Excuse us....

babe and I are flying to Arizona today to join my mama and sister (and many more) in celebrating my nephew's first birthday. Oh and I suppose there will be a continuing celebration of my birthday as well...after all, it should be called a birthweek, as more than one day is needed to observe such a splendid occasion. (For the record, I feel this way about everyone's birthday, not just my own.  Birthdays are a big deal!) 

We're leaving the fridge stocked for our hard-working man of the house who, thankfully, got NBA Jam for his birthday-so between that and homework and work, hopefully he won't get too bored and lonely. But we're sure gonna miss him!

Wish us luck getting to the plane! I vow not to forget my driver's license or flush it down the toilet in the airport, or stop for baby food on the way there, or sleep through an alarm telling me to get going, or be packing past the designated leaving time. Geez, I'd better get going!

Dear Rachel-

It's been a wonderful 24 years riddled with laughs, giggles, and guffaws, with a few tears and quiet moments peppered in every now and then.  Here's to your first birthday as a mom, your third birthday cancer-free, your fourth birthday as a wife, and your 24 birthday celebrating everything you are, and are becoming.

Happy Birthday to me.

Love,

-Rachel

Weekend Mirths, Celebrating 8 months

Sawyer boy weighs in at 22.4 lbs, is 29 inches long and is a fluffy-white wiggle machine with ticklish feet.

He's looking more like his daddy every day, and growing more smart and sneaky and mischievous like...well, both of us back in our days.

He loves digging through our shoe bin, winding his daddy's spare fishing reel, shoving toys (or anything, really) into his mouth and then crawling around with them dangling underneath him. Oh and books! How he loves books, especially touch and feel books. It's about the only time he'll sit still. He's got the flick of his fingers movement down pat, and he'll use it make everything spin-"the stick", seen in the background above, keys, spinning toys, wheels on trucks, trains, strollers, and laundry baskets, and he'll use it to open drawers.  Sawyer babe loves rifling through drawers! And boxes. And baskets.  And trash. But I try to prevent that one from happening whenever possible.

He takes no pacifier, chews on sippy cups and spoons, and loves drinking straight from the tap.  Besides loving yogurt melts and strawberries and ham, he loves eating paper.  Paper might just be the great love of his life right now.  We have to keep books, magazines, receipts, mail, wrappers, cardboard, and tags all put away or out of reach or things go missing....

Sawyer can crawl, pop a squat, climb up on smaller things, and walk with one-handed assistance.  For those of you who may be interested, his speech is developing nicely. He reduplicates ma-ma and ba-ba, and has started variegated babbling as well. He's getting good at self-feeding and actually prefers it to being spoon fed.  

Such a kingly child deserves a faithful steed, but faithful steeds are in short supply around here so we had to settle for a chariot to parade king Sawyer around in for his birthday celebration. We unwittingly created a chariot monster-he just can't get enough.

Happy 8 months Sawyer! I'm going to go hide the quilt now....

P.S.- Is that robot sweater just so dern cute or what? It's killing me, especially with his daddy wearing his Star Wars shirt at the same time. Ahhh my nerdy men.

If I lived in New York....

image

If I lived in New York this autumn, and if either Jeffrey or I had a real job, I'd be getting this leather pencil skirt.  Leather. Pencil. Skirt. It rocks-and I'm pretty sure I could rock it in no less than 50 awesome ways, possibly more, but then I'll never know. Instead I'll be wearing something like this:

mom jeans, with a little faux leather for some edge.

Motherhood looks well on me, wouldn't you say?

White Chocolate Raspberry Bread Pudding

If you have a sweet tooth, you may have noticed I sneaked a photo of this bread pudding in at the end of our weekend mirths, and maybe you even wondered what it was...

This, my friends, is White Chocolate Raspberry Bread Pudding.  When we visited Jeff's parents back in August, we all tried to decipher a cryptic bread pudding recipe that ended up being way too sweet for everyone but my resident decadence lover (you cannot make a recipe that would out-sweet my sweetster, he has a serious sweet tooth).  Jeff even loved it so much that when we were buying chocolate chips for his nightly cookies and ice cream, he said, "hey let's get some white chocolate chips for bread pudding."- this coming from the man who never deviates from the grocery list, and if I do he gives me the stink eye! So we got them. I tweaked the recipe a bit and now you too can enjoy scrumptious, not-overly-sweet bread pudding that lends itself to a caramel sauce or ice cream accompaniment.

White Chocolate Bread Pudding
Ingredients:
8 pieces of Texas toast, cubed
1 package (1.5 oz) french vanilla instant pudding
2 C milk (I used 1%), plus more for thinning
1/3 C vanilla greek yogurt (I used Chobani...it's a favorite around here)
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 C brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 C white chocolate chips
1/2 C fresh raspberries

Method:
Butter a glass baking dish. I used a 8x11 rectangular pan. Toss the cubed Texas toast with white chocolate chips in the buttered dish.

Whisk together french vanilla pudding mix, milk, greek yogurt, brown sugar, vanilla, and eggs.  Whisk in more milk if needed until the mixture is the consistency of pancake batter (i.e. when you pull the whisk out of the mixture it will run off the whisk in a smooth, consistent line). Pour pudding mixture over the bread cubes, and be sure every bit of bread is covered.

Cover with foil and refrigerate over night.  1 hour before baking, pull pudding out of the fridge to give it time to come to room temperature.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F, press fresh raspberries into the top of the pudding, recover with foil and bake for 40 minutes.  Take foil off and bake until lightly browned and bubbly, 10-15 minutes more.

Serve with caramel sauce or a scoop of ice cream.

Enjoy!

HappyGram

Happy Birthday Gram! We love you for the amazing grandma that you are and the shining example of happiness and love you've always been.  Thank you for all you do and all you are! Hope you have a wonderful day!

LOVE YOU!

Weekend Mirths

Our weekend in three words: lazy, lazy, lazy.

Or perhaps these could sum it up better: ma-ma-ma (though technically, not really words...yet).

Sawyer started babbling like crazy this weekend and amid  the endless "ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba", we deciphered a stream of "ma-ma-ma".  My heart was so happy, I nearly cried.  We're now working on "da-da-da" and also trying to work on the "etiquette" side of speech, because after all, screaming out at the top of your lungs as you fling your toy joyously in front of your face is not exactly church-appropriate communication.

Excuse me....

I need to go wipe my nose on mom's shirt.

Sawyer came down with his first man cold on Wednesday.  He's been a little mopey and very sneezy and quite needy and generally has acted just like a little man about this cold. So we'll be working on getting better this weekend.

Stay healthy everyone! And have a great weekend!

Labor Day Weekend Mirths

Our holiday weekend was about as tranquil as they come these days.  We celebrated Jeffrey's birthday with his mother up in Park City, then came back home just in time to catch a huge thunderstorm.  We sat and watched the lightning illuminate our room, listening to see if it would wake up Sawyer but he snoozed right through it all.  By Sunday all the storms had cleared so we took a walk through Hobble Creek Canyon. The scent of autumn was on the hills and evidenced in little pockets of color change.  

That first whiff of fall got us thinking we'd like to catch some more autumn goodness so on Monday, after a few runs through the splash pad, we drove the Alpine Loop.  Windows down, sunroof open, and a baby sleeping in the backseat, we rode along in Sundance feeling like the world was at our fingertips.  

{eat your veggies babe!}

Happy Labor Day!

I think I FINALLY got this blog up-to-date on our end of summer adventures.  I'm now resting from my labors, but you're welcome to check out what us Klises have been up to for the past two months or so.

Have fun! And happy Labor Day!