Kitchen Catastrophe

I think its pretty well known that I love to cook and bake.  I've been feeling pretty good about my abilities lately too.  That is until today.  You know the saying "pride comes before the fall"?  Yeah that about sums up my kitchen experience today.  Last week I loved just about everything we had for dinner, this week is not going as well.  Last night I made quiche, and I've made it lots of times but tried to make a deep dish quiche instead well my pie crust shrunk too much while baking and when I poured the filling in it ran over the crust and filled in around the crust as well so we had egg on the inside and outside of the pie part.  Annoying.  It tasted fine but I think that has more to do with the fact that it was filled with swiss cheese and bacon.  I really need to prefect my pie crust skills and maybe buy more pie weights.  Shawn's ok with it as long as there is more pie to eat.

Lets move on to my embarrassing experience today.  I wanted to make bread to go with dinner.  I got it all ready to start rising and turned on the oven to get nice and warm so the dough would rise stuck the dough in the oven and forgot to turn the oven off so instead of just letting my dough rise it was partially baked by the time I checked on it.  Then later while I was trying to make dumplings for the soup for dinner I added twice the amount of half and half and had to start all over.  Its just not my day.  I was also trying to make cookies at the time so I"m going to add it up to the fact that I'm not good at making 2 things at once.  Hopefully I'll have this down by Thanksgiving or my sister may never want to come again.  On the bright side the cookies turned out great, the one saving grace today, because the chicken and dumpling soup I made was less than awesome.  Ok but not awesome.  I'm going to wash my woes down with some diet ginger ale.

Fall Fest

Yesterday was a beautiful fall day.  It was only 70 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, and perfect for rolling down the hill in our front yard.  I don't think our kids have ever done this but they seemed to have a great time.  It was pretty fun to see some of their awesome moves.

Here is the side roll.

Here is Devin's catching air move.

And its hard to tell but Graham is doing somersault down the hill or the death roll as I like to call it.  Thankfully he stopped before he face planted into the sidewalk.

I really wish I had gotten a picture of my favorite the roll up the hill.  It was so funny to watch Graham try to roll back up.  I never said he was bright.  :)

We ended the evening with an amazing new recipe for King Ranch Chicken and chased it down with some Maple-Pumpkin Stack Cake.  Perfect end to a perfect fall day.  I love fall!

Fundraisers

I think I have discovered my least favorite thing in the world; school fundraisers.  I know every school has them but ours seems to have a lot of them.  This month we are supposed to go out and ask for donations from different companies like a gift card to dinner or movie tickets so we can put them together and auction them off at our school carnival thing.  Then we get to walk around our neighborhood and ask people to pledge money to our kids that are running in the school race.  Caroline also gets to sell magazines to our neighbors that 40% of the profits go to her gifted program.  And want to guess how much we are going to do?  None, zero, nada.  Its not that I don't support the school its that I HATE asking people who already pay taxes to give money to a school they have no kids at.  I will happily give some money to the school  and pledge money to Caroline when she runs but if we are really that hard up for money for the school I would so much rather raise taxes then beg for money from people.  If we were selling something good sure maybe we'd do it but magazines?  Come on the only thing people will actually buy when selling things door to door are Girl Scout cookies.  So unless we can strike some deal with them I'm out.  Am I the only parent who doesn't like this stuff?

A rut

Does anyone else ever get into a blogging rut?  I feel most people actually do then they don't post for a while and when they finally want to post its been so long they think they have to relive every experience of the last month which seems like too much work so they just stop blogging all together.  Its a sad tale but I've seen it happen before and it makes me sad inside.  I don't have a ton to blog about but I thought I'd just post about the normal pretty boring stuff going on because even though its boring now I really do like having something to look back on in a year or so.

Graham: Not much is new with him just as crazy as ever and really wants to give up his nap which I REALLY don't want to happen.  He loves playing with Devin all day long except when he calls Graham a baby.  Its hard being the baby when you think you're so big.

Devin:  Loves all things that include dirt, guns, and bums.  He is the epitome of a boy.  He could dig in the dirt all day long and tries his best to (trust me I just cleaned his nails and they were NASTY) or play something that involves shooting people with your hand guns, or talking about bums, and not the kind that live on the street the kind that you sit on.  I don't know whether to laugh or put him in time out most of the time.

Caroline:  She probably thinks she could live by herself and do just fine.  She thinks she knows everything and its only just a little frustrating sometimes.  She still loves school, lost another tooth, and started the Encore program this week and joy of joys brought home another fundraiser for the school.   And she rarely stops talking, so half the time I have no clue what she's asking me because its taken her so long to get to the question.  She's fun.

Me: I feel like I can't pull my thoughts together which is one reason I blog, so sorry if this is long and boring, I just needed to clear my head.  Ah I feel much better now.  Hopefully more exciting posts will be coming soon, but don't hold your breath.

Cookies, cookies, cookies

That's really all that we've been up to this week making about a billion cookies.  Well more like 6 dozen cookies and 2 dozen cupcakes.  After writing it down I'm realizing that's a lot of baking.  Thankfully we were able to put the majority of them to good use.  I made some coconut cupcakes for a bake sale at Vanderbilt and they were so good.  I'm going to have to make that just as a cake one of these days.  And since I had a ton of coconut left over I made coconut macaroons and coconut lime sugar cookies for companies that donated money to Caroline's school.  Parents have been asked to ask companies to sponsor our school and I really hate doing things like that but I still would like to help so I do it in the form of baked goods.  Anyways after all of the do gooding I still had a about 1/2 a dozen cupcakes and almost 2 dozen cookies left over.  Oops, I tend to overbake but I figure worse things could happen.  We should probably lay off the sweets for a while, but that never lasts too long around here.

Graham enjoying a little chocolate after I had dipped the macaroons in it.

And since we try and be fair around here Devin got some too. They were really happy that day.

And just because he was being so good today I thought I'd post a little about Devin.  We came home from Costco today and right when we got home he just sat and played with his cars for about a half an hour without even looking up or asking for anything.  I really LOVE it when my kids play like that, and I"m going to play a little favoritism and say that Devin is the best at it.  Hey all kids are good at something right?   I love to listen in and hear what game he's come up with.  Here's my attempt at a sneaky picture of him playing without noticing me.

Secret Club

Shawn outdid himself, my bike is really the best present ever.  When we bought it I didn't think I'd go that far on it but I"m already going further than I thought.  And did I mention how fun it is?  I love seeing people walking or running (yuck) along the greenway and flying past them, but I think my favorite thing is seeing other people riding bikes and they always nod or wave to me.  Its like we're in this secret club and we're the only ones who know how much fun biking is otherwise everyone would be doing it.  Really who would rather run than bike, only crazy people in my opinion.  I hate hearing myself breathe and my big, fat, feet pounding the ground.  I'd much prefer to zoom past those poor suckers on my bike.