We voted!

Happy 4th birthday Kate!

Through the years..........

Happy Birthday to Kate's best friend and birth buddy!

Sad day for the Hudson family!

Today, one of Kate's best friends, Kellen, moved to Germany with his mom and dad. As an adult it's always sad to see friends move away. You shed some tears and try to move on with life. For a 3 almost 4 year old, all they can think about is that they won't be a school tomorrow. They can't comprehend 2 years!

Kate was quite distraught. They at least were able to frolic around on the curb one last time, while we loaded and then unloaded all their luggage.

Poor little girl has lost all her best buds. First her best bud from birth, Yaya moved. Thankfully only a little more than an hour away. Now her best bud Kellen. What is a little girl to do?

As a mother, you hope a hug and kiss will make everything all right, but sometimes shedding a few tears with them is all you can do. An of course promising them we'll play on the web cam!

She likes it! She likes it!

Ok....so me being the stubborn, hard headed person that I am, I just couldn't let go the fact that Claire didn't want to eat cake. I mean really!

Since we had some left over cake, I decided to try it again, without all the pressure of the spotlight. I was pleasantly shocked and pleased, that Claire eagerly ate the cake. Of course she did! = )

For those of you that want to experience the "pain" of Saturday, watch the 1st video. If you want to see the messy, low key video of today, watch the second one.

Either way, I am a less stressed mother now. Who knew you're one year old eating cake would be a de-stresser! = )

Claire's birthday week!

(Pretend like this picture was taken on Saturday!)

So Claire turned 1 on the 15th of September. I'm still trying to catch my breathe. I think I've been running to try and keep up and yet I still missed her 1st year.

Monday we celebrated with mini cupcakes with purple icing. What girl wouldn't love a cupcake? Apparently my little girl! After looking at them with this confusing look, she finally hit it and "oh my!' got icing on her fingers. Yeah! Let's get messy girl! I mean, if you've ever been around Claire when she eats, you can't keep her plate full. She shovels it in. So here it's been 5 minutes and all she's done is stuck her finger in the icing. What's wrong with this picture?!!??!

She finally decided to be "adventurous" and try the icing. Well one lick and she stuck her tongue out, gaging with this horrible, "I want to throw up" look on her face. Ok fine. Let's try a plain cupcake. Surely that will go over better, right?!?!? WRONG! One bite of that and she started crying and gagging and spit the cake out. I'm sorry. Is this child related to me?

Alas, no messy 1 year pictures!

Saturday we had a little get together. Try number 2! This time I thought, let's do something that might be more appealing. The girl loves bread, so I found these cinnamon roll twists that you top with chocolate icing. YES! This will be great! I'm so excited. Hand it over to her with a candle, everyone is waiting with great anticipation and........yup! Once again she looks at it with great confusion. "Mommy! What am I supposed to do with this weird worm like thing?" Oh no! Not again! This is a stressful moment for a mother! Ok break it down to smaller bites. Maybe the whole this is just overwhelming. Takes one bite....yes....yes....yes....she spits it out and hands it over to me. WHAT?!?!?!?!

Ok so when all else fails, give her a cookie. So I gave her a chocolate chip cookie. Now cookies aren't that messy and 1st birthdays are all about mess.....aren't they? Who decided that, because my hair has turned gray trying to make it a messy day! Back to the mess....I had a can of whip cream, so I put a little squirt on the top of her cookie. Dairy, light weight, delicious. Surely it won't be a big deal. WRONG! Bring on the tears and not just little spider tears. NO!!!!!!!!! Huge crocodile tears, like someone just took away her favorite teddy bear. Are you kidding me! When did Claire become so "dainty". This is my line backer, garbage disposal, nobody gonna bother me daughter!

So! There you go! That pretty much sums up Claire's birthday. I think she had fun. I HOPE she had fun. I'm sure she will forever be scared by sweets and maybe that's a good thing. I wish I had that problem!

Better start coming up with ideas for birthday #2! Thankfully I have 51 weeks! I'm thinking an ice cream cake!

The silver lining to the day: Claire stood by herself, without holding on to anything! So it was a great 1st birthday!

Happy 1st Birthday Claire!!!!!!!

Watch out Partridge Family!!!!!!

Rainy day fun...

For those of you that didn't know, this little storm called Hanna came through today. For us, it was a slow moving day. None of us had energy to do anything and thus the whining began!

Thanks to the divine inspiration of Rebekah, I decided to put on my thinking cap and come up with something for Kate to do. What started off as a quick internet search for playdoh, morphed into a lesson on senses.

I found a recipe for Cinnamon playdoh. Sounded interesting and yummy to me. So I thought, why not check out my spice rack. So we had a brief discussion about senses and then identified what they were. Kate did a lot better than I thought she might. After that, we sat on the floor in front of my spice rack (it's part of my kitchen island) and smelled, touched, tasted, looked and even listened to all my spices.

Some caused Kate's nose to cringe as she sneered, "that's spicy!", while others cause her to squeal with joy, "Yummy!". We had fun and ultimately she ended up picking cinnamon without any prompting or knowing what would happen with it.

After all that excitement, we got down to business getting super messy, making our playdoh.

First we started off with the essentials, flour and salt and a lot of it there was!Kate wanted her playdoh to be purple (her favorite color), so we dyed the water...not that it really mattered. The end result was definitely NOT purple.

After some mixing (and adding more flour and more flour and more flour!!!) We finally had our dough. The end result was odd. Almost sandy like (thanks to ALLLL THE SALT) and very sticky. I felt like I was working with bread dough. We had to flour our play area often.

The end result, Daddy and Kate....very weird. Mommy isn't so good at making playdoh people. Didn't pass that class in preschool.

Kate however worked very hard on her sand castle, complete with a bridge, mote, windows, flag, boat, boulder and horse. Use your imagination people! She's only 3...well almost 4. = )

We ended the day with a family movie. First time we have done that. Thanks to the library, we were able to watch Alvin and The Chipmunks (the new one). Great movie! All of us got a good chuckle out of it, even little Claire. Two thumbs up from this family!

No Labor on Labor Day!

We took advantage of the beautiful weather and day off (for daddy), to have a family day in DC. There was lots of parking, which made us leery of whether our van would still be there when we got back, but thankfully the DC police confirmed it was ok! So we parked by the Captial /Arboretum. The Arboretum was havng a neat exhibit of globes or "Earths" as Kate was calling them. Each one represented a way to save the planet, whether through recyclng, alternative fuels, etc. They were really cool.

From there we headed over to the reflecting pond in front of the Captial. Never miss an opportunity to be by water, though the water is pretty nasty! = )

After our adventure at the pond, we walked down to the Native American Museum. We had never been before. It was beautiful and the water out front was so relaxing. You almost forgot you were in the middle of a major city!

Inside, Daddy and Kate got to play fun games (which Mommy won!) and then Kate and Mommy learned all about basket weaving and got to make a minitaure basket!

Claire did her usual.....EAT!

We decided we wanted to eat too, as the cafeteria was calling to us! We had a chicken tamale and quinoa, some chili and fried bread and of course a granny smith apple to top it off! It was delicious!

From there we headed to the Sculpture Garden to splash our feet in the fountain! The cool marble benches....IN THE SHADE...were divine!Of course Claire was thinking...."what about me Mom?!?!?"So off she went to splash away!After our nice break, we headed down to see the Elephant and Dinosaurs, Oh MY!We ended our adventure with a ride on the carousel!

Operation Baking Gals

My friend, Kara, is always finding the coolest blogs and making the coolest foods and such. Well her latest find is Operation Baking Gals. Since I'm always looking for an excuse to bake and emulate the greats like Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines (LOL!) and of course SAMPLE (the most important job of all), I decided to join the cause. Sometimes you really just have to sacrifice yourself for the good of man kind.

All joking aside, it is pretty cool. We bake yummy goodies from home to send abroad to the WONDERFULLY COURAGEOUS AND DEDICATED men and women who serve in our armed forces. A plate of cookies or other goodies from home is the least we can do to say thanks! I've never met the recipient of my goodies, but he's my neighbor. The one that helped during the Tsunami relief effort, has been deployed several times since 2004, and who is dedicated to his country and service! Thanks Colin!

As per Kara, she asked that we take pics of our goodies! I have to admit, this isn't something I tend to do, so I kept forgetting to take pictures. But I did at least capture a few during the process. I made some Caramel Bars, another great recipes thanks to Allrecipes.com

The super yummy oat and butter mixture!!!!!!!

Melted caramel with milk...it was supposed to be heavy cream, but I didn't have any!

The final result, a sea of melted caramel and chocolate chip, buttery goodness!

The recipe was REALLY easy and makes plenty! I changed it up a bit. I did a 9x12 and a 8x8 pan, so I tripled the oat flour mixture and added an extra 12 caramels and 2tbs of milk. Otherwise I sprinkled as many chocolate chips as I wanted (half cup? WHATEVER) and just dropped the left over oat mixture all around, lightly pushing it into the caramel. I highly recommend not cutting until they cool completely. It's really messy otherwise. If you want warm bars, cut them when they are cool and heat them up individually.

ENJOY!

Great day!

I'm getting some flack for not keeping up with my blog! (I love you dearly!) So I figured I would post a couple of different things.

A couple of weeks ago my friends Kevin and Kristen got married! It was a beautiful wedding and despite a brief thunder storm, was a spectacular day! The highlight for Wood and I, of course, was not being a part of the wedding or even watching Kristen walk down the isle, but our little, or grown up cutie.

Their photographer was incredible and took some great shots! You can check out his blog at Love Life Images.

The following weekend my mom and I went to see the Lion King at the Kennedy Center. I'm still speechless! Fate has had a way of keeping my mom and I from seeing it. FINALLY all the stars came into alignment. We had a fabulous lunch at a T.H.A.I. Shirlington, where we happened to run into Megan, Brad and Ashley. By far some of the BEST Thai food I have ever had! It was super yummy! We headed off to the Kennedy Center to our AMAZING seats, Center Stage front row box seat! UNREAL! If you haven't seen Lion King yet, I highly recommend it!

After the Lion King, I got to spend a great night with my family. The weather was great and so we went up to a local shopping area and let the girls play.

It's been a great couple of weeks!