Brilliant Bread

Kitchen Aid fun:

thanks to mom and dad for the Kitchen aid!!!!! and to mikes parents for the attachments! And me for the cookbook! We have been having fun making stuff with it. I think its been used every day since Christmas! I still haven't seen Mike's baguettes everyday, he says we don't have the right flour. So as soon as we get the right flour and some semolina it will be great fun making our own pasta fresh. I hear there is nothing like it, I think I had some once when I was on the census training at this little italian restaurant I found....they had the best ravioli I had ever tasted stuffed with fresh spinach and fresh cheese. Anyway, I digress, I made the yummiest cinnamon swirl bread...it didnt even last a day! I made some sandwich style bread last night too...perfect recipe! just like this little sandwich shop we used to go to in utah because they had some great bread...not sure if you guys got to visit it it was called Great Harvest...well I know their secret now...soon I will try their flavor combo's like spinach bread with tomato soup. Here's some pics of the cinnamon swirl...

So finally we have completed Jadas playhouse. We found this last March in Sams club, a cypress wood and cedar mix for only 200 dollars. The plastic ones cost just as much but the harsh sun out here rots anything plastic within months...even jadas sand shovels dont last but a month or two, so needless to say i was super excited to find this wooden playhouse so cheap! We had it from March until her birthday in August and she was super excited. I put it together but we had to wait till we had the money to finish the vision. So we used the rest of the christmas money we had to finally finish. I had decided to put it in the highest corner of our yard so the floor would drain, i had to dig up the entire back corner and build a drainage river in the back and on the side of the playhouse and we are gonna line it with river rocks. Then i had to move the house and level and dig a trench for the frame to bury in, and finally we got like 8 bags of shredded tires ( rubber mulch) and pured in a "yard" around it and put up a tiny white picket fence. jada has big plans for the springtime and planting a flower garden and flowers in pots all around her house. Here's the pics:

Christmas at last! Hope everyone was Jolly for awhile at least :)! Missed granny's gumbo, sad, miss my family, very sad. Will be coming home most definitely in March. March 14th i believe is Jada's spring break. So christmas morning Jada opened a present she long suspected to be a pillow and voila it was Monkey Jammies...she hates monkeys but loves the jammies, finally we can rid ourselves of the jammies Jada refuses to let me sneak away that she has owned since she was 3. the pants are nearly to her knees now! So our toyless Christmas went over well, even santa complied with the exception of a Barbie doll and a Toy from the grandparents. Jada is the proud new owner of the nintendo DS which she loves, from mimi and other paw paw. Plenty of clothes thanks to granny and lots of books including an encyclopedia of Presidents (her newest interest to which i find i am grossly uninformed and can use the book to help me teach her) and a Shel Silverstein poem book (which i have already had to read half of cos she loves the silly stories as i did when i was little). So our christmas day as you all know led to Christmas sledding and followed by a night of family games and hot cocoa till everyone about fell asleep. it was fun and here are some pictures of the sledding, i included one of my favorites of mike's brother whose hat made him look like that bully on "A Christmas Story" Will somebody pleas send me back pics of Christmas at home??????

God bless Jada, she always lets me play photo shoot with her, here are some nicely natural lit close ups i was practicing on her when i thought the light looked perfect, i think i was right. no touch ups on thses pics at all just the way i shot them with border added. The top pic is her showing off some newpolar bear christmas socks and sweater.

Just looking through pictures last year when i was back home...thought these were funny.

Christmas Ballet recital

Jada's Christmas Recital was a couple days ago. What a fiasco too! The whole night almost a big disaster for mike and I. Anyway we made it through and here are the pictures and video. the video is blurry because the camera couldn't focus (because they start the dance in the dark.) Sorry. Jada is all the way on the left, i tried to keep her in the middle. The first video is at practice the next is the show. There is another video of Jada laughing alot, she was so tired and giggly after her ballet show.

Pretty soon we will be heading up to the mountains to play in the snow. It will be interesting with the dog, cross our fingers we don't cross the paths of any bunnies and have her run off. Jada has big plans for the snow including a snowman, snow fort and a big snowball fight. She says she wants me and her and cici on one side and daddy on the other.

Poor Jada says she wants another cat for Christmas too. I keep telling her if we got a cat the dog would eat it. She also says she still cant decide what to ask for from Santa so I assured her I already wrote a letter requesting her stocking be filled with green beans and broccoli.

Halloween, come and gone

So halloween was interesting this year, i almost had to go alone because mike worked late. Luckily he got out just in the nick of time for us to go door to door.

Jada had a blast this year running door to door. Although i think her and her cousin weren't ringing doorbells or knocking right because quite a few houses that i saw giving out candy didnt even open the door when the girls got there but thats ok, she got a cauldron full anyway.

She was a witch this year, she decided last year as we were walking the clearance aisles thank goodness so her costume was under 5 dollars. She says she wants to be a musketeer for next year so if I cant find anything on the clearance aisles this year i may commission granny to make something. Of course Barbie may have a new movie out by then and they'll want to be something else.

Jada got best costume at her grandparents house and a cute little skeleton trophy. We carved the pumpkins, of course jada wanted a cat again, baked pumpkin seeds which i polished off, and plan on making pumpkin bread with the rest of the pumpkin pieces we carved off and pureed.

Its funny everyone thought when Jada was dressed like a witch she looked just like me, I wasn't quite sure how to take that but they said it was seeing her in the dark hair wig....hmmm....Oh and it was spirit week at Jada's school one of the days was crazy hair day there is a picture below. Here are some of our halloween pictures: