Another Music Video - Call Me Maybe :)

Collin's Mario Cake!!

More pics from his birthday to come....

SPRING!

Concussion and Cake

We had just come home from a fun Friday night at a playground. I was starting to prepare an Elmo cake order for the next day (kind of last minute) when Daniel fell off the back of our couch on to the wood floor. (He had been jumping around on the couch at the time). The back of his head caught his fall. Usually our kids cry for a couple minutes when they get hurt and then they bounce back a little while later. This wasn't one of those times. Daniel cried so hard he passed out for a moment, and then after several minutes of crying and acting uncomfortable he started vomiting. Hours later in the ER, we learned our little guy had a mild concussion and a fractured skull. It was a bad night! Luckily, the concussion was mild enough to observe him from home and his skull had a clean fracture without any brain trauma.

Daniel HATES doctor offices and was so relieved when they let him go home:


Around 2:00am when we settled down to bed, I remembered I needed to find way to make an Elmo cake first thing in the morning...yikes. After some quick scrambling around in the morning and one extremely messy kitchen afterword, I had a very chunky Elmo cake. He looks like he'd had one too many of Cookie Monster's cookies (I should have used a smaller tip to ice, but there was no time to fix it). There was a little smash cake too, but I forgot to take a picture of it....

Good news: Daniel is back to his usual self and he likes to tell people his new mantra, "Jump on da ground!"

Making of a Monster (cake)

Here is the breakdown in pictures of Bryan's Animal birthday cake.... He's a big Muppet's fan, and he always complains that I've never made him a cool cake for his birthday (I've made him a cake every year, but apparently none of them have been memorable). I had big plans to make him something last year and then wound up getting really sick, so I was determined to make him one this time - even when we had water leaking down into out guest bath and had to rip out the ceiling the day before. :)

I used an two 8" round pans for the head and a pound cake pan that I cut a part for his body. It's a chocolate chip so he has some cute polka dots:

Next, I iced a thin layer of icing and added some fondant eyes and mouth. Animal is a pretty messing looking Muppet so I wasn't too worried about it looking rough.

Next, I added his wooden dowel drumstick and gave him his orange fondant shirt and arms, and the rest of his face accents.

Then the fun part, pipe a ton of pink icing all around for his crazy hair, and finish with black icing eyebrows. I painted on his shirt with a little watered down black food coloring, and that's it!! Easiest cake ever, shhhh, don't tell Bryan that!

Little Tikes Makeover

It's yard sale time at our house! I'm looking twice at everything to see if it should go, and I spotted this faded consignment sale Little Tikes picnic table purchase ($7) that we've had for 5 years. So ugly.... and I thought why not attempt to make it cuter and if I fail, it can go.

Start with serious ugliness:

Take it apart and start spraying... (I <3 spray paint!!)

Ta Da!! My monogram 'H' kind of looks like a 'K'...but I don't really care :)

2011 Family Pictures

I just wanted to share some of our family pictures we took for our Christmas cards this year. We rushed around getting every one unusually clean, ironed, and out the door to meet the photographer....who was a NO SHOW! With it being exceedingly rare that we were all clean, ironed, and out the door, we ran back home grabbed our own camera and made do. They were free and I love them! :)

The only picture of Bryan and I, taken by Mason.

And my favorite outtake:

Slumber Party Fun

Hot n Cold a video by Bry n Meg on Flickr.

Elise and her friend had a sleepover, and around midnight they still had a TON of energy. This is what developed. :)

Mason's Birthday was a Long Time Ago

BUT, I still want to share some pictures from it. I'm not sure how my little guy became a 5 year old - it's hard to believe he's so big.

Last year Mason had a water slide party in the back yard, and he and his friends loved it so much we decided to, uh... do it again! Except this time we tweaked it with a theme, and made it a camping birthday party. We titled it "Camp S'more Than Four". So along with the water slide we bought a gigantic tent for the boys to play in (even though we've never been camping), roasted marshmallows, had a fishing pool set up, you get the idea... And right as the party got started, I got stung by a bee and was too grumpy/flustered to document all of the decorations.

Here is his invite:

My BIG birthday boy blowing out his candles, and a glimpse of his camping birthday cake I made.

Elise's extra late birthday post

In keeping up with my delayed blog updates, I have to share our month of June - a.k.a. the birhday month.

Elise requested her first slumber party this year, and I thought that it would be a piece of cake: movies, junk food, only a couple friends, no entertaining parents.... It was that easy for the first few hours, but around 3 am, while Bryan was dead asleep and the girls were still bouncing off the walls I started to make plans to outsource her 9 year old party!

Here was the very simple set up. Elise also asked for a KitKat cake, which I appreciated (much easier than previous years!). The goody bags had slumber party essentials like nail polish, jewelry, and candy as well as shaving cream for our outside fun.

Elise turned into a shaving cream ninja...

Little brothers are easy and fun targets!


The clean up crew - note Daniel's actions in the background!

The birthday gang!

Daniel vs. Child Locks

Ballet and Ballerina Cupcakes

For the record, I'm ridiculously behind on this blog.... Life is happening much faster than I'm capable of sharing it! So the next several posts are going to be in complete illogical order, but I want to share the big things that have happened that I've slacked on lately, starting with the end of the year ballet performance Mason and Elise did in May (did I mention I'm behind?!?).

Mason has taken ballet for the past 2 years, and as I know now, this was his final performance before retiring to, well...baseball...and other stuff. Luckily, we got enough of his ballet footage to completely embarrass him for the rest of his life, and looking back in his final video you can see how over it he really was. I watch this whenever I need a laugh. For the record, I didn't film this, you have Bryan to thank for the awesome quality!

Elise, on the other hand, is still loving dance and plans to continue, yay! Here are my two ballerinas together (for the last time) accepting their paper plate awards:

I also made ballet cupcakes for the reception. These were super easy to make using the heart Cricut shape and hot gluing on crepe paper and a ribbon to a lollipop stick. I don't, however, suggest making 50 of them or you are going to want to go insane!(I'm sorry I can't remember where I found the idea, refer back to how behind I am with blogging).

Our Beach Vacation Music Video

Disney World Vacation!!! :)

Mason's Training Wheel Free!

He couldn't be any more proud, but his poor knees are starting to look pretty beat up! Elise enjoyed playing the role of expert biker and gave him a few pointers. I had to put the pics in black and white to hide the Bratz girls helmet he's wearing because he has outgrown his Spider Man one from last year....

Piano Girl

Elise had her first piano recital last month (yes, I'm running on a month's delay around here)! She was so cute and so nervous that she ran as fast as she could back to her seat when she was done - not allowing me to take any cute curtsy pictures.




As a side note, I've been following this cool hair blog lately, and I got the idea for doing Elise's hair there. It's hard to tell from the picture, but I divided her hair half back into 4 different braided sections and joined them in a braided bun. She has some really cute stuff on the site.

Collin's 3!!!

Collin turned 3 last month and we celebrated his two favorite things junk food and Buzz Lightyear!

We had his birthday party at a Menchies so all the kids got to create their own frozen yogurt and toppings and they decorated a little Menchies shirt. They also played Toy Story 3 in the backgroung for the kids. And because the weeks leading up to his party I've been making cakes I decided to keep it simple with cupcakes. I even bought the cheesy WalMart cupcake toppers! Easiest party ever!!

Collin next to the giant chalkboard the kids got to decorate.

His Toy Story Cupcakes

Mimi and Collin wearing his decorated Menchies shirt and his frozen yogurt creation!

Earth Day Goodies

I made Elise's class an Earth Day surprise today and brought in individual dirt cakes for them topped with a birdy peep in it's nest. I should have taken a picture of Collin in the act when he dunked his hands inside one of them and then wiped his hand along the walls to clean his fingers.....grrr....!

Here is a link to the
chow mein noodle nest recipe (just like Rice Krispy Treats).

Here is a link to the dirt cake....so yummy!