much the same as my stress making of pies for thanksgiving, i attempted to bring all the holiday joy by baking a million cookies. i kicked things off with some old favorites from over the years, plus some hits from last year. i made up the cut out sugar cookie dough (regular AND gluten free!) […]
hazel
hazel’s josh allen cake.
when hazel told me that she wanted a josh allen birthday, i was really excited to make her cake. i mean, i like making all the kids cakes, but its for sure more fun when it’s a theme i love too. and the 2020 buffalo bills are on fire, as is their superstar QB, so […]
hazel is seven!!!!
i don’t know how it all went by so quickly, but the baby hazelnut turned seven this month. seven! even though we were thick in the stupid post thanksgiving covid spike, we were determined to make her day epic. we kicked things off with gramma and grampa dropping off a special delivery of duck donuts, […]
gingerbread house party.
as i prepared for our annual gingerbread house decorating festival, i made the executive decision to forego the store bought house kits and went with graham cracker homes instead. i acquired an extremely ridiculous amount of decor items over the weeks leading up to the decorating party, so i figured we might as well share […]
november 2020. another pandemic month in the books.
after our big travel month of october, november was pretty chill. we are still in a pandemic and all, so there was a lot of home life during this month. sigh. my parents arrived just before halloween, so the first few days in november will filled with family fun. guitar hero, the simpsons, our second […]
october 2020 happenings around home.
initially, our travel plans for october took up the entire month, so we weren’t planning on much halloween decorating. but we came home a week early, so the obvious choice was to go all out decorating for halloween and/or fall. the girls and i went to a little farm stand in lewisville (rogers nursery) where […]
lenoir camping, etcetera.
we ended up not staying in lenoir for very long. the two weeks in the outer banks preceding it, combined with upcoming halloween and a visit from my parents caused us to cut it a bit short. but, we packed in a few good hikes (previously blogged), took some good drives, and had quality downtime. […]
fall hike at the chimneys.
for our last fall leaves adventure of 2020, we decided to go for vista views over waterfalls. we deliberated between finding a new spot or revisiting an old favorite hike, but in the end “old favorite” won out and we returned to the chimneys in linville gorge. the drive to the hike is an adventure […]
linville falls.
derek didn’t have as much time off during our time in the lenoir and linville area, so i took a few solo trips with the kiddos. one such adventure was to linville falls. this is also a pretty heavily trafficked area, but we went on a weekday and took a more difficult trail than most […]
fall at crabtree falls.
after our trip to the outer banks, we had a one day layover at home, doing laundry and switching out wardrobes, before heading to lenoir for a few days in the mountains. it was peak leaf season, so we wanted to see some beautiful fall color, but we also wanted to balance that with other […]