Speech Therapy

Kira gave me some speech therapy lessons while we were visiting. They go like this:

Kira: Butterfly.

Me: Butterfly.

Kira: nods in agreement.

I passed, I think. She has been in speech therapy for a long time so I'm pretty sure she can give lessons. Other favorites: dinosaur, cookie, elephant, and computer.

So fun!!

My Favorite Tree

This is a picture of my favorite maple tree at Million Park. It turns a beautiful orange gold color every fall. This picture is from last year. (You can see what a dry year we had... the grass is barely green).

Earlier this year we were hit with a massive ice storm that damaged nearly every tree in the county. I didn't get a chance to take a picture of this tree covered in ice because the park was closed, but you can imagine what it looked like. This summer I took a picture, and you can see that it lost a limb or two.
And here it is again this fall. It's already starting to recover; the hole is smaller than it was this summer. And it's still a beautiful shade of orange gold.

More Photography Fun

I had the opportunity to take a few family pictures of a friend of mine in the ward. She has a beautiful family... so fun!

Cupcakes

I had the opportunity to host a baby shower for a sweet girl who used to live in our ward. She just lives in Nicholasville now, but it was a good chance for her to catch up with old friends.

I decided on a cupcake theme - and it was a perfect chance to try out my new giant cupcake pan!

Prepped and ready to go:

Right out of the oven:

And the finished masterpiece:

A few of the other treats I worked on: pink vanilla cupcakes with cherry filling, cupcake pops (with red velvet cake), double chocolate cupcakes, and the newly christened "belly button" cookies. (Rachael was watching me make the indents for these cookies and said, "Are those belly button cookies?" They are now!)

And the finished table...

Food

It seems like all my posts lately have been about food... well... no change here.

We made pretzels for playgroup today. Some regular shaped ones, but the fun ones were the pretzel people we made. Isn't she a charming girl? OK, well, at least she was yummy.

Chicken Soup

Roasted the chicken, picked it clean, made chicken broth, used carrots from the garden, made the egg noodles from scratch. And homemade french bread to boot.

I'm golden for the rest of the month... or until someone else gets sick.

Recovery Disc and Backups

My computer tried to eat itself yesterday. One minute it was fine... the next it rebooted itself... and never came back. Fortunately for me, I have a very technically capable husband, and between the two of us we managed to back up all of my data onto an external hard drive.

Then with some imagination we found a website to create a recovery disc, which if you have Windows Vista, you might know that a recovery CD does not come with the computer when you buy it. We were able to download the necesary files and burn a DVD.

I lost a few internet bookmarks, but other than that I can't tell I have lost anything critical. More frequent backups are on the horizon and now we are sure we have a working recovery CD.

Happy computing. And thanks for your help, Ry!

Practice

I had the opportunity to attend a wedding last Saturday. I wasn't the photographer, but I had my camera along anyway and took as many shots as I could, just for practice. Unfortunately I didn't put the flash on (it was spooking the horses) so most of my shots were too dark, but I did get a couple I liked.
This one below is my favorite snapshot: it's the groom and his sister. She got married the day before. This is a picture of the two of them just before they all walked down the aisle - it was cold outside and he was keeping her warm.

Blue Skies

I snapped this picture this morning... the sky is rarely this color blue here. I think it's probably the lower altitude, but one of the things I miss the most about Denver is the sky so blue it hurts your eyes. We have had lots and lots of wind lately - and this is the happy result!

General Conference

Every six months I am so thankful for the opportunity to hear from our prophet and other church leaders. We watched pretty much all four sessions... a first for me in a long time. I especially loved the Saturday morning session. My very favorite musical number was the choir singing "O Divine Redeemer."

Baking

Fall officially started a couple of weeks ago, which means it's time to get in the kitchen and start baking. Till spring.

We started with pumpkin blueberry muffins that we made for playgroup. Rachael mixed the dry ingredients and Alex mixed the wet ingredients. It took about three times as many dishes to make them but the kids had a really great time, so it was worth it. Plus kids will eat nearly anything they help prepare, and the muffins were no exception.


It was my friend Jenny's birthday so I made her a cake. A Double Decadent Brownie Torte, to be more specific. I misunderstood the directions, though, and really whipped the eggs for way too long, so the cake was kind of airy instead of dense like a torte should be. Still tasted good. (In my defense, the recipe isn't very well written. It has you melt the chocolate and a couple of other things together, then beat the eggs with some sugar, but at no point does it ever say to combine all the ingredients together. I did manage to figure that part out on my own).
More cupcakes. Because we can. These are made with yellow cake that I colored half yellow and half orange, then frosted with green buttercream. Yummy.

Can't wait for pumpkin bread... cranberry bread... and Thanksgiving!