My Grandma's Orange Cookies

I love my Grandma. She was a wonderful baker and always made Christmas special. In a fit of nostalgia my sister had my mother send her Grandma's recipe for Orange Cookies. No Christmas was complete for us as kids with out getting to have some of these wonderful treats.

Grandma Fern’s Orange Cookies

2 cups- white sugar
1 cup- butter, lard or Crisco
1 cup- buttermilk/sour milk
2 eggs
juice of orange (1/4 cup)
1 tsp. Baking soda
1 tsp. Baking powder
4 cups of flour (enough to make a soft dough)

Put soda in buttermilk/sour milk, put baking powder in the flour

Icing
2 lbs powdered sugar, 1 stick butter melted and cooled, orange juice to make consistency to spread (juice of about 2 oranges), grated orange rind of 2 or 3 oranges

Note- to make sour milk 1 Tbsp vinegar in 1 cup of sweet milk

Bake 375 degrees for 9-10 minutes
Makes 4 dozen

I love the lack of directions. Everyone baked all the time back then. So you just knew how to make cookies. For those wanting a little more direction - Cream sugar and butter, Add egg and beat, Combined milk, oj and soda in a small bowl, Combined flour and baking powder in another small bowl, Alternately add liquid and dry ingredients to sugar, butter and eggs till soft dough forms. Chill dough for about 1 hour. Roll out on a lightly floured surface to about 1/2 inch thick. These are more of a soft cakey cookie. Cut out circles with a floured biscuit cutter or glass (about 2 1/2 inches each). Bake. Cool. Ice. And eat. Merry Christmas.

And the Award for Best Photographer Goes To...

I realized that I didn't give credit to our wonderful photographer.

Christina Cole Photography!

Christy is the best! She was sooo patient working with our crazy kidlets and my ideas for photos.

This running shot is exactly like I had hoped it would be. Don't you love the energy!

Strike a Pose

Two notes at the outset.

1- Yes it's been forever since I've posted. It appears that for me Homeschooling and posting don't mix. I'll try to work on this.

2- Photo heavy post alert. For our Christmas present to the Grandparents we had our family picture taken. It had been about four years since our last family photo, and seeing as Little Miss is two (the same age Princess was in our last family photo) it was about time.

How cute are these kids? I love this photo!

Yep, that's my boys for you. Stick = sword.

I wanted to get a photo of them "sword fighting"

because this is what they are always doing.

How sweet are these two?

Ya just gotta love her smile!

I really love this pose. Check out the two bookends. Silly geese!

Together Forever!

Happy Birthday Mom!

Hi Mom! See I'm posting, for your birthday!

Just thought that I would let you know that I love you.

Thanks for always being there for me and loving me.

You're the best!

Lions and Tiger and Bears, Oh My!

One of the things that we have always liked about the part of Ohio that we were from is all the great places to go hiking. Just with in a few minutes of each other are John Bryan, Glen Helen, and Clifton Gorge. Since the Little Red Hen had her In-Laws with her, and Grandma VO could use some piece (I mean peace) and quiet we decided to go for a hike. The little girls fell asleep on the way there so we mommies hung out at the cars while the girls napped. Uncle Dan, Grandpa and Grandma G took the troops for the hike.

Ya gotta love all the fun of climbing and getting to explore caves. The Master, my nephews nickname, even got to find a "wild bear" (Uncle Dan).

Park it!

We took all the cousins to the park to play. It was chaos in motion, but lots of fun!

"Whee!"

Slides are fun!

Stuntwoman on the run!

"Take my picture!" Uncle Dan does his impersonation of the kids.

"Spider Boys"

King of the "hill."

"We should play at this park more often."

Group photo!

How do you play?

There was lots of fun to be had when we had our visit with the cousins at Grandma's house. Stuntwoman and Little Miss loved playing together. (Do ya think they might have learned about talking on the phone from their mommies?)

The boys did what boys love to do. Yep, you guessed it, they were TV zombies.

And of course the mommies had to have fun too. We raided Grandma's fabric stash! We also sorted through the button boxes. Check out the Little Red Hen's blog to see the cool bracelet she made with some of her buttons.

Happy 4th and Happy Blogiversary

Wow! Has it been a whole year since we moved to Nashville? Guess so!

This year for the 4th of July we were in Ohio visiting Grandma and our "Canadian" cousins.

We got to go to the parade in the town I grew up in on the 4th. It has always been one of my most favorite things about coming from a smallish town. The parade is a true slice of Americana; marching bands, civic groups, business people, politicians, churches, and lots of fun!

Cowboy had the best quote about all the candy he and his siblings collected, "It's like trick or treating, except the houses are coming to you!"

Hope y'all had a great 4th!

Uhmm, yah, I'm still blogging

Well of course things have been crazy busy around here as usual. So I guess I'm a little behind in posting anything. And of course for a little bit it's not going to get any better.

Our friends will be moving out of their house this weekend. As of Monday we will be renting their house. We are happy that they will be able to be closer to work for the dad and that they will get to spend more time together as a family, but will be sad that they are about 2 hours away from us.

We are only going to be using the laptop for Internet once we move, because we won't have access to DSL and would have to use Cable which is way too expensive. So I'll have to figure out how to post photos. (Sounds like a job for NASA Guy!)

Anyway, just wanted to say we are still alive, just busy!

It Must Be Spring!

How do I know that it is Spring? Because there are caterpillars sitting on my kitchen counter. Well they were all caterpillars yesterday. Today they are all hanging from the top of the cup and forming chrysalids, so I guess they are pupating. I took a few pictures of Little Miss and the caterpillars yesterday.

Little Miss wanted a closer look and these strange crawly things.

I love her expressions.

Can't wait until we have butterflies! If you want some of your own visit Insect Lore.

Gameboy's Game Day

Opps! I found this sitting in my drafts. This was Gameboy's 11th birthday party, so I'm only a little late posting it.

This may seem original... but for Gameboy's Birthday the theme was games! Yep we are really creative like that around here.



One of his favorite games to play is Heroscape. We got it for Father's Day last year. The neat thing about this game is that you can set up the playing field however you want. Then afterwards it is similar to Dungeon's and Dragons. The neat thing about it is that it is quick to learn and easy to play.

Look it's games on the computer!

And games on the TV.

And a game controllers cake. (Should have used fondant.)

Happy Birthday Gameboy!

A Boy and a Bridge

He's no longer a Cub Scout.

Gameboy earned his Webelos rank and the Arrow of Light.

NASA Guy made him this super cool skin to keep all of his scout awards on.

Unfortunately I didn't get a good picture of the bridge that NASA Guy made for the boys to cross. You can kinda see it a the bottom of this picture. It was pretty cool though.

Here the 11 year-old Scout leader and NASA Guy are making the joining knot. This rope was the hand rail for the bridge as the boys moved from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts.

And here they are on the other side, so my oldest is now a Boy Scout. I better not blink 'cause next thing I know he's going to be earning his Eagle.

Tagged - 4th Folder, 4th picture

I was tagged a while back by my sister to go to my pictures and post the fourth picture in my fourth folder. Here's what I found.


Last year the twins, Space Man and Cowboy, got a praying mantis egg case as a birthday present. It was really cool watching all those little buggies hatch out. It was amazing to see how tiny the are when they are just newly hatched. Here's a picture of them right after they had hatched. The brown blob in the bottom of the container is the egg case. One case can hold around 200 baby praying mantises.

We really didn't have anything to feed them, so after a day or so we let them loose in our backyard. And wondered if we would ever see any of them after they had grown up. (Space Man and Cowboy moonlight as entomologists in their spare time.)

So my fourth/fourth is of one of those little itty-bitty mantises all grown up. NASA Guy found him/her crawling on the wall of our carport. Pretty cool huh? If you'd like to try hatching your own praying mantises check out our favorite bug place - Insect Lore.

The Dancing Princess

Princess has started taking ballet lessons.

It was love at first sight.

Here are a few pictures of what she has learned so far.

Little Miss had to try on her sister's ballet slippers.