EASTER BUNKEY

IN THE BEGINNING...


THERE WERE CURLS.


And that completely didn't last. T_T She got too hot and the weather was too rainy to sustain them. Sigh. Incidentally, SHE IS SO GROWN UP. Check this out, first Easter:


SO. We did Easter Grilling at Lainey and P'd's house. I knew exactly where I wanted to have our Easter photos if it rained (and it did). I saw it yesterday. THE EASTER WONDERLAND.


Autumn made crazy faces the whole time so this is the best one.



This is my favorite, though. I didn't realize it until I uploaded the pictures...look at that dramatic arm!


Everyone needed the Easter wonderland picture! First up! Nanny and Boppa!


Aunt Lauren...Autumn had so much fun hanging out with Lauren this weekend! Brad is in New Zealand, the various Sellers were in Tuscaloosa, so she got undivided attention, lucky ducky!


This isn't the more austere of her Lainey and P'd photos but aren't they so fun?


Autumn was super happy to get her Easter bunny basket gift! In it, there was a sock monkey with bunny ears--you can see it in the bottom right of the picture. Later in the afternoon, she ran in the kitchen and was all IT'S THE EASTER BUNKEY! I thought she made it up but it was actually Mike which is still pretty darn cute!


After pictures, we changed, ate our traditional (not really) Easter dinner of steak and mexican corn. We had an indoor easter egg hunt and we had one casualty egg but fortunately it was a plastic one!


BUT, we forgot to hide the eggs we dyed! Still, we had fun doing it. And Mike gets egg salad with unhidden eggs! (Blech)


Happy girl! Lots of dye.


It's kind of funny, my fingers were dyed pink but Mike couldn't tell! I probably shouldn't be so tickled by his color blindness but it can be rather entertaining.


OOOH! We made our own Cadbury eggs! They are, um, not egg shaped. At all. Maybe vaguely. But they taste pretty good! I mostly used this recipe if you wanted to check it out!


AND. An Easter can't go by without me posting the Best Bunny Ever.


Happy Easter!

(and, again, I forgot to turn off the watermark thing! arg!)

Sun, sand, and faces of silliness

I was kind of thinking I had posted all the best pictures from the beach but as I went through them, I ran across this picture.


Let's enhance this a bit, shall we?


LOOK AT THAT FACE. I laughed so. hard. I have no idea what she was striding purposefully toward but I really wish I could remember what was happening for her to have that face on. :) Happily, she perked up for the photos with Mike and Me. And for this one with Nanny and Boppa.


And, look at this! With the magic of a ladder and the autoshoot on my camera, we got a great family photo! Mike is hiding a bit but we have a spot to photoshop Lauren in, haha. This reminds me I need to upload the other pictures I took and email them to the family.


Autumn was pretty done with the whole posing thing...


but I convinced her to try to take a good picture with Lula. You saw the good one in the last post but here's one of the outtakes:


Here's another fun one! Lainey got Tyler and Autumn an Easter pinata and it was hilarious. We didn't have anything to hang it on. Or anything to hit it with. So, we improvised. They used a vacuum extension as a bat and Mike held the pinata at the end of a broom handle. I like his self-protection pose. Note Lindsay guarding the TV. Miss Autumn has a great swing although it is, oddly, left-handed. She eats and writes with her right hand but bats and kicks with her left side.


Since we're on quirkiness, I found out that Autumn thinks seaweed is beautiful. Her words, not mine! She gathered a bunch on one beach walk so she could "decorate and make the condo beautiful."


I've never been a beach person but I have to say that watching Autumn have such a blast in the sun and sand is turning me into one. I mean, how can I resist these kinds of smiles:
\

And this sad face when it was time to leave?


On the way home, Autumn told us she wants "to stay at the beach for one zero zero weeks." Awwwwww. We'll be back soon, I hope!

Memory Lane, New and Old

Remember this?

July 2009

Those days are OVER. Without any prompting, Autumn started swimming (with her floatie jacket) from the shore to Mike and back. I mean, I was pretty shocked.


I'm doing a short post a couple of days early because I have a big aikido thing happening this weekend and I'm almost certain I won't have time to do a decent post. I am hoping I won't be tooooooo tired/broken by the end of this so everyone say a prayer, haha. I'm not anticipating getting hurt so much as just, well, doing aikido for like 10 hours.


Anyway, I  have a few really good pictures from the beach and I'll definitely get to them. It was a great weekend. My mom got to come! Autumn was sooo happy about it!


And although Ryan and Leah initially didn't think they would make it, they joined us, too. Autumn was ridiculously happy. We were going to surprise her but as soon as she woke up she goes, "MAMA. I HEAR TYLER'S DAD."


Autumn had nearly all her favorite people in one place so I had a happy little camper. I think I am going to frame this photo.


 I regret that I don't have any of Autumn in the hot tub because although she did enjoy herself in the sand and the water, the hot tub was her location of choice for the entire weekend. Smart kid!

I guess that's all from me for now! I'm sorry for the briefness and lack of creativity but it's time to rest up before the big weekend! :D

happy Easter, friends, click here to read more.

Easter Sunday!

I don't know about you guys, but there has been some wild weather here lately! Gorgeous days interspersed with serious storms. Today we had another tornado warning where the news people are all, "the main location for potential tornadic activity is approaching Germantown..." so Autumn and I had lunch in the closet. :)


There's supposed to be more weather drama tonight so I'm charging my phone and getting in bed a little early to try to get some sleep before another closet trip.

Anyway! Yesterday was Easter! I hope all my friends who celebrate Easter had a great day. Here's Autumn before we left for church. I curled her hair (princess hair) but I didn't do enough styling product so pretty much the second she started moving, the curls started falling out because her hair is exactly like her mama's.


She got those gloves in the small basket the Easter bunny left at her place at the table. :) Can you believe they are from the dollar bin at Target?? She didn't wear them to church but has had fun putting them on and taking them off.

Here she is coloring an egg before we dyed it.


We went to the 8:30am service. They only did childcare at 10 and 11:30 (there were three services just for Easter) so Autumn went with us and we served in the children's areas during the 10:00 service. Autumn did really well. I was concerned she wouldn't like the loud music but, oddly, the one thing that she was "scared" of was this blinking light on the ceiling that needs to be fixed.

Also, this was funny. There was a girl in front of us who was turning around to look at Autumn. Autumn stopped coloring, looked at the girl, looked at me, and then stage whispers, "MAMA, THAT GIRL IS LOOKING AT ME." And then spent a good chunk of the rest of the service sitting in my lap and putting my hand over her eyes so no one could see her and she couldn't see them. Silly monkey.

Oh, at church they showed this Gospel spoken word video. You might enjoy it...it is nicely done. Click!

My mom is out of town visiting Donnie and Liz so we went over to Mike's parents' house where, of course, the Easter bunny had paid a visit! He (she?) even left a note on the basket!


And there was much rejoicing.


Autumn is still a little confused about why the Easter bunny comes when we celebrate Jesus coming back to life again. See, I kind of don't think I thought about stuff like that when I was almost 4. I think I was just happy to get candy, haha. We talked a little about it (new life, eggs, and all that) but nothing too crazy in depth. I'm just glad that our reading of the bible stories and her church lessons seem to be making an impact on her.

We had a fun egg hunt. She loooooves hunting eggs. I need to set up some scavenger hunts at home or something. Autumn was particularly tickled by the eggs that the "silly Easter bunny" dropped in the fountain.


Our lucky ducky got some dollars and coins in her eggs again! She put them in her bank along with the ones from Roxie's birthday. It's getting full so soon she'll get to divide up her bank (we're doing the savings/donation/buy something fun thing) and get that soft My Little Pony!


Afterward, P'd, Boppa, and Lauren took turns rolling her around the yard. I wish I had taken some video because her laugh is just so infectious. Hardly anyone can helping smiling when she's cackling away.


On a different note, I made a cake! Mike had asked me to make this Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake from Cook's Illustrated. It was kind of involved so I made it Saturday to bring to Easter dinner. I assembled all the ingredients and they were really pretty all laid out. These are the dry ingredients. It took me a few tries to find some Dutch process cocoa. I used all mine and sometime since I ran out, regular grocery stores stopped carrying it so I ended up going to Penzey's, which wasn't a huge deal because I love that place.


The recipe has you make a pudding and use a certain technique for mixing the batter so you get that height and crumb of an old fashioned cake, as opposed to the rich, smaller cakes that are kind of in right now. The frosting was also a little bit of a chore, it needed a double boiler like the pudding and then an ice bath to get it to just the right temp. Was it worth it? Oh, yes.


I definitely won't make this cake for anything but an occasion or special request but it was soooo good. Mike took some to work today and one of his coworkers called it the best cake he'd ever had (I'm not sure he was entirely serious, haha) and asked for the recipe. It was fun to do something so involved!