Turning 10

Well, we officially have a child in the double digits. Nicole had her tenth birthday yesterday (2-27). We had a nice little celebration at home. She requested homemade egg rolls and fried rice for dinner. I was happy to accomodate. Here's the spread. Homemade egg rolls, vegetable lo mein, and fried rice.

We decorated with purple/pink...I even found a paper lantern to go with the egg roll dinner.

I baked her a strawberry cake for her dessert.

Ignore the 7 candle. Last minute, and go figure, I didn't have any candles. But she wanted a candle to blow out and I found this 7 candle in a drawer. So there ya go.

We gave her an apron (which she has been wanting) and some appliques and ribbons to decorate it with. I think she was pretty happy with all of it.

Baking Day

Yeah!! We got a new camera! I'd take a picture of it, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

So, here is my baking day in pictures. I started out this morning making homemade granola.


It came out really good. The last time I made it, it didn't come out that crunchy, so it didn't all get eaten. But everyone sampled the granola from today, and it's official: it's good!

I got a new mixer yesterday. It's really a kitchen system, as it's a mixer and blender together and you can even get a food processor for it. It's really powerful and can hold something like 12 lbs. of bread dough at a time. Which makes 6 loaves. Not bad. I'll definitely be bringing this to Northern Asia with us. So, I made a bunch of bread. I only have 4 bread pans, so I made 4 loaves, and then with the leftover dough I made a pan of cinnamon rolls. Yum! The bread came out really nice and light, and the rolls were delicious! Yep, I'm lovin' the new mixer.

I don't know what happened to the bread, though. They sort of mushroomed. Guess I let them rise too long.


Yummy cinnamon rolls. And all dressed up--with half a pan already gone.


So after all the sampling, no one's even remotely hungry, so looks like we'll all have a bowl of granola and a slice of homemade bread for dinner. Doesn't sound too bad, huh?

Just A Little Update

We've been spring-cleaning the house this week. It's so nice to have an uncluttered house. We're going to go ahead and have a garage sale this Saturday to get rid of all the extra junk. Hopefully make a few bucks, too. :)

Keith is leaving tonight for San Antonio for a meeting. Just wasn't worth it for the whole family to go. I'm trying to keep the kids home for a while to give them a break. We're going to the Victoria area this weekend, so I didn't see the need to go somewhere tonight.

Our monthly "donations" are slowly coming in. We're over 30% now. Somewhere around 32%, I think. We still have our goal to reach Northern Asia by the fall.

Nicole's birthday is next week. Can't believe my little girl is going to be 10! She is so excited. I think she's even posted about it. She's been saving all the money she receives for something special. She's already decided on her birthday dinner. We don't do big birthday parties here, just a small family party. I let them pick their favorite dinner or whatever they want, bake them a cake, put up a few decorations, and have a couple presents. We really like it this way. It's a lot less stress and less money. So, anyway, Nicole has picked homemade egg rolls and fried rice. Fitting, don't you think? And then I'll bake her a cake. She can't decide if she wants chocolate or strawberry. I'm hoping for strawberry as I have a new recipe to try out. We bought a new digital camera online, so it should be here next week in time to take birthday pictures.

Well, I guess that is it...so much for a "little" update.

Our San Antonio Trip

Well, this post isn't going to be as long as I had planned since my camera decided to die and take my pictures with it. So, I'll just explain what we did with pictures I find on the internet.

Last weekend we went to San Antonio for some meetings. We had to spend the night, so we decided to just go a few hours early and take the kids to see some of the sights. We took them to the Alamo.


The kids really enjoyed the history and touring it. We then took them to see the Riverwalk.


We didn't stay long, just went to CVS (Yes! There's one on the Riverwalk.) to buy some diapers because I had conveniently left mine at home. We then splurged and took the kids to tour Ripley's Believe It or Not! That was a bit weird! But I think they liked it anyway. Sure made for some interesting memories!

So, that was our San Antonio trip.

Murphy's Law

You know that law when one thing goes wrong...everything goes wrong? Good ole Murphy's Law.

Well, that is what we are experiencing over here right now. I know many of you have been patiently awaiting our e-newsletter, and I'm so sorry it's not been sent out yet. But that's because our scanner broke. We need to just get up with the times and buy Microsoft Publisher, so we can automatically save in pdf instead of scanning and saving as pdf. Ah, the never ending "needs" list.

What else...oh, we went to San Antonio this weekend, and I'll post about that shortly, but don't expect any pictures. Our digital camera broke. So, all those great pictures I took this weekend of the Alamo, and other things are gone. I wanted to buy a new camera anyway, a better one. But not yet! Well, guess I'll push that further up the list.

So, why is it when one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong?

Caleb's Lookin' Good!

Before the haircut:
After the haircut: