Easter Sunday

This Easter we wanted to go up to San Luis Obispo again but the Marine Corps didn't give Nick any extra days off so we ended up staying here. I thought that was so weird since it's a pretty important religious holiday but whatever. Instead we stayed here which wasn't so bad because the base had a lot of fun events going on. On Saturday we went to an egg hunt and Haley got a basket full of eggs. Nick enjoyed the free snow cones ...three times. Then on Sunday the girls got their Easter baskets and then we all got ready and went to Champagne Easter brunch. It was nice except our waitress was drunk. I know this because she came to our table twice and said "I think I'm getting really drunk" without either of us prompting her, in fact she told us she was drunk as a substitute for her introduction, as in "I think I'm drunk, what can I get you to drink?". So that's how our Easter went.

3 Months Old

My little angel butt is 3 months old as of the 9th of April. This month she has decided that if she is awake she wants to be either propped up in a sitting position or standing up, she prefers to stand though. She has also decided that her signature pose will involve having her fist up by her face, as made evident in the above photos. Her current favorite activities are going for walks and playing with mommy, daddy, or sissy, and drooling, oh does she ever love to drool. In fact, it's borderline gross. I took her to the PX yesterday and she was sucking her fist so much that she was leaving a trail of drool drops throughout the store, like a snail trail.

The last photo of her buttcrack is a result of a really heavy diaper. We had spent a couple of hours at the park, then she fell asleep in the car and slept until 6 so she went without a diaper change for 5 hours. After she woke up when I pulled her pants off to check her diaper this is what we found.

Cinnamon Roll Fail

Unfortunately I don't have pictures of my cinnamon rolls because they never made it to roll form and the dough is in the trash. I guess I could've photographed the dough sitting in the trash but I don't like to add insult to injury, especially to myself. So here is what happened, everything was going great until I cracked my egg and let it fall into the dry indredients only to find that it was a bloody egg. Yeah, gross right? Unfortunately it landed right on the yeast so I had to scoop out the egg and the yeast came with it as well as some flour. I went ahead and put more yeast in and a new egg and turned on my food processor. I had the dough hook in the food processor, something I hadn't done before, and I guess I didn't put it in right because nothing was happening, dough was not being made. So I thought maybe I need to stir the wet ingredients to the bottom. I turned it on again and liquid started pouring out of the bottom of the food processor. Great. So then I decided to just do it myself, mix that dough by hand, which it turns out is a complete pain, and there is definitely a reason people use bread machines. So I mixed and mixed and it was really dry, it looked nothing like the picture at all and so I gave up, probably a little too hastily but I hadn't had my coffee yet and I took the egg and the food processor issues as a sign that homemade cinnamon rolls just weren't in the cards for today. I was very dissapointed and settled on eating a carne asada taco for brunch seeing as how it was 10:30 am by the time this fiasco ended.

As for the strawberry cream cake, that thing was amazing. It looks a little like a 5 year old assembled it and it looked so dang delicious that it was half eaten and I didn't bother to adjust the white balance on my camera even though I knew the photos were far too blue, and they're out of focus. Anyway, this is about the cake not my photography so I'll get over it.

Yum!

Did you know that I adore eating? I'm sure most people adore it too, but I'm not sure if most people can spend a substantial part of their days scanning through food blogs looking at pictures of food, and then saving recipes in their internet favorites. Usually I make recipes that are simple and quick but not anymore! I have decided that at least once a week I'm going to make something a little more time consuming and intricate, sometimes twice a week. This week I'm going to make Strawberry Cream Cake courtesy of Eat Me, Delicious and homemade cinnamon rolls from The Tasty Kitchen . So I decided to play a little game where I compare photos of the food I made to photos of the food taken by the people who made the recipe. I have a lot of faith that my cake will look awesome, the cinnamon rolls I'm not so sure about because they involve yeast and frankly I'm a little worried about using something that is alive, reproducing and producing CO2. It just sounds more like a science experiment. Anyway, here are the photos of what the food should look like:



Doesn't that strawberry cake look just amazing? I can't wait to make it. And yes, in case you are wondering, I am making it for my birthday which is tomorrow. I'll post my photos on Sunday hopefully :)

Hair Bows and Bouganvillas

A few weekends ago we went to San Diego so Haley could spend the night at Sea World with her girl scout troop. Long story short I messed up the dates and we went one weekend too soon. We still went to Sea World the next day and Haley got to go again with her troop the next weekend so everything worked out. While we were in San Diego we stayed in a place called Old Town. It's basically the La Villita of San Diego except far more hilly (is that a word? It had lots of hills). We loved it so much. The picture of Haley by the bouganvilla is from a restaurant parking lot that we briefly had parked in before realizing it was a tow away zone.

Before we took Haley over to Sea World only to find that we had come on the wrong weekend we had walked all over Old Town and smelled it's many Mexican restaurants but we couldn't eat just then because we thought we needed to get Haley to Sea World. By the time we got back every restaurant had a line wrapped around the side of the building and Alice was fussy so we knew we didn't want to wait in line. Instead we bought a couple of flour tortillas from a street vendor and continued walking. Let me tell you, a flour tortilla from a street vendor is just about as close to San Antonio one can get while in San Diego. It was heaven, unfortunately we each only got one bite because Haley accidentally dropped them on the concrete.

We eventually stumbled upon a place called Rockin Baja Lobster and we ended up eating there. It was a chain restaurant and that would not have been my first choice by far but I'm so glad we ate there, it was amazing. Nick and I ordered a bucket of lobster, shrimp, chicken, and carne asade for $39.99! This was not a small bucket and it was overflowing with lobster tail. They were small lobster tails though and they were prepared in the simplest yet most delicious way, they were lightly seasoned, then "flash fried" in a pan I am guessing because they were not oily or breaded. The shells were also left on so it was a very hands on dining experience. It was so filling that we only ate the lobster and shrimp because we were full by the time we reached the chicken and carne asade which were on the bottom of the bucket. I loved that place.

As for the hair bows Alice is modeling in the above picture, those were made by a fellow military wife for Alice. We had been having problems with people calling Alice a boy so I ordered the bows. I think they look SO cute, but they're much bigger than I anticipated. When Nick saw her wearing one yesterday he said "Oh my God! What did you put on her head?!".

2 Months Old!

Wow, pregnancy seriously took forever, especially the last 2 months. Alice is already 2 months old and it feels like just yesterday she was born. I love my girls so much and it just blows my mind how quickly they grow. This month was pretty neat, she really started to show her little personality now that she keeps her eyes open for more than a few minutes. She smiles all the time, she loves to just sit and be talked to, she likes it when I play with her cute feet, she loves bath time, she still trys to stand up all the time, oh and I really hope I don't jinx myself here but the colic thing seems to be ending. We have our good days and our fussy days but the good outweigh the fussy and the fussy aren't nearly as bad as they used to be.

Petting Zoo

We had a traveling petting zoo in town this last week so Nick and I took the girls to check it out. When we arrived there was a sign warning us of all the possible ailments that we might encounter if we didn't wash our hands including death so you better believe I doused my family (excluding Alice) in purell! Thanks goodness I had some purell because the petting zoo didn't provide any which I thought was weird; most of them have bottles hanging on the fences. Oh and look carefully at the picture of Haley; there is a sign in the background that reads "do not feed fingers to the animals". I guess it's a common problem, people feeding the animals fingers, common enough to warrant a sign.

There is also a video of Haley feeding a donkey on our youtube site.