Dad's Birthday Dinner (Siobhan)

~Dad's Birthday Dinner~

Mom, Ethan, and I decided to do a meal on the grill for Dad's birthday this year. It was SO delicious! We had buffalo chicken tacos with a creamy blue cheese cilantro ranch and a carrot/avocado topping.

Mom made a fresh grilled pineapple salsa which we served on the side with some tortilla chips. We also had grilled achiote shrimp.

For dessert we made Dad's favorite cake: carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and vanilla ice cream! Happy Birthday, Dad! We hope you had a wonderful day!

Click here for our Buffalo Chicken Marinade recipe printable

Click here for our Buffalo Chicken Tacos with Blue Cheese Cilantro Ranch recipe printable

Click here for our Grilled Achiote Shrimp recipe printable

Click here for our Carrot Cake recipe printable

Hikes and Thunder Cake (Siobhan)

 ~Hikes and Thunder Cake~

We recently joined some friends for a day of hiking and reenacting the 'Thunder Cake' story. In this book a little girl is scared of thunderstorms, but her grandmother shows her that there is no reason to be afraid of them and bakes a 'thunder cake' with her. Everyone had a lot of fun!

Our friends took us on a trail near their house. It leads right down to a beaver dam.

The kids had lots of fun using Shaila's new bug catching kit to study the wildlife near the dam.

They even caught a couple salamanders!

After we got back to the house, Mrs. H read the kids the Thunder Cake story.

Then everyone reenacted the book. First they gathered eggs from the chicken coop. Next they got tomatoes and strawberries from the garden. Finally they found the chocolate, flour, and sugar from the barn and churned their own butter.

Brandan's favorite part was the 'thunder cake' cupcakes!

Thank you so much, Mrs. H for such a fun day!

Beech Hill Farm and Ice Cream! (Siobhan)

~Beech Hill~

To celebrate the twins' first birthday, we took them to Beech Hill. Beech Hill has always been one of our favorite places to go in the summer! Baxter and Cade loved eating ice cream and seeing all of the animals.

Even though Baxter and Cade are similar in a lot of ways, they definitely have their own personalities. They even eat their ice cream differently! Baxter smashed his cone and made a huge mess, and Cade neatly nibbled around the edges 😊

(Cade left, Baxter right)

We always love looking at the goats, and we even got to see the peacock open his feathers!

Double Trouble (Siobhan)

~Double Trouble~

Baxter and Cade go absolutely everywhere together! They love helping each other get into trouble 😉 Now that they are walking, they love finding new places to explore. Their favorite place to climb is on top of our flour bin...

Double Trouble!

Click here to see more Twin posts

Butterfly Rescue (Siobhan)

 ~Butterflies and Praying Mantises~

One of our favorite science projects each year is our painted lady butterfly hatching. We buy caterpillars from Insect Lore and watch them turn into butterflies.

We've always had great success with hatching our butterflies, but this time around we had one butterfly which was born with a broken wing. Shaila is an avid animal lover, and she immediately claimed it and took care of it. She named it 'Mephibosheth' (after Jonathan's lame son that King David took in.) We set all of the other butterflies free after a few days, but Shaila kept Mephibosheth because she knew he wouldn't do well in the wild. She fed him sugar water and tamed him so that she could walk around the house with him on her finger. When he had lived a nice long life, she released him into our flowerbed out front.

We also bought a praying mantis egg sack. We had almost given up on it hatching, and we woke up to dozens of little praying mantises crawling out of their container!

Shaila and Ethan let them free by our garden so they could eat all our pests 😉

Click here to see our other butterfly hatching posts!

Converse Shoe Cake (Siobhan)

~Converse Shoe Cake~

Lydia and I made this converse shoe cake for Elim's sweet sixteen. Elim had custom designed converse shoes, so we copied the pattern of her shoe, carved out the cake and decorated it with fondant.

A big thank you to Ann from How to Cook That for the inspiration for this cake!