Cupcake

On Boothe's birthday I made some cupcakes for dessert and to celebrate. She was in baby heaven...First bites. Devouring the icing.Thoroughly enjoying her birthday treat.A picture is worth a thousand words.Washing it down with some cold milk.

Now she's ready for her real birthday cake at her birthday party on Saturday. This was just practice...

Cherry Bomb

So our next door neighbor has 2 cherry trees that he does not pick from. He lets us take all we want and the rest go to the birds. They are tart cherries so they have to be baked or cooked in some way and he must not be one to bake. He is a single guy who lives alone.

We pick every summer, but this summer the cherries were extra abundant. I usually freeze some and this year have about 6-8 cups of frozen cherries. The problem with cherries is that you have to pit them all which is no fun and gets "not worth the effort" after awhile.Here is what I make with our cherries....This year I made 2, one for us and one for our neighbor whose cherry trees we pick from.

Cherry Crisp

Mix 4 cups Cherries, 1.5 cups Sugar and 4 tablespoons Flour in a bowl. Pour evenly into 9x13 pan.

In a seperate bowl mix 1.5 cups Flour, 1 cup Oats, and 1 cup Brown Sugar. Cut in 1/2 cup Butter and 1/2 cup Shortening. Sprinkle over cherry mixture.

Bake at 375 for 45-50 minutes. Easy as that. Eat and enjoy!

Last time I made it, I used a 9x9 pan because I wanted to use the divider that bakes individual pieces already cut (see above). It turned out fine and when put in the fridge it firmed up and turned into bars. Here is my thought for next round...I'm going to pack half of the topping down into the bottom of a 9x9 dish, then pour on the cherry mix and then the other half of the topping. I'll let it cool and put it in the fridge to firm up and I'm hoping for nice solid dessert bars. If you try it, let me know how it turns out.

Beautiful day

Wow, we had amazing weather here today. No humidity, sunny and warm with the perfect amount of breeze. Needless to say we spent every moment we could outdoors and that left little time for a blog post. It was one of those days when the sun warms your skin while the wind cools it. We played in the water, on the swings and with the dogs. If God wants to make every day of summer as nice as today that would be fine with me.

The pictures are some nice ones of the girls that I took at Amanda and Rich's wedding a week ago.

I hope you all had a wonderful day also!

Happy 1st Birthday, Boothe

A year in rewind...

These are just some of my favorites from the past year. Good thing I took so many pictures because I was (am) so sleep deprived I probably wouldn't remember half of it. This post is all about Boothe's arrival, 1 year ago. It all just went by way too fast....

Happy Birthday, my beautiful baby girl! I love you more than words can say...

My girls

They are mine, all mine.

Mine.

Garage sale finds {round 4}

So I skipped out on garage sales this weekend. I didn't even check the paper because I didn't want to find out what I'm missing! I've exhausted my second-hand allowance for the month and didn't really feel like taking the girls out today anyways. Here are some things I have found recently.

I love these old glass jars for storing things. Not sure what I'll be putting in this, but it goes nice in my kitchen. $1.A couple books. I love Shel Silverstein poems and Jodi Picoult books. I hate buying books at full price or even on sale. Solution: used and cheap!This is the soap I use in my homemade laundry detergent. I'm not sure how old this bar is. I found it at an estate sale. The packaging for Fels-Naptha is now different. Only a quarter.10 cents...15 cents new about 30 years ago. I really pulled one over on them... So far 6 pairs of shoes for $10 TOTAL. 5 of the 6 are Stride Rite. I've been looking for saddle shoes and haven't found any in stores. I found 3 different sizes at 1 garage sale.I'm trying to not buy any more Pull-Ups for Magnolia to wear to bed. They are dry about half the time in the morning, but when we tried wearing only underwear to bed, I was changing too many sheets. These are waterproof covers, 4 for 50 cents. I'm trying these with training underwear under them. A few pieces of clothes here and there. No, I would not dress my children in these 4 at the same time.This set was only 50 cents and we have a couple other sets like them that are perfect for Magnolia to eat with. I'm not a fan of the plastic utensils for kids.We got a whole bag of plastic plates, bowls and cups for $5. I will use the melamine bowls in the house, the rest is for playing outside in the playhouse, swimming pool, beach, etc.2 more movies for $2.The Easter Bunny brought Magnolia a box of "tell me a story" cards and we really like them. This set is a different story line and is in brand new condition for only $1.A floaty for Boothie, $1. I also found the one Magnolia uses (it's perfect) at a garage sale last fall.These were still in the box. Brand spanking new. I remember having a pair like this as a kid, but they were the regular skate kind. Now kids are MUCH cooler so only In-Line will do. $8.A play tent for $5. It connects to a tunnel which Boothe is just so happening to be getting for her birthday!A travel DVD player for only $20. Huh? Why were they selling this? Plugs into the car and hooks on to the back of the front seat for long trips or packs nicely for airplane rides. Having one of these isn't essential so I wouldn't have bought one at the store brand new, but I wasn't going to pass it up for $20. It will get more than $20 worth of uses.And this. This is probably the strangest, most unlikely thing I have ever purchased at a garage sale. It is a 1/4 sized violin for young children to learn to play on. I had no intentions of having my girls take violin lessons...but now I do. It's a $200 (minus value for being used) violin and I paid $10 for it. As I debated whether to get it or not I realized that I could at the very least sell it for more than $10 on craigslist or ebay.