The Goings On

Well, life just keeps plodding on here.  Lots of little trips to the grocery store, school runs, playing outside in the rain/mud, baking for a baby shower, cookies and brownies, and planks-lots of planks!

The little darling just started sitting up.  Every day he gets better at it.  Of course that makes him and me quite happy.  He's happy because he can see the world in a more normal way without having to act like a seal and me, well it means he can sit and play with something without getting his face perpetually smooshed into the dirty carpet (yes, I vacuum regularly but you'd never know it).  Win, win people!

My neighbor and friend had a shower this weekend and so I was asked to make her a cake.  Nothing too fancy because well, I'm not a cake decorator and I must be realistic about my own capabilities.  However, I did my best.  The theme of the shower was "Busy as a Bee" because this friend just had her third child and she is quite busy!  So, I attempted to make a beehive out of brownies to put on top of the cake.  Utter fail.  It looked like a big pile of well, poop (a delicious one at that, but still quite unappealing).  So I ditched the beehive in the eleventh hour and just decorated it normally with some yellow around the edges.

I was quite pleased with it because it was the first time I was able to make a chocolate cake and frost it with white frosting without the brown crumbs getting all mixed in.  I accomplished this by doing a "dirty layer" of frosting after freezing the cake for a short time.  I have tried this many times before but it hasn't worked.  This time it did.  I don't know why but I'll take it!

Onto planks...my boys got some lovely little Keva planks for Christmas.  Out of all the boys though, Caleb has really taken to them which is not a surprise since he's the builder in the family.  The only problem is that they fall down easily.  Sometimes he will work for hours on a project only to have a sibling brush by them and accidentally send his creation crashing down like a bunch of dominoes.  This train he built was wrecked numerous times but his determination won out and he kept starting over and moving on.  He's built a bunch of stuff but here is another one of his latest-a church.

And lastly, I have a confession.  Don't judge!  I have finally passed the buck on one of my wifely duties and I am not sorry about it, no not one bit.  Here it is-I got tired of my husband going to work in wrinkled clothes.  I am horrible about keeping up with the ironing and since Nathan was born, I have not ironed one stitch.  That's right, nothing!  Steve never complains; he simply puts on his shirts and heads out the door.  Sometimes I could get the shirts to be okay by grabbing them out of the dryer just in time but they still weren't all that great.  The guilt was piling up (not enough to get me to do anything about it because I don't have the time or energy to...but the pile, the literal pile of laundry and the guilt pile, was getting bigger and bigger).  Then last week I had an epiphany.  Why not take his shirts to the local laundry for ironing?  It can't be that expensive although truth be told, any price that was reasonable was looking pretty good to me at that point.  Months of wrinkled shirts guilt was on my shoulders by then and I simply had to do something about it (except get out my own iron)!  I checked into it and lo and behold, it was not too bad.  $12-15 of my own cookie money every two weeks was all I had to pay to get rid of the guilt?!  Done!  Sign me up!  Why didn't I think of this sooner?

Hope you all are having a great week!  I'll be back next time with the particulars on that cake.  It was scrumptious.  I got the recipe from a friend and it deserves to be shared.  I won't make another kind of chocolate cake ever again.  It was that good!  Talk soon friends...