Me, Fall, and Baking...a dangerous combination

I am very willing to admit that I am rather addicted to baking. If I had my way, I wouldn't do any form of preparing food other than baking. There is something comforting and inviting about preparing baked goods for your family. I always bake on a fairly regular basis that includes our family's bread (on weeks I can keep up with hungry mouths), our pizza crust every Friday night, and random muffins and yumminess when I have time.

But something about fall, kicks my baking addiction into high gear. Anyone else? Suddenly, I feel compelled to begin baking anything that requires cinnamon, pumpkin, nutmeg, or anything that requires a brown sugar crumble to be layered on top of it.

So, my family will be benefiting from my addiction this week. On top of all of our usual home baked food, we'll be indulging in apple muffins, sweet and savory crepes for dinner tonight, and maybe a loaf of pumpkin bread thrown in there somewhere.

What's your favorite go-to fall baking recipe?
Happy baking!!

We're Going to the Zoo

Thing 1 and Thing 2 and I headed to the zoo last week. The weather was absolutely perfect, and we had nothing on our schedule, so we headed out. I have never taken the two little boys to the zoo by myself, so I wasn't really sure how it was going to go. But overall, we did really well. Our zoo is broken into two large sections, so we only attempted one section. But the section we visited has the train, so we had a winner! The boys could ride the train all day and never see any animals, and be perfectly happy.

On the train!

Too busy looking at the tracks to look at the camera.

Mommy, elephants! Right there!

Elephant watching before we headed home.

Muffin Tin Monday

Thing 1 and Thing 2 participated in their first MTM today! I used to do them with Bub every week, but once he started school we stopped. I decided the boys might be old enough to give it a try today. They thought it was pretty funny they were eating out of cupcake liners, and Thing 1 ate better than he usually does!

They had hot dogs, bananas, cheese, and pretzels.

This is Thing 1's "cheese" face.

Head over to Muffin Tin Monday to see what everyone else is serving up!

What We're Eating

This is our next to last week before I start up teaching Kindermusik and before S starts his MBA program. So, this is probably the last week I'll be cooking "real food" every night for quite a while.

Monday: Sloppy Joes, Homemade Rolls, Corn, Salad

Tuesday: Fish, Mashed Potato, Some sort of fruit

Wednesday: Black Bean Quesadillas, Tortilla Chips

Thursday: My grandma's fabulous lasagna, Homemade bread

Friday: Homemade pizza on the grill, Apple slices

Saturday: Eat out night!

Sunday: Pancakes, Sausage, Hashbrowns

Birthdaypalooza

Thing 1 and Thing 2 would not listen to me, and decided to turn 2 even against my advice to stay babies for a little while longer. And since I couldn't stop them, we had a great birthday weekend full of trains, friends, family, cake, and gifts.

On their birthday, we spent the morning lounging around and opening a few presents. They love playing kitchen, so we got them their very own little kitchen set up and they LOVE it!!

Yeah, our boys are rarely fully dressed. Especially on lazy mornings. It's just too much work with two : ). I think the adorable diapers work as an outfit anyway!

Then I made them a Fishing Hole game I found over here. They have been fishing non-stop and love to show us what they caught!

"Momma!!!" Translated to, look what I caught!

A little birthday loves on the way to lunch. They love to hold hands in the car or the stroller until one gets tired of it and starts screaming. Which, of course, causes the other one to hold on tighter. So, it's cute while it lasts.

We went to Fritz's for lunch at Crown Center which was a smashing hit. I wasn't sure we'd even get them to eat because they were so busy watching all the trains and letting us know when a new one was coming out. (Fritz's is a local restaurant that uses motorized trains to bring the food to guests. It was started during WWII - I think- when the owner didn't have enough workers to service the tables.)

After lunch, we walked out on a bridge connected to Union Station that crosses over the "real" train tracks. Luckily, after a few minutes of waiting, a big freight train came through and we got to watch it rumble right underneath us. The boys were mesmerized and just stood and stared as it passed.

The next evening was their party, and we were lucky enough to have about 20 of our closest friends and family sharing with us in the festivities. The boys had so much fun seeing all their family and close friends from church. We ate some food, opened lots of presents, watched the fabulous movie S makes each year of the previous year's highlights, and ate some yummy cake.

I have always made the boys' cakes, but I started branching out of the typical molded cake frosted with stars when Bub turned 5. He was having a pirate themed party, and he had to have a pirate ship cake to match. So I created this for him and it's still one of my favorites.

The next year, our party was all about Legos. So I scanned a Lego guy and blew it up on the copy machine and then traced the cake around it. The babies were only 3 months old, so I'm still not sure how I pulled this off.

This was Thing 1 and Thing 2's 1st birthday cake. They each had their own monkey cakes to smash/eat.

But this year, I was in a bit over my head. I saw a cake with four different Thomas engines coming out of tunnels and I knew that's what I wanted to make. Needless to say, I've never covered a cake in fondant before or made train engines and covered them in fondant...but why not??

By Wednesday, the four trains had become two and I was totally fine with that.

So, we had Thomas and Percy coming out of tunnels.

I have never been so happy to have a birthday cake done as I was this year. S estimated I spent about 20 hours on prep time (practicing) and the actual making of the cake. But the boys loved it and went crazy when they saw the trains coming out of the tunnels, so it was all worth it in the end!

Even though it has been hard watching my babies turn 2 and enter the world of being toddlers, I am blessed every day by my three boys and so excited to watch them grow up together.

So, in the immortal words of Thing 1 and Thing 2 " I Two!!!"

Staycation Day 5

Day 5 was Outer Space/Stargazing day. We actually didn't do all that was intended for this day, but truth be told, I was okay with that. It was my birthday, and I was okay with Bub not wanting to sit down and do a lot of messy crafts that were going to create clean up for me. So....we stayed up late and went stargazing with Grandpa's telescope and called it good.

But, here's what we did have planned.

Origami Stars

Alien Orbiting Craft

We're still planning to do the origami stars this weekend, because they look really cool.

I also found a star chart for kids here. But, now that we're in the 21st century, you can also just pull star charts up on your phone. This was way cool for Bub, because you just point it into the sky and it calculates where you're at and shows you the constellation/stars you're looking at. A far cry from when we were kids poking holes in construction paper so we could watch the solar eclipse!

But, Bub loved looking at the moon through the telescope and we even got a "Holy Smokes, you gotta look at this!" And he loved pointing the phone at the ground and seeing all the constellations under us. So, we'll call it a success.

Staycation Day 4

We went Around the World on Day 4 - well, we visited a couple of countries. There's only so much you can fit in a trip around the world in one day. We started the day by making a passport to keep track of the countries we visited.

Love the little hand that's trying to swipe the passport!

Then Bub had to fill in all of his important information.

I found the passport template here

After our passport was complete, we were off to Mexico where we created Mexican rattles.

Luckily this included coloring, because we are all about coloring these days!

Thing 1 insisted on bashing his on the table to make it shake. Shocker.

Thing 2 is just plain confused as to what he just made.

I found the template for our shakers here.

We had tacos for lunch to celebrate Mexico and when we finished, we were able to add a stamp to our passport. I didn't get a picture of the stamps, but she actually included these with the passport template.

Our afternoon was spent in China, so we made Chinese Lanterns to decorate for our dinner.

Truth be told, Mom made Chinese lanterns for our decorations. Bub is not a huge arts and crafts person, so this week has been a little taxing on his craftiness. He can illustrate and write books until the cows come home, but please, oh please, don't make him color, cut, and paste. Go figure.

So, we never got to the Chinese characters painting we were going to do. But here's the link for that also.

To round off our evening, we obviously had Chinese for dinner complete with Bub's favorite, homemade crab rangoon! We ate out of take out boxes and tried chopsticks and had fortune cookies for dessert. Yeah, it was stereotypical, but he's 7, you have to go stereotypical at this age.

The passport was, by far, his favorite portion of today, so I may try to do a longer theme at some point and really use the passport for our adventures.

Staycation Day 3

Day 3 was all about water. And really, when it's going to be 100 degrees, what else is there to do outside? We had a lot of fun, and this was probably our favorite day so far. Unfortunately, trying to control water around three boys - two of those being toddlers- didn't allow me to catch any photos of our fun. But here are some highlights of our activities.

We set up a wash stand and the boys worked hard washing all of our adirondack chairs.

We filled our sand box, which is empty this year, with water for a mini swimming pool.

The sprinklers were all used at some point during the day.

I drew a large target on our fence with sidewalk chalk, and Bub had to spray for a bulls eye with his water gun. The babies thought chalking on the fence was brilliant, so they had to try it out too.

Then I had Bub stand against the fence making a silly stance, and I sprayed around him with the water gun to make an outline. The babies got in on this action too : ).

We also did a little Kool-Aid painting. You just sprinkle dry Kool-Aid on the paper and then spray it with a water bottle and watch the colors blend together.

Bub got a little crazy with the spray bottle, but the edges turned out really cool.

During the little boys' nap time, we filled water balloons and had a good water balloon fight to cool off.

We celebrated after dinner with popsicles on the deck - this was the little boys' first popsicle and I think they fully approved!

Summer Staycation

Our family's tradition has been to take our vacation in the summer, whether it's large or small. But we're changing things up this year, and going on a super fabulous, super secret (Bub doesn't find out until Friday) vacation in October. He's finding out Friday, because that's when we'll start counting down to when we leave. So, in lieu of a vacation this summer, we're doing a little staycation at our house.

I decided each day would have a theme, and we would try to involve as many activities around that theme as possible. So, each day, I'll report back what we did, what worked and what flopped.

We began yesterday with our annual Ice Cream For Dinner day. Now, we have plenty of ice cream throughout the summer; probably more than we need, but it's summer. But, this is the one night, I let Bub scarf down a PB&J sandwich, call it good and start loading the goodies onto his mound of ice cream. Last night's choices included blue sprinkles and lots and lots of Magic Shell. Thing 1 and Thing 2 enjoyed a little neapolitan. In fact they enjoyed it enough, they drank down every last drop of melted goodness out of their bowls and giggled the whole time.

After ice cream, we headed to the pool for a fabulous evening of splashing around.

Day 1, a success.

Today was game day. Since the projected forecast was 100+, I thought we'd make today an easy indoor day (our other days all include crafts of some sort and I've tried to gear our food to the theme also). Of course, Bub thought this meant he could play his new Wii game all day...But we managed to squeeze in a couple rounds of his new Lego Robots game, and worked a puzzle. I had planned on doing more after lunch, but his friends showed up to play and he was off. Thing 1 and Thing 2 had a good time dumping out the Sesame Street Chutes and Ladders game and playing with the game pieces.

Day 2, pretty much a success.

Tomorrow is Water Day!!! Off to get water balloons ready!