christmas time

Tis the season

"kiss cookies" as my hubby calls them. Made enough to snack on
and then some for Santa.

A little center piece I made. Glued candy canes to a jar and filled
the jar with Hershey kisses

butterfly cookie masks

Alana has a very cute cookbook that Grandma B got her.  She saw these cute little butterfly masks in there and wanted to make them. Daddy got called into work so I decided to cheer the kiddos up by making these with them. I think their favorite part was testing the frosting just to make sure it was good.

cutting out the hearts

put the points together and pinch them

cutting out the "eye holes"

Having a great time helping

cooling waiting for some frosting

very carefully placing the sprinkles just right

All done. We are going to a friend's house later for dinner
and she decided to leave a couple blank in case someone didn't
like sprinkles.

Yummy tomatoes

Our tomato plant was going crazy and we had way more tomatoes than we (I) could eat. So I decided to try and make my own tomato sauces.

Here they are all peeled

It smelled sooo good. Added a little of this and a little of that.
Should have written down what I put in there. It was good.

Freshly made bread sticks to go with it...sure why not?!

Alana's quilt

I had some left over material and needed something to do with it. My Mom suggested making a quilt. It just so happened I was planning a trip to OH to stay with them for a week with the kiddos so I packed it all up and brought it with me. We went over my Grandma's house and she showed me how to cut the squares out and get it going.  What a fun day that was. I never thought in a million years I would do a quilt!

My squares didn't actually line up but it's all good. Adds character

Alana picked hot pink for the backing of her quilt

Here she is all snuggled up in her quilt. I think she likes it.

Nothing a little love can't fix

So the hubby was having a bad couple of days. So in order to cheer him up the kids and I decided to make him a cake and his favorite meal to let him know that we loved him.

The kids decided to use the Garfield cake pan my Aunt just gave me.
I forgot to take a picture before we cut into it.

Dave's Favorite meal. Chicken Kastu, steamed rice, and mac salad.

Cinnamon Rolls

Ok. So for whatever reason I was in a baking mood yesterday. So I made 2 loaves of whole wheat bread and then decided to try my hand at cinnamon rolls. Having never made anything like that before I wasn't sure what to expect. They actually turned out pretty yummy.  Though next time I will be adding more cinnamon and sugar mixture to it.

rolling out the dough

adding the cinnamon and sugar

rolled and cut ready to rise overnight in the fridge

fresh out of the oven

ready to be eaten

Making ice cream

We got a few inches of snow last night and the first thing I thought of was making some ice cream using the snow.  My Dad used to do that when I was little and I loved it. That is one of my favorite memories as a child. Every winter I would always want to make ice cream using snow but we never had an ice cream maker. So this past summer we bought one. We made ice cream using ice and rock salt but that just doesn't have the same texture as using snow. I am so happy that I got to make it today with Tyler. I hope that these times will be great memories for Tyler when he gets older.

Chopped chocolate for our Chocolate chip ice cream

the snow bowl next to the ice cream maker

mmm. Chocolate chunk ice cream ready to be eaten!