Wedding Cake

Here's the wedding cake I made for Ronald and Alci's wedding. I have more pictures and more stories, but I told my mom I'd put up a picture for her to see the cake.
This is poor tired Royce after being on his feet for 2 days straight setting stuff up for the reception. This was about a half an hour before the reception started.

Head Band

Here is a little head band that I made for Emmaline to go with her Christmas dress. It was kind of a spur of the moment thing, and it came together pretty easily. I got all of the stuff from Hobby Lobby. (Their floral stuff is 50% off right now.) I just got a flower that had a yellow center, and glued the center and put black glitter on it. The headband I found in the wedding section, by the veils, and it was only $1, but it was white, so I took a black permanent marker and colored it. (Royce laughed at me a little when I did this part. :) ) Then I glued the headband and glittered it, and hot glued the flower on. I also trimmed down some of the green part on the bottom of the flower, because it was sticking up a little too much. But for a craft project that I made it turned out pretty well. Emmaline was a patient model for me while I made it and took the picture, so I didn't make her put her Christmas dress on when I took the picture, so that's why she's holding it up.

This last one is just another way Emmaline "organizes" stuff. Silly goose.

On other side notes, she's started giving her toys names, and she named her puppy sprinkles, and her baby Peaches. And she tells me that Peaches is my cousin. Random.

Frink out.

Thanksgiving

We went to Nana and Papa's for thanksgiving. It was so much fun, and sadly these are the only pictures I took! The kids played really well together. It was really neat to see. We had everyone there except Ross (on his mission) and Ronald and Alci (school at BYU, but we got to skype with them to figure out some more details for the wedding, and to give Alci a chance to meet the rest of the family. We had "met" her on skype a few days before we went down there). It was really fun to see everybody, and do lots of cool things, including planning a wedding reception! It was awesome. Carol and I were like two kids in a candy store. But that's coming up on the 29th (I think?) of December, which is the day before Royce and my anniversary. And I get to make a cake! I'm nervous, because I really want it to look nice. I'm also nervous because I had to order some special fondant cutters to make some of the flowers, and if it takes it a week to get here, then I only have a couple of weeks to make flowers I've never tried before. So hopefully it works! And I need to go do the dishes, then start making some roses!



Haha...this is Daddy trying to deflate the air mattress.



I had to take two of these pictures, because I couldn't get back far enough in the kitchen to get all of the kids in, but this is all of the grandkids on the Kimmons side, minus Lyla, who is just over a year old.


Katie did such a good job taking care of Lyla. She just followed her around and kept her out of trouble.

I took Gina's cake out last week and when we got there for Thanksgiving, she still hadn't cut it! I think part of that might be Papa, but before we left I gave her a little more inspiration to cut open the cake and eat it. I hope it still tasted okay. I've never let a cake sit for a week without eating it!

Finally, today we decorated our apartment for Christmas. Yeah! It was really fun. I love our fake little Christmas tree. :) But here is Emmaline with a couple of her own decorations.

Emmaline's First Cake!

This is the first cake that Emmaline has decorated by herself. I baked it, (obviously :) ) and she put the buttercream frosting on, then I put the white fondant layer on, and rolled out the fondant colors, and she did the rest! She cut them all out, and put them on the cake. I wasn't even in the room, I was washing the dishes. :)I really liked the little flower boarder she put around it. We're taking it with us, because she made it for Gina for her birthday.

Twilight Cake

Alright, here is my Twilight cake. Royce's sister Gina had a birthday at the beginning of the month, and she loves Twilight, so I forced myself to make a Twilight cake. (Hehe.) We were actually going to bring it out a different week, but then schedules changed a little bit, and it just happened to be this weekend, and I thought that was cool. It's a surprise, so hopefully Gina doesn't look at my blog . :)

Lea wanted me to make a video so she could see the back of it too, so hopefully I can get it uploaded. It was giving me problems before.

I find myself personally offended when they compare Twilight to Titanic. Hehe.

Random Stories

Emmaline found my stethoscope the other day, and was checking everyone's heart, and then I found her doing this, and I thought it was really funny, so I took a picture.
Then when I was putting the groceries away yesterday I noticed something funny.

Royce was here like this:


and about 20 feet over in her room, Emmaline was like this:


and I thought to myself, hmm, I'd probably better get used to this. :)


These last pictures are a blanket I made for Royce's brother, who is on his mission in Tacoma, Washington. He said he wanted a warmer blanket for Christmas, so I made him a fleece blanket, and here is Royce and Emmaline testing it to see if it would be warm enough, or if I needed to add another layer. (I really did make them sit down on the couch and put the unfinished blanket on them to see if it would be warm enough.)
I ended up adding a third layer of fleece, and it just sounded like a hassle to tie three layers together, and I had to patch together the front anyway, I decided to just sew it up. I had to patch the front because they only had one yard left in the nice woods print, and they just don't make very much variety for boys in fleece. It was either this or High School Musical. (Okay, there were a few others, but I thought this one looked the nicest, especially with the brown back.) So hopefully he likes it, and it keeps him a little warmer.


I almost forgot. I had the craziest conversation with Emmaline the other day. She had some plastic baby turtles, and sea lions and stuff, and while she was playing this conversation came about.

Me: Emmaline, what are you doing?
Emmaline: I'm cooking babies.
Me: Why are you cooking babies? (With a bit of a shocked tone in my voice)
Emmaline: Don't worry mommy, I'm not going to eat them all; I'm going to share them with my moose.

Yikes! We had watched the Disney movie about the earth the other night, but when it came time for the polar bear/shark/wolf, etc to start hunting the baby animals, we changed the channel so she couldn't see it, but I guess she picked up a little more than we realized. Apparently it wasn't too traumatic for her. That's good...I guess.

More Cake

So I made a cake about a month ago for the food contest among the UT married student housing apartment complexes, and it's this big party, and last year they had a bounce house, and ponies, and all sorts of booths and stuff, but the day it was supposed to happen a big storm came, and they had to cancel because of the rain, so they re-scheduled the event for tomorrow, so I got the chance to try out another decoration idea for my cakes and submit it into the cooking contest. (That was a really long sentance.) Anyway, here is my cake. I want to practice my piping some more. For some reason it's really hard for me to do. And it kills my hands after too long. I think I'm just coming up with excuses so I don't have to pipe any more. :)

Halloween Night!

Here's our cute little witch. We went to the ward trunk-or-treat party, then went to Randalls and got a pizza, more candy, and a movie to watch. It was a pretty good Halloween. I didn't get very many good pictures, but we were too busy having fun.

Here she is with some of her friends from "school." Sorry, not a very good picture.

Halloweeeeeeeen!

Here's some of the stuff that we did to kick off Halloween. I was happy with how the bats and spiders turned out, but I wanted it to be a fun project that Emmaline and I did together,
but it was a little trickier than I had expected, mainly because I ended up using hot glue, so she couldn't/didn't want to do very much. But she still had fun, so I guess it's okay. I got the ideas from family fun, and they've got other cute ideas there too. Here's the link to that web-site. It's where we got the idea for the window decoration too, but we made it a little easier and just used construction paper. Overall it was a pretty cheap craft; I already had the eyes and construction paper, but the rest was just $6. (Obviously there were multiple bats and spiders. :) )

http://familyfun.go.com/halloween/halloween-crafts/

I guess the spiders weren't on the web-site, but they're not hard either. I just used the same amount of feather boa as the bats, and took a pipe cleaner and kept folding it in half until there were eight legs, and glued the boa and eyes on.

This one was a little bit more simple, and Emmaline could glue the eyes on herself, but she still didn't want to cut any out, which surprised me, because she normally likes to cut stuff out.

When I went to take the picture, it wasn't the best time of day, so I just took a different picture for each half.

Here's Emmaline and Daddy carving our pumpkin. I wonder why I can never get a straight face from Emmaline when I'm taking a picture of her. :)


Here are my little Halloween cookies this year. They didn't exactly turn out. It was a different royal icing recipe, and it was really thin, and in combination with trying to frost my cookies when they were still too warm, my little spider webs all fanned out and melted into each other. But, Emmaline liked them and had a lot of fun decorating, so that's what's important. (Even though they frustrate me for not turning out :) )

This was just kind of a random picture. Royce was working on his homework, and eating chips and salsa, so Emmaline pulled her chair up beside him, and they ate chips and salsa together. :) So sweet.

Emmaline Turns 4!!

So Emmaline turned 4 last Wednesday, so we had a little party then with the three of us and my parents via the computer, and then on Sunday we had a party with Nana and Papa, Gina, Ronda, Rocky, Carol, and Chloe and Lyla, two of Emmaline's cousins. (Which was a pretty good turnout. 4 of the 9 Kimmons kids were there, and the ones that weren't live too far away to come for just
one day.) But it was a pretty fun party, and I think Emmaline had a pretty good week.

This is the main present that my parents bought for Emmaline, and they even called before they bought it to see if Royce would be kind enough to set it up for her. :)
This is what it looked like this first night after an hour and a half and 25 out of 60 pages of set-up instruction.
This is the finished product. It really is pretty fun to watch, and the kids really like playing with it. It really can hold Emmaline's attention span for a long time.

On Wednesday she also opened Aunty Lea's present, and she made her this cute little decoration, and all of the bows. I can't imagine how much time it took her to make the bows. I tried to make one when we went to her house this summer, and not only did mine look like poop, but it took me forever. Lea definately has the crafting gene of the three of us.

This is another present my parents sent her. It's a pony that you can color on, and then wash in the washing machine and color on it again. Emmaline colored all of the flowers by herself, and I thought she did a pretty good job. (The bow is another one that Lea made, and my mom also sent her the new clothes she was wearing, and a new little dress. They miss her a lot, and I think it makes them feel better to buy her tons of stuff. :) )

This is the last present my parents sent Emmaline. I'm not sure if you remember or not (whoever "you" may be that I'm talking to) but my parents sent Emmaline a jumping, singing bunny for Easter, and it scared Emmaline to death. Well, we learned enough to warn her ahead of time that her puppy moves and makes noise, but she has still been pretty hesitant with this guy. She won't let us turn him on unless she's up on the couch, and he has a pretty sensitive sensor on him, so she wouldn't go in her room if he was in there. I have to take him out of her room, and put him on the kitchen table before she'll go in her room. But I think with time she'll get used to him, just like she did her Easter bunny. :)

So then we had our fun little party on Sunday, and she opened her presents from us, and from Royce's side of the family. She ended up with a lot of stuff for just one little girl. :)

This is one of the movies that Nana and Papa got her, (they got her a few movies, with lots of cool singing, so we're excited about that) and she wanted to watch it just as soon as everyone left, and I swear it wasn't more than a minute and a half of watching it, and I looked over and she was like this:

This is the Lightening McQueen car that Rocky and Carol and the girls got Emmaline. Chloe's birthday was just about a week before Emmaline, and she had a cool Mater cake, and got some little cars, and Emmaline just loved them, so they were nice enough to get her Lightning McQueen and Doc, and now she carries both of them around in her purse, everywhere we go. :)

These last two presents are ones that Royce and I got her. We got her the camera because she loves taking pictures lately, and she's had fun with her new camera, but unfortunately the pictures come out awful. I'm kind of sad about that, and am tempted to get her a new camera, because even when I'm taking the picture it doesn't come out at all.

We also got her some rings and a necklace, because she loves wearing Royce's and my wedding rings, so we told her we'd get her her own ring for her birthday. They were a little too big, but we could moosh them enough so they'd work.

Oh, and Royce's grandma sent Emmaline 5 dollars for her birthday, so we took her to the dollar store to pick out some fun stuff, and she ended up getting a sword, a car, balls, and a horse. She's been playing with a lot of boys in her little school lately. :)


The rest of these pictures are just mainly the girls having fun together. Emmaline came in to blow out her candles, then they went into her room to play, and we couldn't even get them to come out for cake and ice cream. It was pretty cute.
This is Chloe and Lyla (sisters), and Papa.



Here's cute little Chloe!

So I guess that's it, and thanks for everyone who helped Emmaline have a wonderful birthday!

Monsters Incorporated Cake (for Emmaline's birthday)

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Emmaline's birthday was Wednesday, so we had just a little family party with the three of us, and she opened her presents from my parents and Lea, (my parents watched via the computer) and then tomorrow we're going to have another little party at our apartment, and Nana and Papa are coming, and Ronda and Gina, and Rocky and Carol and Chloe and Lyla. So I made her monster cake for the party on Sunday, and I just finished it. It took so long and now my fingers are numb, but it's finally done! (Hmmm, maybe cake decorating isn't a good hobby for someone with Rheumatoid Arthritis. :) ) So here are just a couple of pictures from Wednesday (in her new outfit from Grandma and hair bow from Aunty Lea) and I'll make an official birthday post after her party tomorrow. (The last picture is what my table looks like after I finish a cake. And I cleaned it off twice during the middle of decorating the cake.)