benjamin is two!

Today we celebrate the birth of Benjamin, the smartest and coolest two year old around!  Ever since he was born he has always been so smart and quick to learn new things.  He is such a sweet boy and so loved by his family.  Here are a few shots we have of this adorable little guy over the past two years!  He has made living ten hours away from our family very hard!

Isn’t he the cutest little guy!  Well, he is growing up fast and we heard that he is very interested in cars and anything that goes vrooooom!  So I did some sewing (shocking, I know) and Jay did some car shopping (I think he was secretly in little boy heaven), and voila, we have a two year old birthday present ready for some major vrooooming action! 

I have had this fabric in mind for this particular little boy before he even knew he liked cars!  One simple city streets quilt and a car roll to park all his new hot wheels!

We also made him up this little birthday video so we can sing to him from so far away!  Happy Birthday Benjamin, we love you so much!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtWUjkIPZXY

tricks and treats

We have had a really wonderful October this year.  It has been great to get to experience all of our favorite fall activities with Charlotte this year!  We were lucky that she is at such a fun age during October.  This month we have had a whole bunch of treats and just a couple tricks!

We have really enjoyed spending time with friends, going to pumpkin patches, apple orchards, and out to lunch with family and friends.  One special treat we have had recently was to meet my Aunt Paula in Fredericksburg, just a little drive up 95 for us.  She had not yet got to meet little C and was passing through Virginia on a business trip so we got to meet and have lunch.  Here is a picture of all three of us!  Aunt Paula was one of my favorite people as a child and I know that C thought she was super cool too!

This past weekend I really walked into a major trick.  I always get all these great ideas, much of the time thanks to all the blogs and pinteresting I read.  Well, I got it in my mind that I wanted to make caramel apples.  Jay so positively blogged about it here, but he was way off!  They were not good at all- he very politely refused to eat them!  They looked okay, but were crazy to eat!  The two that I tried had to be pried out of my mouth using the toothpick that we used for dipping.......a major fail.  What a trick!  The moms did warn me, did I listen no!  Caramel is so tricky!

But at the end of the day, who cares about rock hard caramel when you have this little flower giggling and cooing at you!

Hope your Halloween is filled with more treats than tricks!

-melissa

pin-ter-est

So the other day I’m heading to our local grocery store with Charlotte and like many other times Melissa needs me to pick up a few things. This time around it’s ingredients for a recipe that she found on you guessed it...Pinterest. Nowadays when Melissa is looking for a new recipe she doesn’t head to recipes.com or even food network’s site...no she heads first and foremost to Pinterest. The place to go to discover, compare and in this case, the place to go in order to find something to do on a Saturday night. Let me tell you what I mean.

So I pick up the ingredients. A little butter, light corn syrup, brown sugar and a few more odds and ends. Couple this with the fresh apples we picked last weekend and you’ve got a wife who is interested in making carmel covered apples. And not just the regular kind mind you. Melissa wants to first slice the apples insert toothpicks and make carmel apple slices, because, “everything is better when it’s miniature.” After consulting with both of our mom’s she doesn’t receive a good report. Her mom tells her to call my mom, so not a whole lot of help there. My mom says first of all, “carmel is very difficult to make.” And secondly, if you accomplish in heating it to exactly 248 degrees, “you probably won’t be able to get it stick to the apple flesh” due to something about pectin. But one thing I love about Melissa is that she’s not afraid to try and she always wants to prove people wrong (I hope Charlotte inherits some of that). So what would have been a fairly relaxing and lazy Saturday night at the Hess house suddenly turned into Willy Wonka’s candy shop.

Melissa bathed Charlotte and I put her down for the night, but before I went upstairs to put Charlotte down Melissa let me know that we needed to make the carmel apple slices tonight because tomorrow was going to be busy. Now I could have declined this candy making apple extravaganza completely, but I have to admit that after we shared a delicious carmel apple in Seattle a few months ago I was interested to see if we could really replicate something so delicious in our very own home. So I melted some butter, Melissa measured the brown sugar and corn syrup and I began to stir over medium until it boiled. While I stirred, Melissa cut apples and pierced the slices with toothpicks. Remember, “everything is better when it’s miniature.”

I stirred for a long time and that’s when Melissa broke out the white wine and man she hit it hard...just kidding, but the photo is funny. We slowly got the temperature up to 248. I kind of felt like Marty from Back to the Future trying to get the car up to 88mph while trying to produce the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to to make things happen. Eventually it boiled we added some sweet condensed milk and eventually some vanilla and voila, carmel.

Now for the moment of truth. Would it stick to the apple flesh? Come back next week to find out

Just kidding!!!

It did stick! Pretty well at least. It definitely stuck better to the skin than the flesh, but I think we were pretty pleased with the results. We chopped up some peanuts and sprinkled the slices with the nuts and some mini m&m’s.

Overall it was a pretty fun project. We both got a little bit of hot carmel on our hands but survived and what would have been a dull night sitting on the couch was a fun moment where once again, as much as I make fun of Pinterest, it has some great content and has produced some great food, home decor and general humor in my life. So the next time Melissa starts talking about the next big idea she found and wants to try I’ll probably respond by saying, “Yes, that sounds ‘pinteresting’ to me."

-jay

welcome to the world honor

Honor Yafimbana Feliwok was born exactly one week ago tonight!  We are so excited to have her as a part of our family and we can not wait to get these two girls together to play and become the best of friends!  We love you baby Honor, happy one week birthday!