May Odds and Ends Part 2

 This edition of Odds and Ends is entirely about Abby and Ben :)

I can't remember who snapped this one of a cuddly Ben during game night...

Abby was so good with Ben the couple of weeks we had her home.

He enjoyed her getting the family books down from the shelf and "reading" them to him.

At some point she took a few selfies :)

Often, when I play the piano, Ben will grab whatever he is doing in the other room and make many trips into the front room to transfer all of the toys to start lining up on the piano bench.

This time he was extra cuddly and Andy captured the moment.

Ha!  This one makes me laugh!

Ben has never loved gripping a writing/coloring utensil.  However, he has a hard time letting go of whatever toys (usually animals or cars) he brings to school with him.  So, when his class took a field trip to Jump the Moon art studio, the people there were super clever and taped the markers to his animals to get him to participate :)  They said it worked great!

Tired guy...

We enjoyed our short time with Abs before the day arrived to take her to the airport to fly off to Alaska!

Our friend Katie Young's cousin manages a few fishing lodges in Ketchikan and had encouraged Abby for a couple of years to go up and work for him one summer.  Well, with the loss of her car and the realization of how expensive living away from home was, she decided to take a semester of school off and earn some money.  So, 5 months in Alaska at the Silver King Lodge became the plan!

(Josh followed us down in his car to see her off and then continued on to Provo for his FSY training)

May Odds and Ends Part 1

 The very beginning of May we went and picked Abby up from UVU

(She couldn't drive herself home since she had totaled her car in January)

It was full swing graduation so I had to force her to get out and get some pictures with a mascot that had no one else around 😂

Before leaving town we stopped in to see cousin Joey at work at Crispy Cones.

These two did quite a bit together during the school year.

So grateful he came out from Tennessee and was a good buddy for Abs!  They were even living in the same complex :)

Flowers were super busy the second week of May as always since the school thinks it's a good idea to do Senior ball the same weekend as Mother's Day 😟

Close up of Matt and Anna's flowers

Some of my other favorites that I made...

This was my favorite Mother's day bouquet that I put together.  It was a small one but I ended up loving the combination of two tone pink carns, iris, hydrangea, rununcs (all some of my favorite flowers) etc.  We ran out of the yellow solidego or else I would have put a bunch more in there to tie in to the iris.

Laura had us grab some leftover flowers to take and make bouquets for ourselves.

I just grabbed a few of my favorites...pink and white mini gerb, sunset colored rununc, similar colored carns, bells of ireland and I always love some cute little ying yangs that pop!

While we had everyone at home for a couple of weeks we decided to go to the Layton temple open house.

It was a great experience even though Ben was a bit of a handful :)

Another thing that always happens on Mother's Day weekend is Vintage Market Days!

Since Abs was in town I made sure to tell Laura I wouldn't be available one of the days that week so Abby and I could go together.  She had never been and wanted to.  T was also able to meet up with us for a while!

I took pictures of all the things I loved but wasn't sure about buying so that at the end I could remember and go back for the things I couldn't live without.

These are a couple of the colored glass pieces I ended up purchasing.

I took a picture of the peach cherry blossom pitcher on the right and then ended up just buying it right then because I loved it so much.  A little bit later I found a perfectly matched dish that fit underneath that I couldn't pass up!

You can't tell because of the red background but the square cake stand in the left picture  (upper middle) is a beautiful purple.  I bought it after contemplating the more rare (and expensive) black stand to the right.

We three gals had a great time!

(I think Mom would have joined us had she not been in Oregon :)

May Cookies

As part of my birthday the previous month, I had purchased some instruction on how to do tipless bag florals using royal icing.  So, I took the small bouquet I had made for myself from Laura's leftover Mother's Day flowers and used it as inspiration to practice.

 Out of the blue I had a woman contact me about wanting cookies for her gathering before she left on her mission to Texas.  Her name was Sundee so she thought it would be fun to have a little sun in the general area of Austin where she had been called.  She had me do 5 dozen.

When she came to pick them up I was expecting a young woman but it turns out she was a cute Senior sister!

Ben's old teacher from South Cache contacted me and asked if I would make cookies for her baby's first birthday.  She sent me some inspo pics and said she trusted me.

I ended up sticking pretty close to her pictures.

I had been really frustrated the last 2 or 3 orders because I was getting a lot of color bleed :(

(look at the blue tail under "Rookie")

For that reason I ended up charging a bit less on those orders.

I was pretty proud of the detail on my baseballs...

I punched holes through the icing to try and make it look like they were really sewn.

While making these and struggling with the bleeding problem again, I was at the point where I was wondering if I could continue taking cookie orders.  I was researching online to try and find a solution but nothing I tried seemed to fix my problem.  It is super frustrating to spend so much time on cookies only to find the next morning that they have bled :(  There is nothing to be done at that point and I felt like I was letting customers down.

Well, I ran into Cindy Atkin at Love to Cook amidst the process of making these.  She is the cookie queen of the valley.  I expressed my frustrations and she gave me several things to try.  One of which was using a fan to help crust the icing over immediately after flooding.  I am happy to report that this has for the most part fixed my bleeding problem!  I am so grateful to her for her advice!

Andy's B-Day

Andy's parents were passing through town and wanted to take Andy out to dinner for his Bday.

We went to El Toro Viejo.

By then, Abs was in Alaska and Josh had to work that night so it was just the four of us for presents and treats.

For some months, Jo had been badgering us about getting an automatic card shuffler...so, I finally followed through.

Love this guy of mine!

Andy also got a chair in the bedroom that turns into a bed for Ben.

We set it up and here he is enjoying it for the first time.

For several years now, and for many different reasons, Andy has had some disappointing birthdays.

This one finally felt like it ended up being a good one for him :)  Yay!!!