Birthday Month

February is also known as "birthday month" at our house because my birthday and A-Dub's are both in Feb., 8 days apart.  So it is busy, busy and can also be a bit expensive, which is ill-timed since credit card bills reflecting Christmas purchases are rolling in.  That being said, when an opportunity came up to make cookies for a corporate Valentine party I jumped at the chance to have fun and make a little cash.  

One day I will do an exhaustive sugar cookie post.  Exhaustive is the right word because it is exhausting.

I forgot to take pictures of my purple cookies until I'd filled the box with half of my red ones.  You kind of get the gist.

I made 200 cookies!  Plus a few extra for the munchkins . . . no way could I make all those cookies and not share a few with them.  And for those who know what happens when I make cookies . . . you would be impressed to know I did not stay up past midnight one single night doing these.  I actually planned ahead!  

Here I am getting a little help from Miss Gigi--we sorted sprinkles by color (in our pj's) the Saturday before and she did such a good job and only ate the broken ones that weren't pretty enough to put on cookies.

A-Dub and Bobo played outside so he would stop disturbing our piles.

So then it was my birthday and look at the awesome and hilarious cake A-Dub got for me.  If you don't get it, go to this website.  cakewrecks.com.  And spend the next 5 hours laughing your ass off.  And remember they only feature professional cakes.  Nothing homemade.

A-Dub said it was really hard to convince the ladies at Tom Thumb to do the cake how he wanted but that they did do it right.

For dinner that night we took the kids to the Magic Time Machine and Snow White was our waitress.  She was very sweet to Gigi.

We let her pick out her own outfit.

This is a school bus.  You can reserve it to eat in . . . maybe next time?!?  We definitely will have to go back--Gigi has been talking about it a lot.

One of Bobo's new words that he says really well is "ballOOn!"  It's super cute.  He has been talking a lot but most words/phrases he only says the first few syllables of.  "I love you" is "aaaa llaaaaahhhh," "milk" is "mih," etc.  But he says balloon very clearly.

So you might think that due to my birthday's proximity to Valentine's Day I might be resentful towards it but quite the opposite, I have always loved Valentine's Day!  My favorite color is red and I like hearts so I always enjoyed getting heart-themed wrapping paper on my birthday presents. 

So I may have gone a tiny bit overboard . . . . . 

Double-fisting blow pops, courtesy of his sweet sister for opening them for him.

That is silly putty, which she later ground into her pants, necessitating them being thrown away.

I could not seem to make good heart shaped pancakes though and I was really frustrated so I made one enormous pancake and cut hearts out of it with a cookie cutter.  Not that it mattered because neither of them ate one single bite of their breakfast.  A-Dub and I agreed, next year we'll do candy after they get home from school.  And then they won't eat any dinner ;)

A-Dub and I both went up to school for the class parties but there was SO MUCH CHAOS in Gigi's room we didn't take any pictures.

First Kool-aid mustache!

Happy V-Day!!!

Yes I did make a heart-shaped pizza.  Two in fact.  I found this recipe recently, and it was really easy and good!  I made one pizza in each oven and my pizza stone will only fit in my bigger oven so we really got a taste-test comparison.  Pizza stone of course won hands down.  I am so curious about what goes on during turkey pepperoni production that makes it curl up. 

To celebrate our birthdays A-Dub and I had an "A-Dub and Taylor day" on the Saturday between our birthdays.  First we went shopping at Northpark, along with the rest of the entire city of Dallas.  We saw two people we knew just at the food court.  A-Dub is actually pretty fun to shop with.  We both like to get good deals, so we have a debriefing where we show each other what we bought and what good of a deal we got.  Then we went to the Bliss Spa at the W Hotel and had a massage and facial.  If you want a good massage, Karin at the Bliss Spa.  She was tiny and I was a little worried she wouldn't get the massive knots out of my back and shoulders.  I loathe getting a massage that is the equivalent of a back rub.  But I told her I really needed her to work me over and oh my goodness I could barely breathe I was in so much pain!  But it was a good hurt, and just what I needed.  Also they have heated massage tables which I love.  

Then we had dinner at Fearing's at the Ritz Carlton and spent the night there.  Fearing's is amazing of course and we left so miserably full we fell asleep before 11pm.  Lame.  We were all pooped out though (to borrow a phrase from Gigi).  Best part of the weekend--laying in bed that morning and watching TV while drinking coffee.  Then we had brunch at Fearing's which was equally amazing and we were equally stuffed.  We even had a (semi) celebrity sighting--Jaap van Zweden, the conductor of the Dallas Symphony was eating at a table right by us.  He looks exactly like his picture on their website.  We had so much fun on our weekend away but we missed our babies so much!

So then it was A-Dub's birthday and I wanted to make sure that after all the celebrating we'd been doing it wasn't just like whatever.  Plus it was a Monday--boo.  :(  I forgot to take pictures of his birthday breakfast but it was good.  Breakfast tacos with onion, green bell pepper and sausage.  Yummy.

He picked up the angels from school so I rushed home from work and whipped up this.

Red velvet.  His favorite.  I will post the recipe one day soon but I'm giving up sweets for Lent so it won't be for another 6 weeks at least ;)

Wish I'd taken a video of this boy having a meltdown because he did not have any cake in front of him yet. 

Gigi looks exactly like my sister in some pictures and this is one of them.

We let the kids eat first so we could have perfectly grilled steaks.  I am extremely particular about how my steak is cooked (medium rare--no one ever does it right (except in a restaurant and my mom :))).  These were perfect.  Yea, me!  A-Dub's favorites--rosemary roasted potatoes and sauteed spinach.  

We ate in front of a fire even though it was 60 degrees outside.

Before we had kids I don't think we ever ate a single meal at home sitting at the table.

A very happy birthday to my partner in crime, the love of my life, best dad ever, the extremely camera-shy ADub!

It has been such a fun February that I am completely exhausted!

Christmas

So, Christmas pictures are way overdue but here are some anyway!

So, so grateful that our daycare has Santa come to school so we don't have to deal with the mall!

I hate my hair (and my face) in this picture but it's the best one we got.  Amy, can you come take Christmas Eve pictures next year?  Props to A-Dub for semi going with the wardrobe theme.  I know you think I'm crazy, but in my defense, I already had mine and Bobo's outfits - wasn't planning on matching - when I found the dress for Gigi.  From there on I couldn't resist.  Got a lot of stares at church.

Yes, she was saying "that's mine!"

Santa brought her everything on her list!  If you are disgusted by the number of presents under our tree please know we had 9 people opening gifts.  We really tried to tone it down (which we say every year) but between Santa, parents, grandparents and aunt it adds up to a lot of presents.

Bobo loves animals, especially lions.  So it was fortuitous that "The Lion King" was the Disney movie that was for sale this Christmas.  And we have watched it probably 100 times.  Bobo can kind of say lion, but usually what he does is pick up the DVD case and bring it to us.  It's so cute (but really, I've about had enough of Simba and Co.)!

Transferring stocking goodies to a new purse/bag.

Can you see how the flame on the candle on the right is way higher than it should be?  I guess I should have recognized that something was wrong with it, because something happened to it--I have no idea what--but I came in the dining room to find a small portion of the tablecloth underneath the candle ON FIRE.  I quickly doused it out (I don't even know how--a water glass I guess) and everything was okay, except my pretty table cloth and our table has a black spot on it but it's already very dark brown so I think it will be okay with a little TLC.  So glad I happened to come back in the dining room or who knows what would have happened.  The candle had burned strangely - a portion of the side of it had burned down way more than the rest of the candle so I'm not sure what happened.  Maybe the lighted wick fell off onto the table?  Anyway, it still didn't ruin my fun tablescape :)

Opening presents was so tough that this guy had to take his first nap at like 9:30am! 

We got matching boots :)  And we wore them to the mall one day, and got more stares, and I heard a lady say "oh look, they have matching boots," which pretty much made my day!

I hope you had a very Merry Christmas as well!

Halloween

Oh boy, what a crazy week!  Halloween being on Monday was tough, because we had 2 parties on Saturday, our church's "Fall Festival" (a Halloween carnival) on Sunday night, the kids' school Halloween Walk-Around (they get in costume and go trick-or-treating at local businesses) on Monday morning and then finally our neighborhood Halloween carnival on Monday night.  Of course the kids' Halloween parties were on Monday afternoon so I was at work for approximately 3 hours.  Also of course, I signed up to make Halloween cookies a month ago and didn't really factor in when I was going to make them!  But I'm a woman of my word . . . and thanks to Flickr, I found some really cute cookies I wanted to make.

Okay so my witches look like frogs.  My witch cookie cutter needs a serious upgrade.

And I also did bats.  They were super easy.

We're still majorly into princesses and Gigi made a perfect Snow White.  Love that foot hanging in the background!  That's Bobo.  My friend at work suggested that I get Gigi a Halloween bucket shaped like an apple.  I loved that idea but couldn't find one anywhere so I made it.  I guess I'll save that blog post for next year when it's more relevant!

Bobo was a dwarf.  Non-specific, just dwarf.  People kept asking me if he was Shrek.  He wasn't happy about his hat.  I knew a beard wouldn't fly.

This was the best picture I got and it really annoys me that his hat wasn't styled cute!  It was super cute and my mom made it and the vest and belt.  Thank you Mom! 

I was in love with this guy's costume!  Wish I'd gotten a picture of him and his astronaut big brother.

These two were attached at the hip all night.

Love that these two brought the girl power!  Supergirl (in pink) is my goddaughter and she is as sweet as can be.  Her sister is Batgirl and she is so sassy!  She cracks me up.

Hope you all had a wonderful Halloween too!