Monumental Matters at the MOA

My favorite events are the exhibit parties at the MOA!  Unfortunately, this time it was also possibly the favorite event of half of BYU.  We've never been to such a crowded party. You could not move and the lines were all insane. It's possible that a lot of people were there for the band, but we weren't sure. Luckily, we got there early enough that our lines were only mildly insane and that meant we could get our donuts and make our candles without too much time in lines.

Everyone loves a BYU donut, especially the maple bars!

It was nice weather so we escaped the crowds eating outside.

The mountains are so gorgeous this year!

The line was intense, but this was sincerely one of the neatest crafts they've had.  They had beeswax to roll tapers and beehive candles.

I took us over to the art exhibit, and then I realized that we had already seen that exhibit during the summer children's party.  We took this as our cue to beat the crowds and head home :)

Crazy Hair Day

Crazy hair day is just about the only dress-up day that we managed for Red Ribbon Week this year.

Molly had me braid her hair overnight, then put it into two cute pigtails with big cat pompom elastics.  Elliott likes having his hair spiked with mousse.  It never lasts long, but it looks really cute while it lasts!

Bouldering Class

Miles has been taking a bouldering class at the Orem rec center and he loves it! He's the oldest kid in the class and by far the tallest, so he's been giving himself extra challenges to make up for his height.

This is the hardest wall he's been able to climb so far!

This is him showing off how fast he can climb!

While Miles is at class, the rest of us have an hour to stay close.  There isn't quite enough time to drive home and come back unless you just really enjoy driving.  The Orem rec is only a few blocks away from Target, so sometimes we run errands.

Elliott loved this dino that looks just like the giant version of his dino.

One day, Miles was having a spectacularly bad day and asked if we could get him cookies while he was at class.  Elliott and I stopped at The Chocolate and ate a cookie upstairs while we waited :)

Weekend Projects

Molly and Elliott have been having so much fun recently doing their Kiwi Crate and Doodle Crate projects!

Elliott loved learning about polarized light with this fish suncatcher and his polarized sunglasses.

Molly wasn't so sure if she would like making a kinetic bug sculpture from the name, but she had so much fun once she got to decorate the wings and put it together!

Conference Weekend

Here are some scenes from the most recent General Conference weekend!

This was our Saturday sessions puzzle.  You can't really tell from the picture, but it has 15 large shaped pieces (the cat, the kettle, the cake, the oven mitt, etc.).  All the sides are white so you have to put together from the middle.  It was a good way to keep people in the room and doing something where they could still listen!

Molly and I stopped at the mall between sessions to look for church shoes for Molly and a baby present for my friend, so we also stopped at Trader Joe's for snacks.

Listening on the couch on Saturday night.

I made butternut squash cake donuts for our Stuart family Sunday morning session get-together.

Elliott thought it would be fun to dip cuties in his chocolate milk.  That was an okay idea.  Elliott also thought it would be fun to combine chocolate milk, orange juice, and pineapple juice.

My mom: Elliott, would you like a straw?

Elliott: Nope! And then he went and dumped it in the sink.  Shockingly, those don't make a good combination.

My little contortionist.

Our Sunday afternoon puzzle! This puzzle is quick and beautiful and was perfect for just that one last session.

September Suppers

I had so much fun doing this back in February that I thought I would do it again in September!  Here's most of the things I cooked this past month.  You can see a clear difference between the first and second half of the month, where my job started back up again and the kids started more activities and things just all around went kind of crazy.

September 1: Orange poppy seed ice box cookies and Cambodian chicken salad.  The salad was light and refreshing and made for delicious leftovers.

September 2: Miles can't eat any of his old favorite breakfasts any more, so now I've been making him breakfasts.  This week was acai bowls.  For dinner, we had zucchini and dill frittata and smoothies.  Gerrit hates zucchini but grudgingly admitted that this was good.

September 3: I made pesto pasta with roasted tomatoes and mushrooms for dinner.  It's a VERY easy recipe that I've been making for years and years.

September 4: Another old family favorite is breakfast burritos.  I started making us these when we were newlyweds and everyone still loves them 15 years later!

September 5: More braces-friendly breakfasts!  These are green hulk muffins and they're banana muffins with spinach.  You don't taste the spinach, but it adds nutrients.  Dinner was pork tenderloin with chipotle corn and green beans, and then we had a nectarine-raspberry galette for dessert.

September 7: These sausage and gravy biscuit pockets were delicious, and as a bonus, it accidentally made so much that I was able to put in the freezer for a busy day a month later!

September 8: Terrible, terrible picture, delicious green enchiladas with tomatillo sauce with summer squash and grapes.

September 9: This red curry chicken with coconut rice was originally supposed to be a red curry shrimp, but we have a suspicion right now that Elliott has a shellfish allergy so I used chicken.  I paired it with an edamame salad that made delightful leftovers.

September 10: This is not my picture, but it does actually look pretty close to the chicken bacon ranch puff pastry pizza that I made!

September 11:This is my official birthday dinner.  I gave myself the gift of an easy dinner with very minimal prep time, and that would be these Greek salad pita pizzas.

This is my birthday cake!  I made a graham slam cake (graham cracker cake on graham cracker crust, graham cracker butter, vanilla cream, graham cracker frosting) and a cinnamon ice cream with peach jam and streusel.

September 12: For my actual birthday, I gave myself the gift of a very easy dinner all three of my children would eat, and that would also be something I could make early and then eat between dance class and Heritage days.  The answer to that complicated need is pork and peanut lettuce wraps!

September 13:Creamy chile corn chowder and cheddar biscuits.  Elliott discovered that cotija (the cheese on top of this) is his new favorite cheese.

September 14: Sometimes I like to make a lot of small dishes for dinner.  In this case, that was cornbread, marinated white beans, tomato salad, and diced potatoes.  The cornbread and the potatoes were the big hits.

September 15: This is a raspberry cream cheese braid.  I thought for some reason I was making a Danish from how I wrote it down, but it's just sweet bread!  We also had a potato-bacon hash with tomatillo sauce for dinner.

September 16th: Elliott and I went to the mother-son date at the rec center, so the two of us ate seven-layer dip for dinner (not something I'd normally do, to be honest), and then Gerrit took Molly and Miles to Slab Pizza for dinner.

September 17th: Sometimes my body just gives out on Saturdays from exhaustion. This was one of those Saturdays.  Gerrit made us pancakes for dinner and also cooked up a bag of sweet potato fries I was going to use in our dinner otherwise.

September 18th: These are not my pictures, but they're kind of accurate! We had steak with chimichurri and a fig salad with butter lettuce.  Gerrit's verdict is that he likes butter lettuce, but not the rest of the salad, and none of the kids would try it.

September 19: This pretzel-coasted chicken nugget salad was much more successful for some reason :)

September 20: This Greek-inspired quinoa salad was my lunch for the rest of the week.  I save all of my salads that I'm certain everyone else will refuse to eat as my lunches.

Dinner that night was bean tostadas with cauliflower and grapes.  To make it braces-friendly, I had Miles eat his on un-crisped tortillas.

We also had these tasty s'mores blossom cookies!

September 21: When I saw this recipe, it was labeled Vermont breakfast egg muffins.  I imagined they were mini-frittatas.  They're more of an egg-heavy standard muffin with sausage and apples and cheese.

September 22: Pizza night! We always have pepperoni pizza and then we also had zucchini ricotta pizza.  Again, Gerrit liked it much better than he thought he would.

September 23: I was planning to make homemade pizza pockets, but then I went on the fifth grade field trip and came home very tired.  I turned the ingredients into substantially easier pepperoni pizza grilled cheese sandwiches instead.

September 24: Another Saturday where everything just shut down completely in exhaustion! Gerrit made us the broccoli cheese soup I was planning on and Miles made us the corn muffins.

Sunday 25: Luckily, I was better enough to make slow-cooker beef burrito bowls and homemade chocolate pudding parfaits with chocolate streusel.

September 26: This is called pad gra prow, and it's basically just Thai basil stir-fry.  The recipe I had was super-accurate, but I just kind of used what I had in our fridge and used ground chicken instead of pork because I had some in the freezer.  They used deep-fried eggs, which I have never done before but would totally do again.

September 27: Delicious, delicious fish tacos!

September 28: I made the kids these ricotta blini with orange, honey, and sea salt for dinner before I headed out for a stake Primary president's dinner.  We had Costa Vida catered which was also good, but I was still a little sad about missing these blini.  They look like nothing special but taste amazing.

September 29: I totally forgot to take a picture, but I made a carrot, apple, and leek soup. It was supposed to be sweet potato but I forgot to buy the sweet potatoes, so carrot it was!  I also made two loaves of homemade multigrain bread that got demolished very quickly.

September 30: I was in the middle of defrosting chicken for seven-layer chicken burritos when my parents called to tell me that the kids were eating hot dogs at the city party they had taken them to.  I put the chicken right back in the freezer because it was not worth cooking for just the two of us.  I ended up eating a protein bar for dinner and Gerrit got himself a gyro from the gyro stand around the corner.