Living, Loving, Learning

Moroccan night at Gasthaus! Bruce made an amazing Fattoush salad. Secret ingredient: pomegranate molasses! Made us feel like we were back in the D at Cedarlands for a minute!

Just took my fiend to cupcake Mecca. So fun!!!

Poem in your pocket day!

I just want to wish my sweet amazing beautiful sister, Alexis a very happy birthday from Gastland! I also want to share this amazing etsy artist, LauaraKG with you.  Jessica and I decided to go into together to commission her to do a painting of Wilfred, Alexis and Jay's gorgeous puppy.  This is one of the photos I sent her. And this is the result....so great!!!  Anyways, I figured some of you, like me, like to support independent artists and are always searching for awesome gift ideas!!  Hope y'all have a beautiful day. And don't forget to send Lexi some good juju on her special day. 

Lucy and I went on Griffin's school field trip on Friday. We had a great time. The kids were great...wild, engaged, funny. 8 is a crazy age to be! I was happy to be able to get to know Griff's good friend Lucas better. I think our favorite part of the day was going through their coal mining exhibit. Mining is such a huge part of life in this area that we were really interested in learning more about it. And the kids loved the hats!!

So here are some People pictures from Lucy's party.  Look how nicely they queued for the pinata! C-A-N-D-Y! SNACKS! TOYS! FRIENDS! PETS! BABIES AND PUPPIES! FAMILY! I think everyone really did have a great time. Thank you to all our dear friends who were able to come.  We are so happy to have you all as such an important part of our lives!! Big Baby...really, there is no way to explain. 

I have to say,  Bruce and I totally knocked ourselves out to throw Lucy the best Dr. Seuss 4th birthday party that we could and I am pretty proud of the results!  It was a wonderful day for her and hopefully for all her friends that came. Our kids have LOVED the story The Lorax for a while now and were so excited to go see the movie.  Bruce had a brilliant idea to make his own truffula trees .  With some PVC pipe and spray paint he put these together.  I made the tops out of tissue paper (tutorials widely available).  Of course, once I got started on them, I just had to make some extras to hang around the dining room.  I used the extra paper to make a super colorful one for the front porch.  These were so easy and cheap to make, I highly recommend them as party decorations for all different types of themes!   I printed out some of my favorite Dr. Seuss quotes and gussied them up with some fancy paper cutters (Thanks, ...