General Update on What's New

We got so many things going on at the same time that I don't know what to write about. The highlight this weekend was going to Domenick and Carmela's wedding. It was a lot of good food and dancing, not to mention getting all prettied up, which I don't get to do much of these days.



I'm also happy to report that I'm finally back down to my pre-pregnancy weight and size 4! (All thanks to many friends that recommended Weight Watchers :) and watching food portions.) However, if the holiday partying continues at this pace, I may be in trouble..

We had couple other events this weekend that were very fun as well, but this Blog would look like an encyclopedia if I wrote about everything that we do.

I prefer to keep this Blog more focused on what's new with the kids. Speaking of which, both Ashley and Katelyn have been fighting a cold all week. They are both coughing and got runny noses; it’s nothing to get too excited over, but I did take them in to see Dr. Yia just to make sure that their lungs where clear and they were :)

There are a couple of new things that Ashley's been into lately. She's always been fond of coloring, but now she's branching into drawing people. The faces look more like ghostfaces from the movie Scream, but she's trying. I'll have to take pictures of the portraits that she's drawn to put up here. She's also been getting better at writing letters. She loves to play school, and really enjoys going to her Preschool. She even asks me on weekends if she can go to school. Not sure if I never mentioned this on the Blog, but she's 100% lefty. She does everything lefty, including holding her spoon and writing. Katelyn, on the other hand, (no pun intended), is a righty! She does everything righty!

Katelyn is a ball of energy, she's none stop all day. She's figured how to climb up on to the kitchen chair and from there on to the kitchen table! She thinks it's hilarious when she does this and we drop everything to run to her to get her down before she falls down on the tile floor! Kitchen/family room area that we have gated off used to be a safe place to leave her for a few minutes, but not anymore. She's also fond of jumping on the couch, and has fallen down from there more times than I can count.. Apparently the pain from falling doesn't bother her and hasn't taught her to not do it. She can also now push a chair to the kitchen counter and climb up to reach anything on the counter top!

We'll have to sign up Katelyn for gymnastics as soon as possible, so that we can tunnel that energy into something productive. She can already do a forward roll and likes to stand on her head doing the downward dog yoga pose :)

She's also finally beginning to like reading books. Her attention span has improved significantly in the last couple of months. For someone that doesn't like to sit still, we can now get through 3 books with her in one sitting! She also likes to color, but unfortunately half the time she also wants to eat the crayons that she's coloring with, so the coloring has been very limited for her.

In other news on Katelyn's front, she's got a lot more teeth now, literally. She has an extra tooth in the front on the bottom. Instead of having 4 bottom front teeth, she has 5! I guess that explains the teeth crowding.. We asked the pediatrician about this, but she said that it's no big deal. So, in total she's up to 17 teeth! (8 on top and 9 on the bottom!)

Here's a picture of Nastya holding Katelyn where you can see the extra tooth:


I think that’s about all that I wanted to mention for now. I have to make more videos of them. Watching them in action is priceless!

Blueberry Tarts with Crumb Topping

I've been testing out a few recipes that I want to prepare for Christmas dinner.
One of them was for Blueberry Tarts. I made them a couple of days ago, and they came out pretty amazing! I made small tarts, however I'm thinking that for Christmas I'll make one large one.

Thanksgiving Weekend

We had a great four day weekend! On Thanksgiving day we drove up to my mom and Chuck's house for dinner. It was a nice gathering minus all the screaming entertainment provided by Katelyn on the ride there and back. She was not a happy camper to be strapped in a carseat for over an hour.. The hope was that she'd fall asleep on the ride home, but no such luck.. She insisted on watching the DVD all the way home. Lesson learned, keep long trips to a minimum until she's a little bigger.

Friday was a long day. Indira and I went shopping to the Outlet Mall from 1am - 5am, I mostly picked up clothes for everyone. They had 50-60% off whole inventory of many stores.. After that I dropped off Indira at home, woke up Mike, and the two of us continued to shop up 8am. By 8, I was falling asleep standing up, but it was worth it since we bought everything on our list. Mike watched the kids until the afternoon, and I got to sleep a bit. We went out shopping again at night, just to get the kids out of the house.

Unfortuantelly I got no pictures from this weekend, because my camera's been acting up and no longer takes pictures :( I get the "Card Locked" error on display, and the only way to clear it is to open it up, remove battery and chip set and blow inside. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. All I know is that I missed some great shots this weekend :) The good news is that I took advantage of the Black Friday deals and picked up a new camera! It arrived yesterday, so we are back to taking pictures :)

Here's a picture from last week of Ashley and her friend Lily (our neighbor's daughter) over at Barnes and Noble. Turns out the bookstore is the place to go, if you've got time to kill with kids and you want to get out of the house...

Ashley and Lily will be in the same grade when they start kindergarden, possibly in the same class. That would be great, since Lily is a very sweet girl :)

Cake Decorating (Week 4) - Last Class

Yesterday was the last day of my Cake Decorating Class. We practiced writing on the cake and learned to make roses. Both skills need a lot of practice to make them look professional. Our final product was a Cake decorated however you like.

I make a Chocolate Kahlua Cake with chocolate mousse and fresh strawberry filling. Covered chocolate whipped cream frosting and decorated with vanilla whipped cream frosting tinted with different colors. I don't like the taste of the Buttercream Frosting that we've been using in class to decorate our cakes, and it's full of Crisco, which is loaded with trans fats. The whipped cream frosting tastes really good, but is harder to work with, since it gets too soft at room temperature.

Since Chuck's birthday just past I thought to surprise him with a Homemade Birthday Cake on Thanksgiving:

Weekend Where Abouts..

This weekend, we again worked very hard to bring some order to the house. It's been hard work lately to keep up with everything in the house. Mike finished organizing the shed and I put away Halloween decorations and started sorting through kids' clothes. Saturday we took the kids out to Toys R US and the Barnes and Nobles to get out of the house, and Sunday they played a good part of the day with our neighbors Emma and Liam while we attemped to continue working on house stuff.

I got a nice picture of Katelyn at the book store:


I tried out a couple of new recipes.. the highlights were oven roasted smoky turkey legs like the ones you get in Disney World, and Chocolate Pecan pie. Both came out extremely delicious!

I actually cooked up a storm this weekend (from Friday night til now), I made Shepherd's pie,baked ziti with ground turkey, mushroom soup, smoky turkey legs with sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, and salad; for desert I made brownies, chocolate chip muffins, pumpkin bread, and chocolate pecan pie. I have a recipe to make granola bars that I wanted to try, but I guess that one will have to wait until we finish up the left overs.

Quick update on my garden

It's been a rather mild fall so far, not too many cold nights. Yesterday I picked some radishes for the dinner salad from the garden. They were really good! So happy to be able to continue to pick stuff so late in the fall! Parsley, rosemary, thyme and oregano are still looking good as well! Taste pretty amazing in the soup :)

I'll definitely be planting more stuff as soon as the ground gets soft in the spring!

Katelyn fell out of her crib!

We always knew that Katelyn was part monkey and very strong, but this past week we got a "nice" surprise from Katelyn. She's been a little uneasy about taking naps lately, so we've had to leave her in her crib and let her cry a bit to settle down before falling asleep. Last Thursday she again decided that she wasn't tired enough to nap, so she was furious and screamed histerically. She's very stubborn and once she sets her mind on something that's it.. She threw all of her things out of the crib and then managed to throw herself out of the her crib with a loud thump. She went to her bedroom door and continued pounding her fists until we got there. I happened to work form home that afternoon, so I heard the whole thing first hand.

We knew being how active she is that this day was going to come sooner than it did for Ashley (Ashley stayed put in her crib perfectly happy until she was 3 years old) but we didn't expect it to happen at 16 months!!

Her crib doesn't have a drop down side, and she's not big enough to throw her leg over the side to climb over, so the odds are is that she pulled herself up enough where she could lean over to fall out.. Scary considering that she probably fell on her head or her back, but without any visible signs of hurt.

I Googled what to do and consulted with a few friends that have kids that have done the same at a young age. Katelyn is not even 17 months yet, so I don't feel like she's ready for a "Big Girl" bed, and the responsibility of being able to wonder around her room before sleep and when she wakes up. So the choice was obvious.. we had to get a tent to put over her crib to keep her from climbing out.

I ran out to Babies R Us to get the tent and came back empty handed :( They don't carry them!! Urg.. So what are we to do.. Indira rocked Katelyn to sleep for her nap on her hands, but night time is a whole different ball game. Both Mike and Indira were out of the house, I tried to get Katelyn to sleep in the crib at night, I figured if she's tired enough she won't fuss and just go to sleep. But as soon as she was done with her milk, she was screaming bloody murder and trying to climb out. I didn't want her to fall again, but I wanted to see if she'd try again. So I sat quietly in her room in the rocking chair, just to see what she'd do, and soon enough she wedged her feet in the slots in the side of the crib and almost made herself fall out head first. Realizing that leaving her in the crib is not a save choice. I cleared everything out of her room, moved her crib over and put her crib mattress on the floor where her crib used to be. I attempted for almost an hour to get her to lay down on the mattress to sleep but no luck.

Her normal bedtime is around 7:30. It was after 10pm and she still wasn't sleeping, finally Mike came back, he took her in her room and 5 minutes later emerged with news that Katelyn was on her mattress settled down.. I don't know how he does it, but somehow he's the only one that can reason with Katelyn and convince her to listen when no one else can. She slept on the floor the whole night until 6 am. At which point I suppose she thought it was time to get up. Mike again visited her room for another 5 minutes and convinced her to sleep until 8 am !!! Amazing! Thank God he's got this power over her, or we wouldn't get any sleep.

On Friday, after having processed what has happened, I realized that getting her to sleep on the floor is going to be an ongoing challenge. I got a tip to look for the tent at the Burlington Coat Factory and luckily they had it!! We right away set it up, so that she could nap inside the tent that day. She was a little leary at first, but now she's used to it. We zip her up inside so she stays put. So far it's worth every penny of the $60 that I spent on it. At least we have a piece of mind knowing that she can't fall out and hurt herself and that she's not leaving the room.

Here's what the contraption looks like:

Cake Decorating (Week 3)

I had another cake decorating class last night. I made vanilla cupcakes and decorated them with vanilla buttercream frosting. It's amazing how easy it is to do once you have someone show you how!

Now I just need to make up special occasions to bake and decorate cakes for :) So, if you are reading my Blog and want me to make you something special, by all means I need guinea pigs to practice on :)


Next week we have the last class. I'm going to make a chocolate cake with chocolate puddig filling, and fresh strawberries. I just need to pick a color scheme to decorate the cake.. I'm leaning towards fall colors, red, orange, yellow. We'll see what happens.

Cake Decorating (Week 2)

Last night I had my second cake decorating class. We learned different cake decorating techniques.

I made a four layer white cake with raspberry and chocolate mouse filling, and frosted it with the vanilla buttercream icing. I'm not a huge fan of the way this icing tastes, but it is easy to work with because it doesn't melt at room temperature.

Yesterday was Indira's one year anniversary since she came to US. I dedicated this cake to her :) We had a mini celebration when I got back from class. We had cake and a glass of wine. The cake tasted really good, but I think I'll need more practice decorating.. See for yourself :)



Here's the side view of the cake, after we've eaten some of it :) he he!
I guess we were all too anxious to taste it :)


Next week we are decorating cupcakes, so stay tuned..

Cooking with Mommy

Lately, both Ashley and Katelyn are obsessed with fish crackers. Katelyn begs for them all day long! They eat so many of them that I'm afraid they are going to turn yellow from all of the artificial food coloring that's in those crackers.

I typically wouldn't give them something like this, but it's so convenient and especially when I need them to be quiet for a few minutes!

I found a recipe online to make homemade cheese crackers, so this Sunday we made our own home made cheese crackers, using the cookie press to press them into different shapes. The end result looked amazing, however they didn't like the taste :( Daddy loved them! (I put paprika and worcershire sauce in the dough) perhaps I have to tweek the recipe to make it more kid friendly.

Here are a few pictures of us making them: