Tulip Festival

We had so much fun at the Tulip Festival!  On the way in, people kept commenting on how cute and happy Rylee was, and they were talking to her and smiling, she's so adorable. When we got to the gardens, Erin just wen tearing off down this hill, she was so cute!

and then she just kept going! I had to go around with the stroller, and by the time I got to the bottom, Erin and Tyson were nowhere to be seen.  I finally found them about 15 minutes later, at the carosel.

All I wanted was a picture of my two girls in their tulip outfits at the tulip festival.  It was not to be.  Erin is a little stinker and would not cooperate.  I got some really  cute ones of Rylee, though!

Here we are enjoying some lunch.  Rylee kept taking Tyson's carrots.

Here is Erin running from the camera.

Sort of a cute picture...

And here she is being a complete brat.

Sheesh.  Oh well, we had fun anyway!

Bath Time Fun

I love having similar pictures of both my girls at the same age.

Garden Boxes

Last fall Tyson built us some raised bed gardens for vegetables.  It will be an adventure.  Here is Erin and Tyson planting our first plant, strawberries.  We'll see what happens.  Maybe they will grow.

Erin was really excited to help her dad with the planting.  She loves doing anything with him.  She's so cute.  Tyson really loved it, too.

Rylee is Eight Months Old!

Our little Baby is growing up so fast!   In this picture you can kinda see all 6 of her teeth.  She is eating and chewing like a pro- she loves food!  She finally got to sink her teeth into some real food.  She's even tried hamhock and bean soup!  She loved it!!  She can roll over on her front and back (on the bed, not the floor) and she is scooting backwards.  She talks all the time, her favorite thing to say is "ya ya ya" very very loudly.  She is so Darling!  She still loves her sister and thinks she is the coolest person on the planet.  She wants to be included in everything and protests very loudly if she is not.  She is getting tired of her binky, maybe she will give it up on her own.  I keep telling her she can take all the time she wants to get bigger and older, but she doesn't seem to be listening!

Easter Monstrosity

I'm not gonna lie.  This cake was a gigantic pain in my butt.  I went a little crazy with my idea of a cute cake for Easter.  I have always wanted to make one of those cakes with different colored layers, but I didn't really know how: hence the pain.

I used two cake mixes, cuz I wanted three layers.  I wanted to make my favorite cake recipe, Lemon Cream, which adds cream cheese and sour cream to a lemon cake mix.  Since I didn't want the yellow cake to mess with the other colors, I used a white cake mix and put lemon extract in it.  At least that part worked!  I mixed it all together so I had to guess how much to remove to die each layer different colors.  I did not guess well.  The last layer was the pink one, and I ended up using mostly the whole batch of mix for three layers instead of four.  Then the layers didn't match the peeps (I also had to go to two different stores three times to get the right combo of peeps colors) I should have gotten the neon die.  Oh well.  Plus I only had two cake pans so I had to wait for the first layer to cool, then wash the pan and bake the third layer.  Every layer ended up a different size.  What I learned from this is that I should have used just one cake mix and divided it into three smaller layers instead.  Duh.

Then I made home made cream cheese frosting.  It was really good, but it was hard to work with, it kept sliding down the cake, so I had to put it in the fridge between decorating stages.  Yes, there were stages.

I died the coconut myself, which was a lot easier than I thought, but still a pain.

Here is Erin testing a peep for me, the yellow ones did not make the final cut.  She liked them, though.

Then I had to frost each peep to glue it on, cuz I did the peeps the next day and the frosting wasn't really wet anymore.  My three color pattern did not quite work on the bunnies, there was a place where it went blue purple blue instead of blue purple pink.  It bugged me, but probably no one else noticed. This cake is HUGE.

So here is the final product: Lemon Cream Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting and Coconut Garnish with Three Colored Layers.  OMG.  I think I'm crazy.  Another reason for the title of this blog.

Easter Eggstravaganza

Get ready for a lot of pictures!  We had a lot of fun over our Easter weekend... first off was Easter Egg Coloring on Friday night with Aunt Jess, Ammon, Aunt LoLo and cousin Nie Nie (Annie to those of you not in on her knickname situation, which has not really caught on).  Erin and Ammon had fun just generally making a mess.  We had three different kinds of egg dying kits, but Erin just likes to keep dipping and painting until they are all sort of the same muddy grey color.  She has fun doing it, though.

Annie really got into it and made some pretty intricate and interesting eggs, my favorite was what she called "fire".  Erin really wanted to make all of Annie's into her messy grey ones, but we managed to prevent that.

I guess putting newspaper on the table just really didn't prevent much mess.

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Next on Saturday we went to Aunt Terry's house for the Big Hunt.  There is always so much candy at this event; luckily Erin is not a pro yet.

Gma loved Rylee's reaction to the grass, she pulled her feet up at first, but then she decided it was fine and just stood on it and smiled.

Look at her "trucker butt", every part of her is adorable.

A nice action shot, she got pretty good by the end, but Jackson beat her to most of the loot, thankfully.

Gpa had a lot of fun helping her find things.

Rylee just chilled on her blanket and was happy. Don't worry, she has sunblock on.

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Next was the visit from the Easter Bunny!  He likes to be artistic when he comes to our house.  Here is the before shot.

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Then we went to Grandma Ericksen's house for Easter Dinner, yum.  I tried to get some good pictures of Erin and Rylee in their adorable outfits, but Erin wouldn't cooperate, surprise surprise.  So, you just get Rylee.  She's cute enough, though.

Ammon got these cool touchable bubbles in his easter basket and he and Erin had a blast catching them.  Unfortunately I did not get good pictures of this. 

We had so much fun this year, and we're looking forward to next year!