Putting the bla in blogging

Guys, I've seriously neglected this blog. It's a little embarrassing. I'm pretty sure the few people that used to read this besides my family have stopped bothering to do so because I don't update very much anymore. I'm going to try and be better. My goal is to jot down stuff daily. Now that I've joined the smartphone world I can actually do so much more. So here it goes- I'm going to try and take the bla  out of my blog.

Ready to POP!

. . . was the theme of the Whittier Women baby shower that we threw for Hayley this past weekend. It actually turned out really cute! It was so fun to get together with the family again. I tried some new recipes (cookie pops and s'mores popcorn) that were a HIT.

Tonya and I did the cooking and decorating (ok, let's be honest. I bought some decorations that Tonya told me to get and she put it all up.) Jodee and Andrea did the games and prizes. We had a good turn out of cousins and it was so fun to catch up with them.

We did colors of purple and green, and to go along with the "ready to pop" theme, we make cake pops, cookie pops, caramel popcorn, s'mores popcorn, and purple and green chocolate coated popcorn. Feast your eyes on it:

The caramel popcorn I've made tons of time before, but never the s'mores popcorn. I kinda made up my own recipe after doing a little research online. I made marshmallow popcorn (6 Tb butter, 5 cups of marshmallows melted together) then I formed those into balls and finely crushed some graham crackers and rolled the balls in that and drizzled melted chocolate over each ball. SO GOOD!!! That recipe was a keeper.

The cake pops-not so much, even though they were really tasty, they were a HASSLE! Seriously a lot of work. I bought both regular oreos and the golden "birthday frosting" oreos. If I ever make these again, I'll get double stuffed oreos because there was not enough filling. The golden ones worked a lot better because they were double stuffed. Anyways, after messing up on a few, Tonya had read that it helps to stick the end of the stick in the melted candy melts and then put them in the cookie and then freeze the cookies so that the filling isn't soft when you dip them. This was a lifesaver tip and worked great! They just took a lot of time. But people really liked them! Maybe I'll only make them for special occasions. . . .

Enough blabbering about that stuff. It was fun to see all the cute baby girl clothes Hayley got. We all joked about how we could have gotten her some useful stuff, but it's just so fun to buy baby clothes, especially for little girls. I really had to contain myself and not buy her a ton of things.

 I am so excited to have another niece! She is due in the middle of May so not to far away!

Easter

Easter weekend was kind of weird for me this year. . .meaning, we didn't really do much that was "eastery" the whole weekend. We did have good company of family so that helped!

Friday night Paul and I went down to the American Fork temple to be with my bestie cousin Lora as she received her endowment. It was so wonderful to be with her and her family in the temple. And now she is engaged! Congrats cousin!

We picked up Jodee to bring back up to Ogden with us because Tonya and company were staying at a time share up at Wolf Creek right by Ogden. We thought it would be fun to all get together and par-tay!

And we did just that! We brought hamburgers to grill and had a tasty meal and played a few fun games after the cutie pie went to bed.

It was a fun evening! Love my family.