From my perspective:
From Nik’s perspective:
I can’t believe that I’ve been your aunt and you’ve been
my niece for nine whole years!
I treasure all the times that I’ve been blessed to spend with you, and evidently, so does Uncle Jon!
And now, you’re such an awesome older cousin for Ellie (and I’ve heard, a fabulous big sister to Violet)!
We love you very much! I hope you have a wonderful birthday!
I love herbs, specifically growing herbs, and I just saw this post about planting theme herb gardens. I love this idea – I’m particularly fascinated by the idea of growing a medicinal herb garden. Our long-term goal for our yard is to severely reduce the amount of grass we have and put in edible landscaping instead. I think some themed herb gardens are in our future!
I’m embarrassed to admit that I made it one day past Ellie’s 6-month birthday without a changing pad in my diaper bag. I usually just grabbed a receiving blanket and tried not to make a mess. I finally remedied the situation last week and made three changing pads, both for us to use at home and when we’re out. I used up the leftover fabric from our diaper bags and had fun experimenting with some quilting patterns while I was at it.
…except when this happens.
(That’s not her in the act of falling; that’s her holding her head up because she wants to be sitting up. She has a very strong neck!)
And proof that I eventually made the bed:
Nik was making dinner in the kitchen, I was attempting to finish a sewing project before Auntie Julie came over for dinner, and Ellie thought she was being ignored (probably because she was). So she decided to make her wishes known. Perhaps she has learned that it’s hard to distract me from sewing because she chose to call for her daddy instead.
Ellie is six months now and we wanted to make sure that she really had a good start with solids. We want her relationship with food to be based on really good feelings from the very beginning. So we decided to start with pizza with Auntie Julie. We even cut her a little piece just her size!
She wasn’t too impressed. She wouldn’t even open her mouth to take a bite. So I ate it for her!
Our secret to great oven-baked pizza: the bottom of our 12-inch cast iron skillet. Heat your oven to 500 degrees – put in the cast iron pan upside down to preheat also. Cut a 10″ parchment paper circle. Roll out your dough. (We usually use this recipe but we splurged this time and bought some dough at a pizza place- all white flour decadence!) Put your dough onto the parchment circle. Top with toppings of choice. Slide pizza (parchment and all) onto the skillet. Bake until done – usually around 10ish minutes. Enjoy perfect crust and delicious pizza.
Saturday night’s pizzas?
1. Pesto with broccoli, pinenuts, and cheese.
2. Asian barbecued chicken: this barbecue sauce, cooked chicken breast, sesame seeds, cheese. (This was Ellie’s pizza.)
3. Pepperoni: homemade tomato sauce (garlic sauteed in olive oil, add canned tomates, cook down, puree in blender), pepperoni, cheese, sprinkling of oregano.
All delicious!
For all you Alaskans out there, I just came across these Pilot Bread videos. They were linked to in this post about disaster preparedness. As we all know, Pilot Bread never goes bad so it’s the perfect thing to keep around to eat in an emergency.
My favorite way to eat tuna salad is on Pilot Bread. And at camp, there was always Pilot Bread, peanut butter, and jam if we were hungry. A few years ago, I bought some at Costco in Anchorage and actually brought it back to Baltimore in my checked baggage. (Hello? B-more grocery stores? You should stock Pilot Bread!) Yes, I missed Pilot Bread that much. And yes, I enjoyed my tuna salad a lot more for a few weeks.