C is for cookie

We've had a good past few days. We've been baking treats, trying to give them away, and then getting way too many back. Luckily I ran a half marathon on Saturday and burned off some calories there, though at this point, I'd probably need a marathon to do that!

The race was lots of fun. I'd never done a half before and it went by so fast. It was great. About halfway through I thought to myself, I wonder if I'm going fast enough, but decided to be safe and not push it too much more and thanked myself for that around mile 11. The race was in Charlotte, a little over 2 hours away, and we'd planned on all going up the night before and having a little family outing, but then Ben had to work so I ended up waking up at 4:30 in the morning and driving there that day, running the race, and then driving home all by myself. But, I had a good race and ran a 1:30:29 averaging 6:55 miles so it was pretty much worth it.



Anyway, I really enjoyed the treats I made this year so I thought I'd share. Nothing original here, everything I made I found on other cooking blogs. I made chocolate turtle cookies from My Kitchen Cafe, Sugar cookies and the best icing/glaze ever from Our Best Bites (it looks much prettier there), hot chocolate mix from here, and orange cranberry bread from King Arthur flour.

I wish photography was as easy as baking. The cookies looked even better in real life.

It's never too early for presents

Christmas came a little early for Ben and I this year. We've been eyeing my brother's camera all year and finally decided to take the plunge into the world of digital SLR, or fancy pants , cameras. It's a little intimidating. We just stared at it the first few days, too afraid to touch it, but we finally broke it out of the box and read just enough of the massive manual to figure out which button to push to take a basic picture. Hopefully we'll get a little braver soon and check out some of the cooler features that I assume it has, but here are some of the better pictures we've taken so far. Laura Bruschke here we come!

Dancing to the beat of a different drummer

Today was Elise's last day of ballet class. I'm not sure how much ballet she actually learned, as seen in the videos, but she had lots of fun with her little friends and was always good for a laugh and some awesome moves.

How to make your children love you

Go out and buy them a $10 used slide on craigslist, even if it doesn't fit in your car's trunk and you have to make the man you just bought it from tie it down for you. This will make your children happy and pleasant to be around.*

* This effect is, unfortunately, only temporary. And some fighting will occur as a natural result of the acquisition of a new toy.

Bonus: How dads can make their children happy while the moms are away on a long run.

See how easy it is?

Take a closer look

Yeah, I know. All you see is a bunch of leaves completely covering up our driveway and sidewalk. But take another look.
Ok, I'll break out the zoom lens here.

Yay! Our first deer sighting at our house. I've seen lots while out running, but none right next to our car like that. I looked out our bedroom window this afternoon and saw a deer browsing through our bushes. I showed it to Elise and she loved it and we went outside to look at it before she scared it off.

Oh, and I was shamed into raking those leaves up for an hour afterwards, even though I know they'll just be back.

Birthday girl

Elise’s birthday is the day after Halloween, and to be honest, it’s kind of a pain. I know it could be worse, on Christmas or Thanksgiving, or Columbus Day, but I get into the Halloween zone and kind of forget about her birthday. We get home from trick or treating and all I want to do is go through the candy and pick out all the good stuff, but I still have presents to wrap, decorations to put up, and a cake to plan.

I've been thinking about starting her in some sort of dance class for a little while and when some other girls we know decided to sign up for one we decided to along with it too. Luckily for us, the first class was on her birthday so we went along with it and told her it was all part of her birthday present. She looked so cute in the dress she picked out and was spinning around all morning in it. Her class went pretty well. She hasn't shown a huge amount of natural talent for it, but it’s only for 6 weeks and she’s having fun so it doesn’t matter. And it puts a smile on your face Saturday mornings to see 8 little girls prancing about in ballet dresses.


She saw a Barbie cake at the grocery store a few months ago and was very impressed by it so I thought I would give it a shot, though Ben really wanted to do this cake for some reason. I am horrible at decorating and I had some issues with drippy homemade frosting, but she loved it. Opening presents took forever because she wanted to play with every single thing immediately but she got plenty of new books and toys to at least keep her busy for another month until Christmas hits. We got her this Princess laptop with a bunch of learning games which I know she likes because I had to take it away to punish her for something yesterday and she completely flipped out for about 15 minutes. That was fun.





Looking back on this year, I can't believe how much she has changed. She has become her own little independent person who now talks back to her mother and bullies her baby sister and will only eat Life cereal. But along with that she loves to cuddle and read books, she's incredibly generous with her hugs and kisses, she gets so excited over the littlest things, and mostly is just the cutest thing ever and scares me with how much she learns every day.

Halloween finally

Our computer crashed last week and even though we got everything up and running again the next day, the one thing that didn't work was the internet. Computers are funny right? Anyway, we finally got everything up and running and I am back to play catch up.

The girls had lots of fun on Halloween. I didn’t want to revisit the sushi costume with Chloe so I tried to put her in a few different things lying around the house. She was very anti-costume and resisted strongly being put into anything so finally I threw her in Elise’s ballet leotard I had just bought and there was no crying so one girl was done. I asked Elise if she wanted to be a Japanese princess again or Snow White and she said Snow White so we threw her in last year’s costume and away we went.

I wasn’t sure how long the girls would last since they both had colds and we already had plenty of candy from the trunk or treat, but after going to a few of the neighbors’ houses they were loving it so we decided to go to another neighborhood more conducive to trick or treating (all the houses in our neighborhood are kind of spread out and have long driveways). By the time we finished in the other neighborhood, Chloe was spitting out an approximation of “trick or treat” at every house and a pretty good “thank you” too. She was super excited and wanted to walk everywhere all by herself.

Elise was cute and told everyone she was Snow White. I was worried some of the houses were a little too scary for her. There was a house with 2 boys with scary masks passing out candy but they took their masks off and she said, “Silly boys,” and laughed really hard to herself so I guess she was fine.


I’m glad the girls had fun, but now we are stuck with way too much candy.

Exhibit A:



Exhibit B:

Those plastic pumpkins hold way more candy than they should.



Comparing candy the next morning. This was before they really realized what it was they were holding.