Christmas Time!

Christmas was a blast, as usual! We had so much fun opening presents and watching these two girls' faces as they saw the treasures inside! I love my girls!!

Santa brought the girls a chair with their name on it, and Erin is starting to recognize her name!  She is so smart!

They both loved sitting in their chairs and opening presents.  Rylee is so fun to watch opening presents.  She has to get all the paper off, then she screams with delight at what's inside, no matter what it is.  She loved all her presents.  She's such a sweetheart.

Erin said every time she opened a present, "it's a box!"  then I would have to say look inside the box!  She said "Oh".  I had put this Angus in a humidifier box cuz it fit the best.  I didn't think she would notice the box , but she opened it and said "oh, a water holder thing, I don't like that."  She was so dissappointed, it was hilarious.  Then I got her to look inside it and she was much happier!  I wish I had that on video.  So funny.

 

Erin's favorite present was her Merida bow and arrows.  She got into her dress and had to shoot some arrows immediately.  She was not too bad after Daddy showed her how to do it!  With some practise she might be as good as Merida!

After we opened our presents at home we headed to Gma's for some awesome breakfast and even more presents.  Gma and Gpa spoil us so much!  The girls got a bunch of leap frog stuff that I need to read the manuals for before they can play with them!  As ever, technology is outrunning me.

Gma's dog, Gilee, was raring to play but she is a little wild and crazy, so she had to be restrained.  Here is a rare moment of calm for both the dog and the girl...

Rylee loves hanging out with her family!

After Gma's we headed down to Grandma's house, for dinner and yet more presents!  We are so dang spoiled!!

Every year I feel overwhelmed by how much we recieve for Christmas.  We are so lucky to have all the loving family we have and we love all of you!  Merry Christmas!!

Halloween Happenings

We had a lot of activities for Halloween this year! Lots-o-fun!!

We carved pumpkins, the girls did not want to actually touch the guts, and Rylee just wanted to eat it, but every time she did she would decide she didn't like it.

A funny side note, I was wearing the same shirt when we carved last year!

My cute girls and their pumpkins!

Here's my pumpkin display.  I love Pumpkins!!  Although I do love my girls more.  What could be better than the two together?

Sweet little Rylee witch

 

 

Erin and Gilee, Gma's new pup. 

Auntie Terry had a really fun Laboratory Party, the food was so cute, and we did the Monster Mash cake walk and decorated pumpkins. It was so fun, thanks Terry!

 

 

2012

Then we went to Black Island Farms.  It was pretty dark but we managed to get the traditional picture! 

2011

I guess Rylee was too little to be in the corn this year!  She was 2 months old!

2010

2009

 

 

On Halloween we went to the Aquarium, it was all decked out and spooky. Good day to go as really no one else was there.

Erin loved these vampire teeth she won in a "toss the bug to the spider web" game.  It's a very creepy picture of her.

 

 

 

 

After the aquarium we went Trick-or-Treating!  The girls both had so much fun, Erin was quite the pro, saying "Trick Or Treat" every time, then "Thankyou" and sometimes even "Happy Halloween!"  Rylee was really cute, she walked about half the time, and stuffed her face with candy all night.  She is  a candy fool!  When she got tired of walking Erin got a piece of candy for her at the doors, too.  It was really sweet. (pun intended)

When we got home Erin had still some more fun handing out candy to the kids. 

 

The holidays just keep getting funner and funner as the girls get bigger.  I love that they know what is going on and they want to participate.  Erin even picked out what she wanted to be.  She got her idea from a book called Two Little Witches, and she wanted herself and Rylee to be "Two Little Witches Trick or Treating in the Dark on Halloween Night" (a line from the book)  We hope you all had as great a Halloween as we did!  Eh He He He He Heh!!

They love their Daddy!

Erin and Rylee are both Daddy's Girls. They love him sooo much, and he is a great Dad.

Happy Father's Day Tyson!

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.