Our Life at Home

Weekend Opener

This morning, after breakfast, we got in the car and drove to Sky Meadows State Park so we could do a little hiking and enjoy this beautiful fall weather.

Less than an hour away from home and so much gorgeousness, right?

This little guy enjoyed the sunshine.

The little girl had the opportunity to walk Bella all by herself for the first time.

Can you tell how incredibly proud of herself she was?



Mom, are you coming?

He was still having fun and happy as ever.

Stopping to smell the "roses".

Look at this, Mama!

Off the trail, we enjoy an apple butter cooking demonstration, live music and the "mini maze" below.

Perfect for half pints who might otherwise get lost in a really tall corn maze.


We stopped at the Hunter's Head Tavern in Upperville for a late lunch on the the way home.  This place is straight out of the English countryside right down to the menu and mortar on the walls.

 

Weekend Round Up

 
We had a great weekend!  On Saturday, we headed two hours south to Charlottesville to Carter Mountain Orchard.  This is a gorgeous (AND BUSY) place.  Check out the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance behind Ava.

 

Ava had so much fun running through the pumpkins and jumping over them.

 

She was having so much fun that at one point she lost her shoe!

Source: mycomputerismycanvas.blogspot.com via Patricia on Pinterest

 

Today, we hung out at home, made lasagna and ran a few errands.  I attempted to make these cute candy corn pretzels above in the top left corner.  My first challenge was trying to find "almond bark".  The first two grocery stores that I went to did not sell it and then I learned it's not called "almond bark" here.  It is often called vanilla candy coating and one of the brand names is "CandiQuik". Good to Know. "CandiQuik" comes with a microwaveable tray - super easy!  I did not have any luck at all trying to use food coloring to dye the white chocolate to yellow and orange.  The food coloring made the chocolate thick and gave it more of a frosting consistency.  Modified plan:  White chocolate covered pretzels with orange and black sprinkles. Yay! I'll post the final outcome sometime this week.

Christmas Photo Cards of Past Years

Before having Ava, we didn't send out Christmas photo cards, only non-photo ones.  We could have, but at the time, I felt a silly having just a photo of the two of us or the two of us with our dogs.  Now, I wish we would've done it because that was how we started--just the two of us.

We've only been ordering holiday photo cards since 2009 and all the extras (make sure you order enough so you leave 1-2 copies for yourself) have been just sitting in a box.  I wanted to come up with a way to display them from year to year and see how we've grown and changed.

I'm not a scrapbooker.  I do order prints but the majority of our photo books are printed digitally so I felt a little out of my league here.  It was important to keep this project super simple. 

I went to Michaels and picked up a 8 X 8 scrapbook album.

 
I removed the photo image in the front cover and replaced it with white cardstock paper stamped with "Merry Christmas".

 
Next, I removed the black paper that is inserted in the pages and use it as a pattern on a piece of Christmas scrapbook paper so I could cut it to size.

 
Then, I glued our Christmas card on to the scrapbook paper, added a few highlights from that year and inserted the paper back into the sleeve.  Here's one page for 2009:

 

2010
 
This album has 10 pages so if I use both back and front, I'll have enough room for Christmas cards for the next 20 years! Don't laugh!  It's not like I'm getting ahead of myself or anything! If I keep up with it, this is a 20 minute scrapbooking project that comes around once a year.  I am hoping that much I can handle.

 
I look forward to putting this out on my coffee table every year.

What do you do with your old Christmas photo cards??

 

Halloween Cards

I've been using Tiny Prints for Christmas cards and Birth Announcements for several years.  I was browsing their website and found these cute Halloween cards.

 
I thought this would be a fun way to share pictures of the kids' costumes with family who do not live close to us.  The actually cards are a little smaller than regulation mail size so I will probably just use the free envelope provided and then place it in a larger envelope, which can be mailed.

Here's what I did:

1.  Set the scene without kids present.  I got lucky on Friday afternoon when both kids were sleeping at the same time.  I played around with positioning the hay bale, mums and pumpkins until I found a configuration I liked.

 

 

 
I take several practice photos so I can position things correctly and also so I can see look at the light and adjust the camera settings accordingly.

 
Once I decide that the set up I'm going to use, it's time to bring in Ava & Oliver.  I go back inside and get them dressed then place them in the middle of the scene and I'm immediately ready to start taking photos. I have about 2-3 minutes before Ava will refuse to sit still any longer.

Anyone who has two young children knows that's it's nearly impossible to get them both looking at the camera at the same time.

 

You have one child smiling and the other looking away...
 

One child gets distracted...
 

Or looks like she is about to take her brother out with one swift punch.

 

And you just hope that by the time everyone melts down, you just hope that you have ONE picture that actually works.

 

Out of 19 photos, this was our best on this day!

 
Ta Da! 

Fall Activities and Traditions Update

Do you remember the Fall Activities and Traditions Post that I wrote here.  Now that we are into  October, I wanted to reflect on September and start checking some items off my list.

Family Outings:

1.  Hike the Wetland Trail at Huntley Meadows Park

2.  Hike Cunningham Falls State Park in Maryland

3. Visit Hartland Apple Orchard to pick our own apples, go through the corn maze and travel along Sky Line Drive near the Blue Ridge Mountains.

4. Attend OktoberFest in Germantown, Maryland. Given the rain, we decided to revise our plans and just attend our smaller, more local one. 

5. Visit the pumpkin patch to select pumpkins and go on a hayride

6. Attend Boo at the Zoo at the National Zoo in Washington DC

7. Watch the Vienna Halloween Parade

8. Go trick or treating with Ava

At Home:

1. Decorate the outside of the house with mums, hay bales, corn stalks and pumpkins  Started this one, but I'm not sure if I'm finished yet.

2. Create the Halloween Pottery Barn knock off that I mentioned yesterday

3. Make a homemade bird feeder using a cookie cutter, gelatin, bird seed and some garden twine.

4. Rake and jump into large piles of leaves

5. Buy a candle with a nice, but subtle autumn scent 

6. Family Move Night: It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

In the Kitchen:

1. Make apple crisp and homemade applesauce

2. Bake pumpkin bread and pumpkin cheesecake

3. Make butternut squash soup

4. Make popcorn balls or caramel corn

5. Have Ava help me make a cake for Paul's birthday

For Me:

1. Organize a beer tasting complete with food pairing event for my cooking club.  I am not much of a beer drinker but I think beer has gone through a revival since my college days.  We have lots of interesting local brewers creating interesting beers and I'm going to pick some of their brains about how to pair some local selections with food.  (Haven't even thought about this one!)

2. Attend Byron Katie workshop in Fairfax

3. Go on the Urban Women's Retreat at Tranquil Space with Kimberly Wilson

4. Book a massage at Sesen Spa

Date Nights:

1. Take Paul to see "I don't know how she does it"  Paul got out of going to this one when a couple of girlfriends suggested getting together to have dinner and see this movie.

2. Couples Night Cooking Class at Cookology

3. Dinner at Bastille in Alexandria (or somewhere else). I haven't made a reservation yet.

4. Run the 5K Turkey Trot (not so much date night but a "couples event")

Is it too early for pumpkins?

No, no I really don't think so. 

When Paul came home from work last week, he wasn't entirely thrilled with my display. He told me it was "too early" to start celebrating Halloween in mid-September and that he found it a little "embarrassing" that I was decorating so early.  I told him I am not celebrating Halloween right now.  I am celebrating fall and that starts right now!  In fact, I was nearly LATE on that one.  Silly Husband, we'll decorate for Halloween in October but until Saturday, I'm decorating for fall!

 

 
 

 
 
 

Weekend Round Up

 
We went to Hartland Apple Orchard over the weekend.  It is a gorgeous place, just under an hour away from the house, in Markham VA.  The drive to the orchard takes you along the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains and we passed many, many gorgeous farm houses along the way.

 

Paul spent most of his time up a tree with the apple picker.
 

Ava did more eating than picking.
 

Sweet Oliver hung out with me.
 

On the way home, we stopped at The Ashby, which is an inn and restaurant in Paris, Virginia.
 

I took a lot of photos of the gardens.  They reminded me a lot of English style gardens and I wanted to try to identify the plants land see if we could incorporate some of them in our garden at home.
 
 

I know it's hard to see, but there are strawberries growing wine barrel.  Fun idea!

 

Time to start baking.
 

Sliced apples with sugar and cinnamon
 

With the crumble mixture on top.  Ready to go in the oven.  Perfect dessert for a Sunday lunch.
 
 

Chicken pot pie.   Paul & Ava take a swimming class together on the weekends and Paul requested chicken pot pie for lunch.  It's kind of a tricky dish for me to have ready for lunch.  Chopped vegetables + cook veggies and chicken + prepare pie crust + bake. It's a lot of steps so to save time, I chopped up all the vegetables the night before and threw them along with the chicken in the slow cooker and left them on low overnight.   That meant, I only had to worry about the pie crust and this time I had a ready made one. 
 

Cooked veggie and chicken pie filling plus the last minute addition of a few frozen peas.
 

Ready for the oven.
 

I had some leftover sugar/cinnamon mixture from the apple crisp that I experimented with by boiling it along with some brown sugar and vanilla extract in the saucepan, adding it to popped popcorn and then baking it.  Really, really  delicious and addicting idea.  This little munchkin is my best helper in the kitchen and she liked it too.  I was really quite nervous about my two year old choking on popcorn so I let her have just a couple of pieces before I distracted with one of the DVR'ed episodes of Olivia - her absolute favorite.

 

2011 Fall Traditions and Activities List

 
I spent several hours over the labor day weekend putting together our Fall calendar and activities list.  I like having a rough outline for the weekend several weeks in advance.  Too often, we wake up on Saturday morning and try to decide the fun things that we want to do that weekend, which never works out all that well for us. We waste a lot of time doing things that way, miss events and sometimes I could've made things easier on myself by purchaing tickets in advance, etc.  I'm not going to list the specific dates on the blog, but we have a rough outline for September, October and November and then I do a seperate one for December since Christmas makes it a busy month.

Here's our list:

Family Outings:

1.  Hike the Wetland Trail at Huntley Meadows Park

2.  Hike Cunningham Falls State Park in Maryland

3. Visit Hartland Apple Orchard to pick our own apples, go through the corn maze and travel along Sky Line Drive near the Blue Ridge Mountains.

4. Attend OktoberFest in Germantown Maryland. 

5. Visit the pumpkin patch to select pumpkins and go on a hayride

6. Attend Boo at the Zoo at the National Zoo in Washington DC

7. Watch the Vienna Halloween Parade

8. Go trick or treating with Ava

At Home:

1. Decorate the outside of the house with mums, hay bales, corn stalks and pumpkins

2. Create the Halloween Pottery Barn knock off that I mentioned yesterday

3. Make a homemade bird feeder using a cookie cutter, gelatin, bird seed and some garden twine.

4. Rake and jump into large piles of leaves

5. Buy a candle with a nice, but subtle autumn scent

6. Family Move Night: It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

In the Kitchen:

1. Make apple crisp and homemade applesauce

2. Bake pumpkin bread and pumpkin cheesecake

3. Make butternut squash soup

4. Make popcorn balls or caramel corn

5. Have Ava help me make a cake for Paul's birthday

For Me:

1. Organize a beer tasting complete with food pairing event for my cooking club.  I am not much of a beer drinker but I think beer has gone through a revival since my college days.  We have lots of interesting local brewers creating interesting beers and I'm going to pick some of their brains about how to pair some local selections with food.

2. Attend Byron Katie workshop in Fairfax

3. Go on the Urban Women's Retreat at Tranquil Space with Kimberly Wilson

4. Book a massage at Sesen Spa

Date Nights:

1. Take Paul to see "I don't know how she does it".  I'm sure he'll love it.

2. Couples Night Cooking Class at Cookology

3. Dinner at Bastille in Alexandria (or somewhere else). I haven't made a reservation yet.

4. Run the 5K Turkey Trot (not so much date night but a "couples event")

That's all!  It's a pretty full couple of months but I love it that way!