Cutter's first birthday!

5 years baby!

Hard to believe that five years ago today Jonathan and I said our "I do's".

And look at us, so cute and as happy and silly as ever. (this picture was taken this Fall)
Two kids, two cars, two homes, one state, new job (well, promotion), tons of wonderful friends...it's been a good five years. Thank you Lord for blessing us! Looking forward to the next five years and plenty more after that!

Crazy hair day and St. Patricks

Jade got to have her first sleep over on Wednesday night (while Mommy and Daddy were on a super cool Anniversary date) with her friends Ashlynn and Drew. It also, just so happened, to be "Crazy Hair" night at AWANA. So my good friend, Amber, did up the kiddos in funky hair with colored hair spray!!!
Home again on St. Patricks day, I spent most of the afternoons working while the kids napped. When they got up, we still had grocery shopping and errands to do. How boring:( To make it a bit more fun, I painted up my kiddos as tiny Irish babes. With freckles and rainbow/shamrock paint! LOL

yes, we got a lot of stares and pointing at the grocery store. Eat your heart out, people who just put on green shirts. LOL

My Jade is 4 my Cutter is 11 months and today it snowed ALL DAY!

I wanted to do a post about Cutter being a month away from a year. But today it snowed all day and Jade got to spend most of the day outside eating snow and making snow angels. She is VERY happy:)
Cutter hasn't spent much time outside in the snow yet, but he enjoys watching Jade play
there is my little bug, all grown up...er...growing up...
And me:)
To see Jade at 11mons go here

Craft Day

inspired by this post I attempted to get the kiddos to do some scrap paper art.
at first they were really excited...but as they realized just how tedious the task was...their attention spans quickly dwindled. lol
here is Kyri's
Emma's
Jade's
Stacia's

I am currently painting my nails

Aphrodite's Pink Nightie

gearing up for Valentine's day!

clay bowls and football tarts...er puffs:-)

So I am a few days behind in my posting, but I thought I'd have a completed project to show by now. For Art/craft Monday Jade and I modeled together some heart shaped bowls. We just used our fingers and air drying modeling clay. Tomorrow (or later today) we plan on painting them, letting them dry and filling them with heart shaped candies for Valentine's day!
For super bowl sunday my little boy was getting over a cold/ear infection. So me and the kiddos stayed home while Daddy went to a Super bowl party. But, not before we sent him off with some manly treats:-) (we filled them with organic strawberry jam...yum!)

Sometimes I love JoAnn Fabrics

Today I had to go to JoAnn's for some modeling clay (art class on MONDAY!) and couldn't pass up the 60% off home decor. See my new pictures? I LOVE them! They don't go with my very "classic" styling to my home...but I think I'll just "change it all" and go with this funky modern-ish flare. Hee, hee

Baby food

While Jade was at a friends house for movie day and Cutter was napping the morning away. I decided to whip up some baby food. For lunch, some oven roasted carrots with whole garlic and olive oil and for snack time (when baby woke up) some pan fried plantains
If you have never fried up your own plantain chips, I'd highly recommend the scrumptous snack. Cutter ADORES these. Granted, they are fried and sprinkled with a bit of salt...so how could he not love them?
When their near being done (nice and golden) I flatten them a bit with a spatula. Then let them dry out on a paper towel and sprinkle (lightly) with kosher salt.

yum! My house smells warm and delicious!

Raspberry pancakes with bananas and maple syrup

I'm getting excited about Valentines day. Not because I'm such a hardcore romantic that the idea of a day set aside, each year, just to celebrate love thrills me. No, instead I'm excited because I have a four year old daughter who loves Princesses and dress up, and red is her favorite color and telling her friends how much she loves them is one of her top priorities in life. And this year, she is looking forward to Valentines day!

Not to mention, my brother, his wife, and their two daughters and son will be visiting here in Washington and I'll get to have a whole passel of kiddos to celebrate Valentines day with!

With Valentine's day on the brain, our morning breakfast was thus inspired.

Raspberry pancakes (regular buttermilk pancakes in which I dumped a whole bunch of raspberries in) with sliced bananas and 100% pure maple syrup drizzled on top. YUM!

That combined with my hazelnut flavored coffee creamer coffee...and my morning has been off to a good start.

Oh, and I have a really cool neighbor who was able to stop by and got to indulge in our little morning treat as well. Then she carted off my daughter to go watch a movie for "movie morning friday!". And here I am, home with a sleeping 10mon old...writing a blog post about pancakes. What could be better?

Painting day

Today for our "art/craft" class, we talked about words beginning with the letter "c", we read a book on being a princess and we created tiny crowns out of old paper towel rolls

here our girls are modeling them

and then we spent some time just doing a bit of free style painting:)

Vogue braid

Do you have a Vogue catalog on hand? Turn to page 177 of the February issue. It's the photo spread on "Gangs of New York". I can't stop looking at the girl in the long, white, lace, ralph lauren dress with the riding hat and messy braid. I would like to be her for a day. Or an hour. Or a moment. Anyway....I was all inspired to copy her messy hair braid, but I have found, that braids are not something I am gifted in doing (Jade's poor pig tail braids are living proof of this)

But, since I have a great sense of humor and a killer "photo booth" app on my Mac...I've posted pics of myself. Enjoy!

this is the dress, btw...but not the hair do

Oh wait, duh, I can just take a picture of the picture! Here ya go!

and the lighting is better out here, so another picture of my fabulous hair. do you see how is glows with the morning sunlight bouncing off it's luscious...lusciousness?

I made Risotto tonight!

I had bought arborio rice a few weeks ago with high aspirations to make some tasty risotto with it. And...I never did.

So today, I decided I'd go ahead and make some. I've never made it before, I was scared off by people telling me how time consuming it is. I no longer had the ingredients needed for the original recipe I wanted to try

so I used this Red Wine Risotto with Peas recipe and just didn't add the red wine, the onions or the fresh parsley. LOL

it still tasted really good. Cutter loved it, Jade loved, I loved it...Jonathan liked it. hahaha! And, I found the 40min it took to cook, I was able to make Italian chicken and a tasty salad, and still spent my usual amount of time cooking dinner in the kitchen. I will be trying new risotto recipes in the future!

I don't think I ever really thought I'd be that Mom who could only post pictures of her adorable children and the life that only seems to revolve around them. And yet, almost all my blog posts are about something precious and adorable that they have done (or someone's birthday, lol). It's not a bad thing, I just am surprised when I see that I really am "that" mom. *grin*

So in attempt to show myself I can post about my children AND myself. Here is a picture of one the many activites that make my life so much fun. I am apart of "Christian Fiction" book club. We meet once a month to "talk" about the book we have read (or I have attempted to read) and play games and eat food. Back when we started this club (was it in May?) We started a tradition to cook food for our get together that was talked about in the book. In some cases it has made coming up with food difficult. This last book we read, "The Shape of Mercy" one of the only foods discussed (well...I guess there was some fancy brie and thanks to Julie we were served delicious baked brie at our party) were eggs. So our meal was devils eggs and baked brie and an egg casserole
I love that I have this group of ladies, who most of which, love books, love God and love to read. I haven't been a fan of all the books we have read, but it doesn't even matter. Just hanging out makes it all worth while. (Oh and this last book was really sweet. Sad, sweet, interesting...I liked it, very cute)

I'm still apart of a women's bible study that meets on Wednesday mornings. Our last study forced us all to analyze our hearts and lives and I found nearly every meeting either I was in tears or someone else was. While it was a very good study, I'm REALLY enjoying doing a bible study on the book of Hebrews. I haven't cried yet! LOL

Tuesday's I attend MOPS. Love my ladies!

Jade enjoys going to AWANA and I'm teaching her Cubbies class:)

So I can't post without adding pictures of my kids. Here is a picture of Jade from a few days ago playing with her "magnetic" wooden paper dolls.
Cutter, from a few days ago, crawling rapidly after me as I tried to snap his picture before he ate the camera
Mornings when we are at home (so maybe 2-3 days a week) I spend doing school with Jade. We have an hour from 9-10am where Cutter usually naps. We work on her AWANA bible study verse, we say the pledge of Allegiance then we spend 20min working on spelling words the alphabet and whatever else I feel we should cover. Next is Math. Jade LOVES math "One more page Momma? One more page?"

Thursday morning's Jade goes to a friends for science class. And Mondays or Tuesday I teach a little craft class. I'm changing the theme of the craft class to art. We'll start working on more drawing and painting skills with some crafts thrown in. I'm very excited about that!

My husband brought home some flowers for me on Friday. They are unique enough I had to take a picture. I'm not sure what they are, and neither was he. But I love that they are so unconventional. I wish I had more tables and shelf space, I'd love for my home to overflow with beautiful plants.
Speaking on plants, all my little tulip bulbs think that spring is coming early. While I'm sure it's not coming any time soon, I can't help but get excited with the thought.
I've planned out my planting schedule for my little square foot garden and I'm anxious for the months to change so we can get planting.

Today is just a laundry and cleaning and errand running day. I do love my Mondays:-)

Birthday fun

So my birthdays for this month were lots of fun. For Jonathan's birthday, on his actual birth day, we went to dinner and then a movie. Then yesterday (Saturday) we met up with some friends at Gameworks in Seattle and had fun playing like kids in an arcade.
Jade got to have a fun, monkey themed, party, where she got to invite "four" friends for her fourth birthday party. She also had a lot of fun...most likely a little movie of her special day will get posted on my blog:)
in other news, my homemade marshmallows turned out pretty yummy. They don't look like anything spectacular...but the pretend "foodie" in me, thinks I'm pretty amazing for having made them:-)

Jade is 4 today!

my baby girl is four today! (no, we didn't buy her a boy bike for her birthday, just a cute pic). She had a monkey party and got to invite "four friends".

Can't believe it's already been four years! To see the post from the day she was born go here

It's my husband's birthday today!! Oh...and I'm attempting to make homemade marshmallows

My man is 30 today. Look at him, all grown up. Just makes you want to look at baby picture albums doesn't it? Or post pictures in black and white? Here ya go
Look at us, our little family minus Cutter. This is us in Michigan at Christmas time...so long ago, back when my husband was only 29 *grin*

In other news...tomorrow is Jade's 4th birthday and I'm preparing some yummy snacks for the occasion. One of which is my first attempt at making homemade marshmallows. Apparently they have to sit overnight to dry out properly. So far I can tell you the batter tastes...A.MAZING!

You really should call before you come over...

...because you never know if my kids will have clothes on or NOT! hahahahaha!

do you wanna come over and eat them yet? LOL

My little bunny

Aunt Vicka brought Jade this adorable bunny hat, back from Russia with her. Gj and Vicka had a layover in Seattle for about 12hrs, and we were able to spend some time with them...and also be given some presents! At first Jade wasn't to keen on the hat...but now it's all I can do to keep it off her head! LOL
here my little bunny is outside near our little garden. Can you seem my garlic growing? I get to harvest it in March, I can't wait!