February and all it brings

Hi guys!

It's March, one of my favorite months - or at least a month with one of my favorite seasons...St.Patrick's Day!! We have officially entered the St.Pat's dancing season, a glorious month full of Irish dance performances to celebrate the Irish holiday, yay!! 

But let's back up just a bit and see what kind of events February brought about, shall we?

Ok, so we got David back to Brasil and he's doing splendid right now. 

February is Grandma Jack's birthday month and this year it worked out that all of us girls got to go have a sleep over at her house, watch Hallmark Valentine movies all night (can't beat that!) and then in the morning we woke up and made a special breakfast for Grandma on her actual birthday.

It was so much fun!

Seconds, anyone?

Another landmark occasion that happened in this particular February was the 10 year anniversary of the Irish dance group that I dance with!! It's been an awesome 10 years and I can't believe I've been blessed enough to be there for all of them! It's been one of the best things I've ever gotten to do and be part of. Especially because of the awesome friends who I've made and the life-long friendships that have come from it. So as a surprise I got Dad to help me with his awesome decorating skills and together we made this cake for me to take to dance class for everyone.

This is just a small portion of the dancers in the group, but it's a good thing, otherwise we wouldn't have had enough cake! :D

  

I learned how to make rice krispie sushi to take to one of our YW activities, so that was a fun experiment!

Then we headed on to Valentine's Day weekend! Normally this is a pretty average day around our house - except for a good reason to increase our chocolate intake. ;)

  This year Dad wanted to make us a fun breakfast so he whipped up some tasty fruit, yogurt, and granola parfaits along with some delightful little cherry muffins. Mmm!

 For dinner he made us another surprise meal and did some chicken salad sands on croissants that were joined by a new Greek salad that we'd never tried before - definitely a keeper! Malia had to work the closing shift that night so we met up with her during her :"lunch" break and ate in the break room at Petsmart. We just bring the party with us wherever we go!

That morning we also went and watched a couple of our little cousins do their cheerleading for a basketball game. They were pretty stinkin' cute!!

  So for Kelani and my big Valentine's Day adventure we decided to have a bunch of our kids over that we get to babysit some times. By the time everyone came we had about 12 kids there from the age of 11 to about 3. It was awesome!!

For lunch we had pancakes then the kids all kind of broke off into whatever sounded fun to them.

Kelani was on nail painting detail and had a mini salon going on in her room - complete with chocolate covered pretzels and a few marshmallows for the ladies to snack on.

We had kids out jumping on the trampoline, a few in the house playing legos, decorating sugar cookies, playing the Wii, and some just running around like wild animals (ok, the amount of sugar they consumed may or may not have had something to do with that... :)

Here's the gang for the "crazy" picture pose!

We also had our monthly traditional Girls Night that we started a few months ago, thanks to our cousins in Jerome and Twin doing something similar to that.

For this one Malia suggested that we go to a hockey game and cheer on the Steelheads. I hadn't been to a hockey game for quite a while so it was pretty fun to head back and watch again.

And here's the view from the top of the parking garage after the game. I think the time it took to actually make it out of the garage was nearly the length of the game, but we had our tunes on and just jammed out in the car while we waited! :)

Now it's March and already been a pretty great month! There's lots more to tell but I think I'll save that for another day. Stay tuned...

The Drop-off...wait, didn't we just do this?!

Hello!

So guess what? David is in Brasil today!! Yep, he flew back and is now going to spend the next 90 days soaking up the sun and doing all the (good) things that he couldn't do under mission rules. Like - going to the beach. Have I mentioned that yet? :)

On Tuesday night, Mom, Dad, David, and I drove to Jerome and stayed the night at the Farm then got up, ate some tasty blueberry pancakes that Grandma Farns whipped out, and then hit the road to Salt Lake by about 7:45.

It was such a pretty drive!!

Crazy comparison, but this picture is from November 2012 on our way to take David to the MTC!  

And here we are in February 2015, on our way to Salt Lake, sending him right back to the country from whence he just came! :)

This was our sunrise, it was so great!!

We got to Salt Lake around 10:30 but didn't need to have him to the airport until a little after 12:00, so in the meantime we stopped in at Costco to surprise Dad's Samoan mission companion, Poao, who was working there and didn't know we were in town! That was fun! 

After that we stopped at a couple different Polynesian stores to stock up on our Polynesian food needs and just get a whiff of the islands. Good times were had by all!

By the time we were done there we hit up a local Jimmy Johns before heading off to the airport.

One last "selfie" with the boy before he hopped onto the plane, but no tears from anyone (even Mom :) this time, he'll be back again at the beginning of May.

Awkward hug moment! :D

One for Momma, then me (the hug part, not the cheek kissing stuff)!

Once we got him dropped off, the party officially started! Joking!!

But since we were in the area, we decided to make a nice day trip out of it, so we parked near the Conference Center then took a walk to see what we could see.

We ended up taking a tour of The Beehive House, which we haven't done in a long time, then meandered over to City Creek.

Dad found his personal Shangri-La at the entrance to the food court of City Creek.

Have you ever seen such an excited look on someone's face before?!

This time around his stomach told him that it could only be satisfied by a hearty Stromboli filled with spinach and melty mozzarella.

Of course, after that much of a sodium intake, the only way to balance out your system is to stop in at this little cavern of happiness...

He hit the jackpot with the pecan-caramel-chocolate drizzle apple. Pure heaven! 

And nothing better than finishing it off with a few chocolate covered cinnamon bears - or by this point might we call them "SINnamon" bears?

To end our day trip of goodness, we went in and saw The Christus, which never fails to amaze me. 

We got one last touch of color on our drive home. A lovely ending to a lovely day.

I'm still here!!!

 Is anyone there?! I know, I know...you may have been asking that about me for the last several months. Where did I go? What have I been doing that seemed so important that it kept me from blogging? 

  Well, it's just this little thing called life, and there's been a lot of it going on, but hopefully you'll forgive my long absence and we can be friends again.

   I honestly can't even remember where I left off - was it the "Frozen" birthday cake? I think that might have been it. That was in June of 2014 - holy cow, it's February 2015! I'm not sure that you or I have time to catch up on everything that's happened between then and now - at least not in one sitting. Don't worry, I wouldn't do that to you!!

   In a brief summary I'll just say, we've had best friends and family come home from their missions, we've had a handful of new babies born in our family (cousins and the like), we've had some fun reunions and vacations, and lots of "Hey, this is your first Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas back from your mission!" moments with said friends and family. 

  It's been a good time and hopefully I'll be able to back-up and catch up a little more as time goes on. For now, I'm going to start working backwards and show you some of the more recent things that we've been up to. Sound like a good plan? Ok, let's do this!

   So David got home from his 2 year mission in Brasil on Halloween of 2014 and then at the beginning of December he moved in with Grandma Farns in Jerome and started a job with a guy there who owns a flooring business. David got lots of quality time with Grandma and all the cousins that live around town.        Towards the middle of January I took a little road trip and drove down to Jerome/Twin Falls to meet up with David and see some of the cousins who were in town from Rexburg. 

   The first night that I got there we got started on a "juicing party" at Heather's house. Ben and Kim brought their new juicer with them and we had fruit juice flowing like there was no tomorrow. There were tons of little cousins around all making sure that they got there sample of each new juice that Ben cranked out. We had some good combos, as well as some "not so good" combos - as in, beware of what you mix with grapefruit, it might bite back! 

 

 Becky, Ben, and Heather, the Juicing Extraordinaires   

 Please, Sir, I want some more!

A bunch of juice taste-testers.

Grady and David - two buds just lookin' for a good time!

Look at that strapping new cousin!! What a handsome man he is! 

(Don't tell anyone, but the babies may or may not be the true reason I went to see the cousins... ;)

"Cheers to good health and strong bones" - a long-standing family toast! :D

 We also had a hot game of Harry Potter trivia!

The next morning Heather treated everyone to a big box of "Jim Bobs"  bakery delights. She's such a faithful customer that she can tell you the special of the day for each day of the week! I've heard about this bakery in Twin before but had my first experience there on this trip. It's a cute little, hole-in-the-wall bakery and smelled like heaven drenched in maple frosting.

 It was only a quick trip so I headed home to Boise later that afternoon. But before the departure, a big crew of us tried out an Indian food restaurant in Twin. It was super delish and I'd go there again any day!

I got home in time to get to make a birthday cake for Mom and Aunt Joni's birthday dinner that we had that night. Mom was nice enough to let me make a surprise cake for them so this time I decided I wanted to try making a raspberry filled chocolate cake. Thanks to Pinterest I was able to find a few different recipes and combine them into a new little creation. It was fun to play around with it (yes, I'm still crazy about making food...)

  Ta-da!!

Now we're moving up to even more recent events! So David came home last week and is here for a couple more days before he gets to fly back to Brasil and experience it in a whole new way- as a regular tourist! :)

So while he's been here we've all just been hanging out as a family and still trying to keep up with our usual schedules. 

Well Saturday rolled around and Nani, David, and I found ourselves home alone with nothing much to do.

It was only about 4:00 but I was restless so I rounded up the other 2 and we went on a random bowling  spree! Kelani thought I was crazy when I suggested that we just get up and go bowling in the middle of the day - and I admit, I'm usually the stick in the mud when it comes to something like that, but it's not too late to change my ways, right?! 

So we headed to the bowling alley and had another first with David - actually a couple of them. This was his first time bowling since before his mission and I was floored to see him spit out a couple gutter balls, considering the fact that this guy is good at everything! :) 

But we had a good time!!

C'mon, Loafie!

Yeah, Nani, work that shot!

What'd ya think? Did I get 'em?

We came, we saw, we conquered....

And now for the story...at last

Good grief! Has it really been since June since I was on here?! I bet the suspense was killing you! :)

I didn't mean to leave you all hanging and wondering what that random thing was that I left a picture of last time. But Heidi is the winner, she answered the question of what it could be. Yay, Heidi! :D

Yes, the picture I showed you was indeed a staircase made out of sugar that Dad constructed to go on Malia's "Frozen" birthday cake. As you are all aware, there is this Disney movie that goes by the name of "Frozen" and it's kind of a big deal, umm, everywhere. 

Malia has especially been frostbitten by the craze and about a month or so before her actual birthday, she requested that Dad build her an epic cake in the theme of "Frozen".

Lucky for us, Dad is basically a genius and has created several awesome cakes throughout the years but it had been a while since we've had something quite like this.

For several weeks before Malia's birthday in June Dad employed the help of all of us (except Malia, who wasn't allowed to know anything about it once we got started) and we got into serious cake-building mode.       Dad planned everything out and did most of the actual creating so I guess you could consider Mom and I the "creative consultants/back-up helpers". Some days it turned into a cross between those tv shows

 "Hell's Kitchen" and "Cake Boss", but I'd say the result was most rewarding. 

I don't even want to think about how much sugar we went through in the process, and the many nights that Dad stayed up well past midnight are a little crazy.

Anyway, in the end we ended up making 2 1/2  yellow cakes which we turned into jello poke cakes, then 2 lemon poppy seed pound cakes, a boatload of frosting, and a few layers of fondant. We found a recipe for homemade lollipops and Dad used that for several different effects.

Obviously things are not totally up to scale, we just kind of mashed several different locations and scenes from the movie all into one place.

And if you'd rather just see how it all turned out rather than reading all the commentary, here we finally have some pictures!

This is an "aerial" shot during the assemblage of this beast.

This is more of an in-depth look over the frozen lake and into the snowy mountain castle. 

Another shot from the top of the finished cake.

We had Malia's birthday dinner after church and I think we had her pretty hyped up to see the cake that had been in the works for nearly a month! 

Dad brought up the cake from it's basement hide-out and then had Malia close her eyes until he could get it in front of her.

Surprise!!!

Time to check it out!

The sister missionaries were over for dinner and it was almost one of their birthday's too, so we kind of had a double party. :)

Except for the action figures, pretty much everything else on the cake was edible. We had the frozen lake made out of the lollipop mix, as well as the staircase and castle. The troll village was fondant, frosting, and chocolate rocks and the big daddy troll was marshmallow and frosting. Then we had rock candy sticks to look like the frozen trees.

This guy was just too heavy to put on the cake, plus the sugar cubes and frosting paste just kept falling apart so Dad just held him up to be seen during the big reveal. :)

Here's the cute troll man! I think he was one of my favorites!

The sad part was that all of us except for Malia got to see the cake so much that we almost never wanted to see it again! (Just kidding). She only got to see it for a few minutes before we cut into it.

 The great thing about Dad is that he never does anything half-way. The exhausting thing about Dad is that he never does anything half-way. :)

  A long time ago one of our cousins used the motto "Go Big or Go Home" to describe Dad. Yep, that about says it all! He just loves having projects to do and things to figure out and create, which has always been for us to see what he'll come up with next. 

  Whew, now I hope you can all rest easy and not have anymore sleepless nights as you think, "What ever could that picture be of?!" ;)