Prego

Thanks everyone for all your nice comments! We are very excited to be having a baby. I am 12 weeks right now, nearing the end of my first trimester. I have had REALLY bad "morning sickness" (a.k.a. all-stinkin'-day sickness). Throwing up... nausea...tired and exhausted ALL the time with lots of food cravings. My doctor prescribed me an anti-nausea medicine that didn't help much. But Jeff has been wonderfully sweet to me, making dinner, doing the dishes, cleaning the house, everything! All I do is go to work, eat, and sleep. Hopefully all this is coming to an end by the end of next week. I am not showing yet, but I am a little pouchey.

I know I don't really appreciate other people's ultrasound pictures until you can see arms and stuff. So if you are one of those people, just skip this. It's here pretty much just for my mom. Mom- here's our first ultrasound picture taken at 8 weeks. The baby is about the size of a bean. Isn't he/she cute?

A few more...

I have a couple more stories about things we made around Christmas time that I really wanted to share. (Yes I know its February).

The English Toffee Mishap

In December I baked and baked all my favorite Christmas treats. One of the recipes on my list was English Toffee. I gathered all the ingredients together and started creating. I was boiling the concoction together in a saucepan over the stove for the specified time. Then when said time was reached, the recipe instructed to remove the mixture from heat and add vanilla. This is where I think I messed up- I turned off the heat to the burner but did not move the pan to a cooler spot. I asked Jeff to take over stirring while I got the vanilla out. He continued to stir as I poured in the vanilla and then it started exploding!!!! Chunks of boiling hot toffee started bursting out of pan. I jumped away immediately, but sweet Jeff tried to take the pan off the burner, and received two burns on his fingers in return. Once the pan stopped spurting hot chunks of sugar we examined the contents, hoping it was salvageable. Once look at the spoon told me no, I was not going to be giving this to friends.

The spoon had melted into the toffee. Mmm chunks of plastic and toffee anyone?

We had to pour cold water over the toffee to get it out of the pan. He is what it looked like. It went straight into the trash. I really do not know what went wrong. I have made English Toffee tons of times and never had this happen. All I can think of is that I did not remove it from the heat as I poured in the vanilla. The mixture must have been too hot I guess. Any guesses? 

I had all the ingredients to try again, but my baking enthusiasm was crushed. That was the end of Christmas baking for 2009. (Jeff's poor fingers healed, but they were nasty-looking for quite a while).

Christmas Countdown Blocks

Here's the Christmas countdown blocks I made at the Hamaker Thanksgiving craft party that I promised to post a picture of. I think they turned out really cute!

The "Bradley Bunch" Recipe

Our friends had a recipe on their blog that we wanted to try out. (We halved the recipe). You take some of this

And some of these

And some of these

We'll let you know how it turns out September 5th.