hopeful

I love planning my kids' birthday parties, in large part because I love anything with a theme. For Finn's 1st birthday, we had a baseball theme. We requested that all guests wear their favorite sports apparel and I made a carrot cake rendition of U.S. Cellular Field (complete with pinwheel scoreboard) that was frosted...

As mentioned previously, Sean and his father spent a few days over spring break constructing a swing set in our back yard. So what used to look like this... ...now looks like this! These are the guys who built it... ...and these are the guys who watched. And here are a few pics reminding us why we wanted...

Whew! It has been an absolute whirlwind since my last post, filled with all kinds of fun that, over time, I will get around to writing about here. In brief, my husband had the week off for spring break, my in-laws came for the better part of the week, we took three separate road trips, Sean and his dad built a swing set,...

I've been trying to grocery shop every other week instead of every week; no reason, really, except that I'm constantly tweaking my grocery habits to find what works best for our family so I thought I'd give this a shot. There are definite upsides to less frequent shopping - it makes me plan very carefully, it means one...

This is something I have always wanted to try, and if I had known how easy it was going to be, I would have tried it a long time ago. The ingredients couldn't be any simpler, the steps are very straightforward, and the end result is absolutely marvelous. I came across the recipe in Stephanie O'Dea's Make It Fast, Cook...

In my last post, I shared a little bit about how my family celebrates Mongolian New Year, or Tsagaan Sar. I didn't include too much information about the food, or the fact that my amazing husband pinched over fifty meat dumplings (buuz) in the days leading up to the event, or the fact that my kids devoured the dumplings...