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 :)

Lillian's First Birthday

I'll admit I went through a brief period this past week where I thought about stopping the whole blog thing. I was afraid I was going to run out of ideas, recipes, etc. and that people would just get bored with it. Casey encouraged me to keep up with it and I realized I could always post what we do that week/weekend even if it's not that exciting and it'll still be a document of our life. I'm always trying new recipes as well. I just need to get better about taking pictures before we devour it. You don't have to have an extraordinary exciting life to have a blog, because I certainly don't!

This past Saturday Casey, Kara, and I went home for my niece's first birthday. She's growing into such a little person. Sometimes I look at her and think that she's actually growing into a person that I'll be able to sit and have a conversation with one day. I'm blessed to have her in my life and I hope she's had a great first year of life. I hope that she knows that she'll always have her aunt and uncle to lean on for support and that if she gets mad at mom and dad, she can come stay with us =)

Casey, me and my mom waiting for people to arrive



The birthday girl with her mom and dad. My grandma made her #1 onesie.



Kara and Lillian



Little man keeping an eye on the scene

Opening her glow doll

More presents!

Her bath toys that my mom got her

and more...

Opening her Sophie the Giraffe from me and Casey

About to devour her piece of chocolate cake. I made her the cake from the Hershey website with their icing. She didn't really get any in her mouth, but she had fun playing in it. I enjoyed it at least! Casey also got a video of her playing in it that I'll have to post sometime this week.


We love you Lillian, Happy Birthday!

Thankful

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving! Sorry for the lack of blog updates. The holidays are slowly sneaking up on me and we've been busy this week preparing for Thanksgiving. I decided to undertake the bird this year for some reason, and it actually turned out pretty good. Word to the wise, almost every single turkey that is frozen is already pre-basted even though it won't say so on the turkey anywhere. Pre-basted turkeys are not supposed to be brined. I brined mine for a shorter amount of time. It turned out juicy, but the whole time I had this huge fear that this big 23 lb salty bird was going to give everyone high blood pressure as an early Christmas present. I also made deviled eggs, pumpkin rolls, sweet potato casserole, and mashed potatoes. I enjoy cooking obviously, so I didn't mind at all. The food was good and I have a ton of leftovers leering at me from my refrigerator. I actually just had a piece of pumpkin roll for breakfast and I feel no shame.

I think that everyone, regardless of what you have going on this time of the year, should really think about what you're thankful for. I know I tend to think about all the things in my life that could be better, or that need working on, or if only I didn't have this to deal with etc.. You realize what a good position you are in life when you think about all of the positives. I have a huge list of things in my life that I couldn't begin to be thankful enough for. I have a savior that loves me unconditionally regardless of my mistakes. I have a loving husband that I'm thankful for every single day that I get out of bed. I have a family that I enjoy seeing and that I look forward to seeing on the holidays. I feel sorry for those people that dread the holidays b/c of their family. I don't consider myself unlucky that I was horribly homesick when I went away to college. I consider myself lucky that I have a familiy that I'm lucky enough to miss instead of the people who were glad to be getting away from home. I have an awesome puppy that loves me and shakes because he is so happy to see me everyday when I get home =) I'm thankful that I *do* have a job right now in this awful economy. I'm thankful that I have a home to go to everyday and that Casey and I never have to go without. There are so many things that I listed above that sooo many people don't have. It's nice to look at what you do have instead of constantly looking at what the person beside you has that you don't.

Well that ended up being a little more long-winded than I expected. I guess I could post some pictures from my holiday. I didn't take as many as I would've liked, but I tried to remember to take them when I could!

In attendance of our family dinner was: me, casey, mom, dad, my sister, her husband, my aunt and uncle, my grandma, my sister's lab (Maddy), Tuck, 3 cats, and Lillian.

This is my mom with her brother and his wife

My sister and her family

Miss Lillian

My turkey!

The inside

It's kind of blurry, but you can see Tuck, Maddy, and one of the cats swarming the dinner table

Me and Casey

These aren't from Thanksgiving but they were on my camera

I was on the phone one day after work and Casey decided to throw all of the baskets of laundry on top of me. This is why things don't get accomplished in my house if I'm not supervising ;)

My Dog Has More Friends Than I Do

I was looking at pictures from this weekend and I realized as I was going through them that on Friday Tuck went to go see his buddies Sox and CatDog and then he had a date with Mason at the park on Saturday and we just brought him back from seeing Coal a couple of hours ago. Dude, how does he have more of a social life than I do? Well, since I apparently didn't do as much as he did this weekend, I'll post some pictures of his exciting weekend.

This is from his trip to visit CatDog and Sox on Friday evening. He was still sniffing out the parameters at this point.

It didn't take him long before he started sprinting around the yard with Sox. Sox would be the black blur in front of him. My dog is a sprinter, definitely not an endurance runner. Sox has somehow nailed down sprinting and endurance.

The ears! They shoot up in the air when he runs and it makes him look like Mickey Mouse.

CatDog didn't get in on the fun very much, but she kept an eye on her little brother. That would be Adrienne, my co-worker, holding her.

They played until it got dark and then they just hung out like old homies.

Switching over to Saturday... this is from our day at the park with Mase-diggy and Kara

Tuck doesn't really know a lot about tennis balls, but he knows to run after Mason when he chases them until he's tired. It works for him.

The Mickey Mouse ears kills me

Mason with his pointer tail being kind of crooked =)

Both of them checking out this man in the background

This is Kara. I kind of love her. She keeps me sane and she loves me back, what more could I ask for?

I feel like I've managed to photograph my whole weekend. I also realize that people might think I'm a big loser once they realize what I do on the weekends but that's ok with me. Friday we actually did go to dinner with a couple of friends after my dog's playdate, and we did go see a movie and do some shopping on Saturday. We went to see The Changeling and I would recommend it to you if you were thinking about going to see it. It's different. I think it's different in a good way though. The movie does a good job of placing you in the time period that exists in the movie and Angelina Jolie does an amazing job as Christine Collins, a woman who rebels against the LAPD when they try to return a child to her that isn't her son when he goes missing (holy run on sentence). It's a true story and an interesting one. It's also a little liberating to see what one woman accomplished by refusing to by quiet. So women, just remember that ;)

Today we had my family over for some of Pioneer Woman's lasagna. We have a few slices left over so hopefully I can get some pictures of that to blog about. I was supposed to blog about my last TWD recipe which was rugelach but I deleted the picture of the cookies and gave the cookies away. Dumb.

This morning at church we also made the decision to become a member at the church we've been going to off and on since January. It just felt right this morning and we're really happy with our decision and have really enjoyed our time there. So that's a step in the right direction!

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Halloween and More Pictures

Scary, right? You mean a flaming 'X' and a goofy looking spider with one tooth doesn't scare you? It probably shouldn't, but behold, this year's pumpkin creations. I went with the spider and Casey started with a skull and cross bones until he realized that he was in over his head and decided to do the XBox 'X' and use some whittling skills he saw on the pumpkin challenge on Food Network. The more complex the better in his eyes. In the Almarez household around this time every year there's a pretty consistent theme. I can't find something that's cute and not scary and Casey can't find something that's complicated enough (we won't mention the pirate ship of 2005 that maybe got 1/120 of the way completed before Casey realized it wouldn't be finished in time for Christmas, let alone Halloween). Last year he did complete a pirate ship and it looked very nice. I decided to do a bat with huge eyeballs.

In 2006 we did baby pumpkins seeing as how we were still in college and usually pumpkins didn't make it very long outside. I did the one toothed monster and Casey did a little tribute to JMU.

This past weekend we watched movies and my best friend Kara and I made dinner on Saturday and we hung out with her and her husband. Sunday my father-in-law was nice enough to take some family pictures of us with Tuck. I'm kind of embarrassed of wanting more pictures when I haven't printed out a single wedding photo :-\ but I had my reasons. Tuck got his long coat cut off yesterday and I was feeling a little sentimental about losing his puppy fluff and asked him if he would do some pictures of us with him before we got it cut. We went to the Blue Ridge Parkway and stopped at an overlook and we really got some cute shots of him. Here are some of the ones he did of just Tuck.

He looks so proud =) my little man. This week is just another work week. We have Halloween coming up on Friday and I still need to put together a costume for work and figure out our plans for Friday night. Well, tomorrow is Thursday... maybe I should get on that...