My Birthday

 For my birthday, my in-town family came over for cake and my girls dressed up in their princess costumes. I love their style.

 On my actual birthday I was treated to LOTS of cupcakes and I loved it. For my birthday cake, I chose to have a dozen cupcakes from The Sweet Tooth Fairy and then we cut them up into little pieces so I could try them all. My visiting teacher, Misti, also brought me some yummy red and white cupcakes and my friend, Dawn, gave me a giant cupcake from Flour Girls and Dough Boys. Yum yum!

 My kids loved the red frosting the most.

Officially, it wasn't part of my birthday, but later that week, my mom watched my kids and I got to go skiing with my dad, Katie, and Jack. It started out foggy and hard to see, but eventually the sky cleared up, and we skied hard. We managed to time our runs so that we made it on to the lift just before it closed at 4:30. We were pretty proud of ourselves since we had to ski pretty quickly down what was a more difficult run for us in order to make it to the lift in time. No one crashed, so we made it. It was a lot of fun.

January 2012 Snapshots

On January 14, my sister Jamie and her husband Chris were sealed to Tyler. Then a few days later, they moved to California. We were glad we could go to the sealing and glad they had it in Utah so we could be there.

In January, I decided to try green smoothies as a way to get my kids to eat some sort of vegetable. For the first few days, I thought the green mustaches were very funny and cute. I still think they're cute, but they're not so much of a novelty anymore and we also started using straws, which usually means no green mustaches.

Preschool at our house. Anna has really enjoyed preschool. I love the group of moms and kids we did it with, but I'm not going to lie. I was very happy when I had my last day to teach, but that's not to say I hated teaching. I just didn't relish it.

I let Anna paint one day and she decided to give herself red gloves.

My cute Evie in the sweater and hat Dan's aunt knitted for him.

Evie June's 2nd Birthday

We planned Evie's big party for Saturday morning to make it easier for family to be there, so on her actual birthday, I made cupcakes and let the girls decorate a few. Of course, for them, more is always better--more frosting, more sprinkles, etc.

 We also opened presents from Mom and Dad and from Grandma and Grandpa Brough since they couldn't be there for the family party.

Then after the girls went to bed, I worked on decorating Evie's cake. She had asked for a Zoe cake, so I took the Elmo pan I had and then frosted it to look like Zoe. With all those different colors of frosting, it took forever. Plus I had a hard time because I tried a new recipe for the frosting and it was a little too stiff, but I admit that even though I whine about how long it took and how late I was up, I really do like decorating cakes--but not so much that I want to do it more than twice a year.

 It was a chilly day, so Evie snuggled with Grandma.

 My mom brought Anna a present too, so that she wouldn't feel too left out. She got her a cool rocket launcher. Evie had a hard time jumping on the puffer button with enough pressure to launch the rocket, but then Aunt Christa helped.

California Children's Museum

We flew back to Utah Saturday night. We needed something to do that day and settled on visiting a children's museum.

 Anna loved the dress up area. They had a rather extensive collection of clothes and shoes.

 She looks like she's channeling the spirit of Ghengus Kahn, but I think I just caught her at a bad moment.

January Beach in California

The day after our trip to Disneyland, we slept in and recovered. Then in the evening, we took the girls to the beach. I'm such a sucker for beach photos.