.surprise it's a shower!

We had a surprise wedding shower for Tara this weekend! We made it a Hawaiian luau since she is moving to Hawaii this very winter!

Oh, and did I mention they are getting married next week!! AHH!

It was so funny when we were planning my Mother-in-law’s surprise birthday party a few weeks ago and she decided to start planning a surprise shower for Tara. She had no idea that meant we’d be having two surprise parties within a month of each other. So much fun for one month!!

Here’s Tara’s surprised face:

and Tiana’s cute/excited face:

and a bunch of the friends who came to party:

the happy Mothers:

the Hawaiian-inspired food:

and some games:

Tara is going to make a ridiculously beautiful bride! She is such a beautiful girl.

We can’t wait to go to Cardston for the wedding! It’s going to be an amazing day!

Plus, we are desperately in need of a weekend getaway trip. EEEEEEK!!!

.fruitful weekend

Meet our new baby, Carbon Camry

We came out of this weekend with one more car than we brought in.

This car is like a dream, we're still having a hard time believing it's ours!
We feel very blessed.

We also came out of the weekend with a whole lot of new understanding and strength, thanks to Conference.

We spent every minute with family.

And we got our five-pin bowling on after Priesthood Session...


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One more thing!

I can't even help myself. Here's a sneak peak at something else we did with the family over the weekend:


...More to come...

.Go Clones!

My handsome husband plays on a basketball league called the Clones.

With all of his work buddies.

I can't imagine why they selected that name hahaha

Seriously though, I can’t…..... ?

Anywho, he’s having a lot of fun playing basketball again! I know he’s been missing it for a while now, and he is really good!

Final score (they lost this time, oh well)

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We're getting ready to watch us some Conference in a few hours!

Can't wait to hear something inspired, comforting and encouraging from the leaders of the church this weekend. I always do. Isn't that lucky?

It's gonna be great...

See you on the other side!

.lately times

It’s getting colder and colder outside.

Almost time to pull out our coats... or buy a new coat? I like that idea!

Also, the sun is going down much, much earlier. Sad to say goodbye to the sun.

Oh and that wind! Can you even believe it?

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I haven’t been scheduled at work quite as much this week (you can tell by looking at my blog) since they’ve been training a new framing manager and need to give her as many hours as they can.

I’ve been riding around with Air as he does his rounds for work. Often-times he’s still working when the sun goes down, and if I’m free, I like to go along and wait in the car. Just to be with him.

It's kinda nice.

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Have I told you yet about our friend Kyle? He’s awesome. We’ve been enjoying date nights with Kyle and his girlfriend.

Of course her name is Nicole, wouldn’t you know it?

I’d almost say the majority of my friends have that name or a variation of it.

Anyway, Air and Kyle grew up together and they are so fun to be around…

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Air’s not on his diet anymore! And he is feeling a lot better!

He even has enough energy that he’s been playing on a basketball league. And that’s amazing!

We’ll see what the Dr. has to say on his next visit… I’m hoping for no more dieting.

I guess it wasn’t that bad. We were just running out of ideas for meals.

Here’s an example (meat ‘n patatas):

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For mutual this week I taught the beehives how to make personal pizzas.

I made the dough ahead of time with my bread machine. It was so easy.

And the pizza’s turned out divine!

Here’s a link to the recipe I used. It made 8 personal pizzas easily.

We even had an extra girl show up so I was a little worried, but it was NO PROBLEM.

Look how domestic I’m becoming! Weird.

.about the cake

Did you see the cake from my last post?

Well, I made it.

It was really really easy.

And I loved how it turned out!

Here's how I did it:

First, I baked two 9x13 cakes. I had a white mix and a devil’s food mix and layered them. I put the white on top since it’s much lighter.

I made a buttercream frosting this time. Recipe found here.

Then I spread a thin crumb layer over the whole thing. Just to hold it together and cover up the color of the cake with white.

I put my trusty 1M tip in a bag. No coupler since I don’t have one big enough.

The rest is easy.

Start going around the sides of the cake making rosettes.

Put your tip in the middle of where you want it to be and just pull it around. Going in one direction for all of them.

There’s so much room for error with these. They look good no matter how lazy you are.

I totally rushed through this, and nobody would ever guess. Unless you did, then I don’t know…

And then the top…

This is the point where I actually ran out of frosting and had a panic attack. I had to scrape all of the rosettes back off the top and make them a lot thinner and spread out. Kinda crappy!

But again, you CAN’T screw this up!

It ended up looking fine. If I’d had extra frosting, I definitely would have gone over all of the little gaps where you see the crumb layer and filled them in a bit.

Anyway, it looked beautiful with candles and sparklers on it while we sang!

And the raspberry/buttercream filling was to die for.

I just mixed raspberry jam with some of the buttercream frosting (this is probably why I ran out of frosting. next time I’ll make a lot less filling).

And Wha-La! An excellent cake for your Mother-in-law's 50th Birthday party!

P.S. Mom! Thank you so much for the mixer (seen in the first picture)! Still works like a charm after all these years.