It's been a slow week around the blog, sorry!  I've got a lot going on at work and a sick kid at home.  When things finally calm down, I'll get back to my regularly scheduled snark.  However, I couldn't let another day go by without sharing this recipe that has been floating around on Pinterest (where else?!). My house smelled heavenly last night.  I've seen the recipe called a several different names and each recipe has a few different ingredients (toffee bits, white chocolate chips, coconut) but no matter how you make it, you'll be glad you did!

Pumpkin Crunch Cake

Ingredients:

• 1 box yellow cake mix
• 1 can (15 oz) pumpkin puree
• 1 can (12 oz) evaporated milk
• 3 large eggs
• 1 1/2 cups sugar ( I used 1/2 c of splenda and 3/4 c of sugar because that's all of the sugar that I had)
• 1 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 15oz chopped pecans
• 1 cup butter, melted

Heat oven to 350 degrees F. 
Grease bottom of 9 x 13″ pan.
Mix pumpkin, milk, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, and salt. 
Pour mixture into greased pan. 
Sprinkle dry cake mix over pumpkin mixture and top with pecans.  
Drizzle melted butter over pecans. 
Bake 50-55 minutes.
Drool while your house fills with yummy smells.
Eat.

I envisioned this big post today about our Florida vacation.  Then I came across this article, and well, it took over...  Parenting in the now. Loving now, less emphasis on being the best. Very helpful reminder for me on such a normal day.

Article via

Notes From a Dragon Mom


Emily Rapp is the author of “Poster Child: A Memoir,” and a professor of creative writing at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Santa Fe, N.M.

MY son, Ronan, looks at me and raises one eyebrow. His eyes are bright and focused. Ronan means “little seal” in Irish and it suits him.

I want to stop here, before the dreadful hitch: my son is 18 months old and will likely die before his third birthday. Ronan was born with Tay-Sachs, a rare genetic disorder. He is slowly regressing into a vegetative state. He’ll become paralyzed, experience seizures, lose all of his senses before he dies. There is no treatment and no cure.

How do you parent without a net, without a future, knowing that you will lose your child, bit by torturous bit?

Depressing? Sure. But not without wisdom, not without a profound understanding of the human experience or without hard-won lessons, forged through grief and helplessness and deeply committed love about how to be not just a mother or a father but how to be human.

Parenting advice is, by its nature, future-directed. I know. I read all the parenting magazines. During my pregnancy, I devoured every parenting guide I could find. My husband and I thought about a lot of questions they raised: will breast-feeding enhance his brain function? Will music class improve his cognitive skills? Will the right preschool help him get into the right college? I made lists. I planned and plotted and hoped. Future, future, future.

We never thought about how we might parent a child for whom there is no future. The prenatal test I took for Tay-Sachs was negative; our genetic counselor didn’t think I needed the test, since I’m not Jewish and Tay-Sachs is thought to be a greater risk among Ashkenazi Jews. Being somewhat obsessive about such matters, I had it done anyway, twice. Both times the results were negative.
Our parenting plans, our lists, the advice I read before Ronan’s birth make little sense now. No matter what we do for Ronan — choose organic or non-organic food; cloth diapers or disposable; attachment parenting or sleep training — he will die. All the decisions that once mattered so much, don’t.
All parents want their children to prosper, to matter. We enroll our children in music class or take them to Mommy and Me swim class because we hope they will manifest some fabulous talent that will set them — and therefore us, the proud parents — apart. Traditional parenting naturally presumes a future where the child outlives the parent and ideally becomes successful, perhaps even achieves something spectacular. Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is only the latest handbook for parents hoping to guide their children along this path. It’s animated by the idea that good, careful investments in your children will pay off in the form of happy endings, rich futures.

But I have abandoned the future, and with it any visions of Ronan’s scoring a perfect SAT or sprinting across a stage with a Harvard diploma in his hand. We’re not waiting for Ronan to make us proud. We don’t expect future returns on our investment. We’ve chucked the graphs of developmental milestones and we avoid parenting magazines at the pediatrician’s office. Ronan has given us a terrible freedom from expectations, a magical world where there are no goals, no prizes to win, no outcomes to monitor, discuss, compare.

But the day-to-day is often peaceful, even blissful. This was my day with my son: cuddling, feedings, naps. He can watch television if he wants to; he can have pudding and cheesecake for every meal. We are a very permissive household. We do our best for our kid, feed him fresh food, brush his teeth, make sure he’s clean and warm and well rested and ... healthy? Well, no. The only task here is to love, and we tell him we love him, not caring that he doesn’t understand the words. We encourage him to do what he can, though unlike us he is without ego or ambition.
       
Ronan won’t prosper or succeed in the way we have come to understand this term in our culture; he will never walk or say “Mama,” and I will never be a tiger mom. The mothers and fathers of terminally ill children are something else entirely. Our goals are simple and terrible: to help our children live with minimal discomfort and maximum dignity. We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future, but see them into early graves. We will prepare to lose them and then, impossibly, to live on after that gutting loss. This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents: fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.

NOBODY asks dragon parents for advice; we’re too scary. Our grief is primal and unwieldy and embarrassing. The certainties that most parents face are irrelevant to us, and frankly, kind of silly. Our narratives are grisly, the stakes impossibly high. Conversations about which seizure medication is most effective or how to feed children who have trouble swallowing are tantamount to breathing fire at a dinner party or on the playground. Like Dr. Spock suddenly possessed by Al Gore, we offer inconvenient truths and foretell disaster.

And there’s this: parents who, particularly in this country, are expected to be superhuman, to raise children who outpace all their peers, don’t want to see what we see. The long truth about their children, about themselves: that none of it is forever.

I would walk through a tunnel of fire if it would save my son. I would take my chances on a stripped battlefield with a sling and a rock à la David and Goliath if it would make a difference. But it won’t. I can roar all I want about the unfairness of this ridiculous disease, but the facts remain. What I can do is protect my son from as much pain as possible, and then finally do the hardest thing of all, a thing most parents will thankfully never have to do: I will love him to the end of his life, and then I will let him go.

But today Ronan is alive and his breath smells like sweet rice. I can see my reflection in his greenish-gold eyes. I am a reflection of him and not the other way around, and this is, I believe, as it should be. This is a love story, and like all great love stories, it is a story of loss. Parenting, I’ve come to understand, is about loving my child today. Now. In fact, for any parent, anywhere, that’s all there is.

I never could have imagined how much we love we have for you.  When you are sick, our heart breaks. When you're a complete terror, our head aches and our heart breaks. When you are sad and crying, we want to cry as well.  But when you're happy and full of life, we relish in it. 

You may be three, but you'll always be our baby.  You're learning who you are.  We're watching you turn into a little tom-boy lady… watching you learn about the world… watching you learn to read. watching you figure out the thing called friends… watching you watching me… watching you grow.


I just pray that you grow to be amazing, loving, humble, and awestruck by God.


Grow little one.. just slow down a bit!


Happy Birthday, Cameryn!

We love you so, so much!

I did a lot of pinning last week.
Are you on Pinterest? Speak up! And if you want to follow my boards, I’m here.













I want this little guy!











I love this room.  I really, really love the contrast of the bright white with the black handrails. 

I have this refillable Dawn dish soap dispenser in my house.  Except mine is NOT this pretty.  Spray paint + monogram = awesome.



I'm sorry if the links don't work.  The pictures won't show up so I have to save the pic, then embed the source.  What size should I be making my pics when I embed them?

We're headed to Florida today, but we're not alone!

Meet Flat Stanley.

I wanted to make most of Cameryn's birthday decor since we are going with a rainbow theme and it seemed pretty easy to make colorful party stuff.  (although she's really pushed for princess everything!)  The party is tomorrow and I can proudly say that my balloon wreath is complete.

To make the wreath, you'll need:

• A medium sized Styrofoam wreath (I picked up mine from Michael's)
• Balloons- I used about 200 total, both large and medium sizes
• Floral pins (I got mine at Wal-mart, $1 for 100!  I used almost 2 packs.)
• Curling Ribbon- I cheated here.... I bought the premade ribbons that you would just stick on a package and cut it into two pieces.

From start to finish it took me about an hour.







I was worried that the balloons wouldn't cover the ugly green styrofoam and I started thinking that maybe I should have wrapped the wreath in (fabric) ribbon first.  When complete, I couldn't even see the styrofoam!  I guess you could if you wanted a more complete look from behind, but since no one will see the back of the wreath, I am not concerned.