Lil's Birthday

We helped Lillian celebrate her 2nd birthday a few weeks ago and it's so amazing to see how much she has grown since last year.

I love this little girl.


My sister and Lil
I made her cake this year and I'm not a skilled decorator so don't judge me :) She had a farm animal theme so I decorated farm animal sugar cookies w/ royal icing and stacked them around the cake with coconut grass. The cake was a three layer Hershey's perfectly chocolate cake and the middle layers were white chocolate buttercream and the outer layer was just plain ol' vanilla buttercream. It turned out really well and I got a couple of requests for cakes with those particular flavors again so, yay!


Before Casey wrote on the cookies.


Duck sugar cookie favors.


Waiting so patiently for her cake.



Present time!



One of the outfits we got for her. I might kind of want it in my size.


Her baby Stella doll and carrier. This is such a cuuuuute doll if you need a gift for a little girl. She has a little magnetic pacifer and she's so soft.



This picture cracks me up b/c I feel like Tuck is plotting how to take her down in the background. He wants to be a princess for the day too.


We also got to babysit her for the first time this past week. My sister left her here while she was sleeping so she kind of freaked out when she woke up but we made up for it and played with jewelry, jumped on the bed, and made sugar cookies.

Casey and Lil playing with sugar cookie dough (and eating some of it).



Telling Tuck Tuck that it was all gone. She has always been able to say Tuck Tuck really easily but she has trouble with Sookie. She was "Cookie" or "Wookie", but close enough.


We topped off the night with some Wall-E snuggled up on the couch. We're so lucky to have her in our lives :)

Out with the old...

... and in with the new!

We got our door hardware that we ordered for all 17 of our doors today and we installed all of the ones on the first floor and it's a huge improvement and the handles are really smooth. I'm pricing hinges but that will be our next project.

Quick Healthy Chicken Noodle Soup

This was from my most recent Cooking Light magazine and it really took no time to put together. This is a great weeknight meal that I'm going to add to our rotation.



Servings: 6
(Source: Cooking Light)

2 cups of water
1 (32 oz) carton fat-free, less sodium chicken broth (I used a little more than called for)
1 tbsp. olive oil
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped celery
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper
1 medium carrot, chopped
6 oz. fusilli pasta (I used mini fusilli)
2 1/2 c. shredded skinless, boneless rotisserie chicken breast
2 tbsp. chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

Combine 2 cups of water and chicken broth and heat on medium until hot. While broth mixture heats, heat a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add oil to pan; swirl to coat. Add onion, celery, salt, pepper, and carrot, saute 3 minutes or until almost tender, stirring frequently.

Add vegetables and pasta to hot broth mixture and bring to a boil. Cook 7 minutes or until pasta is almost al dente. Stir in chicken; cook 1 minute or until thoroughly heated. Stir in parsley.

Calories: 237
Fat: 4.8g
Protein: 22.9g
Carb: 23.9g
Fiber: 1.7g
Chol: 50mg
Iron 1.8mg
Sodium: 589mg
Calc: 28mg

Small Update

This was the most recent picture of our fireplace from Christmas. We can't add tile surround b/c it will be too close to the entertainment center and we intend to replace the black tile when we replace the flooring so I just did a quick update to get rid of the brass and the wooden handles.


Much better!

Merry Christmas/Happy New Year!

I thought I would start with a few Christmas pictures that I managed to take.

Case and Tuck on Christmas morning at my parent's house. We stay there Christmas Eve and then get up to head to Casey's parent's house first thing that morning and then we head back to my house. We go back and forth a little but we're lucky that they're only about 5 minutes apart.




All of us in our pjs and ready to go.



Casey and Tuck at his parent's house. Tuck does like us despite his poses in these pictures.



My mother-in-law and father-in-law on Christmas morning :)



Then we headed back to my house to open presents with my family. That's my mom, dad, Casey, my sister, and my brother-in-law and Lil is in the middle somewhere.



I managed to get this picture as Casey was opening his blu-ray player. I told him we weren't getting one for awhile.. and I lied :)



Miss Lillian who was more interested in bubble wrap and opening other people's presents. We got her the turtleneck and little wool skirt she is wearing. She did have a better understanding of things this year so that was fun to experience and we even got to do a craft with her on Christmas Eve. It's actually the same one that Heather posted about a few days ago but we didn't get any pictures b/c we were all covered in paint.



For New Years we ended up having people over at the last minute and ordering pizza for a pajama party... what better way to ring in the New Year!

All of the girls rocking our pjs. Our husbands/significant others were there but I realized I didn't get any pictures of them or me and Casey. Hm.



But I did manage to get a picture of me with one of the boys, of course.


I took a look at my blog to see what I was doing this time last year and what my resolutions were. I thought I wrote a big list of resolutions but it turns out it was just to make bigger progress on an issue that tends to sneak up on my life. I'm proud to say that I only ever make progress on said issue so I can say that I kicked that resolution in the face BAH BAH.

I also saw irony in the form of garlic knots. I haven't made them in awhile and it turns out that the last time I made them was around this time last year and what do you know, we had garlic knots tonight. That wasn't really relevant to anything, but there it is.

It's weird to look back and see that I was really curious about what 2009 was going to bring b/c 2008 was such a hectic year. We didn't really have a hectic year honestly. We purchased our first home together and that will be the biggest and fondest memory that I have of this year but otherwise it was just a year of working on our home and honestly just enjoying being married and hanging out with each other and our family and friends. It really was a calm and content year.

Sooo... resolutions for this year.

1. Continue enjoying this content feeling that I have with my life, my marriage, and our home.

2. Continue to make this home our own by making a dent in some of the home improvement projects that we have on our list.

3. Travel more! We didn't do any traveling at all in 2008. We didn't have much time off from the wedding and then it was into save mode for the home and then afterwards for all of the fun little stuff that pops up when you have a home (like a snow shovel when there's 18 inches of snow outside).

I think all of these are obtainable goals and I really do try to set 'resolutions' that can be met. Weight loss is never on there but I do always kick myself around the first to get back into shape. It's not that I let myself go over the course of the year, it's that I let myself go during the months of November/December. I have carrots and cauliflower pre-packaged for snacks this week and Cooking Light oatmeal in tupperware for breakfast every morning. No more of the binging on fun food for weeks at a time. It's back to just the weekends for that.

I should make a resolution to blog more but I know how sporadic I am and I know that if I don't have a lot going on then I don't blog so we'll see how interesting my life is. The hoseband and I are attending a tiling class next Saturday to attempt redoing our guest bathroom so I'm sure there will be posts once we get started on that.

I hope everyone had a great holiday and a good New Year!


Oh! Oh! Oh!

I forgot to introduce you to someone.

She's real pretty isn't she. She's just something special. My husband thought I needed one for Christmas after asking for the past 2 years and he was right! I made the above mentioned garlic knots with her today and I've also made chocolate chip cookies and a birthday cake so far.

Ok, that's all now.

Why Hello Again

I'm embarrassed that the last time I posted was Halloween and now Christmas is less than a week away. I guess you must know by now that I go in spurts. Sometimes I get a wild hair in my butt and blog frequently for weeks at a time and sometimes you'll see me blog about Halloween and then Valentine's Day. If you stick around you must be used to this so that at least comforts me.

I'm doing a ton of baking and more activities that I could blog about, so I really have no excuse. This past week we had dinner for Casey's Birthday on Wednesday with his parents and we had sleepover guests (my family) on his actual birthday on Thursday. I'm doing a lot of baking/cooking for Holiday parties and pot lucks and I'm about to gear up for my annual Holiday baking. I don't know if I'll actually get around to blogging these recipes but I'll link the recipes which is kind of close.

Sea Salt Truffles
Gingerbread Cookies
Peanut butter Blossoms
and Fudge (I use the recipe on the back of the marshmallow fluff I think)

I actually made Heather's Santa Surprise cookies last night b/c I was snowed in and I have a ton of baking supplies right now. I don't know if there's much I need to catch you up on. We've been preparing for the holidays, going to plays, parades, looking at Christmas lights, watching Christmas movies, shopping, wrapping, decorating... and we're having such a good time doing it in our first home.

In case you're not from this area, we do have a ton of snow outside right now! We've been home-bound since noon on Friday so I guess I have no excuse to not put up a catch-up blog post. Casey and I are surely spending a lot of quality time together right now if anything else haha! I made crack dip that I was going to make for a party on Friday night and we munched off of that and leftover food from his birthday party and played the new Mario game for Wii which is so much fun if you don't have it! If you're like me and have an Xbox or PS3 husband you'll appreciate a game that you can both play together. Yesterday I became acquainted with my new BFF the huge shopvac we got on Black Friday and literally went around and sucked up everything I could find in the house. We did laundry, cleaned a little bit, put a ham in the crockpot, watched Christmas movies and rented Four Christmases.

Here's some snow pictures. This was Friday night right when it started. I loved the way our LED lights looked underneath the snow.



This was our neighborhood last night. There was a lot of snow, but even more fell over night.


I don't think we'l be able to see our lights now. This was Saturday morning.


I opened the sliding door and Sookie and Tuck both took a big leap into a snow drift and disappeared. I dug him out and her (she's not even supposed to go outside and has never tried before then). She figured out she could walk on top of it if she ran really fast. You can see that when she's walking on top of it she's almost in line with the seat of our patio chairs.


Casey digging Tuck a potty circle. That's our gigantic holly tree in the background.



Here's our deck again. Check out the mountains in the background.







Yes, Sookie is still here. She even made it into our Christmas card picture this year. This might be her last appearance seeing as how she wanted to pretend to be a dead corpse in the pictures. Nothing says Merry Christmas like a dead cat!










Tuck does love here though, so we keep her around :) I seriously don't remember kittens being this hard to control. Maybe Tuck was easier b/c he was short and was never a chewer. I didn't have trouble keeping him out of things (and I still don't). I do have to watch out for her jumping on things as she currently swings from my roman blinds. I swear her water bottle gets refilled twice a day.








She makes me do crazy things like sling all of my sheers over the top of the curtain rods (in the background). Mom asked me if that was a style I was going for. Yes, if the style involves keeping her from swinging like Tarzan from sheer to sheer.








Merry Christmas!

Happy Halloween!

In case you don't remember, we take pumpkin carving pretty serious around here. This year we actually had a stoop to put pumpkins on so we decided to fill it out. The other side didn't turn out as well in pictures but Casey carved another pumpkin on the other side and I painted a white pumpkin with our house # (not very well, but it got painted). I might try to take a picture tomorrow during the day if I remember. I'm sure you can probably tell who did the face and who did the transformers pumpkin, but just in case you can't, I did the face. We're pretty excited about our first year in our house at Halloween and getting to hand out candy. We would get a handful of trick or treaters at the apartment but nothing overly exciting. Our neighbors have already warned us to come prepared with lots of candy. We live in a pretty family friendly cul de sac and there are a ton of kids in the surrounding neighborhoods, so I'm pretty excited.




I wanted to add these two pictures that I took with my phone. They're shots I snapped on my lunch break behind our house (that's our driveway in the picture). We have a gorgeous shelf of mountains behind our home that provide a great view from our deck. I was so excited to see the colors change and you can kind of see it in these pictures.

I can't wait until they're covered in snow, but I won't get ahead of myself. Everyone have a safe and Happy Halloween!