Nothing in the clean fridge . . .

. . . except a half naked baby!

When I got home from Seattle (I still need to get all the photos together to post) I went through the fridge to clean it out. Then I decided to give the whole thing a really good scrub. You know the type of attention it needs - taking all the shelves out and basically detailing it on the inside. I got off maple syrup from the door, something sticky in the back and I could almost see some leftovers had grown legs and were about to run out on their own accord. EWWW!

When I was putting things back I came across this

Eliza had wiggled out of her pants and climbed into the fridge to get either her baby food or Jeremy's medicine. She's a quick one. Cute, but into stuff.

Fun Rainbow Cake

I got this idea from Jon's cousin's wife who in return got it from this blog (don't you love how a good idea can travel?). On Sunday Jon had to go into work and my mother-in-law was watching my cute nephew and brought him over to my house to play. I had already decided to make this cake and it made it even more fun teaching my nephew how to lick cake batter off the beater (which he didn't like doing - he did end up licking the bowl for me).

Cassie is really wanting to know how to cook and so we made a white cake mix cake and she separated the yolks for me and did all the measuring. She also was allowed to use the hand mixer all by herself including putting in the beaters. She is getting to be so independent.

Next we divided the batter into several different bowls and added some gel food coloring. This is where Jeremy and Evan came to help us stir the color into the batter. We made purple, green, yellow, pink and orange batter.

You dump the batter into the cake pans on top of each other in the center and wait while it slowly creeps to the center and then you bake it.

As a side note . . . during this process Jeremy found a clear plastic wrapper from a Capri Sun straw and balled it up and stuck it up his nose. He kind of freaked out when it got stuck there and tried to use his finger to get it out and managed to push it up further. I should have taken pictures of him during this process, but I totally forgot. We made several attempts to extract it and after a call to the pediatrician we ended up going to Urgent Care to get it out between taking the cake out of the oven and frosting it. Ironically the cousin we got the rainbow cake idea from also balled up a gum wrapper when he was a kid and got it stuck up his nose. I wonder if there is a connection? Hmmm . . .

Cassie (who would NEVER put a straw wrapper in her nose) made some yummy butter icing from scratch and frosted the cake. We thought it would be fun to do plain white for the frosting and get a surprise when we cut into it. The top layer was done well as far as putting the colored batter into the center and letting it even out on it's own. The bottom one, however, was a less care driven and I can now see the results.

It was a really fun project and now she wants to try making a zebra cake with dark chocolate and white cake. I'm so glad that she wants to learn how to cook. I'm hoping that she continues learning and that we can do lots of fun projects like this again.

Family Pictures Again!

I figured out what the problem is with downloading the photos. I'm only allowed a certain amount of space for pictures and these fies are really big. Here are some complete family photos. One of these lucky pictures is going to get a place of honor in the hallway. The others will find some other place (like on a blog or something).

I know which one is my favorite. How about you? I'll try and be sneaky and post the rest in a different post on the same day and they should follow right after these.

Family Pictures

I've been wanting a good family picture since Eliza was born. Every day that I pass by the family photo on my wall in the hallway I think , "Great family photo - where's the rest of the family?" One of my mommy friends from Cassie's school came and took pregnancy photos for me. That's one BIG belly.
Then she came over and took cute newborn pictures of Eliza when she was less than one week old.

She included in her overly low price a family photo session. I wanted to wait a little so Eliza would be a little older and I would be a little slimmer. Well Eliza got older, but I appear not to be slimming yet. I kept waiting and waiting until finally I said, "Enough . . . I can always take more family pictures later."

We met her at Seal Beach and I brought my great-grandmother's red velvet chair (thank you Natalie for letting me borrow it) to mimic some of the cool photo shoots I see on my favorite photo blogs. I love how they turned out. Cindy was even able to get pictures of Jeremy looking right at the camera. She went to get individual shots of the kids and the females did a little better at posing than the male did. She did manage to capture the essence of the family at this point in our lives. Thanks Cindy (who I don't even think knows about this blog)!

Here are a few highlights from that day.

I'm having some technical difficulties with uploading more photos. I'll post more later.

I think they are lovely and I had lots of fun taking them. I think I'm going to try to take more family photos in the future. They are only going to be this little for a very small time.