Nathaniel's Cakes

When Grandma Louise was here in February, I bought a cake decorating kit so that she could teach Nathaniel how to decorate a cake.  This is the cake that they made together:

For St. Patrick's Day, I invited the missionaries for dinner and Nathaniel insisted on making a shamrock cake.  

Then, for my birthday, Nathaniel made this cake for me - completely from scratch:

When a friend of his at school saw a picture of my cake, she asked him to make a cake for her birthday.  This is the cake he made for her.

Nathaniel says he doesn't want to be a chef when he grows up, but I think he could be a very successful baker/cake decorator!

Superstorm Sandy and MMH

We had quite an interesting couple of weeks toward the end of October 2012.  First, we had a small house fire on Wednesday followed by a hurricane on Monday and Tuesday, October 29-30.

This is our front and back yard on the 31st.  There were A LOT of leaves and a few branches.

Our back yard has a lot of trees behind it and three trees fell, but all of them fell parallel to our back fence.  Whew!  You can see two of the trees in this picture.

This was an email that I sent to my relatives on the Saturday after the hurricane:

We are doing fine.  We lost power on Monday night and it came back on Thursday night.

During that time, our gas and water were fine, so we had hot water (since our hot water heater runs on gas) and we could use our gas stovetop.  We were using our power generator for a few hours twice a day to keep our refrigerator cold.  Our oven needs electricity to turn on - it's a really old wall oven that has an ignitor "light" that uses electricity to get really hot and the gas won't turn on until the ignitor reaches a certain temperature, as a safety issue.  Our furnace also needs both gas and electric, but the weather was pretty mlld Tuesday and Wednesday, so we were pretty comfortable.  It got cold Wednesday night, so we all bundled up with a bunch of blankets.  The twins slept with Michael and me and Eliza, Timmy, and Katie slept together on the pull-out couch in the family room.  We ran the generator most of the day on Thursday to use a little space heater in the family room.

Some places still are out of power, most of the town where Aaron and Whitney live, for instance.  They have a gas fireplace in their family room and now that our power is on, we gave them our generator so that they can run their refrigerator.

Only some stores and some gas stations have power.  The stores that are open are completely out of perishables (refrigerator food like dairy and eggs, produce, bread, and a lot of frozen goods) and some of the gas stations are running out of gas.  The gas stations have lines that take over an hour to wait.  A lot of people are filling up gas containers too (which are also sold out at the stores).  At this point, Michael and I both have 3/4 tank of gas in our cars and an extra 6 gallons in our containers.  Michael has gone early in the morning - about 5:30 a.m. and has only waited about 45 minutes for gas.  We just heard on the radio that they are going to start gas rationing - if the end of your car license plate ends in an odd number, get gas on an odd numbered day...

The kids have had the entire week off of school because of power outages.  I'm hoping they go back to school on Monday.  The schools build in 3 "snow days" for any emergency closings.  If they don't use them, like last year, they give them 3 days off - last year, they got an extra day before Good Friday, which they had off, and a day before and after Memorial Day.  If they use more than the 3 days, then they start taking away from spring break and other days off.

We have plenty of food for the time being and we have hopes that things will get back to "normal" soon.  We didn't have any of the flooding that others were affected by near the shore.  There wasn't a lot of rain; most of the flooding and devastation happened because of the wind creating severe waves near the shore.

It's interesting re-reading my email.  It was a challenging time, but I felt like we learned a lot from it.  We certainly weren't as negatively affected as many other people were.

We had Aaron and Whitney's family over on Tuesday evening - I think they were getting stir crazy and needed to put some of their food in our fridge.  We used some of their chicken to make chicken tostadas.  It was fun having their company and nice to have some "normal" food during that time.  We were very grateful to have a generator (and gas to make it run), since that kept our food from going bad.  We also were able to plug a lamp into the generator on that night... The next night we were using candles.  Lots of candles.  What a huge difference!

Most of the weekends following the hurricane until almost Christmas, Michael, Jonathon, and Christian, went out helping with the Mormon Helping Hands.  Once we found out that Nathaniel was okay to go too, he started going out with them.  I stayed home with the younger kids.  It was really great for them to be able to help those who had lost so much.

On Thanksgiving weekend, some people from a stake in Virginia came up to help us out and Michael and I went to the church on Saturday morning to help serve them breakfast.  It was wonderful to have the extra hands!

Here are some pictures of Michael and the boys serving with Mormon Helping Hands (and one of me in the kitchen):

Also, here is a video that someone made of the clean-up effort that happened in New York.  It was very similar to the kind of work that went on here.

To the Park!

This was the last time we went to the park before school started last summer.  The older kids are so good about pushing the younger ones on the swings and playing with them on the playground.  It was pretty warm, so we didn't stay too long.

August 31, 2012

Nathaniel and Eliza's Trip to Puerto Rico

Last year, Nathaniel and Eliza went and visited their grandma and grandpa in Puerto Rico for two weeks.  Since they were traveling alone, I was able to walk them to the gate and I stayed to watch the plane pull away.

Then when it was time to pick them up, I got a special pass and went to the gate to pick them up.

They said that they had a great time!  August 15-27, 2012

Nathaniel's 13th Birthday - August 10, 2012

Here are some pictures from Nathaniel's birthday last year...

Zac and Sam Turn THREE!

Zac's and Sam's birthday was on Saturday this year.  While Michael was out getting gifts, he got Annie groomed too.

The kids thought she looked so cute with the bows on her ears and on her collar.

Once Michael came home with her, we had dinner - hot dogs and macaroni and cheese.  Then we opened gifts.  Zac and Sam LOVED their gifts!

After gifts, we ate ice cream cake!

We lit the candles and sang "Happy Birthday" to Zac first.

Then we lit the candles again and sang to Sam!