MLK Brunch

I'd been trying for a while to have my old dinner group over for brunch. I thought it would be a long shot, but I suggested MLK Day. Everyone actually had it off. But Lara wasn't going to be able to make it since she was hanging out with her parents for her mom's birthday. I made baked butter pecan french toast with blueberry syrup and an egg dish that uses pie crust and chopped up some fruit.

Winnie brought Sabrina with her hand all bandaged up because of a nail clipper incident. You can kind of see part of the bandage in the below pic.

It was great to see everyone. Hopefully, it'll be easier to plan our next get together.

Mathis' 2nd Birthday Party

For Mathis' 2nd birthday we didn't want to do anything big, but I did want to do something, esp. since we did something for Maile and Beck for their 2nd birthdays. I didn't want him to later ask why he didn't have a birthday party when Maile and Beck did.

Even though his birthday was on a Saturday, we wouldn't be able to have a get together then because Hansel was going to be out of town for a marathon. He originally had registered for the Napa Valley marathon on 3/6 but later realized it was the same weekend we booked the Hyatt at Northstar. So, he was able to have his registration for that marathon credited toward the Rock-N-Roll marathon in Phoenix on 1/16. He was going to get back Sunday afternoon after running the marathon that morning. So we decided to have Mathis' birthday party that evening.

We invited two of my cousins' families, Vicki/Stew, Rich/Caroline, and Al/Leilani. We kept it simple -- pizza and nuggets, green salad, baby carrots, fruit salad, and, of course, cupcakes! Partly out of health consciousness but mostly out of laziness, I only frosted half.

In the below photos I asked the kids to say, "Pizza!"
Check out Mathis' Dumb and Dumber haircut, courtesy of his nanny.

Mathis knew exactly what to do when we all sang Happy Birthday. He blew out the candles at the end of the song.


The kids had a great time especially the boys. Some of them could not tear themselves away from Beck's Thomas Logging Adventure toy from Christmas.