Cake Pops!

The Jollys sent Katie Anne a box of cake pops for her birthday!  

One of my friends and Book Club members, Kristen Meers, owns Eye Candy Cake Company, and she makes these delicious cake pops!  Katie Anne - and SJ - were very excited to get a special delivery, and even more excited to eat them!

The birthday girl enjoying the delicious vanilla cake pops!  

Thanks, Ella and Colin!

 SJ was absolutely in love with the chocolate cake pops!  His expressions while eating them were cracking us up!

Kristen's cake pops are amazing - go and check out her Facebook page here!

Messy Eaters!

SJ is your typical baby ... he loves to make a mess when he eats!  

 SJ has almost completely given up baby food at this point, and he loves to feed himself.  When he gets started, there's no holding him back - he smears food all over himself!  He loves to rub food in his hair and eyebrows, so cleaning him up after a meal is quite a challenge!

Yum yum - eating off his own arm:

Action Shot!

Nasty hands!

The other day, I tried giving SJ a plate for the first time.  That didn't go over too well... in about 3 seconds, he'd dumped all the food from his plate into his lap and tossed the plate in the floor!

Now, that's better!

Katie Anne was totally different as a baby - she rarely got food on her face and didn't like making a mess.  But, if brother does something funny, she wants to do it, too ... so for the sake of fun, she made a little mess today as well!

Normally, she's a very neat eater.  She does NOT like to get food on her clothes.  So, for this messy meal of Spaghettios, she asked to wear one of SJ's bibs to keep her shirt clean!

Here are some silly pictures of KA eating, too!

Popsicle Picnic

Nothing says summertime like a popsicle picnic in the front yard!

 

  This was SJ's first experience with a popsicle, and he was definitely not a fan at first.

He was a good sport about it and kept trying to enjoy it.

He eventually started to like the popsicle and wound up eating most of it, but I wouldn't say it was one of his favorite things.

Katie Anne loves popsicles and had a great time eating a treat and hanging out on the quilt in the yard!

SJ says, "Who needs to eat popsicles when there are all these delicious leaves around?"

SJ was in quite a goofy mood and made all sorts of crazy faces while we were outside.  Here he is, busting out the angry eyes.

Now, back to his sweet self...

Hello, friends.

Drunk on his own power!

The name's Jones... SJ Jones.

Sister Squeezes!

Katie Anne put on several musical numbers while we were outside relaxing.  What a performer - she's made for Broadway!  I love the big finish...

Quaker Dinosaur Eggs

Katie Anne is a great eater.  She'll eat almost anything we put in front of her, and she can walk into any restaurant and find something to enjoy.  However, she doesn't have many breakfast options that she likes.

Wait, I take that back.

She does like a lot of breakfast options, like eggs and pancakes and biscuits.  But, those are a pain to fix and go bad in the five weekdays that she doesn't eat breakfast at home.  Plus, Mommy and Daddy often wind up gorging themselves on these breakfast products if we have them in the house.  So, we're always on the lookout for the quick, easy breakfast staple that can last from weekend to weekend in the pantry and that won't tempt Mom and Dad.  It seems like we alternate between waffles, cheese toast, and Poptarts.  She's not a huge cereal fan, doesn't like grits, doesn't eat NutriGrain or cereal bars, doesn't eat yogurt, and doesn't like oatmeal - or so I thought.

When I was making her breakfast the other day, she was just begging for oatmeal.  She says that they have it all the time at school and that she loves it.  So, I told her that we'd get some oatmeal the next time we were at the store.

Well, when we pushed down the breakfast options aisle a day or two later, looking for oatmeal, she spotted these:

So, we tried out our Dinosaur Eggs the very next morning.  When we opened the package, this is what we found- regular oatmeal with "dino eggs" inside.

 

The package said that using hot water and stirring with a fork were the two most important steps, so we followed directions carefully.

 

 Then, we started hunting for the hatching dinosaur eggs:

 After a long and disappointing hunt, we did find two dinosaurs in the oatmeal.

Katie Anne ate a bite or two of the oatmeal - the two bites that contained dinosaurs - and then she was done.

 

So, I would say I learned 3 things from this breakfast experiment:

1. Katie Anne really doesn't like oatmeal.

2. Dinosaur Eggs are not worth the increased price.

3. If I had a child that liked oatmeal and wanted to find hidden things in there, I think I'd be a lot better off to put gummy bears or something in the bottom of the bowl.

So, looks like waffles, cheese toast, and Poptarts for the foreseeable future!

Dinner at George's

Tonight, we had an absolutely delicious dinner at George's at Alys Beach.  Fresh seafood, sweet hushpuppies, and scrumptious desserts outside on the candlelit deck... and the service was so attentive.  The server and hostess were constantly checking on Katie Anne, or "Little Peanut" as they called her, and they were gracious to us adults, too ... they even provide warm shawls on the back of the chairs for diners to wrap around their shoulders if they get chilly.  Fabulous!

 

 

 

 

George's has a frog theme, and Katie Anne ordered the Toadily Happy Pasta. It was actually little green and white frog-shaped pastas!  Super cute and tasty... she absolutely adored it.

This is her literally raising the roof and dancing in her seat in a fit of joy while eating her buttery, cheesy, froggy pasta!

For dessert, our server brought Katie Anne her own big bowl of vanilla gelato with chocolate buttercream ... she loved it and absolutely inhaled it.

Two little cheesy grins

The rest of us had tasty desserts, too... Trisha and Saunders had key lime pie, I had a fruit crisp, Carlton had a "Chocolate Goo", and Vicki sampled a little from here and a little from there!  See her hand reaching in?  Carlton was too busy loving his Chocolate Goo to even look at the camera... his talk of sharing quickly evaporated when he tasted it!  It completely exceeded his expectations.  In fact, he's waxing poetic about it right now as I post this... "Like a hot fresh brownie right out of the oven..."