May 12: Church Garage Sale

Wow, what a crazy week!  I am tired and would just love to sleep in my bed for a couple of days straight (if only!!). 

Our church had a final fundraiser for our summer mission trips--a garage sale.  I am going on a trip to Haiti, so I was helping with the sale this week.  All of the garage sale items were donated from church members, and we had A LOT of donations.  This picture shows just SOME of the stuff that we had. 

The gym was full, the hall outside the gym was full, the parking lot was filled with furniture...it was so much stuff. Ridiculous amounts of stuff! I spent a lot of time at church this week sorting through the donations.  Yesterday, I just unpacked and sorted and folded bags and bags and bags of clothes for hours.  I really didn't think we would ever get through all those bags.

But we did get everything sorted and organized, and then at 7 am this morning the crowds came and destroyed all that beautiful organization in a matter of seconds!!  However, we did make $4200 in just 5 hours...so I'm thinking that it was all worth it!

May 9: Happy Birthday to Daniel

Happy 30th birthday to Daniel!

We celebrated last Friday by going out to dinner with friends, so today was fairly low key.

Audrey helped me go shopping for Daniel's present, and she insisted that we get him five presents!  So we picked out five (fairly small) gifts for him, and then we gave them to him throughout the day today.  This was the first test of Audrey's ability to keep a secret, and she failed miserably.  She told Daniel multiple times what his presents were, sometimes right before he started opening them!

On Wednesdays, we normally take dinner over to our friends Adam and Lindsey.  (And on Tuesdays, they bring dinner to us...we've been doing this since September, and it's a lot of fun!).  Instead of dropping dinner off at their house today, we invited Adam, Lindsey, Simon and Elliot to come eat with us and enjoy some cake for Daniel's birthday.

Our meal was pretty good, if I do say so myself!  We had some of Daniel's favorite foods:  BBQ shredded chicken sandwiches, homemade WHITE hamburger buns (he requested something with white flour, as we eat wheat almost exclusively these days!), roasted potatoes and asparagus, and some fruit.

Here is Daniel's cake (dessert #3 of the five I am planning to make this week!).  This cake was nothing fancy, just a box cake mix and tub of frosting and lots of sprinkles.  Audrey was in charge of the sprinkles, can you tell??

May 8: Isla's One Year Photo Shoot

I realize that Isla doesn't turn one for three more weeks, so it is a little early for a one year photo shoot. (and I am in no hurry at all for that one year birthday to get here!)

But, I like to take the girls' yearly pictures early, so that I can use their photos at the party.  Plus, this Sunday is Baby Dedication Sunday at our church, and I need to submit a picture of Isla.  I just don't have ANY other pictures of her that I could use, so I had to take some more!

My plan for taking these pictures wasn't so great though.  Audrey has been asking to go the playground at the park for weeks now, so I figured we could kill two birds with one stone.  I dropped Audrey and Daniel off at the playground and then took Isla to a more picturesque spot in the park.  This plan left me alone with Isla, which meant I had to both take the pictures and get her to look at the camera and smile.  Not a great idea!  I really needed someone behind the camera to get her to look and smile and stay still!!

I took 70 pictures during this photo shoot and ended up keeping only 17 photos.  I had to delete a lot of them because they weren't quite in focus.  For a girl who doesn't walk or crawl, she sure does move a lot!!  Despite the difficult circumstances, I am happy with several of them.  She is such a cutie!

Showing off her beautiful round head.

 I think this might be one that I use for church on Sunday:

 But I do like this one too:

 I had to give her my keys to keep her still and happy, which meant I had to crop the rest of the pictures from her shoulders up so you can't see the keys in the picture!  Whatever works!

  

Isla has been crinkling up her nose when she smiles lately, and I love it so much. 

 

I also love just about everything about this picture...her big blue eyes, her cute little nose and chin, her chubby cheeks, the little smirk on her mouth, even her ears that stick out!!

May 6: A Week of Desserts

For some reason, this is turning into the week of desserts.  I need to make a dessert for at least five different occasions this week!  I went to the grocery store yesterday and bought all kinds of processed foods with white sugar and white flour and all the stuff that we have been not been eating on the real food diet that we (casually) try to follow.  It was kind of fun to buy lots of sweets!

First up on my list of desserts was Cherry Trifle for a lunch meeting at church today.  My mom used to make this, and it is delicious!  I'm not a huge fan of sour cream, so when my mom first gave me this recipe, I was skeptical about the sour cream addition.  I sometimes use a little less sour cream than what the recipe says.  But really, you don't notice the sour cream at all in this dessert.  It gives just enough of a sour taste to balance out all of the other sweetness, and the end result is SO good! 

Cherry Trifle

1 angel food cake
1 can cherry pie filling
1 cup sour cream
1 small package vanilla instant pudding
1 1/2 cups milk
8 oz container of Cool Whip

Mix the pudding, sour cream and milk with a whisk until smooth.  Allow to sit for a few minutes until it thickens.

Break the angel food cake into pieces, and layer half of the pieces in the bottom of a large bowl (I have also made this in a 9x13 pan and it worked too!).  Pour the cherry pie filling on top of the first layer of cake.  Add the rest of the cake pieces on top of the cherry filling.   Then add the pudding mixture on top of the second layer of cake.  Top with Cool Whip.

Tonight, I made these Pineapple Upside Down Cupcakes for small group in honor of Daniel's birthday.  Pineapple upside down cake is his favorite, and when I saw the recipe for these cupcakes, I just had to try them!  I'm not a huge fan of pineapple upside down cake, so I didn't even try them.  But Daniel said they were good, and then he proceeded to eat three of them!

I took a picture of them with my phone at group tonight.  But I lost the card that I need to get the pictures off my phone (these are the days I wish I had a smart phone, my dumb phone doesn't have internet access or the ability to send pictures or else this wouldn't be a problem!).  So no pictures of the cupcakes today, but just trust me that they looked really cute...like personal sized pineapple upside down cakes!

May 4: Daniel's Birthday Party

Daniel is turning 30 next week, so we got together with some friends tonight for an early birthday celebration.  We went out to dinner and out for ice cream...all without kids!  So fun!!

I was thinking back to what we did last year for Daniel's birthday.  We also went out to dinner with a few friends.  Here we are at his birthday dinner last year:

This was exactly three weeks before Isla was born!  Wow, so much has happened in the past year!!

May 3: Koolaid Playdough

I've been kind of grumpy this week, so I have tried to think of some fun things for us to do to get me out of my funk.  I always feel the need to do extra special things with the girls when I am grumpy, probably to make up for the fact that I am not being very nice!

One of those things:  making homemade playdough.  I have never made playdough before, and I have no idea why I waited so long!  It was so easy to make, and it is so much better than the storebought stuff.  It is softer and much easier for little ones to mold and shape.  Audrey loved it!

We used this recipe for Koolaid Playdough.  It uses Koolaid to color the dough, and it also gives it a great smell.  Audrey picked out the Koolaid flavors/colors:  Kiwi Strawberry to make pink playdough and Grape to make purple playdough.  (Pink and purple have replaced yellow as her favorite colors).

I was also inspired during this project to make Pink Lemonade Playdough for Isla's upcoming pink lemonade birthday party!

May 1: 42 months old

Audrey is now 42 months old, exactly 3 1/2 years!  She is very interested in having more birthdays, and she was excited to find out that she will keep being more "numbers" (what she calls getting a year older) as she grows bigger and bigger.  Tonight she came up to me and said, "Mom, someday I am going to be all the numbers.  I am going to be 17 numbers.  No, I'm going to be 100 numbers.  Can you believe that?"

I really can't believe that, and I would prefer to just keep her at number three forever!!

 

 She continues to love to sing.  Between watching Disney movies and listening to Disney music on Spotify and playing Disney songs on the piano with me, she knows a lot of Disney songs.  It's a bit ridiculous!  She is so heartfelt in her singing though, I can't help but encourage it.  Some of her new favorite songs are from the Disney Cinderella movie.  She has never seen it (due to the dumb Disney vault that makes it hard to find these old movies!), but I have taught her a few songs.  It's a little hard to understand her in this video, but she is singing Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo. 

 

  Here she is singing a portion of Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid.  I think she knows even more of the song than what she sings in this video. 

Audrey loves to play, and her imagination is starting to blossom. She enjoys playing with her "guys," which is what we call her collection of stuffed animals and figurines.  She talks to them and re-enacts scenarios from her everyday life and from movies she has seen.  I love watching her imagination at work!!

Audrey always has a plan for what she is going to do next, and if she doesn't have one, then she wants to know what your plan is.  Our days often begin with Audrey saying this, "Mom, first I'm going to eat breakfast.  Then I'm going to play.  Then I'm going to watch a movie.  Then I will get dressed.  Does that sound like a good plan?"  She likes to count all of these things on her fingers, and then memorize what each finger stands for.  So we often have to go over the plan several times, so that she can remember which activity goes with which finger.

There is so much more I could write about Little Miss Audrey...but that is probably enough for tonight!!