The Latest

These are my two latest cakes. The first was for Ellie, an adorable little 6 year old who is obssessed with Phantom of the Opera.
This one was for Logan who is in love with Mater. I had fun experimenting with my airbrush again, but the paint job still wasn't great. That was mostly due to James washing his hands and flinging the water off of them and all over Mater. Water has some interesting effects on painted fondant.

Anyway, just thought I would share since this is what I get the most joy and frustration from.

Phantom Cake

I really like to decorate cakes. I have never felt very creative, but decorating cakes makes me really stretch that brain muscle. The only draw back to it is that I don't pay very much attention to my kids when I'm in the throws of a cake. Things like this can ensue.
Lizzy really likes the trash can. On this particular day she found, what I thought, was an empty box of cornstarch. I guess it wasn't as empty as I had thought. :)

Here's a picture of what I've been working on.

The mask and rose are both made out of gum paste. The above is not the finished product. I still had to trim the mask a bit, and then I painted them both with shiny paint. (I used my airbrush!) The picture below is the finished product.

Aren't they shiny and pretty? Anyway, the cake is for this Saturday. I still have to figure out the placement of these two objects on the top of the cake. I think that is going to be more challenging than you or I think. Do I leave the mask laying down, or prop it up like in this picture? If I prop it up, how would I do that in a non-conspicuous way? Do you see my dilemma? I'll get it figured out. Anyway, I just had so much fun with these that I had to share them right away! I hope you like them.

What About....LIZZY

Are you familiar with the movie What About Bob? Remember the part where Bob is eating dinner with his therapist and family? Bob can't stop "mmmming" about the dinner. It is meant to be funny because nobody "mmmms" while eating their food. Right?

Lizzy loves food. Apparently she's like Bob and the urge to "mmmm" is too overpowering to resist.

To Be a Kid

I kind of miss the days that my legs looked like this. Ahhh...to be a kid.

7 Years!

Happy Anniversary to my hot hubby, James! This is year 7 for us and there is no end in sight, thank goodness. :)

I've been told that we have a unique engagement story, so I thought that I would share it with anybody who may read this. Obviously some details become fuzzy over time, but I will do my best to share as accurate a story as possible.The year was 2002 and I was fresh out of high school. James had been home from his mission for about a year and a half. It was the first day of the college semester (my first day of college period) and James had a friend visiting him. His friend, Clint, strongly encouraged James to muster up some courage and go with him, Clint, to meet some of the girls in James' ward. James had almost zero interest in girls or marriage but came off of his summer vacation with a goal to overcome that. After all, he was almost 22, practically an old man, and he knew it was time to start thinking about marriage. Clint and James knocked on our neighbor's door. A girl answered and politely shrugged them off. They knocked on our door next. I answered and said: "Hi. (hesitantly) ....and, you are?" (I assumed they were there because they knew one of my roommates). James was the one who answered, "In your ward"! Now, to be perfectly honest, I thought it was a lame answer and it kind of put me off. Regardless, I invited them in and they stayed and chatted for about an hour.I didn't think much about this first encounter, but James returned the next day with one of his roommates. He came again the day after that with another roommate, and the day after that with another roommate. Pretty soon he was coming nearly every day. He made so many appearances that I was convinced he liked my roommate, Brittney. As a result, I didn't spend much time talking to James because I didn't think he was there for me. If you ask him, he'll say he kept coming over because he thought we were a fun bunch of girls, but that was it.A couple of months went by and my roommate Brittney began to date James' roommate Casey. Here is where the story gets odd and confusing so just go with it. During many late night conversations in both of our apartments, I was told by Brittney that Casey told her that James was interested in me. James was told by Casey that Brittney told him that I had told her that I was interested in James. James and I have compared our stories and can't figure out why Casey and Brittney said those things because James and I had never been interested in each other at all. Thankfully some of this miscommunication did happen because being told that James was interested in me made me consider him as a viable option as a boyfriend. The affect of James being told that I liked him made him convinced that he needed to make me be his girlfriend. No joke. He started coming over and telling me that I needed to stop wasting my time with another guy I was kind of seeing at the time and be James' girlfriend. I wanted to date James but I had just started committing time to this other guy, Joel, and didn't feel like I could just break it off for James. I barely knew James! Every time he had come over, he only spent time with my roommates Brittney and Ashley.Over the period of one week James came over every day and tried to talk me into breaking things off with Joel because James wanted me to be his girlfriend. (I'm not kidding, those were his words. Not "date" but "boyfriend/girlfriend".) I was becoming so confused and overwhelmed and didn't know what to do.It was the last day of the week, Sunday, and James was at my apartment, once again trying to convince me to be his girlfriend. We were having a debate of what decision I needed to make when my roommate/bestest friend in the world, Carlee walked through the room. In passing she said to James: "Just propose to her. She'll say yes and have to break up with Joel". James looked at me and asked if that was true. I considered it for a second before saying, "yes". Case closed. We went to ward prayer that night and I told Joel it was over. Three days later James went to the temple to pray about me and came back to my apartment so we could talk things over some more. (We still hadn't been on a single date yet.) James told me that he would like to date me and he felt good about that decision. My response was, "Well sure, dating would be good. But the way I look at it is this: If we date, we will get engaged, and of coursed married". James hesitantly agreed that this sounded accurate to him. That was all I needed to hear. From that moment on I was telling people that we were engaged. That frightened him a bit (I've since learned) but he is such a shy guy that he couldn't tell me that he didn't really believe we were engaged. But, since he never said anything, we were engaged! He gave me my ring two months later and we were married 4 months after that.
It has been so much fun to be married to James and I am grateful to Brittney and Casey for doing whatever they did that made James and me interested in one another. I am grateful to James for having a back bone to tell me to break up with Joel, but no back bone when it came to telling me that he didn't really know if he wanted to marry me. Sometimes I fear that he married me simply because he didn't have the heart to tell me that it wasn't what he really wanted.

Regardless of how we got engaged, it's been an awesome 7 years and I am completely psyched to see how the next 7 turn out.

The Last Couple of Days

Yesterday was James' and my 7th wedding anniversary. We didn't really celebrate it though. I woke up early that morning and finished working on a wedding cake for my friends brother. After I finished it and got it delivered, James took me to an oral surgeon so I could have my wisdom teeth taken out.
This is me last night (Friday the 30th). Nothing like being drugged up, freshly showered, reading a book, and cuddling up with a bag of frozen corn and okra.

Here is the wedding cake. I finished the board off by putting a black ribbon around it. The couple also put a silver "J" on top.

We took this video of Lizzy that same day. James went in her room to get her up for the morning. She was all smiles, but completely covered in throw up!

It is now Saturday morning and 24 hours after my surgery. No swelling yet. Also, I'm only taking Ibuprofen to manage the pain. I'm not in that much pain, yet, and the Lortab just made me feel woozy and dizzy. Anyway, it was a fun anniversary in it's own way. Stay tuned for a post that is more anniversary related.

I normally wouldn't waste all of your precious time with a post about my birthday, but I really had such a great day, that I wanted to share it with you!

My day started at 7:30 AM when I noticed a pink post it note on the bathroom mirror. James had left for work an hour earlier, so I knew it had to be his doing. The post it declared that I was now on a treasure hunt for my birthday present. There were 9 different stops along the hunt, each containing a clue and part of my present. I will admit that one of the clues had me stumped for a good 10 minutes. Anyway, my gift was a new airbrush that I (am scared to death of because I have no clue how to use it) get to learn how to use to decorate cakes with! I've been wanting one for some time but due to my nearly nonexistent cake decorating know-how, I have been hesitant to spend the money and buy one.

The next great part of my day was when James got home from work extraordinarily early; around noon. That was followed closely by my good friend, Mary, coming over to share some lunch with me. She also brought me a fun candy bar that she found from World Market. Speaking of candy, my friend Jocelyn also brought me a candy bar, one of her favorites, a Utah's Mint Truffle bar. I think that's what it's called. Doesn't matter, it was mmm mmmm good!

James did a good job of making sure I didn't take care of the kids too much during the day.

That night, my mom came over so that James could take me on a mysterious date. I had no idea what we were going to do. As we were driving to destination, "unknown", he handed me the phone and a phone number. He told me to call it and figure the rest out from there. I called and the person answered the phone in such a garbledy gook way that I panicked and hung up. James clarified for me that I had called The Golden Phoenix, my favorite Chinese food restaurant. I called them back and ordered some food for us. We picked up our food and then James found a random street to park on and ordered me into the back seat of our van. (Don't get any ideas!)
He had brought my favorite movie, Pride and Prejudice, to watch while we ate our dinner. It's the five hour version movie, so obviously we didn't watch the whole thing. After a while, we hopped back into the front seats and drove to the Clark Planetarium. We watched one of their light shows put to music.

As we were walking out of the show, I asked James if he had baked me a birthday cake. He sidestepped the question nicely and walked me to the car. He drove to the Olive Garden and I immediately knew what my "birthday cake" was. I love one of their desserts and James had planned to run in and buy me a piece. Unfortunately, they were ALL OUT! James came back to the car disheartened. I told him that I had always wanted to try the chocolate cake they have at P.F Changs, so we drove there. I ran in to order it. I waited and waited and waited some more for them to bring it out to me. After waiting a little bit longer I asked the girl what was up. She did some investigating before they came out with the cake. Because I waited for so long (really, it was only about 15 minutes) they gave it to me for FREE!

We drove home, put a candle in the cake and my mom and James sang happy birthday to me. My mom gave me a one pound box of See's chocolates before she left for the night. (Can you tell that people know I love chocolate/candy/cake/sugar?)

That piece of cake was massive!

All of that fun was coupled with phone calls from loved ones. I received my first birthday phone call at 12:08 AM from my sister Andrea. I may have sounded a bit put off when I spoke with her, but in my defence, I had been asleep for almost 2 hours. I really did appreciate her fun antics and desire to be the first one to wish me a happy birthday, but maybe next year she will wait until 8:00AM.

I know a lot of people are sad with each birthday that makes them a year older, but I really have nothing to be sad about. I've done a lot of fun and good things the last 26 years. I've probably had a fuller life than most 26 year olds. I may not be as cheerful about turning 30, but at this point I don't see what there is to be afraid of. I'm excited to see what all I can accomplish in the next 4 years.

Thank you to everybody who made my day special. I had a genuinely great day.