Big Grandma

Grandma went to heaven tonight around 1am. We know she is so happy to be there and be with Grandpa again. Thanks for all your prayers and thoughts. I will update as we plan the funeral, etc.

Big Grammy (Tanya's grandma)

Just a quick note to let everyone know that my Grandmother is in the hospital after having a massive stroke last night. She was unresponsive when her caretakers tried to wake her this morning and was taken to the ER. She has remained unresponsive and the CT scan showed a large bleed in her brain--probably due to a ruptured aneurysm. She is receiving pain meds and is comfortable. I will update here as things change.

Please be thinking about our family and especially my mom during this time.

New Pics of Tristan and Rehanyn

Reunion Decorations

Here's the actual party room. In the distance you can see the cakes. The large grey thing to the right is a podium that is bolted to the floor so is unable to be moved--we made it into a rock. That's my friend and fellow party planner Jennifer working on the food table. She also made most of the vines that you see hanging from the ceiling (our friend Roxann did alot of them too.)
Here's some of our food being delivered. Apparently they didn't pay much attention to the food request because we got some food we didn't order and didn't get some that we ordered--Frustrating to say the least!!!!
Here's Lew--one of the nurses--at the registration table.
Here's my sweet girl Adreyn there to help mommy and daddy during the Reunion (Daddy was taking pictures)
Another picture of the food

Here's the "standee" corner. We put up a bamboo scene setter on the walls and then the lion and jeep were for the kids to play with and get pictures.
Here's another view of the party room. The trees were 2 columns we covered--they look good huh! Let me just say this room was packed with all the people who came
Heres a picture of the activity tables we had. There were lacing cards, rubbing plates, stickers, coloring pages, and stencils!

We had a great party! Of course we figured out a few things to change next year but overall it went very well!

Reunion Centerpiece cake

Here's the centerpiece cake

Here's the cakes all together
Here they are again
Here's a couple of the satellite cakes
Here's the other 2 satellite cakes
Apparently everyone enjoyed them as we had only a third of the bottom tier left when the party was over.

In a side note--we had the largest turnout in NICU Reunion history!
We had 400 people attend!

I'll post more pictures later--I'm really tired!!!

Jason did a great job taking all the family photos and Adreyn was a great helper for both mommy and daddy and for all the nurses!

Reunion Cakes #3

Now, decorating the satellite cakes (they'll go around the centerpiece cake).

I found the pictures I wanted by "Googling" coloring pages and found ones I liked. I printed them out on cardstock and cut them out. I then used a toothpick and went around the outline of the picture imprinting the outline on the cake

after the outline was on the cake I used a toothpick to free hand the interior--using the coloring page for reference. Here you can see it after I got all the details on.
Here's the completed cake:
Here is a cake where I did the next step after using the toothpick to get the design in the frosting. I then go over all the toothpick lines with black or brown icing. Like this:

Here's that completed cake (ignore my mess please :-) )

Here's the other completed cakes
This one is my favorite I think:
Well, I'm glad those are done. Now I just have to decorate the centerpiece cake but I'll have to do that at the Reunion. I'll post pictures of it when I get it done. Hope you enjoyed seeing the process.!

I'm going to bed now!!!

Reunion cakes #2

Okay, next post-- Here's the top tier of the centerpiece cake (strawberry cake)

Here's the middle layer of the centerpiece cake (white cake)
and the bottom layer of the centerpiece cake (half chocolate, half white)
I decided on the cake flavors based on what cake mixes I had in my pantry when it was time to bake.

Here's the four satellite cakes, (chocolate, carrot, red velvet, white)
And this is how much frosting was left when everything was frosted. Looks like I made just enough, huh.

Next post--the completed satellite cakes!

Reunion Cakes #1

Okay, this is the first of several posts about the cakes for the NICU Reunion so I can keep all the pictures in order. Wednesday I spent the entire day baking 10 cake layers. Then 1 cracked and one stuck to the cooling rack and broke into a bajillion pieces. So, this morning I rebaked 2 layers.

Here are the cake boards for the centerpiece cake
Here are the cake boards for the satellite cakes
Here are some pics of the cakes waiting to be frosted. I didn't take pictures of the ones I had to throw away because--#1 I was really frustrated #2 I didn't think to do it until they were in the garbage.

This is the huge batch of buttercream frosting I made to frost all those cakes. It's 8 batches of frosting. I tinted it tan (the Reunion theme is Safari so I thought tan was a better background than white.

So on to next post and more pics.

Latest Cake

Here's some photos of the cake I just finished. It is for a friend of mine from work. It's for her daughter's 2nd birthday--Mia is obsessed with hello kitty.

I traced a picture of hello kitty onto the cake and then just free handed her face and body with buttercream icing.
The flower are made out of marshmallow fondant. If you don't like the taste of fondant you should try this stuff--it's pretty good. I hate the usual fondant but I like the marshmallow fondant. I used cookie cutters to cut out the flowers and then used different size icing tips (the round end not the tip end) to make the circles for the middle of the flowers.

I used the flowers on the sides too and just had them wrap over the top of the cake.

Oh, BTW the cake is vanilla with buttercream icing.

Rehanyn's ouchie

Monday Rehanyn had a bad day--Mommy accidently shut her fingers in the sliding glass door when I was on the way to work--talk about feeling like a horrible mommy!

Then Daddy called Mommy at work and then sent these pictures to her.


Apparently the kids were rough-housing and Rehanyn jumped on Adreyn's back and managed to put her tooth through her lip and caused a gaping hole. So I had Jason bring Rehanyn (and the other kids) up to the hospital so I could see it in person. I thought it could use a stitch so Daddy took Rehanyn (and Tristan) to the ER and Adreyn stayed with me. My mom was great and jumped in the car to come help Jason with the kids--of course by the time she got there the ER decided that the hole in Rehanyn's lip wasn't big enough to fix so everybody got to go home fairly quickly. Luckily it looks to be healing pretty well.

Our weekend

We went to the Scarborough Renaissance Festival this weekend. I was so good and took my camera and then left the camera in the car and didn't realize it until we got inside the gates and we had parked out in the boonies so I wasn't going back to get it. So the pics we got are from Jason's cell phone.

Here's pics of the kids--Adreyn

Tristan--

Rehanyn--

The girls got "fairy" wings--they both think they are butterfly wings and that is fine with me. You can see them in the photos. Tristan got a "pet dragon" that wraps around his arm--you can see just the edges of it in his photo. Adreyn got a heart painted on her cheek and so did Rehanyn. Tristan got the Batman logo on his arm (see it in the pic?) Although the paint is gone the outline is still there since he managed to tan around it :-)

The rest of the pictures are the pony ride the kids got to experience--they LOVED it!!!

REHANYN

ADREYN

ADREYN

REHANYN

TRISTAN

TRISTAN

REHANYN

Jason and I had a good time too. The day started off a little chilly (60's)--you know that's chilly in Texas!!! Then it got up to the high 80's and I got a really nice sunburn before I knew it. We went to the Candlemaker's at Scarborough and they hand made us a new unity candle (our has been destroyed by kids and pets. It matches our taper candles perfectly--I'll post pictures of it in a future post. It was kind of nice to get one made just for us!!

Birthday cake fiasco

See this adorable birthday cake I made for the neighbor's little boy's 2nd birthday? (please ignore the cake crumbs and discarded pieces of cake in the picture) The neighbor put little toy cars on the "highway" at the party--pretty cute huh.
Here's a picture of the "grass" that covered the cake--I used a special icing tip and just FYI, it turned out cute but was a BIG pain in the butt (and my arm and shoulder still hurt!) Here's the info about the cake. It is 2 double layer 12 inch round cakes--one is yellow cake, one is chocolate cake. The black frosting is triple chocolate chocolate chip icing and the green frosting is my yummy almond buttercream.

Wanna know what the "fiasco" was? Well, here goes. The neighbor daddy picked up the cake and upon putting it in his car immediately crushed some of the grass on the side--not a big problem right? Well, about 10 minutes after he picked it up we get a call--"the cake broke in the middle--can you come fix it?" So here we go to the rescue. When we get there they tell us that two of them carried the cake into the house (while this cake is big it didn't need to have 2 people carry it) and along the way it came apart. Well, due to height differences between 2 people and 2 cakes put together to look like one--it wasn't a pretty cake anymore. It took about 20 minutes but we got it back together and all the icing patched--You really couldn't tell it had cracked (Thank God!!!) and they were happy!

Lesson learned?--If you don't want an emergency phone call about your masterpiece (okay maybe not masterpiece but you get my drift) always deliver it yourself!!!! (And make extra icing just "in case")