Kids

That one time I tried to make a Unicorn Cake 

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So this last weekend we had some family over for Vivian’s birthday. My kids always get amazing cakes made by their grandma for their birthday just like she did for us growing up (who am I kidding she still makes me a birthday cake!) While browsing through Pinterest Viv and I decided on a Unicorn cake for this years birthday.


Since this year’s cake looked relatively easy I decided that I wanted to do most of the work, with my mom by my side of course.

Sunday morning we headed over to my mom’s to get decorating, she had already baked the cakes for me (Thanks Mom!) we layered the cakes and and added the white frosting.


And made the horn and ears. Since I’m only semi-crafty I made the horn out of an ice cream cone painted gold (edible gold spray I found at Wal-mart) and the ears out of marshmallows. I used the square marshmallows,cut them diagonally, then sprayed some of the gold onto wax paper and painted that on.


Viv picked out the colors that she wanted and we mixed up little bowls of each color. Once again since I’m only semi-crafty we used the pre-made bucket of frosting from Wal-Mart, it taste good, cost is decent and cuts your time in half!  We then loaded the frosting bag alternating different colors (this worked well except green+orange make brown, avoid putting those together) I then began to swirl and swirl and things started to come together….

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The cake looked really good, like better then I had imagined!

And then disaster started the strike!!! The frosting in the back started pulling away from the cake!! What do we do?!?! Quick snap a picture with the birthday girl….


Put the cake in the fridge so maybe the frosting will harden. Open the door two minutes later and find this!!! Well actually this picture is of when my mom took the frosting and pieced part of it back together!! I was too busy cleaning the frosting off the fridge shelves to get a picture of it before she started fixing it.


Thank goodness for my mom, she saved the cake and made things right in the world like mom’s do!!


Lessons learned- 1) Leave the fancy cakes for the professional. 2) I guess there is such a thing as too much frosting on a cake 3) Always have mom close by

Love Always … Tam

Wake Up!

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Why is it that sometimes (ok most the time) your kids just know how to pull at your heartstrings….
Viv is on Spring Break and yesterday she spent the day with me at work aka Grandma’s house. She had been playing on the swing set and asked me to come watch her new trick. I said just give me a minute.  She responds with “Mom you are always busy. Why can’t you spend more time with us? Can’t you come out and play with us?”

MY. HEART. SANK.

I know that she is just a kid and that she doesn’t understand all the grown up stuff … like money doesn’t just appear in your piggy bank and the clothes don’t wash themselves, but she is right. After she called me out she went over the ways that I could be home earlier at night to play with them… Can’t you go to work before I get on the bus? But who will watch you and brother? We can go over to Grandma’s house. Or why don’t you and brother leave for daycare right after I get on the bus? Yup, that would work…
But that would mean I would have to Wake Up Early!!

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I am not a morning person! Like many others, I so foolishly thought that once you became an adult or parent you magically became a morning person, in reality its just the opposite. And I know that I really should get up earlier and that it would probably make my life easier, but who wants to crawl out of that nice, warm, comfy bed to be an adult! Fine kid you win, I will try and be a morning person. This morning was a test run, I was up early and out the door (yeah!) Except there was no school and dad was home to get the kids ready, next week is the real deal. But today, today I promised a little girl a bike ride and dinner at the park. So I’m leaving with plenty of daylight and sunshine left to spend some time with my kids.

Love Always … Tam

My Favorite Place in the House

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First of all I hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas! For us Christmas is always a whirlwind, all of our family lives within a 10 mile radius of our house, so we have to be at every event. We don’t always get time to just enjoy the holiday but I am forever greatful to have the amount of family we have and cherish the time we spend together at Christmas as I know it won’t be like this forever. So I will drive and make every it to every single one of those events as long as they are going on, even if I feel like I have just completed a marathon at the end of the day. I did manage to find a few moments to escape to my favorite place in the house to start thinking about my goals for the next year. More on those goals next week, today I want to talk about my favorite place int he house. Up until a  year or so ago I had no place in the whole house that was just for me and it was starting to get to me. I needed a place for me, just me, a place to escape to for just a minute, a place that the kids (and husband) don’t make a mess in, a place for me to just be. My options were very limited it was either make room in the basement (think old farmhouse basement, cement walls & spider webs) or the tiny room at the top of the stairs, I went with option two.

The room at the top of the stairs was far from my favorite place, it has over the years become the room where things come to die!! You know those things you aren’t quite sure what to do with, but you can throw them away? And then you just start throwing things in the room as you walk by. And then you start to avoid eye contact with the room becuase you don’t want to think about ever cleaning that room out. Yeah we all have that room and I was going to make it my place.

It took me a couple of weeks to get it all cleaned out and organized, then all it took was some paint, a new rug, free chair and some Pinterest projects and I now have my favortite place in the house!

Ahhhh, my room, my office, my favorite place in the house. Doesn’t it look great?!?! The kids do hang out with me in there sometimes but no toys can be left and they must pick up after themselves otherwise no entry! I kid, I kid…. or do I….

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Next week will be the new year, which means time for some goals to be made and manifested here on the blog, until then…

Love Always … Tam

4th of July Vacation

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Just got back from vacation, it was actually good and relaxing. I don’t normally like to go away from home for long periods of time, especially with kids and expect it to be relaxing. But when you have grandma and grandpa there to help and they can pretty much entertain themselves for 8 hours in the water, it can be pretty relaxing. Except the kids deceided they wanted to tube… behind the boat…. just the two of them!! I thought I was going to have a heart attack!!!

We went on our annual canoe trip down the Namekogen, this year we opted for a shorter, easier trip and it was just about perfect. Not much paddling was done, you got to enjoy mothing nature, we got out to swim a few places and a snake swam right through us!!! A SNAKE!! I almost peed my pants. That snake just swam through all of us while we here standing in the water like he owned the place. That is until I sceamed and he swam back up river, through the rest of our group and sat on the shore until we left.

No pictures from the river, I leave my phone at home. The boys caught this at the lake

This year we deceid to stay the whole week (plus two weekends, thats 9 days!) so that we would go to the Rodeo Thursday night. At first Viv did not want to go, even though we talked about it for weeks leading up. Then 5 min after we got there she decided she want to come every year. The Budweiser Clydesdales were there and for me that was worth it, those horses are beautiful and gigantic! The first rider out gashed his head into a pole right in front of us, ouch, good thing my kids were too into their cotton candy to even notice.

Food & Drink wise my week was so, so. My mother in-law is a pretty health consious lady and she planned most of the meals, so we had our veggies. The thing that really set me back was the drinking, oh and smores 🙂 I gained some weight back, but not all of it. The important part is that I enjoyed my vaction.

Love Always … Tam

What’s Up?

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What’s Up, besides my weight that is….How can you want something so bad, but yet you can’t control yourself to get it?  Yesterday as we were watching TV a commercial came on for one of those media-spas that “get rid of your body fat in just one day” Vivian turns and looks at me and says “mom why don’t you do that?” I told her because it doesn’t just work like that and it cost lots of money. Bless her heart that g12513857_10208527355720936_8188607754644347526_oirl looks at me and says in all seriousness “I know, I can give you all the money in my piggy bank for it” That right there should have broke my heart in two, made me hop up and get on that treadmill, instead I just sat in my chair and curled up in my blanket a little longer. I know that she is getting older and starting to notice more that mommy has a “big booty butt” (as we call it) and a big belly and I cringe at the day that she will be embarrassed by me because her mommy is fat. I mean I am going to embarrass through out the years, but I don’t want it to be because of my weight.

Last night my mom called me to come over to have a late night “business meeting” in the hot tub. I went over, we sat in that hut tub for 2 hours!! The night was perfect with a full moon, no wind and it was almost 30 degrees out! We talked about work and started getting excited for our upcoming season of senior pictures and our new class of spokesMODELS, we talked about all the new cool stuff coming into the Boutique for the next sale (all I can say is think Joanne Gaines!) and of course we talked about our weight. How we still haven’t lost anything over the winter, how 4th of July will be here before we know it and how this year was going it be different! Man I so want it to be different, I want to skinny (I am using this term loosely because I know it isn’t all about size), I want to go and pick out a cute outfit for the 4th and not just see what there is in my size and looks decent.

Rant over, thanks for listening.

Love Always … Tam

Happy New Year!

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With the new year comes resolutions and like always my first one it to lose weight. Most years I am pump and motivated at this time and get a good start on things. This year I am just not into it. So I have decide to take up a new project/resolution … a Playroom Makeover!!  This summer I got rid of my dinning room set so the kids could have that room as a playroom, really I should just call it “the room you throw all your toys in” because that is what is looks like!!!

Messy Play Room

Messy Play Room

That room had gotten out of control! First plan of action is to clean everything out of that room. Done!

Cleaned out Playroom

Cleaned out Playroom

Now my ideas for the room include, a stage, dress up clothes storage, a reading area, a Declan (aka boy) area and Vivian/Art Area. I have already purchased most of the items and have been doing some painting so hopefully in the next two weeks it will be complete!

Love Always … Tam