Surprise!!! New Friends!

Heather's parents have had some missionary friends of the family visiting this past week with them, and they have 3 girls...the boys have had a blast having friends next door all week...but I wasn't so sure about this in the beginning. Not because they are girls playing with our boys, but because I wasn't so sure how Eric and Bay would feel about the children being girls and NOT boys. Quote from Eric when I told him that the family had 3 girls, "Mom, I'm okay with girls". So there you have it, in 4 more years I will take that in a totally different way, if you know what i mean, but for now, it's great! They have made fast friends and have had a blast playing outside or in, and will miss each other. I am amazed at how quickly children of this age can connect. Pretty neat!

Banana Crunch Muffins....mmmmm.if you could only smell these as I pulled them out of the oven! A friend of mine told me that I need to make a separate cooking blog. Good idea, maybe someday I'll do that, but for now, it's just going to be part of this one :) If you like bananas at all, then you need to try this banana muffin recipe. They are by far the very best muffins I have ever had, even way better than those gourmet muffins that are impossible to duplicate. This is a Barefoot Contessa recipe, one of my favorite cooks. Are these good for you? No way, but man are they good :)

Makes 2 dozen large muffins.
3 cups flour
1 1/2 cups sugar (this is reduced from the original recipe already!)
2 t. baking powder
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
1/2 pound unsalted butter, melted
2 eggs
3/4 cup milk
2 t. vanilla extract
1 cup mashed RIPE bananas (2-3 bananas)
1 cup medium diced RIPE bananas (1-2)
1 cup granola (any flavor)
1 cup grated or shredded coconut ( I do not use sweetened coconut, but if you did, I would pulse it in the food processor first to make it into ground pieces of flake, the whole flakes would be too much)

Preheat oven to 350. Line 24 muffin cups with paper liners. Sift flour, sugar, baking powder, soda and salt into the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Add the melted butter and blend. Combine eggs, milk vanilla and mashed bananas; add them to the flour mixture. Scrape the bowl and blend well...DON"T OVERMIX.
Fold the diced bananas, granola and coconut into the batter. Spoon the batter into the paper cups, filling the cups to the top. You will have PLENTY of batter. Bake for 25-30 min. or until the tops are brown and a toothpick comes out clean. Cool slightly, remove from pan and let me know how you like them!


What????!!!! Is that Heather with a vaccuum???? Yes, Dennis thought he was being funny in catching me with the camera actually vaccuuming. If you know me, cleaning is not my forte, and so I think it is pretty funny that he actually had to prove that every once in awhile I will get that dreadful invention out and use it :) Please ignore the Christmas garland still up on my curtains!

Leah's 3rd Birthday!

Leah recently celebrated her 3rd birthday. We just can't believe how time has flown by. Our little baby is no longer a baby anymore. She loves to fill her 3year old shoes with plenty of 3 yr. old attitude! This birthday was all about ponies...the biggest thing was figuring out how to make a pony cake, that is all she has asked for for weeks! I found a cake shop in Annapolis that rents the shaped cake pans ( a much better deal than buying them, especially when you only use them typically once). So I made her "pinkie pie" from my little pony. She had a great time, and has just now (a week later) realized that it is no longer her birthday.

The flowers are from our good friends Genia, Ray and kids Grace and Elliott. They came over and had lunch, cupcakes, and played on Leah's actual birthday. The day after (when Dennis could be home) we had her presents, pony cake and family birthday celebration with both sets of grandparents.

Here she is with her new tea set.
And with Granni & Gramps

Happy Easter!

I don't know what Dennis was doing behind my back while I took this picture, but it sure did make the kids laugh! At least we got genuine smiles out of all of them, which is a rarity in a photo! I took too many pictures to post on the blog, so if you want to see them, you'll have to follow the link to our webshots site to see the Easter photos section. We had a great conclusion to our Easter weekend activities. I was at 3 services of church accompanying the choir to a really neat Alleluia chorus combined with a responsive reading. I came back home before the 3rd service to help get everyone ready and we took this cute picture, then went to church. In Bay's Sunday School class, evidently they were having a dicussion about the Easter Bunny, and Bay kindly informed all of the pre-schoolers that the Easter Bunny definitely is not real.

We picked up Dennis' mom on the way home from church so she could hang out for the afternoon. We enjoyed egg salad sandwhiches for lunch with our dyed eggs, then hid plastic eggs outside for the kids to hunt. That, of course, is very funny to watch. As we were giving Leah hints to find her eggs, Bay provided her much competition to getting to them first.

We had our homemade ravioli for dinner, some with alfredo sauce and some with spaghetti sauce. Both very yummy. I also made some homemade Rosemary/Garlic tuscan style bread. Yummy as well. And then Flan for desert. If you don't know what flan is, it is a spanish style egg-custard with caramelized brown sugar. I used to hate it as a kid, but it tastes okay to me now.

A great end to a great weekend, and the earliest Easter any of us will ever experience is now over. Now back to life a usual!

Ravioli & Easter

You might ask yourself....what in the world do ravioli and Easter have to do with each other??? Read on to discover :)

Last night we decorated Easter Eggs. We don't have a ton of Easter traditions at our house, but decorating eggs is one of them. The kids had a great time, which is way better than last year (everyone was grumpy last year for some reason????). Bay and Leah wanted to keep dyeing their eggs in every color available, which was funny.

Eric's eggs are the column on the far left, then come Bay's, then Leah's, and then mine and Dennis'.

This was some "serious" fun!!!!

Like I said before, we don't have a ton of Easter traditions around here, and one of them that we definitely don't have is a certain meal we eat for Easter dinner. Sometimes we have had a Southern MD stuffed ham, other times, I'm not really sure what. Anyways, my mom and I read an article about making your own ravioli, so we decided that would be fun to try for Easter. We spent about 5 hours today making ravioli....130 of them....to be exact. They are 1.5" square, and were really fun and easy to make, just time consuming. Half of them are stuffed with a mixture of 3 cheeses, the other half with a meat/spinach/cheese mixture. We dried them for about 1 hour on trays before putting them in the fridge. Whatever we don't eat tomorrow (which should be a lot left over) we will freeze! This might be the start of a new tradition, then again, traditions are sometimes more fun to break :)

Here is a picture of 40 of them lined up on trays to dry.

Can't wait to eat them....mmmmmm....

New face on the house

What a difference a new coat of paint makes to the entryway makes! I just wish I had taken a picture of the dilapidated entrance before I sanded and painted it! It was brown, crumbling, peeling and flaking paint all over the place....it looked REALLY dingy. I got so excited to sand and paint it, it just happened really fast! Now the paint matches the shutters and red brick of the house, and is so refreshing. Just the little things that give me a sense of accomplishment in my day :)

Leah in Curls....Before....

.....and After
At Wal-mart this ThursdayI purchased a set of foam rollers for Leah. I told her she could have curly hair for a couple of days if she would like to. Well, being Leah, we had to put them in as soon as we got home. So I sprayed her hair wet, put them in as she patiently handed me the rollers and watched in the mirror the whole time. She wore them all afternoon, and then went to sleep in them. The next morning first thing she asked if she could see her curls! So we took them out and boy were they tight! Everyone thinks she looked like little orphan Annie for about 12 hours! Gradually they softened and were even there today. She really thought that was fun and I just couldn't believe how excited she was. So we thought you would enjoy the pictures of Leah with quite a curly little head! Although her brothers said they thought she looked like another girl, they wanted their sister back :)

Leah's Birthday Dress

Leah's birthday is coming up at the end of this month. I thought I would make her a new dress for one of her presents. I recently saw a dress in a catalog that had a horse screen printed on it. Since Leah loves horses, I thought it would be something she would love, but at $35 for a dress, I couldn't bring myself to it. So I stole the idea and made my own :) I already had patterns and fabric, so I drew the picture of the horse, scanned it and printed it on iron-on-transfer paper. I transfered it onto the skirt material of the dress, and !oila! her new pony dress. The only thing I would have done differently in retrospect is to make the horse a lighter color since it showed up so dark on the blue fabric. Otherwise, I am so excited to give it to her.