Cupcake Fun!

This post is totally gonna go against everything I have been sharing for the past month about eating healthy but before you get all worked up, let me explain. :)

You all know I love cupcakes.  I love eating them (of course) but I also love decorating them! One of the things on the girls' summer bucket list was to have a cupcake decorating party so two weeks ago Friday, that's what we did.  I invited several of my MOPS friends over with their kiddos so that we could have a fun decorating party and I think it's safe to say it was a hit.  I provided the sprinkles and frosting, and everyone brought their own cupcakes to decorate.

I bought the ready whip frosting in a carton to make it easy.  It's a yummy whipped cream type frosting called Pastry Pride and it worked out great with the exception of me not buying enough! Ooops! My goal was for everyone to bring a dozen or so cupcakes and decorate them with their kids but once everyone got there, I realized that I wasn't gonna have enough for everyone to do that. I was super bummed but it all ended up working out because a couple of the girls just had their kiddos decorate a cupcake or two and then let them snack on it right then and there.

Here was my friend Virginia's daughter, Leah, helping herself to a cupcake!

This is one of my favorite pictures of the day!

It was fun seeing how everyone decided to decorate their cupcakes....

Since I wanted to make sure our guests got to decorate as many cupcakes as possible, I told my girls that they could decorate after naptime, once I could get to the store to get more frosting. It ended up working out great and they had a fun time decorating their cupcakes before dinner time. Alyssa is practically a pro with the piping bag! ;)

She loved decorating just like mommy does!

Here was Audrey all proud of one of her masterpieces...

And in case you're wondering where Alivia was during decorating time, she was there but mostly got into trouble so she was playing with her toys and watching T.V. instead.  She kinda got kicked out of the kitchen after dumping half of a container of sanding sugar on the floor! 

Here were the girls' works of art! All unique and special!

I even got to have some fun decorating some cupcakes too and believe it or not, I made it through that entire day without eating a single one!  I sent these cupcakes to church with my mom that night and she said they enjoyed them!

Since this party went so well, I'm gonna try and schedule another one sometime in the next couple of weeks here for the other friends who wanted to come to the first one but couldn't make it.  I'd better get on scheduling it soon, since school is just around the corner!

Thanks to Virginia, Kirstin, Kellie, Keri, Jody and Elesa for coming out and hanging out with us! It was fun!

Staying Busy!

I've managed to disappear from Blogland again and this time you can blame it on my phone. :)  Over the past week since getting my new iPhone, I've found that pretty much anything I need to do can be done on my phone! Days go by without me even opening up my computer and I've been loving the ease and convenience of this new phone!

Aside from being in iPhoneville, I've been staying pretty busy with an assortment of different things. On Friday, I went to play Bunco with some friends. It was my first time ever, playing Bunco and it was a lot of fun!  I guess I had a stroke of beginner's luck because I walked away that night as the winner with the most buncos and $25 in my pocket.  So cool!

Getting paid, lol!

I even was able to make and take some Halloween decorated cupcakes too, which was fun because it had been a long while since I'd made cupcakes.

Over the weekend, we made it to Alyssa's school Fall Festival.  What I thought would be a super fun day for the girls turned out to be a big bust. It was crazy hot that day and they were all in bad moods.  I bought wristbands for carnival games the girls refused to play and I was almost wishing we'd have stayed home. I took along my good camera and managed to get literally only one good picture....

The girls had fun playing with their cousin Natalya that day and the highlight of their day was getting to go swimming at the pool in my sister's new house!

The other highlight of my weekend was making some cupcakes in a jar for MOPS.  I volunteered to make cupcakes to celebrate birthdays and yesterday was my first time on cupcake duty.  The cupcakes turned out so fun and I was glad I gave them a try!

I made red velvet cupcakes (care of Duncan Hines, lol) and then made some yummy cream cheese frosting to go in between each layer.  You can find the recipe for the frosting HERE.  I'd been doing so well with not sinning in the sweets department these last three months, but I could not help myself. I gave in and had a cupcake and they were SO good!

I'm working on making more of these with a friend really soon for a fundraiser we'll be doing for Wren.  I have a feeling these will sell really well! :)

While at MOPS, I asked my friend Sonia to take my picture with Liv. It's been a year now since joining MOPS and my baby has grown so much since then.  Gone is that little (or not so little) baby girl and here is my growing girl!  I can't believe how big she's getting!

And speaking of babies....I cannot believe that my very best friend, Kristin is due to have baby Matthew anytime now.  As of tomorrow, she will be 38 weeks already!  I'm so, so excited, and pretty soon here, I get to do my very first "guest post" on Kristin's blog announcing Matthew's arrival.  I can't wait! :)

Just Like Old Times (only now I'm married with three kids)!

I have so much to share about what we've been up to lately so I'm thinking today I'll start with something fun we got to do last Friday and then work my way through the past weekend in the next few posts!

On Friday I had the fun chance to get together with a sweet friend from high school.  We reconnected through Facebook last year and have been talking a lot on there but hadn't actually seen each other in person in 13 years!  The funniest thing about it...we live in the same town! She actually moved away and then came back and well me...I've been here the whole time.  I'm so boring! :)

Nightingale loves photography and asked me a while back if I'd be interested in letting her come over to photograph us to capture what a typical day looks like.  After several months of talking about scheduling a meet-up, we were able to finally able to make it happen! The girls and I had such great time visiting with "Miss Nightingale" and they felt completely comfortable with her, which was so great :)  Visiting Nightingale was like old times and we agreed at the end of our visit that we are pretty much both the same people we were back in high school...only this time around, we're both married and I have THREE kids! We laughed together when she said to me that she still couldn't believe that I have three!

What's so cool to me is that Nightingale, or "Nightie" as we always used to call her, is also a blogger!    After our day together, she wrote up a really neat post on her observations of the day and it was cool seeing what she captured and reading about what our life looks like from the "outside.  You can go HERE to read it! It would mean so much to me if you went over to her blog and checked it out! While you're there, please try to ignore my yucky hair!  There was no time to style it that day, and I am way over due for a haircut so I've pretty much gone into lazy mode with styling it!

Well, I'm really looking forward to more chances to hang out with Nightingale and maybe even get to meet with both her and her Hubby together!

P.S.  When you hop over to Nightingale's blog, you'll see the mommy shirt I'm wearing.  I've been meaning to blog about it for ages but just hadn't done that.  Jodi made it for me and I love it!