Rolling In The Dough

Jackie spent the night Monday and announced - in one of her many attempts to dodge bedtime - that she wanted to make cookies. 

We had to negotiate the type, flavor, shape and color(s) before she *finally* went to sleep. Tiny girl is stubborn!

Not pretty but tasty!

So Tuesday we made sugar cookie dough, divided it into quarters and pulled out the Christmas cookie cutters.  

Jac colored the icing and did all the decorating.

And most of the eating.  

Jac was adamant she didn’t want the color to be “baby poop brown” again but she was having too much fun adding colors and . . . Yeah, brown it is. 😂

We ran out of time, so Leanne made her cookies on Wednesday,

including two shades of purple icing 

and most of a large bottle of sprinkles. 

We still had half the dough remaining, so today Jac and I added lemon flavoring, rolled, cut, baked and iced more cookies. Yum! Gotta love a project that provides snacks *and* three days of fun. 

Easter Parade, Round 2

We reshot the Easter pics, with added CO cousin and a guest photographer (Rachel).

So happy to have all these smiling faces together. 

Whirlwind

It was a whirlwind 3 days but I think we checked all the boxes on Addy’s California wishlist. 

Addy and Leia (almost) may be teenagers, but they still love their stuffies

so first up was a visit to the Disney Outlet store, 

and the Japanese dollar store (Daisco? What a treasure trove!)

We lunched at the harbor

and strolled along the promenade 

and Ventura Pier.

We had French fries from In-n-Out, pizza from Toppers and bread pudding from Boadcious BBQ.

Addy learned to make my our favorite focaccia bread,

how to separate eggs (“This feels disgusting. But it’s a good disgusting.”)

and beat them stiff enough to make angel food cake to go with our field-fresh strawberries. 

Jac and Donovan are going to be super disappointed tomorrow to find Addy’s gone. We’re all going to be counting the weeks until she comes back in December for Disneyland!

Surprise!

Look who dropped in for a visit today, all the way from CO. 

Leia and Rachel

Such a happy surprise - we had no idea they were coming.

Jac, Donovan, Leanne and Addy

Now what shall we do between now and Sunday??

Easter’s Coming

It was a bit spur-of-the-moment, but Jac and Leanne had on their Easter dresses and everyone was in a good mood, so we went for it. We ended up with 122 shots and 10 keepers. Not too bad! I’m not quitting my day job but we were pretty pleased with these. (Wait - I don’t have a day job! 😜)

Leanne, 10, Leia, 12, Jaclyn, 4 and Donovan, 2.

 Donovan, “I’m a dinosaur, ROARRRRRRRR.”

School Dayz

School time for Leanne (new quilt, fresh from the long-armer!)

and Leia (new glasses!) 

Honest, they were a lot happier than they look.

Falling Stars

Look what’s headed to the long-armer tomorrow.

I love how this turned out, especially the mismatched stars and the sashing.

So different from the original with all my oopsies “design decisions”. 

And possibly to make amends for the top fighting me the entire time, the plaid backing - another “what was I thinking!??” buying decision -  went together in almost perfect alignment on the first try. 

Shocking. And also, hooray!

Seeing Stars

Slooooowly making progress on this one.

The stars and horizontal sashings are done, just need to finish the vertical sashings, borders and backing before Debbie picks this up on Monday. I think I can, I think I can . . .

Celebrating

Got our second vaccine at the fairgrounds today - 

took less than 30 minutes,

including 15 minutes sitting in the sun, waiting to be released -

and celebrated with some bodaciously good bbq. So very happy to have that behind us and be one more step towards “normal”.