Midterm cooking

Today I felt extra inclined to make something...must be because it's midterms and I don't want to clean so my next outlet is doing some kind of craft/cooking thing. Tonight I did two from pinterest that I've been meaning to do. I made sweet potato fries and some dessert croissants.
Here's the link for the original sweet potato fries recipe http://nannykimsrecipes.blogspot.com/2009/09/sweet-potato-fries-baked.html

This was my first time ever attempting any kind of french fries from scratch...the recipe was simple enough, cut the potato add some oil and seasonings and bake for 30 minutes....

I think I didn't have enough spacing for the fries on this pan because they came out a bit soggy...but it was still tasty...at least I thought so. Trent is still on the fence about this one

I probably should have also left it in a bit longer, I think that the browned ones came out better than the middle ones...oh well!

For the dessert croissants I just went off of a picture. http://shechive.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/berry-break-217.jpg
Looked easy enough spread peanut butter and sprinkle chocolate chips on before rolling them.

Unfortunately I didn't have any peanutbutter just almond butter, and I only had semisweet chocolate chips....I like them! I made half with Nutella, those were awesome!!! :p

I should have tried to roll them faster, because when I was rolling them it was a bit messy and didn't stick well...but they were still good!

Hopefully this will be enough to stop me from having a breakdown before my midterms on Wednesday. If I end up doing another craft/cooking thing I'll post more! Wish me luck for my midterm!!!

Birthday!

This weekend we celebrated Trent's 3rd birthday!

We had a party with friends and family on Saturday. We had kites, a pool, a ball, all at Kamalani park. For those of you who know that park I put up a little pool because they built up the wall of Lydgate's ponds so now it looks almost like river water...not the nice blue ponds we remember growing up :( anywho...it was lots of fun and we were so happy that so many people could come and help us celebrate. Trent was so sad when it was all over he started running after Grandma Evie's car begging them to stay longer. We finally convinced him to go home and open more presents.

Here he is flying his kite with his cousin Hayden and Papa Myles! It was such a good day for flying kites we ended up tying up the kites to a hammer and they flew themselves!

He specifically requested dinosaurs for nearly everything this year! Thanks to Grandma Evie for getting him this awesome Dinosaur cake and aunty Tess for getting the candle last minute!

I re-purposed a board that one of my friends had given me for Christmas one year for Trent. I pretty much had to re-do the whole thing to put in a different background fabric but I think it came out pretty good...Now I can display his birthday cards and drawings as they come in, so he can enjoy them for a while longer!

 Sunday was his actual birthday! Even though we're all kind of getting over our colds (Trent caught a cold after Superbowl and decided to share with Mommy and Daddy!) we still decided to try to make this an extra special day for Trent. We tried to go to Kountry Kitchen for breakfast....the wait time was too long, so we decided to go to Tip Top, we had just missed breakfast so we had lunch instead.

We surprised Trent and took him riding on a train for his birthday! We went on the Kilohana train tour (kinda the best you can do on Kauai for train fans :p.). He was so excited to see the train! They even gave him a shout out on the train ride which made his day. The best part of the train ride was that they stopped so we could feed the animals. Trent has recently been obsessed with farm animals and this was quite possibly the best part for him ^_^ After the train ride Daddy took him shopping one more time for a birthday present...wouldn't you know he picked a toy about animals! By the time we were halfway home he knocked out! It was an awesome day!

Trent and Daddy in front of the train we rode

Family day at the train...can you tell he's excited???

He was so happy to ride the train!

Most of the animals were pigs and goats. The sheeps and cows stayed back...the goats came right up and plucked the bread out of his hand!

Making promises and keeping them

Last night I had to rush my son to the pharmacy to pick up some nebulizer medicine for him before they closed (they didn't have the medicine). On our way to the pharmacy he said "Mommy I want to paint my house" I laughed and said yeah ok what colors do you want, we'll paint your house tomorrow! He started listing all of the colors he wanted and I was laughing thinking he'd forget all about it tomorrow....well he didn't!

As I was sitting down to do my homework he kept bugging me about painting the house. Remembering that I promised that I'd let him paint a house I groaned because I have to set a good example about making and keeping promises that are made (insert morality and guilt). So I set forth making a house out of cardboard boxes that we had laying around waiting to be sent to the recycle bin...yeah ummm, my boyfriend keeps telling me "I'll get to it" the cardboard has now piled up taller than my son :-/ that's another story and we won't get into it....Anywho I made him a house out of boxes and we went outside to pain the house. He only wanted to paint the roof!!!! Aaaargh I was trying to do my homework on my computer while helping him paint, it was a disaster...I had to put my now painted laptop in the house to finish his house painting project.

We painted the house together he told me what he wanted on the house and I tried to help him, my painting/drawing skills are not the best...actually I'm sure once he reaches second grade his drawings will be better than mine!!!

Here's the roof he painted....I totally forgot to put out the cup with water so that he could rinse his brushes before going into the next paint...so his house has a lot of brown/purple color all over :p

He asked me to paint a lion, yeah he said we would have a pet lion....thank goodness this is not a close up of it because it's pretty horrid!

He loves apples and trains so of course we had to have an apple tree and a train in the back of the house! hehehe...oh yeah and a polka-dot window...not sure what that was about!

Overall this was a good lesson for me...remember not to make promises to little ones that you don't intend to keep, because they'll remember and bother you until you make it happen! hehehe