We're Back

Well we made it back from Pennsylvania. Overall it was a good trip. We got into Philly an hour and a half late thanks to a delay in Cincinnati. So by the time we made it to Allentown it was 12:30 pm eastern time. That was Friday.

Saturday, I had some appointments early to look at homes, so no sleeping in. We did the house looking thing, then went to lunch with my sissy Alison and her kids. Noah has not eaten anything at this point. Yeah he is sick, always fun on a trip. Next we met up with my mom and other sister Andrea to go shopping at the outlets (The Childrens Place had some great deals, and there was this fun store called The Gourmet Chef, and there I scored myself some mini-single serving sized springform pans, can't wait to try those out). While we were there I showed mom this infection thing Noah has on his finger. She was concerned, so that night I got to take Noah to InstaCare. Apparently he had some sort of Staph infection and they sent us on our way with a perscription (which because it was a Saturday night was impossible to fill till the next day). Thanks to the perscription Noah starts to feel better. Yeah.

These cute little cousins will all go to kindergarden the same year, they are all within a few months of each other.

Sunday morn I wake up and I feel like crap (sore throat, head and body aches). How fun for me. I decided there is no way I am going to sit in a hotel room all day so I make the hour drive to my parent and attend church with them and some of my siblings. After church we had dinner with many of my siblings (we missed you Jeff and Alison). All day I keep getting fevers and popping as much ibpropren as possible. Thanks to my big sister Andrea who tried her best to help me (even though she was there with her 4 kids while her husband was in Japan). We came home from church and I started crying. "Audrey, why are you crying?" "That is what I do when I'm sick." So sorry, to those of you who had to deal with sick Audrey, she's not so much fun. It was fun to see the fam though. I do not get to do that as often as I would like.

Brad, Audrey, Joel, Andrea, Kyle

Some of the siblings

Next day more house hunting with my mom and sister-in-law Carrie. We met my sister Alison and had lunch at the Cracker Barrell and then went for a shopping trip to Kohls. That night, I met up with Kevin for dinner with his co-workers. This is Monday, I am still not feeling well but as long as I take the ibpropren I'm okay.

Next day Tuesday, I drove around trying to find the perfect neighborhood for me and then met up with Kevin and some of the co-workers to go to lunch and go-karting. There is a reason I do not do things like this very often. I am not a great driver, as a result I crashed and awarded myself with a big old 5 inch long scratch, welt thing on my neck. It was a good fun way to end the trip (seriously). Then on the airport for uneventful trip home.

Noah getting ready to drive the go-cart. Not really, you had to be at least 10.

Kevin before the race started.



This is me, yes I was driving slow enough that you could take an action shot.

Today I have been sitting on the couch wondering if I should go see a doctor about this sore throat thing. Typically when I do that, it is only viral and they send me home with nothing, but how long do a wait???

I bought the boys these cute matching shirts from The Children's Place.

Lunch Ladies

A while back I signed up to host a lunch group at my house, long before I made plans to go to Pennsylvania. So today I had about 25 people over for lunch. I just did a pot luck so there was lots of yummy food. It was lots of fun, but with all those people (about 10 kids the rest adults) there was quite a mess, so thanks Kelli for helping me get my house back in order. Now I am just so tired that I just want to sit and watch my recorded American Idol from last night, but alas I must pack and go visiting teaching. We leave in the morn to go to PA so it will be a busy night getting everything ready. If I do not blog while I'm gone, there will be lots to update you on when I return, so until next time...

Half Way Through

Well today is the official half-way point of my Body for Life challenge. It has been a tough few weeks since I last updated on it. I am at a weight that I was for almost 5 years so it is a tough point to get below. Also, when I stop losing weight it is not as motivating to diet. Yes, Audrey is discouraged, but at the same time I am recomitting myself to try harder and finish out the challenge. I have a tough few weeks coming up since I leave for Pennsylvania in 2 days and then we go to Disneyland in May. It is always harder to diet when I am not at home, but I will try my best. Wish me luck.

Cheesecake Bites

I know it's not cheat day, but....No it took a lot of self restraint not to eat a bunch of these. I had to make dinner for a family and these are something that I have wanted to try, so I did and I tasted one (or two) to make sure they were okay to give away. The rest are in the freezer awaiting cheat day.

I used this recipe as the cheesecake base, but obviously I did not make this in a springform pan, so we had to improvise a bit. You will need to double the crust, because 1 cheesecake recipe will make about 100 little bite size bad boys. I used mini muffin pans, which I sprayed with PAM. I put about 3/4 tsp. of crust mixture in the bottom of the muffin pans and packed that down. I baked just the crust in the oven at 350 for about 5 minutes. Then I filled each muffin cup about 3/4 of the way full with the cheesecake base. Then baked them for 15 minutes at 350. Let them sit until cooled, then carefully run a knife around the edges, and then tip the pan over and they should just fall out. For presentation purposes I put each one in a gold foil candy cup (not really sure there official name). Half I topped with lime curd and a thin slice of a key lime and the others I just drizzled with fudge and carmel. Simple and relatively easy to make.

Cheat Day

So today I am going a little cheat day crazy. There have been a few different recipes I wanted to try. First, white chocolate popcorn. This was super easy. I microwaved 1 bag of popcorn and then melted 3 squares of Almond Bark. Poured that on top of the popcorn, stirred till it was mixed well. Let it cool. Then drizzled melted chocolate chips on it and yum it was done. Unfortunatly I ate it to quickly to take a picture.

Next, yesterday my friend blogged about Lion House dinner rolls, so I decided I just had to try those. So here we go yeast project #2. I think they turned out well. Here is the recipe. I thought they were super easy. Some things I have learned that have helped me with these yeast recipes are: make sure that the temperature of your water is between 110-115 degrees before you add the yeast. If it is to hot it will burn your yeast. I just dip a meat thermometer in the water to test the temp. Next little tip: I hate waiting forever for the dough to rise, so I will turn on my oven to whatever temperature I will be baking at and I will sit the bowl of dough on top of the oven and the warmth of the oven will shorten the rising time substantially.

Jumpin Jacks

Today for our fun Spring Break activity we went to lunch at Wendy's and Jumpin Jacks in Springville. The kids love this place and would stay there and jump forever if we let them. We did limit them to a few hours, but it sure did make the day go by faster. Unfortunatly, I forgot the camera, so no pictures today. It has been a fun filled week for the kids, but we are out of fun money so tommorrow will just be a picnic at the park.

Dino Museum

Yesterday my friend and I took our kids to the Dinosaur Museum at Thanksgiving Point. The kids had a blast. The highlights for them were the sand and water erosion table and the dinosaur bone dig. Isaac had so much fun at the erosion table that his sleeves were soaked up past his elbows. We had also hoped to go to farm country as well, but it was so bitterly cold that it was not an option.
Please someone help me figure out what I am doing wrong. If I upload the pictures and then move them, you can no longer click on them, why is that? Help.

Utah

So just incase you care, yesterday it was 80 degrees and right now it is snowing. It's a good day.

Austenland

I just finished reading Austenland by Shannon Hale. For all you Jane Austen fans out there, it is a quick(under 200 pages) but enjoyable read. Thank you Kelli for lending it to me. Next up on the reading list (hopefully) is Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict. I hear the two books are similiar. We will see which is better. I am always looking for a good clean book to read, so if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

A Trip to the Zoo

Well this week is Spring Break for the kids, so we have tried to think of some fun things to do with the kids to keep them busy. Yesterday we went to the zoo. It was a long day but very fun. We had 6 adults with us and 18 kids and luckily we never lost a child for longer then 1 minute. Oh, I should also mention that it was about 80 degrees outside, how about that for a nice day.

Learning to Use My Food Storage

So, as I mentioned before, I have been trying to be better prepared for an emergency. A big part of that is obviously food storage. I typically by 5 lb. bags of flour and that will last me about a year. Well the other day I decided to buy enough to fill a 5 gallon bucket ( I know it is not a ton, but it is a start). Okay now I have all of this flour, what in the heck do I do with it. So I decided to try and make something with yeast (this is a task I had not yet tackled. I'm a caterer not a baker). So I thought about what I would need in an emergency and of course the first thing that popped into my head was cinnamon rolls. One of my favorite all time treats is a CinnaBon. I went to copykat.com and found this imitation recipe there. They did not taste exactly like a Cinnabon, but they sure were delicious, especially hot out of the oven and the frosting was heavenly (I only made a half batch of the frosting and it was more then enough). I am happy that the recipe turned out, I will not be so afraid to make something involving yeast in the future. Next week I need to start trying some recipes for miniature fancy desserts for a catering job I have coming up, so if anyone knows any good recipes, please let me know.

It is Officially Done

Here is the table completely finished. It isn't perfect, but I am still proud of it. It sure looks better then it used to. I only refinished the top, it used to be a light honey maple stain, which is nice but just doesn't go with dark wood floors, so I had to make them match. It took a lot of time and I would have to think seriously if I would ever want to attempt something like that again.

Also today I let Noah have his first "all day" sucker. Again, I do not recommend it, because it took like an eternity to clean him up afterwards. It was cute to watch him eat it and he was very excited about it, but it was sticky and gross.

What a Weekend!

Well another weekend is done, and it was a productive one. Kevin spent many hours hanging sheet rock in the basement. Yes, it is a fun job, but we are to cheap to pay anyone to do it. He made a lot of progress, over half way done, thanks hun for all your hard work.

My big job for Saturday was working on that darned dining room table. I am happy to say that it is almost finished. I was able to finish sanding and staining the thing. Yeah, and today I put on the first coat of Polyurathane. Only a few more days and it will be done, done.

Even with all the work, I still managed to find time to watch all 4 sessions of general conference (thanks to modern day convinences, I was able to watch them later in the day). It was an uplifting experience, as always. I ended the weekend thinking of all the things that I could do to become a better person. One theme that stuck out to me throughout the conference was Testimony. One line in particular said something like, Let your children hear your testimony. I am not big on getting up in front of everyone in sacrament meeting and bearing my testimony, but I know it is something I need to work on. I also know that there are ways to share my testimony with my children not only at church, and I will make an effort to do that as well.

After the great uplifting experience of the weekend I woke this morning to cruddy weather. This is the house as I was leaving this afternoon, hail and snow on the ground. I know it could be worse but hello it is April, and it should just not snow this time of the year.

Pictures

As I mentioned in a previous entry, I took my kids to get their pictures taken at JC Penney's on Saturday. These are some of the pictures that we ordered:

Unfortunatly, Noah was having a bad hair day. He had a big chunk of hair in the back that would just not go down. We tried to find pictures where that did not show as well.

P.S. We do like Isaac just as much as the other boys, we just take each kid for pictures around their birthdays, his b-day is in November (so stay tuned for that).

It's a Good And Bad Day

We will start with the bad. So, today I decided to try and learn Photoshop Elements. It is not going well. I have spent a good part of my day crying and yelling at my computer, and still have nothing to show for it. I keep thinking that Photoshop is playing an April Fool's Day joke on me, but probably not. I had to just stop because when I get frustrated I become a mean mom and my kids don't like it when I am that way, nor do I. I would like to thank my big sis for trying to talk me through it. Sorry I am hopeless.
While I was neglecting my kids today, Isaac gave little Noah the rest of his apple. Apparently 1-year-olds should not eat apples. I looked at the apple and there was blood all over it. I guess when he bit the apple it caused his gums to bleed. Poor little guy. It did not seem to phase him, he was just mad that I took the apple away.
So now for the good news. I am 1/4 of the way through my Body for Life challenge and I have lost 5 pounds. My goal was to lose 8 pounds in the 12 weeks. Looks like I may have to adjust my goal.
I found out today that I will be able to go to Pennsylvania at the end of the month. Kevin has to go for work. I was ticked that he was going to get to go to my home town without me. But thanks to my mother-in-law who has agreed to watch Tanner and Isaac for 5 days, Noah and I will be going with Kevin. It will be fun to get to see my family. So Yeah for me.