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Category Archives looking back

Birthday wishes for TechyDad

Posted on August 3, 2009 9:00 am by TheAngelForever

Today is a special day in our family. It is the reason three of us spent time baking an extra special cheesecake for tonight. On this day, many years ago in a city that often appears to be in a galaxy far far away, my husband was born. Today JL will be spending the day at work, coding lots of important items. Thanks to going in early this week, he will leave to pick NHL up from Dinosaur Camp. From there we will be dropping the boys off to have dinner with Nana and Papa. Not sure where JL will pick to have his B-day dinner, but my guess is something that involves sushi. After that we will head back to get the boys and finally test out the tie-dyed cheesecake together.

Here are some new photos from the weekend of my amazing husband with our boys. These are when we went to build at Home Depot Saturday morning to make a message center. I can already see the future when JL teaches the boys to build their own computers from individual components.

Later in the afternoon, it was sunny out and we went to the park. All three of the boys had fun running all over the place. The two little guys even had some special one-on-one time with JL.

Last year I wrote a piece, with lots of photos, about our years together and it still sums everything up. JL is the geek of my dreams and I love him more and more each day. Most women would only dream about an amazing husband who cooks dinner almost every night, cleans the bathroom, and loves to play with the kids. This is my reality and I am truly blessed to have found my TechyDad and married him.

Categories:
birthday jl looking back my boys photos

The Pop Century Tie-Dyed Cheesecake experiment

Posted on August 2, 2009 10:13 pm by TheAngelForever

Back in December, we did a lot of research to try to figure out which Disney World resort to stay at. Several of the Disney message boards had amazing posts with information about anything and everything you could ever want to know. Seriously, they had information about the rooms, pools, buses, and even the food. Best of all, they had photos of items that helped to lure us into staying at the Pop Century Resort.

One night, JL and I were sitting at the laptop reading about the Pop Century. At the time our reservations were at a different value resort on Disney property. We read about all of the activities that took place at Pop Century each day, especially for kids that were NHL’s age. Then we looked at photos of things from the food court. We were immediately intrigued by something called tie-dye cheesecake. The photos were amazing and we sat there almost drooling. Several days after this we changed our reservations to Pop Century Resort.

When we went to Disney in May we knew that we HAD to try the tie-dye cheesecake. Of course, we did just that one morning as part of our breakfast splurge.

We had this colorful, delicious treat twice while on our week long vacation. . . so did my parents. A short while ago JL did a search for the tie-dye cheesecake on Google. He found a recipe mentioned on Slashfood.com that compared itself to the cheesecake at the Pop Century Resort. Today we went grocery shopping and JL mentioned that he wanted to try making this. It seemed like the perfect time since his birthday is tomorrow. So we bought the red velvet cake mix, got bricks of cream cheese, and bought food coloring just in case we needed it.

When we got hom JL and NHL baked the 9" round red velvet cake in our never used springform pan from my bridal shower. It also made a dozen cupcakes with the extra batter. Then I switched out and made the cheesecake part. We opted to only do four colors this time around. So I mixed green, blue, purple and yellow for our experiment. Here is the cake just as it was heading into the oven to bake the cheesecake part on top of the red velvet cake.

Now this colorful creation is baked, cooled and chilling.

Tomorrow we will slice in to test and see how our colorful creation tastes when we have it to celebrate TechyDad’s birthday.

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Submitted as part of Grace’s Kitchen Friends on Feels Like Home.

Categories:
baking birthday Disney food glorious food jl looking back vacation yummy

Nanny Fine all the time

Posted on July 31, 2009 12:00 am by TheAngelForever

Oy! Let me take you back to the early ’90’s for a few minutes. Say hello to Nanny Fine, Mr. Sheffield, Niles, C.C. Babcock, Margaret, Brighton, Grace, Sylvia, Val and Yetta. These were all of the friendly and quirky characters from the television show The Nanny. There was just something about Fran Drescher and the rest of the amazing actors on the show. Once you looked beyond her nasal voice, it was oddly captivating.

Thanks to Nick at Nite, I can once again watch The Nanny each night as I settle into bed. I love just sitting there, laughing (while sometimes knitting) and catching each of the fabulous punch lines. The timing on the jokes, often said by Daniel Davis as Niles the butler, still hold up today. As an adult I appreciate many of the items that likely went right over my head as a high school student. Now I enjoy how The Nanny makes me laugh, and melts the stresses of the day away.

So my question this week:

What television show from the past would you, or do you, love to watch? I suppose you can call it your guilty pleasure. It could be a cartoon (like Muppet Babies), drama (like Little House on the Prarie), or another comedy (like Mork & Mindy, The Nanny, Dinosaurs . . . . or countless others) or something else.

Now I will leave you with the fun theme song from The Nanny:

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Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the Mr. Linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #59

Categories:
Aloha Friday fun laughs looking back me moments television

Beaucoup de books

Posted on July 30, 2009 9:10 am by TheAngelForever

To say that we have a lot of books for our boys would be an understatement. As an elementary education major, I purchased a lot of picture and chapter books from Scholastic and beyond. While student teaching I bought even more, and again while getting my masters degree in Reading. I truly do have a very large collection of books from many different genres. At one time or another I have read most, if not all of the books. When NHL was born, and then started in daycare, we added many more books to our house.

Last year, we bought a book shelf for the boys room. This was to house their books and some of mine that had been brought down for their age group. The boys love their own personal library. NHL and JSL are constantly grabbing books off the shelves and taking them to read. The problem, the boys rarely ever put the books back. Most of the time they leave piles of books in the living room, or on their bedroom floor.

With the arrival of my in-laws last week, I had to do something about the book shelf disaster (sorry forgot to take photos of this mess). Thursday night after I was done eating dinner, I excused myself to their room to tackle the project. I took all of the books off of the shelves. I put them into a few piles and started to organize by type of book, author and so on. What I soon realized was there was really no room in the book shelf for all of our board books that JSL reads. As a quick solution I put them into a big Rubbermaid tote and kept moving along with my other project.

It honestly did not take me long, but the result was SO much better than it originally looked (take my word for it). Here is the entire bookcase when I was finished.

A closer look from the bottom up. On the botton shelf I put larger books that would not fit elsewhere, along with some of our coloring books.

On the middle shelf I grouped collections of books by a single author, along with books about familiar television/movie characters. You can see all of the Curious George, Froggy, Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle and multiple other groupings.

The top shelf has the early readers on the left (a few chapter books also here). In the middle I put an empty space for NHL and JSL to put books back when they are done reading.

On the right are some of our Jewish book collection (many thanks to the PJ Library) and books about holidays in general.

A week after this project was completed the books are still looking good. NHL and JSL have been good about only taking three books out of their library at a time. Each day I go back in and help them to put the books back away to keep it on the sort of organized side.

So do you keep your books in a certain order? How do you deal with your ever growing collection of books? Inquiring minds want to know!

Categories:
books looking back messy photos sahm

Favorite quiet moment at Disney World

Posted on July 28, 2009 10:09 am by TheAngelForever

Welcome to this week’s Blog Hop. The theme this week is Favorite Kid Photos. You can have one or more of your favorite photos of your kids, grandkids, someone else’s kid or even YOU when you were a kid. Funny, precious, heartwarming… your favorite!.

This theme made me brain storm some to when we were at Disney World at May. I recalled one of the few quiet moments of the trip. After a long full at at EPCOT, where we stayed to see the fireworks at the end, the boys fell asleep in our rented double stroller. We all laughed that they were definitely brothers since the poses were almost identical. Several times they both moved about and came to the same resting spot.