Jonah's 4th Birthday

This past Saturday our nephew, Jonah, turned four years old. We love that little guy so much and it is hard to believe he is four already!

While they were in Indiana for Thanksgiving, Jonah's mommy planned a party for him at Pizza King in Indianapolis. The located was picked, because Jonah has a slight obsession with trains and this particular Pizza King delivers your drinks by train (although, we were in the party room and this wasn't the case, the boys still liked watching the train).


A week before the party, Jonah informed his mommy that Aunt Dana was going to make him a blue train cake for his birthday. Not wanting to disappoint my train loving nephew, Aunt Dana got to work on a train cake!


I think he was pleased with the train cake...and the attention he got while we all sang "Happy Birthday" to him!

Cousin Karter was on hand to help blow out the candles!

Jonah really wanted to eat the train...and he did! He ate all of the green decorations off, and maybe one small bite of cake. The train was made of fondant, but wouldn't be all I would want to eat!

After cake it was time to open gifts. Karter was excited to help him open the gift he got for Jonah.

A PEZ dispenser!

(I love this picture!)

Who's more excited!?

Of course, our sweet niece Miss Olivia was on hand to celebrate big brother's birthday!

On Black Friday we got a new video camera and were eager to try it out. Check out our first video on the new camera...us singing to the birthday boy!

Happy Birthday, Jonah! We love you!!

One Big Cookie

Hello, my name is Dana and I'm addicted to cookie cutters! On Cyber Monday my favorite cookie supply website (Karen's Cookies) was having some great sales and free shipping on their products. As I was browsing the cookie cutter selection (and kept adding them to my cart!), I saw a cute house cutter and thought I could use it to make some cabin cookies in the future. When the package arrived yesterday I was surprised when I saw just how large the cookie cutter was.

It is literally the size of Karter's head! A few of these cookies would take my entire batch of dough, needless to say we are getting a smaller house cutter. (Please excuse the cheese in Karter's teeth!) Next time, I will be sure to read the dimensions a little bit better.

New Family Tradition

We are super excited this year to continue with some of the Christmas traditions that we have started for our family, and even more excited about creating new ones. For the past 6 years we have had a beautiful faux Christmas tree (including last year when we used Kim & Terry's). Now that we are (almost) in our house and will be here for Christmas we decided to get rid of the old one and start the tradition of getting a real one! We have always dreamed of getting a real one, but thought it was a waste when we lived in MN and were never home for Christmas. We decided that we will start the tradition of getting our tree the Sunday after Thanksgiving...and apparently that means rain or shine! This past Sunday was not the ideal weather for picking out a tree, but we bundled up and headed to the beautiful Whitetail Tree Farm.

Much to our surprise, when we went into the lodge, Santa was there! Karter had a tough time remembering what was on his Christmas list....and Kaden was hiding behind me!

He's still trying to remember!

After walking around checking out all the trees (in the rain), we finally picked this beauty! A Spruce tree.

Karter has clearly had enough of the rain!

This is one of the only times that Kaden would actually let us put him down. Whenever we would try, he would start yelling "boots are muddy!" First of all, he didn't have boots on, and second, he hadn't taken a step...how could they be muddy?!

After we decided on our tree, one of the workers came by to tag our tree and chop it down for us.

We promised the boys suckers if they were good outside, they were excited to pick out their suckers back in the lodge.

Sticky mess!!

The Boy Scouts helped strap the tree to the van and we headed home to start decorating.

Kristoffer made a fresh cut on the tree and then we put it in the stand.

It took us a bit to find our ornaments outside in the rec room. We knew they were out there someone in the pile of stuff that we have, but it took a little bit of digging to find them. We are still missing a few boxes, but hopefully soon(?) we will be able to find them when "The Great Move of 2011" happens.

Kaden is in love with the tree and really enjoys looking at the ornaments. In the 5 days it has been up, we have had 2 casualties...opps!

Karter was such a great helper with the ornaments.

The workers at the tree farm all wore shirts that said "Family memories that last forever" and we are glad, despite the rain, that we are creating those memories for our family!

My Karterman

Karter is such a sweet, loving little boy. Everyday he says something that just melts my heart and makes me so happy/blessed to be his mommy. In preparation for Thanksgiving, last week at BSF they had the kids write what they are most thankful for. Of course, Karter can't really write yet, so they just wrote what he said. His teacher said that he insisted that she write what he his most thankful for (me!) in purple, since it is my favorite color! Sweet boy!

We have a bucket of letters, and whenever we get them out, this is what our living room looks like. The boys have fun getting them out, but rarely want to make any words with them.

Last week I got them out for Karter while I was doing something else (probably making cookies or something). He called me in to see what word he made, and was pretty proud to she me his name!

After he was tired of letters he came in to draw, and for the first time I actually knew what he had drawn! Our little Karterman is getting so big!!

Wordless Wednesday - Gray Man Syndrome

He's Back!

Today is the first day in nearly a week and a half that our sweet Kaden is back! (Which can be translated to, this is the first day in nearly a week and a half that he hasn't been attached to me!) After a pretty rough weekend of not being able to breath or sleep, I took Kaden to the doctor on Tuesday just to make sure that he was ok. Good thing I did...poor baby had a double ear infection!! On top of that, they were concerned that he may have had pneumonia with all of the difficulty he had breathing. Thankfully they didn't hear anything in his lungs that would have indicated that! So now after a few days of his antibiotic and sleeping with a humidifier in his room, our sweet, happy baby is back!! Praise God!

Wordless Wednesday - World's Best Daddy

Cookie Orders

Besides being a great place to waste time, facebook is also a wonderful place to spread the word about my little cookie "business". This past weekend I had two orders from people I hadn't seen in awhile, but saw my creations on fb. The first order was for a baby shower for a fellow NV grad.

She contacted me through fb and placed an order for 50 cookies for her sisters baby shower.

I love making girly things!

Thanks Amaria!!

The second order this weekend was for my sister in-law, Joscelynn's cousin, Rachel. Rachel was throwing a baby shower for a friend and asked me to make cookies, cupcakes and a cake....all pretzel shaped.

Her friend and her husband are not finding out the sex of their baby, so the just call it their little pretzel!

Mmmm...these cupcakes! I'm not a big fan of cake and actually I rarely eat any of my cookies either, but their is just something about red velvet cake and cream cheese frosting that has sucked me in! I LOVED the little fondant pretzels I made to go on top!

This cake was a big one! I started out with a 16 inch cake and carved it down to the shape of a pretzel and then covered it with homemade marshmallow fondant.

The whole collection! I really liked how they all turned out! Thank you Rachel, it was so fun!

And not to be left out...
...the boys are BIG fans of cream cheese frosting! :)

Sick Babe

Our baby boy has been sick this week. It is so tough to see Kaden not acting like himself, but on the upside, we are getting a lot of baby snuggles this week! :) Please say a prayer for our little man.

It's In My Blood

Growing up, my brother and rarely had store bought clothes until we reached junior high. Looking back, its pretty cool that we had one of a kind pieces made by Grandma and Mom. But of course, at the time we (at least I did) thought we were pretty lame. Now, I'm so glad that I was raised around such crafty women. We spent many summers and Christmas breaks playing around on Grandma's sewing machines, making our own master pieces. I will never forget the time she helped me make my Barbie's a quilt to match the one she just made for me!

Last month I braved the pile of our stuff in the rec room and found my sewing machine (passed down from Grandma) and started marking some things off my to-do list.

After reading my manual (I really should have payed more attention when Grandma used to show me how to thread the needle), I was ready to try to make my own headband. I have been seeing a lot of cute headbands in the blog world, but really hated to pay so much for something I could make for about $1. I took a picture of me modeling the finished product, but 1.) my hair style has changed since then and 2.) Kristoffer said it looks a little creepy!

My second project was making Karter and Kaden's Halloween costumes. Kaden makes a pretty good baby model!

Karter loved watching his costume come together, and loved the fact that his vest had gold trim, just like Jake!

My third project was some burp clothes for some pregnant ladies at church. When I was first pregnant with Karter and people would give me burp clothes I thought they were pretty silly. Then I had him and milk was coming from everywhere (him and me...sorry TMI) and fleece receiving blankets were the best thing to catch the mess....other fabrics weren't absorbent enough to be efficient! So I knew what I wanted to make for our pregnant friends, fleece burp clothes. I made the pattern out of an old grocery bag and got busy.

One set is for a couple who doesn't know what they are having yet.

And another set for a couple who just had a beautiful baby girl!

I just made three, but let's face it...I probably could have made sets of 10 by how quickly babies go through these things!

Sorry to bore you with a post that didn't have too many pictures of my cuties, but I had to share some of my sewing projects...it's in my blood!!