An Easy, Fancy New Trick

During the holiday season Mike and I have had a lot of friends and family over to eat. I wanted to make my usual cupcakes look a little more festive.

Waa-Laa...

It was really easy to make the snowflakes. First, I found pictures of snowflakes on the internet that were simple enough to trace. I formatted them to be the size I wanted and printed out a sheet. Then, I layed a peice of wax paper over my snowflake print out. In the microwave, I melted some white chocolate chips in a baggie. I snipped a little corner off the baggie and piped out the melted white chocolate. All I did was follow the design of the snowflake print out. After the white chocolate cooled, I gently lifted them off the wax paper. I placed the snowflakes on the cupcakes while the frosting was still wet, so that the snowflakes would stick. I also added some white sugar sprinkles for some sparkle (You can't see that in the photo).

It really is so easy and literally only took 15 minutes. Snazzy!

Christmas 2008

Michael and I spent this Christmas with the Dresser family. On Christmas Eve, we went to Jena and Mike's house for food and games. We also took a tour on our town's street of lights. We finished the night with mint chocolate chip brownies. Yum.

On Christmas morning, Michael, Cooper and I packed up our presents and drove over to Mama Lana's house. After a nice breakfast (that seemed to last forever!), we opened presents. Michael and I had both picked out each of our presents on a shopping trip together. However, we did wrap each other's gifts. So, the surprise wasn't what we receieved, but what was actually in the package. My mom said this was very practical, but I think it's just smart. We both got exactly what we wanted for Christmas. My big Christmas gift was an ottoman (no, this was not wrapped). I love my ottoman! It's perfect for our living room and I love having the storage inside for blankets. This is a photo of a similar ottoman.

Later on in the day, more family came over to eat Christmas dinner. During the evening we played several games, but Mikey and I hosted the Right Family game. Everyone enjoyed the game, though there were some tears shed when a nephew discovered that he didn't win the hidden $5. Maybe next year, right? (get it?)

We had a Merry Christmas!

This is a photo of Cooper and Lila. Lila is Jon and Lana's new puppy. Cooper and Lila played constantly on Christmas day.

Even though Lila only packs 2 pounds, she never gave up her toy in a game of tug of war. Maybe her growling scared Cooper off alittle.

San Francisco

Michael and I had a grand ‘ol time visiting San Francisco with Jay, Michael’s brother, and Jay’s “special friend” Bethany. We started the day-cation by driving across the Golden Gate bridge. We took time to take some pictures featuring the bridge itself and the city on the bay.

After that stop, we searched for some cheap parking up close to Union Square. Since that does not exist, we parked in a parking garage a black away from all the awesome shopping. ($30--- ouch!) We then rode the trolley down to see the usual tourist spots: Ghirardelli Square, Fisherman’s Warf, and Pier 39. We snapped this shot of Jay and Bethany joking around while watching the seals.

Next we headed up to the shopping. We did a couple hours of shopping and believe it or not I didn’t buy a thing. What self-control! We ended our San Francisco trip by eating at the Cheesecake Factory. That was delicious just as the Cheesecake Factory always is.

Finally, on the way home we took a little detour to see the lights on the Oakland temple. It was beautiful. There were lights everywhere. As I was looking around and I thought to myself, “I wonder if they followed the ‘“only three strands to a line’?” Then after a little investigation, I discovered that they did! It’s amazing. They has hundreds and hundreds of strands of lights and they had some how only consecutively connected three at a time. Amazing. You can't see the lights very well in the picture, but believe me, there were lights everywhere!

All in all, it was a very enjoyable trip.