New Year’s Eve

Today was a fun day full of cooking!  The kids were allowed to stay up to ring in the new year, so Kyrie picked out some snacks from one of her new cookbooks and helped me cook.  Here she is crushing up some Oreos for a pie crust!

We ended up making Space Potato Spuds (twice baked potatoes filled with different toppings), mini tacos (they had a cutesy name, but I can’t recall what it was!) with guacamole for dipping, deviled eggs, and an Oreo pudding pie for dessert.  Here’s our spread!  Kyrie did the majority of the work – she’s getting to be a real pro in the kitchen!

We threw a table cloth down on the ottoman in the family room and ate our yummy food while we watched a movie.  The kids were so excited. 

After the movie we burned our Christmas tree.  The kids have been looking forward to this for days and even started asking about it on Christmas.  That thing went up in flames crazy fast and then burned out just as fast.

I caught this picture of Derk….he’s a bit of a pyro!    As soon as that bad boy lit up, he started dancing around the fire like this, moving his arms up and down with the flames, screaming, “Yeah!!!  Yeah!!!!!”  haha

After that, we pulled out the laptop and let the kids watch the ball drop in Times Square.  Poor Bri was super exhausted by this point, and Derk was just sick of having the camera in his face.   

 

Bri crashed right afterward, but Kyrie and Asher managed to stay up until midnight.  Just before midnight we went outside to watch the fireworks from our driveway.  We counted down the seconds on our phones, and then the kids went crazy shouting, “HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!!” at the top of their lungs.    Here are Kyrie and Asher watching the fireworks.

It was straight to bed for all of us after that.  A very busy but fun day!  We’re excited to see what 2012 will bring for our family.  We wish everyone a very happy new year!

Homemade bread from now on!

I have had my eye on a specific Zojirushi bread maker for MONTHS. I think Derk was sick of hearing me talk about it, honestly. I have been making our own bread for years now, and while I love it, I was very sick of being at the beck and call of a loaf of bread. It’s a 4 hour process where you can’t leave the bread’s site basically. So I would go in spurts where I’d make all our bread for several weeks in a row and then would get sick of all the work and start buying bread again for a few weeks. Then I decided to do some research on bread makers because that’s an investment that would pay off in no time. I read up on so many different brands, and this was by far the best one. You can make every kind of dough imaginable in this baby, you can make jam, you can even make meatloaf (I won’t use it for that, though). It has a delay setting that you can set for up to 13 hours, so you can put the ingredients in at night and wake up to a fresh loaf of bread in the morning. I could go on and on. After months of dropping hints, I got it for Christmas!!!!!!!! It was a couple days late arriving, but it’s finally here! And I’m so very in love. Isn’t she beautiful?!

When the UPS guy rang the doorbell to deliver it, I seriously squealed like a little girl and started jumping up and down. In front of him. He laughed at me, of course, and said it made his day to see someone so happy to see him. I didn’t burst his bubble by telling him it wasn’t HIM I was excited to see. Anyway, I brought it straight inside, opened it up, and made a loaf right away! Asher tested it out as soon as it was done, and he gave it a huge thumb’s up. Yummy! It makes the most perfect loaves. And the very best part? I can throw in the ingredients and go about my day as normal, even leaving the house if I want/need to! Fantastic.

My husband is the best.