Catch Up Post

We took a little trip up to Baltimore a few weekends ago to visit a few of my cousins.  While we were there, my cousin and I took the girls to a local pumpkin patch and apple orchard.  Here are some of the pictures from the visit!

AJ's fave thing is when she gets to hold Amelia for pictures!

My little pumpkin all decked out in orange, including her hair!

Silly girl!

A little family pic minus hubby, of course!

AJ picked out her pumpkin!

Hayrides are serious business.

My big girl.

I may have carved a pumpkin with a power drill.  It was awesome!

Big girl posing with the pumpkins.

All lit up!

We had a great time and I really enjoyed seeing my cousins and spending time with humans other than my own two tiny creatures.

Chocolate Pumpkin Muffins

The moms from AJ's preschool class are having a little potluck get-together tomorrow during school time.  I kind of forgot until tonight that I have to bring something so I hit Pinterest looking for something to make.  I knew I had a can of pumpkin in the pantry so I found a pumpkin bread recipe that sounded yummy.

Chocolate Pumpkin Muffins

Adapted from:

http://www.kudoskitchenbyrenee.com/2013/10/cocoa-clove-pumpkin-bread-twelve-loaves.html#more

Prep Time: 10 minutes       Bake Time: 15-20 minutes

1 cup granulated sugar
 1/2 cup brown sugar
 1/2 cup canola oil
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
 2 large eggs
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
 4 tablespoons cocoa powder
 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
 1 teaspoon baking soda
 1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
 1- 15 ounce can pumpkin puree (not pie filling)

-Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare muffin pans with baking spray. Set aside.

-In a large bowl, blend the sugar, brown sugar, oil, vanilla extract and eggs.

-In a separate large bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cloves.

-Blend the dry mixture into the wet mixture, in 1/3 increments making sure to blend well after each addition.

-Add in the pumpkin and mix well.

-Pour the batter evenly into the prepared pans. 

-Bake in a preheated oven for approximately 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

-Allow the muffins to cool on a rack for about 20 minutes and then remove them from the pans and allow them to cool completely.

I halved the original recipe and made a few tweaks and it still made 24 mini muffins and about 8 regular sized muffins.  These are fantastic!

Photo Dump

I've been slacking in the blog department again and it took me several weeks to finally upload all my pictures to my iPad, so I'm just now getting around to blogging these.  I figured it is easier to just make one big post with all the pictures instead of trying to write individual posts for a whole bunch of unimportant events.

Amelia wore her turkey shirt the other day because I'm pretty sure it isn't going to fit her once Thanksgiving finally rolls around.  AJ was always right on with her size matching her age, so I'm not exactly prepared now that I have a bigger baby.  It's not that she is bigger even, she just I shaped differently, and is wearing 9m clothes at 6 mos!

Crappy iPhone shot after bath the other night.  The good thing about crappy iPhone pictures is that you can't tell how gross and un-showered I actually look!  Lol

I got crazy when making lunch for AJ the other day.  I feel like she is always eating the same thing over an over again (or not eating, as the case may be) and I thought switching it up a bit might help.  Note: these are the same things she normally likes but will often refuse to eat on any given day, so I thought the hearts might entice her.  She ate half of it.  Clockwise from top left: shredded mozzarella cheese, goldfish, green peppers, apples, turkey sausage crumbles, mandarin oranges.

I went crazy on Pinterest and found some ideas for super-easy Halloween crafts and let AJ go to town last week.  She is very into gluing anything and everything, so one of the crafts was to glue mini marshmallows in the shape of a ghost.  She really liked this because she got to eat a lot of them, too!

These are all of the Halloween crafts she has made in the past two weeks.  The middle one is a candy corn, in case you can't tell.  The candy corn and the jack o lantern are basically just construction paper I cut into little pieces for her to glue to paper (or a paper plate).

Making funny faces during bath time.  She has obviously perfected the "duck lips" and it's only a matter of time before she starts snapping selfies, I fear.

She's looking especially wild in this one!

Looking pensive during her six-month photo shoot.

She thought eating the bug was more exciting than looking at the camera.

AJ and I made chocolate donut munchkins last week as well.  They look much better than they tasted. They weren't bad, I just had much higher hopes for them, I guess.  The recipe also made a ton, and since it's just me and AJ eating food in this house, we had a lot left after we ate our fill.

This is a pretty typical AJ pose lately.  She is so wild and crazy, it's a wonder I still have a shred of sanity left at the end of each day.  Send wine.

Ending with this one because I think she looks cute, and sometimes I need to be reminded that she is cute, like when she disables my phone for the second time in one week by repeatedly entering the wrong passcode.  Were you wondering how many time you had to enter the wrong passcode before your phone is disabled?  It's six.  Trust me.

Writing

I think I briefly mentioned the other day that AJ has started writing letters.  It literally started over night.  I was upstairs putting the baby down for a nap and AJ was working on some coloring crafts to send to hubby in his next care package.  I came down and she says, "Mom!  I wrote my name!"  I looked and she did!  On her own, with no help from me!

I like this picture because I think it accurately represents how crazy she normally looks.

Now, I'm not, by any stretch if the imagination, what you would call a "home school" type of mom, but I figure that I can help her practice forming her letters fairly easily, so we've been working on them a bit.

We've been doing a few different things to practice.  We have a Step 2 easel that has a dry erase board on one side and chalk board on the other.  I'm not an idiot, so she doesn't normally have access to the dry erase markers unless I'm sitting right there with her.  This makes her totally willing to stand there and write letters over and over because it's fun and different and a treat!

The first few times we worked on the letters I got out our alphabet flash cards and held them up, one at a time and she said the letter, then wrote it on the board.  After we did this a few times I decided to challenge her a bit and see how she would do.  I didn't show her the flash card, but I said the letter and she had to think about what it looks like and write it from memory.  This proved to be a little more difficult, but there were really only a few letters that she had a hard time with!

Picture that we sent to Daddy

Now, I am sitting here thinking about this and I cannot believe that she is big enough to be at this point!  I feel like she was just born and now she is writing!  I am really very overwhelmed by it.  I can't even really adequately explain how proud it makes me to see my child learning and growing so quickly.  I can't really take full credit for it (or any credit at all, really), but I completely think that sending her to preschool has been the best decision we have ever made for her.

Anyway, my shameless brag post is over now!