Dinner and Ice Cream!

We went out to dinner on Thursday night after Ayden's theater class and Gabriel's adventure in the park since we were already out and had no dinner planned at home. I had been out with a few girlfriends from church to this fun spot in downtown Apex. There are several restaurants on this one street and some fun antique shops as well. There is a cute pizza place and a Mexican restaurant as well. I asked Ayden what kind of food he wanted and he of course chose Mexican. It turned out that the place was another location of our favorite local chain called La Rancherita (by us it is called El Fogon, but used to be called La Rancherita). So of course, we knew the menu well and had our usuals. We spotted a cute little ice cream shop across the street and I, of course, couldn't resist. The kids found some cotton candy ice cream and Julio and I (I ate most of it) split a root beer float, one of our favorites. Of course, nothing beats a root beer float with Henry Weinhard's root beer, which we discovered during our days in Portland. I do miss some of those treats from Portland!

Winter in the Park!

Well, it is mid February and we haven't had many signs of Spring just yet. Ayden is currently enrolled in a theater class called "Oh, The Places You'll Go!" where they pretend to go places each Thursday and have lots of fun using their imagination. This week, they went on an airplane and Ayden told me that he was the captain of the plane! That doesn't sound like Ayden's role at all! :) The class is held at the Bond Park Community Center, so Gabriel and I went over to lake and watched the ducks, geese and sea gulls. Gabriel is still very much into all animals, so this kept him busy for quite a while. Then, we headed over to the Lazy Daze play ground...
where Gabriel found some pictures on the playground structure of a dog, lizard, pig, cow and more. Of course, we made all the sounds of those animals! Gabriel has been pretty much enthralled with anything animal for several months now. We sing "Old McDonald" pretty much every day. :) His other two favorite songs lately are "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" pretty much because we sing all these songs at his Stretch and Grow class that he still loves. He will soon have to move up to the next age level of this class because the age cut off for his current class is 24 months. I can't believe my baby will be two soon!

Potato Head Bowling!

Ayden's ideas always make me laugh and this one was no exception! He had been to a bowling birthday party the weekend before, so he had bowling on the brain when he came up with this one, I'm sure! He cracks me up!

See's Candy? Nah!

I wanted to go to See's candy and get Julio his favorite chocolate, which is peanut butter filled. We had a busy day and week, so I didn't make it over there (it isn't very close by at all) and so I had bought this heart shaped muffin tin earlier this week for another project and thought, I can make the chocolates! I just greased the muffin tin with butter, melted milk chocolate chips in the double boiler, poured some chocolate into the bottoms of the hearts, then put a dab of peanut butter in and poured a little more melted chocolate on top to cover the peanut butter. We both thought it was better than the real deal! Mostly because the professionals usually use peanut butter filling that has a bunch of other ingredients and we think it tastes great to just use regular peanut butter. Yum! :)
We decorated the play room with some heart lights and some heart cut outs we made from some crayon shavings melted between two pieces of wax paper, then cut into heart shapes. I had made some of these for our apartment at Stanford and couldn't resist again, they are so pretty in the day time. The sun shines on them and catches the color in them kind of like a stain glassed window. I love it!

Cookies & Valentines

Here are the cookies I made for Ayden's class. Too bad you can't really even tell that I tinted the middle heart pink as well as the outer heart of the middle two cookies. Oh well, they tasted good and looked fine. I think I just went to that trouble for not very much outcome. C'est la vie!

Here are all of the Valentines that Ayden and his babysitter Heather put together this week (I gave them a little project to do while I went to work out, hee,hee!) They put a heart pencil, love eraser, heart ring lolly pop and the Valentine that you see below in each bag. Gotta love Target for all the heart themed stuff!

So, this was the first year that Ayden made all of his Valentines himself! The only thing I did was trace half a heart on a folded piece of paper and then he cut them out, decorated them and signed them himself. :)

Here's where he signed it on the back. :)

Monkeying Around!

Gabriel has been a lot more into pretend play in the last few months like pretending to cook and eat play food and making his puppets talk to each other. Ayden still loves to dress up all the time, but Gabriel wasn't showing any interest in dress up at all until last week when he wanted to put on Ayden's old Curious George costume! He loves all the books and videos of Curious George, so it was only suiting that he put on the George costume. :) Cuties!