Hot cocoa party

A hot cocoa party was the perfect way to ring in the Christmas season this year. We cranked up the air conditioner and invited some friends to come over after the Coral Gables city tree lighting ceremony. It was a blast all night long. 

I just love holiday baking
Winter Wonderland backdrops from the Caravan Shoppe HERE

Red velevet cheesecake is always a holiday favorite! RECIPE
This donut tree is just a bunch of Dunkin Donuts attached to a foam pyramid with toothpicks. I don't recommend Dunkin Donuts to anyone, so if you have a better source to find donut holes, by all means use those!

Hot cocoa fixins

Lots of friends and yummy treats...great time to bust out the ole' guitar

The best party about throwing Christmas parties is that our house is already decorated for the theme

Slightly different angle

We invited everyone to bring a favorite holiday treat to share. We had way too much, but it was sure fun to taste everything!

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! This year was special because we had our first Thanksgiving in our new house, and we felt like a real established family with our own dinner table to eat and everything! To make it extra special, we invited the 4 missionaries serving in our ward to join us. We also had some old times friends, who turned out to be an amazing help in the kitchen.

Thanksgiving dessert table with triple berry pie, pumkin spice bundt cake,  apple pie, pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, snickerdoodles, mini pumpkin pies, and spice cake donuts. Thanksgiving doesn't have to just be all about the pie, right?

Turkey turned out amazing. 

The kitchen help

Entertainment for the kids while dinner was being prepared from the Caravan Shoppe

First attempt at pie. Thanks goodness for Jewel.

The kids table. This is a picture from the top showing the print out table clothe. From the Caravan Shoppe

The wall decoration to remind the family of the love and memories we share together.

Close up on the dessert table. We forgot to get a photo with all the other pies we also made lined up on the table.

Carving the Turkey.

The kids table after the day had finished.

Ninjago party

Kenny went through a few different ideas of party themes before settling on Ninjago this year. The reality is the kid loves anything Lego, but Ninjago has been his favorite lately. We had lots of fun treats for this party so I literally spent every night for about two months creating stuff, placing it in the freezer and then doing it again. I stack everything up in the freezer and then take it out the night before so it's like a magic preparation the night before. 

Kenny and Ellie doing their ninja moves.

Amazing Grandma Patty made every one of those bandannas by hand and colored all the Chinese words and red sun. It says "Happy Birthday" in Chinese (or at least we think so, according to Google Translate).

I got the idea for the Kruncha treats from Wants and Wishes design. Nobody thought they looked like Kruncha, but they appreciated the effort ;).

The place settings for each kid

Inspiration for edamame and candy sushi was from Anders Ruff

We made lots and lots of ninja cookies for everyone

I saw lots and lots of different versions of the Sensei Wu cake out there, but finally decided on making the base cake with chocolate covered oreos on top and then the minifigure out of chocolate with the lego minifigure mold like these ones.

Nunchucks...aka chocolate covered pretzels
Also inspired from Wants and Wishes design. My advice is to not make these for an outdoor party...they melt super fast in the sun

More cookie details

. The manager of Pei Wei was kind enough to donate all the fortune cookies for me to dip in chocolate and chopsticks to our cause!

All the chocolate legos started melting pretty quickly in the sun, but at least we got a picture of the rice (krispies) cakes!

Scrumptious cake pops are a must to my kids at their birthday parties

Chocolate covered oreos // take out table cake

Gearing up all the kids with headbands and swords for the Ninjago battles. Turns out releasing 24 kids into a giant bounce house with plastic weapons wasn't a great idea.

Kenny had such a great time.

Cutting the cake and friend fun again!

The candy take out bar

Scooping up his goods for his take out box // Ninja cake pops

Get your world-class lemonade for just one dollar!

Kenny and Dylan were so eager to sell lemonade this summer and we finally got around to it just before school started back up again. They were shouting "Get your world-class lemonade for just one dollar" to anyone within earshot. Kenny's goal was to earn $300,000 selling lemonade and he only came up about $299,980 shy of it. Not too bad for 30 minutes of standing on our street corner.

We were dog sitting this weekend so Desi came to join us at the lemonade stand.