New Beginnings

The live taping of the 'Virtue Deli'

The cake that never made it!!

Avery helping me make the cake...yummm

Well, I'll start out as saying those of you who know me know that I am a procrastinator and well not so proud of it, but I am. The new year came and having only been in my calling for not quite a month I realized 'oh, crap' (and I'm sure I said that :) !) I needed to help 2 beehives plan New Beginnings. We pulled it off in under a week and a half and it was alot of fun. As you can see we decided to spotlight the new value that was added this year and we taped a cooking show for the 'Virtue Deli' and everything was great. The girls made their sandwich and afterwards we had it for refreshments.

Speaking of refreshments.....well, I decided it would be fun for me to make a cake for this event. I've never made anything bigger than a normal cake size or one of the kids cakes (I like to call it cake by numbers!) so I was excited to try for a 1/2 sheet cake. The cake came out great. My cooling rack is regular sized so the cake hung off the edges about an inch all around. Trust me, I've made cakes before where I've decorated them and I've got to say they turned out pretty good, but this time I had a bimbo moment! I had the cake all smoothed out and put on the top border and proceeded to take out the parchment paper and realized I had it ALL the way under the cake. Yeah, I know you're laughing now b/c I had this huge cake and could not get the parchment paper out from under it. The pic was taken after many attempts to remove it and you can see the cracks in the frosting. At one point I actually took hold of both sides and just pulled and the cake started to literally crack down the middle. Thank goodness for lots of frosting b/c it glued itself back together. Well I thought I could trim the paper all around and still use it, but the crazy cake kept sliding all around. I hadn't even got to the point of truly decorating it but I was getting sick of it (and mad at myself!) At this point it was midnight and I decided to go to Publix first thing the next morning and ordered a cake. So much for my good intentions!

Needless to say...Avery did not mind having cake around the house for the next week!! She's been on a sugar high since!!!

Oh, what crummy luck

I should have posted this yesterday, but as usual I'm a day late and now I'll be a few dollars short.... Our big Christmas present (well for Bryan and I) was to get a fence to go around our back yard. Bryan and Avery finally wore me down and we adopted a dog about 4 months ago from the animal shelter and one condition of that was we were to get a fence and soon! So after moving things around and prioritizing we ordered our fence and it was installed less than 2 weeks ago. In fact they began the day right after Christmas. So we've enjoyed our nice fence for a week and a half and now a tree has blown into it :( We had very strong winds yesterday and while I was gone to get Avery from school a tree from our neighbors yard fell over. Those lovely pine trees are not my friend! Luckily it fell on one panel (and a smaller one at that) so we think we can fix it for about $100. Our neighbors haven't even noticed that one of their trees had fallen over yet. We just think it will be too much of a hassle to get insurance involved so we're gonna suck it up. Pictures will follow soon.

Jingle Bell shoes

This morning Avery almost did not go to school because I was the meanest mom and would not let her keep jingle bells on her shoes. Last month at our ward Christmas Brunch some of the YW put on cute little jingle bells on her shoes and she loved it. It was very cute during the holidays....but seeing as it is now January I foolishly tried to take them off in front of her...wrong move!! She was crying so hard and I tried to get her to wear other shoes, but she wanted her jingle bells on all her shoes. This was a tragedy in her young 4 year old life! She loves school so the threat of staying home was the only thing to convince her to wear jinglebell-less shoes. Pictures of the said famous shoes to follow!

Finally, we joined the bloggers

Well, this is our first foray into the blogging community. If you are reading this, it just proves you are really bored and nothing is on TV! My friends have been bugging me to join their world of blogging, but I've been hesitating because I don't think anyone will really want to ready what goes on in our lives......but, you asked for it so here it goes!
We are a small family, but are excited about lies in wait for us just around the corner. We have learned that life is precious and you never know how much time you have in this world, so try to make everything count. Bryan has beaten cancer twice and had a bone marrow transplant. Yes, he is doing great and everything has been clean for almost 2 years now. We are very blessed! Avery turned 4 in Sept. and keeps us busy with her first year of preschool. She loves it! It is amazing to see her come out of her shy shell (although she still hides sometimes, it is getting better!). I'm kept busy running her around and I have just been called 2nd Counselor in YW. Boy, that really takes me back. We just had our New Years Eve dance and it was so funny to see that in the 17 years since I've been in YW the dances are exactly the same! Even most of the songs were the same....somebody really needs to help the DJ's with an updated playlist! Anyway, the Beehives are a ton of fun and I'm looking forward to being in YW (remind me that I said that, ok!!)!
Well I am a rambler and I'm sure all my posts will be long and have a ton of grammatical errors. Its sad that I'm so bad grammatically because I love to read and always have a book on me, but commas and correct punctuation always gets me....speaking of which...I love exclamation points and I use them all the time, so sorry if it bugs anybody!!!!!! And I love run on sentences and paragraphs!!!!! Anyway, enough about my bad education (I did grow up in middle GA!) j/k....we are very modernized down that way. Well, this is enough for my first post. I'll probably have to call on some of my more experienced blogger friends to figure out how to put up pics, but they will follow soon!! Oh, and Happy New Year everyone!