Happy St. Patrick's Day! (With a recipe!)

Happy St. Paddy's Day! Ellie says hi. Ignore the red runny nose - I'm more and more sure as the day goes on that it's just due to all four of the top front teeth coming in at once.

We're both sporting our green today.

Anyways, just wanted to boast a little about a successful experiment we enjoyed in the kitchen today. It's Mint Chocolate Chip Muddy Buddies - or Puppy Chow if you know it by that name. (I have to give credit where credit is due - there is a whole separate section dedicated to some great puppy chow recipes on a blog called "Your Cup of Cake," and I used a combination of 3 of them for ideas. First, I got the inspiration for something green from this one, then for the dark chocolate half of this recipe I adapted parts of this one and this one.)

I'm not a photographer, but contrary to appearances it turned out very yummy!

Mint Chocolate Chip Muddy Buddies (by Kami Nelson)

Mint White Chocolate Chow Mix:

5 cups rice Chex cereal

1 cup green mint baking chips

½ cup white chocolate chips

¾ - 1 cup powdered sugar

Place cereal in a large bowl and set aside

Melt mint chips and white chocolate chips together, stir until smooth

Pour over cereal and stir until coated

Add powdered sugar and stir

Dump onto a cookie sheet and let cool

Chocolate Chow Mix:

4 cups rice Chex

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

2 Tbls. butter

¾ - 1 cup powdered sugar

1 tsp. unsweetened cocoa powder (optional)

Place cereal in a large bowl and set aside

Melt chocolate chips & butter together, stir until smooth

Pour over cereal and stir until coated

Mix powdered sugar and cocoa

Add powdered sugar mix to the cereal mix and stir

Dump onto a cookie sheet and let cool

Plus: 1 to 1 ½ cups chocolate chips (opt.)

Mix the mint-white chocolate cereal mix, the dark chocolate cereal mix, and the chocolate chips. Enjoy! Tell us if any of you find any leprechauns or pots of gold. With the clouds and wind outside I'm kind of hoping for at least a rainbow soon. :-)

Christmas in Chile, Part 1

(or February Catch-up, #3)

Here are a few pictures from Christmas to start with. The majority of the info and pictures will come later. :-)

Here is Ellie with Kent's Great-Aunt, Tia Carmen. She died of cancer a few weeks after we got back home. I am so grateful we got to meet this sweet lady, and that we have pictures of Ellie with her!

 

Ellie in the Meantime

(February Catch-up #2 - Stuff Besides Thanksgiving & Christmas)

It amazes me how quickly - and how eagerly - Ellie learns new things about this new world around her. And it amazes me how excited she is when she learns something. And it amazes me how eager she is to love everything and everyone around her.

As of early December, she had learned to scoot backwards, push up to sitting, turn in circles, and pull up to standing on her own, and then finally crawl forward, roughly in that order. She's a little busy bee who loves cruising around the room by holding onto furniture or by crawling (I swear she crawls as fast as I can walk now!). She loves clapping her hands whenever someone says "yay!" or claps their hands, and she loves putting her blanket or dress or fireman's hat over her head and then waiting for someone to say "peekabo!" when she pulls it down again. She also loves shaking her head at me when she's frustrated (I can't imagine where she got a stubborn streak from...).

This is a lazy post - the rest of it is made up of some pictures of Ellie from over the last couple of months. 

October:

November: 

December:

January:

February: 

The End. Next post(s) will be about Christmas.

Halloween/ Thanksgiving Week

(February Blog Catchup # 1)

I’m playing blog catchup. So here is Halloween and Thanksgiving Week (as in Halloween and Thanksgiving 2013. Yes, 3 months ago.) 

Then my goal is to post one entry on the blog each day over the next couple of days til we’re a little more caught-up. And yes, those posts will finally include at least some of the pictures from Christmas in Chile. 

But to start with, Halloween was fun; I got to dress up my own kid for the first time! This is a landmark, people! Ellie made a pretty cute ladybug, if I do say so myself. 

I think I should explain before these next pictures that Kent was a federal prison inmate for Halloween.

I also should briefly mention my birthday in November. Mostly because I have this cute picture of Ellie with my present from Kent. Girl after Mommy’s heart. :-)

 

And now for Thanksgiving. My second-favorite holiday, and it starts off the season for my first-favorite holiday. This year, we were lucky enough to be able to spend Thanksgiving with both sides of our family. Kent’s sister Serena gave birth (Thanksgiving Day!) to a beautiful baby boy, Hardison, our fourth nephew. We got the news while we were eating with my family. We had Kent’s parents and his sister Sarah’s family in town to meet the baby and attend his baby blessing. So after enjoying a great Thanksgiving meal with my family, we got Thanksgiving leftovers and pie with Kent’s family. We also got to see Serena and the baby in the hospital. It was a good day! Okay, it was a good week or so – some of these pictures are right before or after Thanksgiving (as you can see from the pictures of the still-very-pregnant-bowling Serena just a couple of days before).

 Thanksgiving:

 

After Thanksgiving, we went to the Children’s Museum and Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City. And, Andrew and Serena blessed their baby boy when he was 1 ½ weeks old. 

And for our anniversary (the day after Thanksgiving) – five years! – Kent got me chocolate, a balloon, and my two favorite flowers: roses and Peruvian lilies (alstroemeria).  I kindof forgot our anniversary until the middle of the day. It’s a good thing Kent did too. :-)

 

It was also a very good day. I’ve loved spending the last five years married to my sweetheart and best friend!

October Update

Welcome Fall! We're loving the new cool weather. And we're loving our quickly-growing baby girl, Ellie. She shows more and more personality - she may not be able to speak words yet but her varying squeals are a clear form of communication nonetheless. She's sitting up on her own and is loving sweet potatoes for dinner, and this Friday she'll get her 6-month shots.

Just today, I placed her near the kitchen with two toy keys on a toy keyring while I ate lunch, and the next time I turned around this is what I found:

... I already knew that she was able to get the keys off of her keyring, but don't ask me how she ended up with one of them down her shirt. :-) I'm looking forward to dressing her in her little ladybug costume for Halloween - the next post should include a picture. 

The beginning of school this year was kind of a big deal for us, as it is the "beginning of the end" ("dun dun DUN!" - sorry, I had to throw in a reference here to The Croods. :-) Good movie, not crude at all like I had feared.) Kent is VERY busy with school - all technical classes this semester, plus his L3 exam (engineering exam required for graduation), plus job-hunting. We're done next April!

I am enjoying the fact that Ellie finally (!) sleeps through the night, though even with the extra time and sleep I still have too many project ideas and too little time to do them - right now #1 on the list is Christmas stockings, now that we have three members of the family. (Store-bought were fine while it was just Kent and I, but I have really looked forward to doing unique homemade ones when our family started growing!)

This last couple of months have included me throwing a baby shower for my sister-in-law, getting my first passport in preparation for this Christmas break, getting car repairs, needing more car repairs, and lots of spending time with family. They also included Ellie's first solid food, finding her in some interesting positions in her crib, lots of gorgeous little baby-girl smiles and her first real giggles, beautiful Autumn leaves, and a baby who is half-a-year old (where did that 6 months go?).

There were lots of moments of joy, but this last month did also bring great sadness. Prayers for my sister Heather and her husband Greg would be very appreciated. After they have struggled over the last couple of years to conceive, I announced last month on facebook that we were happy to be getting a new niece or nephew next March. Instead we got two little nephews a couple of weeks ago, too early for them to survive the birth. They were named Austin Scott and Daniel Keith, and my sister says they were absolutely perfect and beautiful. They were buried here in Provo. Her own version of their story is filled with incredible faith and hope - 

http://hgzoll.blogspot.com/2013/10/faith-in-zollinger-household-part-2.html

I am so grateful for the gospel of Jesus Christ in my life and in my family members' lives. I know that the priesthood of God can seal families together not just for this life but for the life that follows this one, through ordinances that take place in temples, some of the holiest places on Earth. I am grateful for my little sister's faith through all of this; she has been such a good example to me because of her strength. My moments of anger melted away the first time I saw her and Greg after they lost their babies - the Holy Spirit was with them and everyone in their presence because of their faith. Hard times will pass eventually, because of the suffering and victory of Jesus Christ through His Atonement and Resurrection, and through our limited faith and His unlimited grace we can be healed of every sorrow and infirmity - I have seen the beginnings of such healing in this instance in my own family. It is a miracle. It should not be possible for such deep hurt to go away, except through our loving Savior. All the same, that doesn't mean something that goes so deep will be a quick fix, and all the prayers and love they can get, whether you know them or not, will help a lot.

Love to you all. --Kami

Happy Patriot's Day - "Remember"

From The American Patriot's Daily Almanac by Bill Bennett:

“On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists, mostly from Saudi Arabia, hijacked four commercial jetliners and turned them into flying bombs. Two of the hijacked planes slammed into the 110-story twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Americans watched their TV screens in horror as the two skyscrapers, among the tallest in the world, collapsed. Another plane hit the Pentagon, and the fourth jet crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks, including more than 400 firefighters, police officers, and emergency medical services workers who had rushed to the World Trade Center to help survivors before the buildings fell.

Among the day’s heroes were passengers on board United Flight 93, which had left Newark International Airport for San Francisco but changed course toward Washington, D.C., after four terrorists seized control. Passengers who began making frantic calls on their cell phones learned that other airliners had been hijacked and crashed in suicide missions. Realizing their captors must be headed toward a high-profile target, a group of Flight 93 passengers resolved to stop them.

Passenger Todd Beamer told an operator that he and a few others were going to jump the hijackers. 'Are you guys ready?' the operator heard him say to someone. 'Let’s roll!'

Moments later, Flight 93 went down in rural southwestern Pennsylvania. All aboard were killed. The hijackers’ target was probably the U.S. Capitol building or the White House.

Congress and the president have designated September 11 as Patriot Day. The flag should be flown at half-staff, and Americans are asked to observe a moment of silence to honor the innocent victims who perished during the worst acts of terrorism ever carried out against the United States."

D&C 3:3: 

"Remember, remember that it is not the work of God that is frustrated, but the work of men..."