it was supposed to go purple, white, yellow - but the yellow kinda smeared into the white...no big deal.  I have to say this cake was DELICIOUS.  In fact, I normally just use boxed cakes for my cakes and they turn out fine...but this one was very good.  The frosting was so creamy and almost light, which made it very easy to work with.  It also seemed like it didn't crust as quickly as my normal butter cream recipe, which I also LOVED, since there was ample time to go back and fiddle however I needed to.  I think that's a definite MUST for Colorado, with it being SO dry here.  I will definitely be using this recipe again.  I wish I would have taken a pic of the insides, because the blackberry compote was so beautiful!  Yum.

The 4 year old.

It's amazing to me how time flies.  At the moment it seems to be going very slowly, but then all of a sudden it's been 3 months and I can't figure out what I've been doing the whole time!  My oldest had her 4th birthday in May.  I can not BELIEVE that she's four.  She continually blows my mind daily; whether it be something she learned at school, or something sweet and kind that she does for her baby sister.

Last year for her 3rd birthday, I was still in the "4th trimester" with the baby, and we had a hard time getting anything done for her birthday.  I did make her a cake, but it wasn't the greatest or the cutest.  It was a giant cupcake...which I didn't really like how it turned out.  This year we told her we could have a party somewhere and she chose Monkey Bizness.  It's a giant indoor play area for kids, and they have  couple of rooms that they can have parties in.  For mothers day Matt got me a book on cakepops, so we decided that for this birthday party that Miss Muffet could pick out a couple cake pops that we would take as the treat at the party.  Wouldn't you know it, she picked out aliens, butterflies, flowers.  She thought the aliens were super spooky so they were a must.

I have to say though, they were once again a PAIN to make.  The aliens weren't as bad as the butterflies and the flowers.  I was 'gluing' (with chocolate) cake confetti to the flowers and butterflies to decorate them, and was sorta hating every second of it.  I think it took me 7 hours from start to finish...bleh.  They were delicious though - I just used white cake and white frosting, and the kids gobbled them up.  So, I just need to pick something easier next time.

For her actual birthday, which was on a Wednesday, I let her pick out a cake from my cake book.  She has had her eye on the princess castle cake for nearly a year, so I decided we could make it.  The tricky part with this cake was that it is made out of swiss rolls, which was odd, because nowhere in the book was there a recipe for swiss rolls, so I assumed I could buy them somewhere.  WRONG.  After Matt and I both searched in multiple grocery stores, we found those little cake roll things (gross), but that's all we could find.  So for the smaller thinner towers I did use the small ones that we bought, but had to experiment with making a swiss roll from scratch.  It was harder than I thought it would be - and after burning 2, I just peeled off the burnt parts and rolled it up with some whipped cream, cut and froze them.  Come time to cover them in fondant, I thought they were going to be SUPER soggy and gross, so I was very very worried how everything was going to turn out.  When it came time to cut and eat, shockingly it was all pretty good.  I was surprised.

The other one annoying part about this cake was those marshmallows!  The picture in the book had these beautiful well formed perfect looking marshmallows - mine however were NOT so beautiful, so I think the marshmallows look a little crap-tastic, but the Munch didn't mind - she just gasped and said "it's beautiful, mama!"  That's all I needed.

Ladybug.

I just posted about my baby girl being born, and shockingly enough it's already been a year.  My sweetie had her first birthday and to celebrate we threw her a little birthday party with few of our friends who also have little ones around her age.  I decided since we really went big for my older daughters 1st birthday that we needed to do something great for baby girl too.  Enter the lady bug.  I decided a while back that I wanted to make her a lady bug cake that I had seen in my cake book.  After a little internet research to decide whether to make cake pops or cupcakes, I decided to go with a lady bug cake and lady bug cake pops.  In addition to the 'theme' we also got some lady bug birthday hats, with some cute lady bug napkins and plates.  To top it all off we got a pile of red balloons, which all the kids loved!

So here are the cake pops - pardon the picture - I took it at night, and my kitchen is very yellow at night:

They turned out really cute although were a pain to make.  I had never made cakepops before, so this was all an experiment.  I followed the directions on the Wilton website.  I had a few decide to come off of the stick and take a swim in the candy melts, which was frustrating.  And getting the dots on the lady bugs was also a bit tricky.  I decided to pipe the chocolate on the pops since I couldn't quite decide how i was going to get it on there, and so I was having trouble getting nice little dots - instead got nice little points.  I called them dinosaur lady bugs.

Next came the cake.  I first made baked the cake in a bowl and then put it in the freezer, which was mistake #1, because the cake came out a little rounded on top, so when I got it out and decided to cut that round part off, well - it was frozen and was tricky.  Not to mention my recipe was flawed - the cake had good flavor, but was nearly cooked to smithereens by the time I got it done - so it was very dry and hard.  Moving on.  I decided to put a nice heavy layer of butter cream on the cake instead of just a crumb coat, for those who don't like the taste of fondant.  That way they'd have some frosting there and could pick off the fondant.  

After that it was just the red fondant to cover the cake, and rolling out dots, eyes, and head.  I tried to make some curved antenna for it, but they broke when I tried to put them on the head, so I just colored a cakepop stick black and cut it in half, and stuck the black balls on the ends for antenna.  I wanted something like grass to be at the bottom, but I ran out of powdered sugar, and my buttercream was a little loose - so that's what I ended up with.  Overall I love the cake - even though it didn't taste the greatest!

The birthday was a success, all seemed to enjoy the cake, or well...were polite about it!

Shiny and new.

As of 12/30/2012 I was 'eligible' for a new phone upgrade with Verizon - which means absolutely nothing other than the fact that I get to renew a 2 year contract and pay an additional $30 on top of buying a new phone from Verizon at a discounted price...*sigh*.  Anyways, I was able to 'upgrade' my phone, to a new 4g phone, while losing my unlimited data plan..again, some upgrade.  This year I was torn between getting a new Samsung phone, and an iPhone 5.  I've resisted getting an iPhone in the past, mostly because I'm not a mac user, and I am a heavy google/picasa user.  I decided to go with an iPhone this time because they 'just' (this fall) released the iPhone 5 with 4g, and there are enough apps out there to make picasa and google readily accessible, so I ordered up a shiny new iPhone and it was delivered shortly after the new year.

So far I love it - it's smaller than my old phone, but I don't mind the size - it fits nicely in my hand.  I love how snappy and fast it is, and I love the speed of 4G - it's lightning quick - faster than our wireless connection at home.  We have an iPod Touch at home so the operating system was nothing new to me.

A couple drawbacks to the iPhone that I've noticed thus far:
1.  No widgets.  On my android phone I downloaded an app called "Beautiful Widgets", that let me put a 4x2 widget up on my home screen that always showed me the current weather and time.  It isn't apparent to me that iOS allows that, at least google hasn't revealed anything
2.  Custom Ringtones/Sounds.  It sounds like this is possible, but it doesn't sound as though it's as easy as texting a sound to my phone and being able to set it as a ringtone.  I admit that I haven't looked too hard at this, but from what I have looked at I haven't found anything that looks super easy.  My favorite ringtone is a .mp3, and I haven't found a way to use it yet.
3.  Memory - everything that was on my other phone was on a sim card and if I filled it up I could buy a new one or even get a bigger one.  I bought this phone with 16GB of memory, but that's it - once I use it up I have to start deleting, cause there's no option to change out memory options.
4.  Nagging text messages - if I get a text message, and my phone is locked, the phone will keep nagging me every couple of minutes that I have a message...which I think is annoying.  I don't mind one notification of a new message, but I don't like getting CONSTANT reminders that I have a message.  I'm sure there's some way of turning this off, I just need to figure out how.

Other than that I really like the phone.  Everything seems very fast right now, and I haven't had it lockup or do anything weird yet.  Yay!

A new blog.

Actually, I'm not sure what the difference between and blog and a tumblr is, but I have to say this one is hilarious.  She's a little crass, but her posts make me laugh - and I'm married!

So if you're up for a giggle now and then check it out - she puts new stuff up nearly every day!

http://myfriendsaremarried.tumblr.com/

The 3 year old.

"Mommy,  I'm pretending this is gum."

Oops.

So, I haven't told this to anyone, I am so embarrassed, sort of.  I'm not even sure if I should lay the words to print for fear of being ridiculed for my lapse of judgement.  Ugh.

Ok here it is.  I walked into the kitchen at my work place the other day, and where the snacks/breakfast foods/pastries normally sit and there was a box of chocolates.  The chocolate covered macadamia nut kind, like from Hawaii or something.

No one was around and I thought, "oh how nice, someone brought chocolates!", they weren't opened so I popped of the plastic sealed wrap, opened them up and took one for myself and walked back to my desk.  Delicious!  How thoughtful of someone to be so generous and share...I should do that more often myself.

A couple hours later I went back into the kitchen to fill up my water bottle and as I was walking out I noticed the box of chocolates was GONE.  It struck me as odd, beings that I just opened that box not 2 hours before.  I mean I know that we're snackers at work, but usually things don't go so quickly.  So I checked the cupboard - not there.  I looked in a couple drawers below the area - not there.  Which makes me think - DID I OPEN SOMEONE CHOCOLATES THAT HAD JUST SAT THEM THERE TEMPORARILY?!  I can imagine the scenario - someone needs to use the bathroom - they walk in and set down their box of chocolates, and when they return they've been opened and one is removed!  I can only imagine what they're thinking.

So...let's keep this little secret between you and me - ok?

And then came baby #2

Baby #2 has been around for a while now, but I have been on hiatus from this blog - I keep thinking about it and keep thinking that I need to do an update, but time and life seems to get in the way.  The good news is that on my brother's birthday in February, we were blessed with our 2nd daughter.  If I were to share names on this blog, you would love her name, it's a good one.  One that we discovered at Christmas time while visiting with my aunt and uncle about baby names.

My baby story isn't too exciting, although a memory that I'll always have.  We had been in the process since late December of finishing our basement, and earlier that week, everything in our basement had been wrapped up and it was time to do our part.  We opted to do all the finishing work ourselves, meaning caulking and filling baseboard nails, doing all the painting, and getting the carpet installed.  We decided that day to get to work on it, and spent most of the day in the basement caulking baseboards.  Around 8pm that night I had a moment where I thought that maybe my water broke, although it wasn't the splash down like everyone says it is so I disregarded it.  Matt and I were going to watch Breaking Dawn (!!!) that night, so we sat down to watch the movie at around 8:30.  Within 10 minutes of sitting down I had my first contraction.  I think I finally told Matt I was having contractions around 9 pm after I had a couple more.  We finished the movie and decided to go pack a bag in case this was the real thing and I called my cousin to let her know that this might be it - she was going to come over and watch the 2 year old while we went to the hospital.

I downloaded an app on the iPod to start keeping track of contractions.  The evening progressed and this is what I did until 1 am:

My contraction history is below :

StartTime	EndTime	Duration (mm:ss)	Freq. (mm:ss)	Intensity
Feb 11, 2012 11:17 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:18 PM	00:42	00:00	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:19 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:20 PM	00:35	02:00	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:22 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:23 PM	00:56	02:50	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:26 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:27 PM	01:03	03:48	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:29 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:30 PM	00:44	03:13	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:31 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:32 PM	01:00	02:14	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:37 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:38 PM	00:58	05:22	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:38 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:39 PM	00:35	01:34	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:40 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:40 PM	00:36	01:12	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:42 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:42 PM	00:40	02:02	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:43 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:44 PM	00:26	01:52	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:45 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:46 PM	00:32	01:32	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:47 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:48 PM	00:42	01:50	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:49 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:49 PM	00:30	01:41	-
Feb 11, 2012 11:55 PM	Feb 11, 2012 11:57 PM	01:13	06:53	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:01 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:02 AM	01:05	05:53	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:06 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:06 AM	00:50	04:11	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:09 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:10 AM	01:03	03:39	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:14 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:15 AM	01:04	04:22	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:16 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:17 AM	00:54	02:29	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:19 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:20 AM	01:00	02:39	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:23 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:25 AM	01:19	04:33	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:28 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:29 AM	00:51	04:41	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:30 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:30 AM	00:35	01:51	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:33 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:34 AM	01:03	03:26	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:38 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:39 AM	01:00	04:38	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:40 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:40 AM	00:36	01:37	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:44 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:45 AM	01:13	04:36	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:49 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:50 AM	01:00	04:54	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:53 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:54 AM	01:00	03:30	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:54 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:55 AM	00:42	01:32	-
Feb 12, 2012 12:56 AM	Feb 12, 2012 12:57 AM	00:53	01:35	-
Feb 12, 2012 1:02 AM	Feb 12, 2012 1:03 AM	01:08	06:37	-

Exciting yes?

At 1 am I decided to get up and call the doctor.  She called me back and assessed the situation and we decided that it was time to go to the hospital.  We called my cousin and she came over and headed to Boulder.  

When we got into Boulder around 2, I measured 4 cm (yay!), and they asked me what my pain was at, I decided that I wanted to keep going but around 3:00 I decided that I had had enough and wanted the epidural.  Around 3:30 I had the epidural, was feeling better and was at 7 cm, and the doctor broke my water which put me to 8 cm.  And then the waiting game started.  I was 9 cm around 4:30, but it took FOREVER to get to 10.  Around 7:00 there was a shift change, and I got a new nurse.  Around 8:15-8:30 she decided that I should go ahead and push a little to take the edge off some of the contractions I was having.  And that did the trick, I was finally at 10 cm.  At that point she said "don't push till I get back" and she went and got the doctor, Matt came back from inhaling some breakfast, and we were ready to go.  4 pushes later, I had my teeny purple baby girl on me.  She weighed 6lbs 13 oz, and was 19 inches long.  

She's 5 months old now, and so sweet.  She started smiling around 5 weeks, which we could hardly believe, and now can roll from back to front, and sometimes she remembers that she can roll from front to back, although she forgets that and just puts her head down and cries when she's tired of being on her tummy.  Big sister has adjusted very well, and gives her lots of kisses and wants to always say hello to her in the morning and kiss her before she goes to bed at night.  We certainly are blessed to have 2 beautiful healthy daughters!