Azucena's Birthday Cake

Since we were visiting Mom and Dad, Mom asked Dad to make one of his legendary cakes to celebrate Azucena's birthday a little early. At different times, she asked for a blue cake, a rainbow cake, and a Rainbow Dash (MY LITTLE PONIES) cake. Dad hit it out of the park by combining all three! As you can see, she was thrilled! Thanks, Dad!

Book It!

Turns out our school participates in the Book It! program! :D I was so excited to see the free personal pizza certificate on Azucena's completed reading list. We decided to make a family night of it and got a pizza for four of us and Azucena got her own meal. It was so fun to sit in the booth together. The girls loved that Pizza Hut has their TVs tuned to Disney Junior. :D Congratulations on being an awesome reader, Azucena! We're happy we could celebrate with you!

Free Root Beer Float Day!

I love National Root Beer Float day! Not only is it one of my favorite treats, it was also a favorite of my grandparents, so it's a nice reminder that some things just run in the family. So grateful A&W restaurants participate in giving away free root beer floats once a year so it's a nice family outing for us!

 Azucena was not a fan of the root beer part (it "tickled" and was "spicy") so she scooped out all the ice cream instead.  :)

 Adelaide loved EVERYTHING. She has zero fear when it comes to food!

Aurora proceeded to drink pretty much all of Clark's root beer. Next year we'll get her her own float!

Oregon Trip Days 1 and 2

It's that time of year again!

Christmas Cookies

We were able to spend Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa in southern Utah and the cousins were there! On Christmas Eve we had to make cookies to leave for Santa. The kids were good sports, helping make shapes and waiting for them to bake and then frosting them.

 

Abbigale wrote the letter to Santa on behalf of all the children. (The plate of cookies represented the "best of the best" because that's what Santa deserves!)

Thanksgiving 2015

We were lucky enough to be able to head to Cedar City for the holiday. I was happy to celebrate with my parents for the first time in years and the girls loved being with their Grandma and Grandpa.

 Azucena is unimpressed with her meal.

 Aurora ate everything. Like, rolls, potatoes, yams, turkey, baby food, etc. Yeesh.

 The drumstick was almost as large as her head! Huzzah!

Dad used a nice orange and apple seasoning on the turkey, made a brussel sprout slaw, homemade crescent rolls, and a horseradish yam thing. It was all delicious!

Independence Day 2015

We had a fairly low-key Independence Day this year. We forgot that our town has some celebrations Friday night (oops) and the girls weren't too keen on waking up early for the parade, so we slept in, took care of some errands, cleaned up, and enjoyed the fireworks from the comfort of our street corner.

The girls enjoyed getting dressed up for the holiday! Well, except for Azucena, who we realized doesn't own a dress or top that is expressly made for patriotic purposes. So the poor thing had to wear pants on a hot summer day!

 

A friend posted directions for making a "Firework cake" and I tried it out for dessert. Bundt cakes are NOT EASY. But it didn't look too bad in the end and it wasn't dry, so there you go. :D

 We got the girls dressed up in their swimsuits so we could wash our van. They LOVED helping out and cooling off with the hose.

 (Azucena hates loud noises. Headphones were TOTALLY WORTH IT.)

After fireworks, we had sparklers to light up. We used the Home Depot bucket filled with water to douse the used ones. We had two kinds of sparklers for the girls: regular length (about a foot) and giant ones (as seen in the picture). Well, we were just finishing up with the last of our giant sparklers, and Adelaide put her stick in the bucket. Since it's so long, Azucena thought that because it was sticking out it needed to be adjusted to go in all the way. So, the poor thing reached in to grab it and ended up burning her hand. We had a very, very long night, cooling off moist paper towels, putting burn cream on her hand, and general snuggling and comforting her. But since it took four years for us to have a firework accident and it wasn't too bad, I'm still calling today a success. Azucena is a trooper, and she still talks fondly of everything else we did today.

Christmas Cookies!

I've decided the girls are old enough to start learning to how to cook and bake! That meant that we got to make Christmas cookies this year. I even went whole hog and made sugar cookies so they could cut them out and frost and decorate them! (I'm much more of a chocolate chip cookie gal myself.) We used a friend's family recipe, found HERE. They really, really enjoyed themselves. I also learned that I own no Christmas-themed cookie cutters. I'll fix that soon!

Halloween Cookies

The store had some chocolate sugar cookie dough on sale so Clark and I picked it up so the girls could have a chance to make holiday cookies (when I make cookies, I never make sugar cookies--deprived children, I know). We pulled out the cookie cutters (thanks, Mom!) and showed the girls what to do. We even had chocolate frosting and M&Ms so the girls could decorate their creations!

Waffle Cone Wednesday

It turns out a local place has a $1 waffle cone special every Wednesday night so we decided that if we were having a good day we should drop by as often as possible. The girls LOVED all the ice cream and made a fantastic mess in the process. :)

Texas Gibson Reunion - Part 2

The main event Saturday (besides making the 8 hour drive back to Alamosa) was lunch at Cattleman's Ranch. Can I just say that the crust/seasoning on that steak was FREAKING DELICIOUS? Oh my goodness, if every steak I ever ate tasted like that, I'd be just fine. (Clark said he wanted some A-1 but that's just sinful.) The sides were pretty darn awesome, too: home rolls, slow-cooked chili, and pineapple coleslaw (sounds weird, but so good).

And before I go on about food too much, there was family there, too. Got to see great aunt Harriett, June, Glenn and Allyn, met Allyn's granddaughter and great-granddaughter for the first time, and lots of others were there. So grateful Clark could get the time off of work!

California - Day Eight

Saturday morning started bright and early because we needed to make sure we got on the road with enough time to get to our hotel in Elko. However, Randi was evil and tempted me with a fresh blueberry patch somewhere "near" their home, so of course we had to load everything up and head over there first. Azucena didn't understand the concept of only picking "the blue or purple ones" and picked everything but those. Adelaide at least understood that what we were doing was tasty and ate a lot. :)

 

 The picking farm we went to even had a cute little playground, tractor, and photo op location for the little ones. As you can tell, Rowan did NOT want to share the tractor. Poor dear.

 

 Clark made sure that the hotel we got had a pool because every single other place was either closed for the season or re-filling or re-cleaning or whatever other excuses there are to have an indoor pool closed. So I enjoyed sticking my feet in the hot tub for twenty minutes while Clark played with the girls in the pool :D Hooray for vacations!