Weekend Favorites: A Field of Weeds

What a beautiful Thanksgiving weekend, hey?! While we were hanging out at Ben’s parents’ house, I decided to waddle out to take some pictures. When I got back, Ben asked curiously, “What is there to take pictures of in a field?”

My response: “Weeds.”

But such beautiful weeds!

Of course, there was so much more to our weekend than just weeds. We spent lots of time with family, ate delicious food, and celebrated Anika’s birthday (a little bit early!) with grandparents and aunts and uncles.

I pulled out my garden, threw away wilting flowers, and kept checking more things off the “To Do Before Baby Comes” list. The list is getting short! So is my energy, so that’s a good thing!:)

I hope you had a lovely weekend!

Weekend Favorites

What a beautiful weekend! And it’s not even over yet!

But I wanted to quickly share a few favorites from our time at the cabin:

We had a very spontaneous birthday party for Anika at the cabin. My mom happened to have a cake mix on hand, we whipped up some paper chains, and Anika made place cards for everybody.

After our Thanksgiving/birthday party meal, we headed outside. It was such a beautiful afternoon!

It’s our fall tradition to climb up to Look-Out every year, right when the leaves are at their brightest, and it was so much fun to be able to share this tradition with the rest of my family!

It’s also family tradition to take a family picture there, but unfortunately, Ben was feeling so sick that he stayed back at the cabin while everybody went on this little adventure.

Today we keep celebrating, this time with Ben’s family.

I hope you all have a fantastic Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving – Turkey + Bean Cake = This Weekend

Happy Thanksgiving!

I’m actually not feeling “thanksgiving-ish” in any way. We went to my parents’ cabin on Saturday, came home Sunday night, and have not been anywhere near a slice of turkey.

Turkey at the cabin was not a combination that appealed to any of the adults when we were planning food for this weekend, but when the kids were all sad about no turkey, and we adults were honest about our deepest feelings, I think we all realized that turkey is kind of necessary for Thanksgiving, cabin or no cabin.

So we will do things differently next year, but for this year, Thanksgiving was kind of like any other really nice weekend at the cabin. And that’s still nice!

We celebrated Anika’s birthday there – a little early.

We may not have had turkey, but we had Bean Cake.

For real. That sounds totally gross, but it tastes exactly like normal, amazing chocolate cake, but without any sugar or flour.

How it is possible to blend up black beans with other normal cake ingredients, and get something delicious is a complete mystery to me, but if you want to find out more, check out the recipe here.

And then you should make it, be amazed, and devour it’s completely healthy goodness before you rush out the door, hunt down my good friend Nikki, and hug her like she’s your new best friend, because she’s the one who first introduced me to Bean Cake, and without her, this blog post would not be possible.

And now, I’m off to roast a chicken, in an attempt to make today feel slightly more like Thanksgiving.

I wish you a wonderful day!

Pictures From Our Weekend

We had such a fun time with family this weekend. We didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving last weekend, so we headed out to my parents’ on Friday.  My family tends to just meet at my parents’ cabin here in the Whiteshell all summer, so it was nice to go back “home” for a change. We also haven’t been to my sister and brother-in-law’s in forever, so we spent the day with them on Saturday, which was so much fun.

All the girls went out for lunch (but we left Kaylia at the house, because I was worried about all of her energy in a dainty tea house.) Anika was so excited about the experience that she barely ate.

Amber is a regular customer, so she calmly took in the whole experience, and ate everything on her plate:

Then Wally gave us a tour of his workplace. Just recently, I was explaining to Anika how Uncle Wally makes books, which pretty much amazed her. She asked if she could see for herself how it was done, because that would be, in her words, “a wonder!!” It was a wonder…

I loved spending time with my sister, and the guys went golfing, and it was just a really nice, very full day!

On Sunday, we were at my parents’, and had our Thanksgiving meal with some birthday cake for desert! Anika turns seven this week:

So it was fun and relaxing, and just great to be with family. I love bringing our little girls to the place where I was a little girl.

Pictures From the Weekend

We have spent so much time outside this weekend! Kaylia is always going over to the door, saying “Side! Shoe!” And then she brings me her hat, and says “Please!” (Without the “l”) And so we go out again!

She has discovered Anika’s doll stroller and loves it. At one point, she took out the puppy, backed her little bum up to the stroller, and said, “Sit! Ride!”

Our Thanksgiving has been quite un-thanksgiving-ish. It’s been fun and relaxing, but we’re staying around camp this weekend and getting together with family next weekend.

In the morning, Ben took the girls on a hike to Beaver Pond and the snowmobile warm-up shack, while I went down to the lake for some quiet time.

We had a picnic up by the climbing wall for lunch. It might look calm and relaxing in this picture…

…but looks can be deceiving. These pictures are a little more accurate:

Kaylia climbed all over the blanket, made a big mess, and kept helping herself to food from every container she could get her hands on, and added it to her own little bowl.

After she was done eating/destroying any food she could find, she went to the climbing wall and said, “Up!”

Later on in the afternoon, we went to Brereton and spent some time playing on the play structure:

I keep getting far more pictures of Kaylia than of Anika. I realized this weekend that one of the reasons for that is because Anika moves so fast, she’s harder to take pictures of! She also avoids the camera as much as she can, so I have to keep trying to sneak up on her. I’ll have to work on that. In the meantime, I’ll keep getting more pictures of Kaylia:

It’s been a very nice weekend, but I’m looking forward to being with family next weekend!