The Cake

I'm not showing you this because I think this is the best cake in the world. In fact, I could go on and ON and ON about the things I would do different and the things I don't like about it. BUT here it is and it really wasn't hard! I was worried about cutting a cake into a certain shape, but it cut great. So if you have any shaped cake ideas, GO FOR IT!!

I used 2 boxed cake mixes. One in a 9x13 and then an 8x8 and 4 giant muffins. I started about by tracing my 9x13 pan and my 8x8 pan on white paper. I cut those pieces of paper in to the shape I wanted the truck to be.

Bake the cakes and let them cool (but not too much) flip them over face down so the top is flat.

Then you're ready to cut. I used that template to cut the cake. In this picture, I have the "template" laid over the cake and I am trimming the cake. The trimmings were perfect for filling in the bottom of the cake where it wasn't completely level. They were also good for eating while we worked. Until I could get the cake under there, we used raisin boxes and coke lids...whatever works, right?


This is the main part cut from the 9x13 cake. The white is flour. We used a lot of flour to make sure the cake didn't stick.

Then I decided where I wanted the wheels, and traced around the giant cupcakes where they were going to fit in and cut out a notch for the wheels/cupcakes.

all cut and working on propping with the trimmed pieces of cake.

We put a very very thin layer of plain icing over the whole cake to kind of seal it off so that when we iced it the crumbs wouldn't spread. Then I used a toothpick to make dots outlining where the different colors of icing would go....kind of drawing the parts on the cake.

Next comes the fun part...mixing colors! I just needed these three so it was easy. Thanks to my cake making pro friend Christy, she informed me that there is a red "no taste" coloring that you can buy. perfecto! Once they were mixed, I started spreading them on using the dots I made with toothpicks as my guide.

The next step is a must: give your baby the icing lid and he will love you forever!

While I was icing the cake, mom was working on the tires. She crunched up Oreos, covered the giant cupcakes in chocolate icing and then dipped the cupcakes into the oreos. I like the texture!

Next comes outlining. I just bought this tube of black and it was great. My decorating tips screwed right onto the tube!

My mom had seen an ocean cake somewhere that used crunched up Nilla Wafers for the sand. So we did that for our sand in the dump truck...kinda like the sand paper we used for the invitation. Again, I like the texture.

This is where I want to hand the thing over to my mom and make her do it, but I have to talk myself into doing this myself so that I'll be so good one day that my daughter will want me to do it for her! She is much better than me at writing, but I did it and it was OK.

Finished product!

This would've come out looking like a lump of junk if not for my mom!! It was fun and really not hard! Like I said, if I could go back I would change some things, but this was just fine. Especially for a boy who wouldn't touch cake with a 10 foot pole!

Somehow these got left off my other posts....In between the cake decorating, my dad and I were working in my flower beds. Kanyon wanted to help, so I gave him this pot. This is him gagging after getting some dirt in his mouth (he gags if ANYTHING other than his bottle...well, he even gags at that some....go in his mouth)

This is him going back for more.

Here is our little cowboy on his new toy. Chief and Gram sent this to klp for his birthday. It is called a Po-Knee and he LOVES it.It has straps that you put around the grown ups leg so that it stays on while the kid rides. You push his ear and it makes galloping noises. Ignore my nappy non washed non straightened, I've been baking or digging in my flowerbed all day hair. We dressed klp in his sheriff vest that The Hills from MT sent when he was born and his cowboy boots Chief and Gram bought him when he was born. Somehow we never got around to putting pants on him.

This concludes the birthday posts.....Way too much about way too little. We have a busy couple of weeks coming up so you may not hear from us for a while.

Birthday Party

I'm posting several posts today because we're going to be out of town at the end of this week and I don't want to get too behind. So, if you missed the last one, scroll down.

We celebrated Kanyon's 2nd birthday on Saturday. Everything went fine except the weather. It stopped raining but was really cold. So the whole backyard party didn't happen. Instead we had a half inside half in our junky garage. It was a great time with great family and a few great friends. Here is the table with the cake and dump trucks with snacks.

This was the table insided. The pictures hanging in the back are pictures of Kanyon with the people that were at the party.

These girls represent the families that came that weren't family. Does that make any sense?

Dump trucks with snacks and "dirt" in the big one. The 2 cupcakes were just random ones I had left over from making the cake.

klp was very smiley when everyone sang to him!

In our world, you ask his therapists for things he needs for his birthday. His PT said he was going to need a push toy that he could push on his knees, then maybe eventually stand and push. We had fun looking for that and the decision was easy when we saw this dump truck one! He hasn't quite figured out how to sit on it and hold on, but we'll get there. This picture looks like he is doing it perfectly, but we were pretty much holding him on and then snapping his picture. Either way, he's very proud of his new dump truck!

Jill pulled through BIG time and brought some riding toys for the little ones. They didn't care that it was cold outside! They had a blast, and Kanyon had fun watching them! As you can see, Mallory ate the red cupcake and Grayson ate the blue one! :)

klp was THRILLED with his little dump truck. The spinning wheels are more than he could ever ask for!

Little Addison made her first public appearance. She was born last summer at about 27 weeks and has spent her time after coming home from the NICU on house arrest like us. We've been able to hang out a lot, but it was fun to have her come to the party with lots of other people!!! I mean REALLY...look at her eyelashes!!!

The Briscoes just moved here from Kansas and are quite the KU fans. SOOO they gave Kanyon this AWESOME KU jersey and a KU basketball!

I could post millions of pictures of the party, but I'm trying to keep it reasonable! We had a great time with some family and a few friends. Thank you to EVERYONE for the calls, comments, emails, texts, with birthday wishes for our babies. We are so thankful and blessed with an incredible support system. One of the most amazing blessings of the last 2 years has been the people around us and how much they support us, remember us, and literally carry us through tough days. Thank you all so much. I could really write a WHOLE lot about this subject, but I'll just leave it at thank you and hope that you know how much we mean that.

Pre-Party Post

I have a few pictures of things I want to post before I get into the birthday party posts.

Last week, Kory was able to go with us to Dallas for our weekly appointments. We had his 2 year appointment with his Preemie Dr. and Child Dev. Specialist at Children's and then we headed over to Our Children's House for his regular therapy. The Preemie Dr. went good. They assess his gross motor, fine motor, cognitive, expressive langauge, and receptive language. He had gone up in all areas and had gone up the most in fine motor and receptive language. They see his progress and that is what they look for, so they were happy. It was so great for Kory to meet this Dr. and all of the therapists and see what we do every week. He says now when I talk about therapy and stuff it will all make more sense to him. It was also great for me to have an extra pair of hands around to help me!!
Can you tell Kanyon was thrilled that Kory was actually there with him!!!


Waiting in the waiting room is more fun when Daddy is with us!

I canceled therapy on Wed. so we could all ride back to Longview together. We stopped and ate at Cracker Barrel and Kanyon chewed on this straw the entire time! Now we know how to keep him occupied if we go out to eat. Keep in mind, we've never really done this before because we haven't been able to get out!

Just a funny picture. I keep telling klp that he needs whiskers to tell him if he can really fit through certain spaces. He gets himself stuck quite often.

March Maddness Update...notice anything different??? What is missing?? Kory isn't holding the rabbit ears!! Thanks to bff Jenna for telling us the right antennae to buy! It works pretty good most of the time...and I'd say it adds quite a bit of style to our home with all the things stacked up in the window. I think it would work even better outside, but we really don't want to mess with that.

I didn't do this on purpose, but I realized that Kanyon had on every piece of equipment possible the other night. Poor baby. He doesn't look too bothered in this picture! In all honestly, the only thing that really upsets him is the patch. He hates it. Me too.

I love it when he wears his hoodie!

It just makes me giggle to see him from behind with that hood on!

Then end of an era: Kanyon spent his last day with his church ladies. They were the ones that kept him by himself in his own room ( since he couldn't go to the nursery) so that we could go to class and worship without him. It was the greatest thing in the whole world! Last Sunday Teresa kept him and her mom and sister were in town so they had quite a party for his last week! Erin, now your mom, sister, and grandma have gotten to chill with Kan more than you!! :) We GOTTA get together!!!! ha ha :) klp will start going to the nursery from now on. That is a crazy feeling. It may be after Easter before we're back in town, but when we are, he'll get to go. That is a crazy thought to me! Thank you SOOO much to all of these ladies!!

Ok, that is about it...my next post will be a party post!

Birthday Post

Today is the day....I will keep my words short because there are lots of words about this day and what it brought us. So, for today, I'll share this scripture. My brother found it just before Kanyon turned 1 and he said it reminded him of Kanyon. I had been "looking" for a verse for him and this one is perfect for our Grand Kanyon. I'm working on a print of this for his room, but I'm having a hard time making it happen. Here it is:

May the LORD answer you when you are in distress;
may the name of the God of Jacob protect you.
May he send you help from the sanctuary
and grant you support from Zion.
May he remember all your sacrifices
and accept your burnt offerings.

May he give you the desire of your heart
and make all your plans succeed.
We will shout for joy when you are victorious
and will lift up our banners in the name of our God.
May the LORD grant all your requests.

Now I know that the LORD saves his anointed;
he answers him from his holy heaven
with the saving power of his right hand.

Some trust in chariots and some in horses;
but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.
They are brought to their knees and fall,
but we rise up and stand firm.

Psalm 20

March Maddness and Dump Trucks

As we all know, its March Maddness time and that is always fun. We decided to celebrate it by taking Kanyon to watch his daddy play basketball. Kory was playing in a tournament and my friend Lana was going to be there and I haven't seen her in forever so I really wanted to go. We are SOOOO close to the end of house arrest so we just decided to go ahead and bring Kanyon. This is Kory's last game/tournament so we didn't want Kanyon to have to wait ANOTHER year to finally get to watch his daddy play. We didn't know how he would do. Remember his first bball game to go watch?? ....
He did this the whole time:

But last night, he did AWESOME! He even clapped for our team some. The guy running the clock could NOT figure out the buzzer, so every time it buzzed, he couldn't get it turned off and klp didn't seem to be bothered. We had a great time visiting with Lana and her family and Kanyon loved getting to watch his daddy play basketball!! I think this day ranks right up there with the first ride with daddy in the tractor last summer.

Of course the real March Maddness is the NCAA tourney. We don't have cable but get several channels....CBS is not one of them so this is a tough time at our house. This is how we had to watch the games. It only comes in clear if someone is holding part of the rabbit ears. We tried to bring a bar stool over so whoever was holding it could sit and it didn't work!! UGHH!! The DTV switch is gonna kill us because we have the converter box and we get like NO channels....does anyone know about the antennas we should buy???!!!

OK on to something totally different. The big bday is less than a week away and the party is a week from today. I thought I'd show you our invitations. Its basically just a family party, so I decided to make the invitations since I wouldn't have to make that many. I like to kind of pick a theme just to give me something to do for the cake and invites. This year I went with dump trucks. I will admit that Mrs. Phillips (my teacher personality) had to come out a little to pull this off, but it was fun. I miss Mrs. Phillips sometimes! :)

I found a few pictures of dump trucks from my clip art on my computer. I kind of put different parts of them that I liked together and made the dump truck I liked. I wanted it to be boxier than these, but I liked certain parts of the pictures, so I kind of put them together and drew it out the way I liked it.

I traced over my pencil drawing with Sharpie and then cut the truck up into parts to make a template/pattern kinda thingy. I then traced each part on to a piece of paper. Each part had its own piece of paper because each part was a different color. I bought the colored card stock that I needed and I ran each different page with the patterns through a copy machine so that it would copy onto whatever color paper I needed it to be.
Here are the pattern pages that I ran through the copier. The top left I ran through on yellow, the top right on red, wheels on black, windows on blue....I didn't mean to make the lines on the dump part 2 different thickness...I meant for them to all be thin, but I accidentally used my big marker....no way I was going to re-do it just because of that.

Then my wonderful husband helped me cut them all out once they were coped.(even he got to go back to my teacher days when he would help me cut or glue stuff) Then it was just a matter of getting things glued on and putting them together. The worst part was the wheels because I had to cut out the circles, then I wanted them to have texture, so I used black shelf paper so I had to cut circles out of that too then glue them on top of the black paper tires. I used coarse sand paper and glued it on the back of the dump.

Everything is glued except the dump part I used a brad (found these cute colored ones at Hobby Lobby) in the bottom right corner so that the dump part would move.
So, you move it and see the invitation part. I really could've done better on this part, but I kind of ran out of ideas...this could totally be better, but it was fine.
All in all it was fun. I didn't factor the wheels/sand paper into the deal when I measured for an envelope. I bought the big greeting card ones and they were a little too tall so on the ones I mailed to our MT fam I had to fold the wheels a little which really bothered me, but I had to get over it. I kept the templates if anyone else needs a dump truck invitation!

I'm now working on how I'm going to do the cake...I think my mom and I have a good plan, but we'll see how it goes.

Fun with Family

We had a fast and furious week full of fun and major breaking of our house arrest rules! Me and klp left Longview Tuesday as usual for our weekly appointments in Dallas. We had our usual fun with Kasey and our extra special fun with Kyla and Chelsea! On Wed. after our appointments, I headed to Paris. Kory, my parents, brothers, and lots of extended family went to Austin to the State Basketball Tournament. Staying here alone was not an option so I headed to Paris. Maurine and her girls were healthy so we stayed with them. Rachel went to Dallas to see her parents but we missed her, Rosie, and Nolan SOOO MUCH! This is where the major breaking of the rules happened. Us in the house with a 2 year old and almost 1 year old. It was SOOOO fun!! The kids did great together and I think it was a good warm-up for klp as he prepares to enter a world where other small children exist! The weather was terribly cold and rainy the whole time so we stayed in, but we had lots of fun. Saturday, Maurine's mom and her niece and nephew were headed to Paris, so I left and headed to Gilmer. It was a great chance to get to spend time with my grandma when there's not 100 people at her house! We had lots of fun! Sunday we came back home and Kory made it back too. We were so glad to be together again and my washing machine has been running not stop!! It was a fun week!

While at Kasey's, I got a better video of him crawling. I think this shows his speed a little better.






The eye dr. gave us lots of patches but I ran out so I had to order more online. I ordered the wrong size and they're smaller than the ones the dr. gave us. Paranoid he could see out of them and thus making the patching completely pointless, I did this to ensure total coverage! Can you tell he's a little confused/angry?!!


He's so sweet to smile for me. Yes, his teeth are orange. No, its not from eating orange colored icing or Cheetos or anything orange. I wish. I have to put this sealer stuff on his teeth every month since we can't brush his teeth (along the same lines of not eating). I didn't notice this until I looked at the picture after I took it. Kinda freaky.
Now for a few pics from Paris. Here we are in the bathtub. Avery and Landry were a little overwhelmed with the "bathing with Kanyon" experience. They weren't used to his extreme splashing. I love their faces.....and his look of total concentration.

NO WAY we could get them all to look, but aren't they cute? And modest.

Yeah right moms...no way. But they did look so cute all wrapped up in their towels.

Avery decided that she needed to poo poo so we all somehow ended up in the bathroom with her. We quickly realized she didn't really have to go to the restroom, she just wanted a sucker.

I'm not sure there was ever a point where all 3 kids were fully dressed...this was close. Kanyon's pants were falling off all weekend because they have lots of carpet and that really makes his pants fall when he crawls.

klp did lots of this: licking the window on the back door. Don't ask me why. Maybe he liked that it was cold, I don't know. He's kinda weird.

We missed RoRo and Nolan SOO MUCH! And Rach, we really REALLY missed you!

Here is klp helping Nanny in the kitchen. I LOVE this pic!

We're back home and packing to leave for our weekly Dallas trip tomorrow!! UGHH!!