Sadie's Birthday Party in Pics

Matching dresses will only be "cool" for a little longer...gotta milk it!

The proud grandmas

Cousins!

Beautiful Eislyn

my Nephew Silas

Josh and Gabriel

Trying her cake!  She ate about half a piece rather daintily then pushed it away :-)

Hanna is so good with babies!

Melissa 7 months pregnant and Erin with Luke at 8 weeks old!

Aunt Barbara and Marissa

Go Dragons!

There's a kids soccer league that plays in the park at the end of our street.  Can't beat the proximity, chance to meet more people in our neighborhood, and good healthy exercise for Ella (who would choose to watch TV until her eyes dried up and fell out).  Another major plus is that good friends of ours have played with this league before and our girls are able to play on the same team AND...Chris and our friend Chuck are going to coach the team!  Chris has never done anything like this but he's awesome with kids so I'm sure it'll be great.  Here are some pics from the first practice.  The cuteness was overwhelming!!

My friend Holly brought out the twins so they got to hang with Sadie :-)

Beautiful babies, cute kids, and dads coaching!  So excited for this season! Go Dragons!

We're TEN!

 One cool thing about God giving you the love of your life when you're a teenager is that you're only 31 when you have your TEN year anniversary!!  We are so blessed to have been together for 12 years and still, God-willing, have so much more life ahead to share.  Chris is a standout dad, sweet husband, incredibly intelligent and shockingly well-read, excelling in his career, well respected, hilariously silly, and has more varied interests than anyone I've ever met.  I love this man. He has made me feel loved and cared for unlike anything I've ever experienced.  And a husband who is excited to take a pottery class on our anniversary?  Really?  I'm super blessed. 

 Our anniversary date was a lot of fun.  God provided a babysitter pretty late in the game (I was trying not to freak out) but she ended up being able to stay with the kids for 12 hours and give us a whole day to play!  And, she contacted me to ask if she could babysit!  After I'd asked almost everyone I know. How often does that happen?  Thanks Lindsey!

 Our first stop was the Baltimore Antiques Show at the convention center where I was offered free tickets when I went to the box office!  Score.  We'd never been to an antiques show but Chris is interested in all things historical and we're both fascinated by intricate handiwork and cool art/furniture.  We walked around for close to 2 hours and saw all kinds of crazy things from a table with 50 different porcelain ring holders to enormous Japanese screens to extremely ornate 3d scenes carved into elephant tusks. One guy tried to sell us an engagement ring which I found hilarious and ironic being our tenth anniversary :-) Random event, but fun to just be together without chasing little children and enjoy the spectacle of strangeness mixed with talent.

 Next we enjoyed a little snack at a cute cafe and then onto our pottery class!  There was one other guy in the class with us and the teacher was awesome!  I totally recommend Charlene at The Clayground in Savage Mill. She was a really good teacher and extremely patient and encouraging and laid back.  We both had a lot of fun getting dirty and spinning that wheel!  In less than two hours we had pretty good looking bowls ready for the kiln!

 

  

After a little Starbucks pick-me-up and some great, deep conversation about future plans for our family, we headed home, put Sadie to bed, and got changed into our "fancy" clothes, and left for dinner!  It made me feel better to nurse Sadie and put her to bed myself rather than worrying she'd wig out and not take a bottle (which happened for Chris' mom last week) so it worked out to make the pit stop at home.

One thing I LOVE about Facebook being so popular right now is that I can ask a question and within minutes have a ton of answers!  We've gotten great advice on what type of mattress to get, where to go with kids in Philly, and this time, a great restaurant recommendation in DC!  We went to Proof and the service and food were great!  The atmosphere was also good but the music playing left something to be desired (it sounded like I should be in the middle of a diner or bar not a classy restaurant-it just didn't jive with the decor/clientele).  I LOVE cheese so Proof's full page cheese selection was a big winner in my book.  They also brought us champagne as soon as we sat down, knowing it was our anniversary. Nice touch!  I am almost always a 1 drink person and we really wanted to order wine so the glass of wine plus the complimentary champagne made for quite the "fun" Corinne at dinner :-)

 And yes, I'm a foodie dork and took pictures of our food.  Chris had duck with sweet potato puree and pomegranate reduction and I had a nut-crusted halibut with a curry sauce and jasmine rice.  Super tasty. 

We also had the tempura fresh veggies with a truffle dipping sauce that was amazing.  We shared a caramel bread pudding with banana ice cream for dessert which was also fabulous.  Lovely meal and wonderful date.  Here's to many, many, many more anniversaries to celebrate!

First Day of KINDERGARTEN!

The time has come!  After almost 6 years of spending most every day with me, Ella has started school!  Preschool was good preparation but 2 1/2 hrs a day is a far cry from her new schedule-an almost 8 hour day!  We've heard great things about her school from people in the neighborhood which is encouraging.  Her teacher seems sweet and sent home 2 pictures of Ella from during the day along with classwork she did on the first day! I LOVE having the pictures and being able to see what she was doing during the day!

 

I definitely cried when the bus drove away in the morning and was overcome with a feeling of being irresponsible-is it really right to put a 5 year old on a bus and walk away?  It felt so wrong!  In a brief moment of panic I stopped Chris on the walk back to our house and said "We just put a little 5 year old on a bus!  Is that ok?? Is this really allowed?"

Thankfully the day passed quickly with attending my brother-in-law's dad's funeral and stocking up for the hurricane at Costco but I was ANXIOUSLY waiting for the bus in the afternoon.  I looked at the clock every 5 minutes for well over an hour and every time I heard a noise outside I ran to the window to see if it was her bus.  Then I ended up standing outside for 20 minutes at the bus stop because I didn't want to miss it!  I was SO relieved to see her smiling and walking off the bus.  She had a great first day and can't wait to go back next Tuesday.

The worst moment of the day was probably when I was in Costco and my phone rang with Ella's school on the called ID.  My heart stopped as my brain simultaneously went into counselor mode (a soothing voice saying "choose to be calm, everything will be fine, deep breaths, accept things as they come...") and freaked out mom mode (high pitched fast fast voice scrolling through all the horrific possibilities of what could have happened to Ella).  So I pick up the phone and....it's a robocall saying there's a hurricane coming.  Great.  Thanks.

I still feel like there are a lot of unknowns but excited for that "first day" hurdle to be over and to see what this new season will bring! Go Ella go!!

Cake Creativity!

For the past 6 months or so, I've been trying to embrace my artistic, creative side so the need to come up with a cake for Sadie's Birthday party inspired me to try it out!  I'm not a big sweets person so I've never been too interested in doing much baking but the artistic aspect of decorating a cake sounded really fun (and intimidating) to me.  A couple friends had recently started making fondant covered cakes and gave me some tips, blog links, and encouragement.  

I tried a dry run with just fondant and no cake and then decided to make a cake for my mother-in-law's birthday which was simple but turned out pretty well. 

The cake for Chris' mom

So, I took on the owl cake I really wanted for Sadie's party and with a bit of trepidation, put it together quite successfully! It was definitely time consuming and though I enjoyed it, I don't know if I'll make another one before Ella's birthday :-)

So, I started with this marshmallow fondant recipe. The first time I made it I used my hand mixer and broke it :-(  DEFINITELY use a stand mixer for this.  I finally bought one after 10 years of wanting one!!

This is the lump of fondant post-mixing, it's SUPER easy and the ingredients cost less than $5

 

I made the cake earlier in the day so it had plenty of time to cool.  I watched youtube videos to learn how to cut and ice and stack the cakes.  It was pretty easy.  And it doesn't matter what it looks like cause it's all getting covered :-)  The "experts" say to use a thin coat of icing but I used more because I know people like the taste of buttercream icing more than the fondant so I wanted there to be adequate icing under the "pretty" fondant.

To cover the cake roll out a huge piece of fondant.  Both times I did it, I had trouble making it large enough to drape easily but keeping it thick enough to not rip when I picked it up.  

Tips: 

-use tons of extra powdered sugar to keep it from sticking, it's not hard to add water or crisco to reconstitute it if it gets too dry

-roll it out some, then flip and roll on that side, then flip and so forth.  I tried just rolling out the perfect size with out turning it over many times and the rolling warmed the fondant so much it got sticky and would rip when I tried to roll it up to put it on the cake.  UBER frustrating.  It actually took me 4-5 tries to get it rolled out and on the cake.  

-if it's humid or hot in the kitchen, put on a fan to keep the fondant cool.  I figured this out after about round 4 of the fondant sticking to the mat/counter (I tried both) and it helped a lot

-buy a special fondant rolling pin.  I used a regular one we had and it isn't long enough to do the job really well, definitely buying one of those for next time

 

Youtube videos were also helpful for this step.  You basically roll the large peice on fondant onto your rolling pin and then unroll it on the cake.  Use a smoothing tool (looks like a little plastic iron) and then I used a paring knife to cut off the excess.  Whew! This is the hardest part by far! Any big imperfections I just covered with decorations :-)

Make sure you leave some chunks of various sizes to color for your decorations.  I drew a picture of the design I wanted to make labeled with colors I'd need and approximately how much of each so I could color the "chunks" accordingly. I used gel food coloring from almart and it was really easy to just knead the color into the fondant.  Ella helped make a lot of the colors :-)

Now the fun part! For the decorations I got creative and used knives, playdoh tools, cookie cutters, wine glasses, and bowls to cut shapes.  Chris was good at helping me find the thing in our kitchen that was the perfect shape for what I needed :-)  

 

Tips: 

-you can make some things in large batches (like these leaves) but they'll start to dry out a little bit while they sit around waiting to go on the cake and become a little less maleable.  This was fine for the leaves I used for a border on the owl cake but it would have made other things tough.  For instance, I wanted the  branch the owl sits on to drape over the sides of the cake so I needed it to be super soft and maleable to drape nicely over the sides so I put it on as soon as I cut it out.

-put the cake on whatever you want to serve it on as soon as you stack and ice it. You do NOT want to move this thing after you painstakingly perfect all your details!

 

Per a tip I saw online, I used a paintbrush and water to help the fondant peices adhere to the cake.  It worked really well and was super easy to get them to stick.

Finished Product!

 

Me, finally done, messy, exhausted.  The time from starting to make the fondant until finished was about 4-5 hours.  And that's with the cake already made and iced and chilled earlier in the day. I'm sure with more experience I'll get faster but I must say, I'm very happy with how it turned out :-)