Mom's birthday

Mom celebrated her 83rd birthday last weekend, and my sister Barb managed to pull off a great last minute surprise party for her! Mom was quite surprised by all of her relatives, friends, and neighbors who made it!











The girls had the right idea, it was quite warm out!

Misc.this week...

Andrew started sleeping in his big boy bed! On the second morning he got out of bed, got into his dresser and, well, dressed himself!
Andrew was cute...

Toes got painted too this week!

4th of July

We watched the fireworks this year from the bleachers at the high school football stadium by the house...

Vegan pizza w/ pumpkin crust

This was really good, but will have to load up on more veggies next time. The garbanzos on it were delicious!

First nail painting

The girls recently got their nails painted for the first time! They were so so so excited about it! It took me a while because I kept reading how bad the chemicals in nail polish are for us, so I had to spend some time researching. I found a few brands, but decided on Priti because they have a cutePriti Princess collection.

From Ecofriend.org - "All of the polishes and polish removers used at Priti are liberated from common ingredients like dibutyl phthalate (or DBP), toluene and formaldehyde. You will be shocked to know that the Environmental Working Group’s Cosmetic Database considers all of these three ingredients exceedingly toxic with potential associations with cancer." - I use the Environmental Working Group's database quite often. Even Priti's remover is much safer to use than conventional nail polish remover. And if you recycle your old nail polish through them you get a discount!

I ended up going crazy, buying a bunch for the girls (a girls gotta have different colors depending on the season, right?) and some for me. I even got them a green glow-in-the-dark color! I thought that would be fun to surprise them with around Halloween! So stay tuned for more nails nails nails!

The girls wanted their hands posed with a pony and the nail polish!




Gianna wanted another picture of this pony later on. Her world seems to revolve around horses/ponies, they are so important to her, she couldn't understand someone not wanting to see this exquisite pony!

Swimming Lessons

Here are some pics from the girls' first session of swimming lessons. They have since moved up from Starfish to Goldies and Guppies! (I think to qualify they had to get their toes wet - ha ha!)









Mike surprised us by showing up, and he got lots of lovies from Andrew, as usual! Daddy makes Andrew's world go around!




Bella's first time off the diving board!!! Gianna's first time was today, and I was in a swimming lesson with Andrew, so I saw it, but didn't get a picture :(

Gianna in the giant water snake...

Vegan Food

About 6 weeks ago, I decided to try being a vegan, once again... this is probably my 5th or 6th attempt. But this time I have something I didn't have last time, bunches of vegan blogs full of delicious recipes. Here are some of my attempts:

mini cinnabuns...
they didn't come out that great, I think I used too much almond milk, then tried to make up for it by adding lots of flour, which made for a very bland dough.

stuffed mushrooms... Mike liked these except for the veganaise on top.

broccoli "bacon" salad - my favorite!!! And wait, whose hand is that???

someone else really enjoyed it with me!



peanut butter cups... these were a little too rich to be so big. Next time I'll use mini paper cups.

chocolate chip cookies... these were super chewy and delicious - at least in my opinion! Mike didn't like them (maybe the coconut oil?), but the kids and I gobbled them up!

Last night we had pizza made with a pumpkin dough that even Mike liked! I'll post pics of that later. It was a hit!