Where to start.... why with Leslie of course!

This December marks the fourth year (or maybe 3, but I think 4) that my sister has made her annual visit down here in December after she has been finished with finals. She was here for 9 days... well sort of she left over a weekend to fly to Cleveland to visit a friend for 2 days. I had a blast. The night she came in Mike took me to go see White Christmas at the Fox Theater, it was so good but different from my most favorite beloved Christmas movie! And too bad we never really got good pictures from it we looked so HOT. Oh and you may notice I got my hair colored..I'm now auburn and LOVE IT ( please no reference to the school, I'd never fly that way).
So Leslie and Isabel to got play with a 'Barrel of Monkeys', I hope everyone had that toy growing up, it's awesome. For the rest of the trip we baked and baked and baked. Most of you don't know but my sister in an awesome baker. She had brought be over to the good side of taking the few extra minutes and extra dishes to create totally from scratch GOOD chocolate cake, cookies, etc. I have a friend in town who does it this way and I've always enjoyed her cooking when she invites us over and I saw her at church and gushed to her how much I love food this way. So our first day of baking was chocolate cupcakes, 2 batches, on with chili powder to give it an extra kick, chocolate, chocolate chunk and cranberry cookies. We even ended her trip by making the cakes for Boston Creme Pie, Vanilla Bean cake (not many store actually sell Vanilla beans...) and ginger bread cookies. There was supposed to be a lemon coconut cake in there but, well I had a cheap spring form pan that when filled didn't quite make it to the oven and it it's falling took out the molasses on my counter,,,, both were all over the kitchen floor.

As usual we spend so much time driving everywhere we didn't get out to do a whole lot more, I've decided I want to leave suburbia and move to the city. Mike has been waiting for this for 5 years and is stoked. We would just have to figure out when to move... might be years. But I see the light.

So Leslie also helped me build this awesome doll house for Isabel.



We decided that we didn't want a pitched roof on it so Leslie said it could be a condo with a roof top garden. I took that one step further and decided we need to really make it a garden/lawn and we purchased putting green grass to place on top of it all. The new horse lives there now! We got it all together without any real hassles and then 'wallpapered' it with excess scrapbook paper. We are very proud of it and Isabel LOVES it. So THANK YOU LESLIE! I also need to bet some pictures (please Les) of the gift I made for Leslie, it turned out really great and I'm very proud of it. I had a few set backs so it didn't get to be the surprise I had hoped for, she ended up helping me with the fabric and idea for the shape but nonetheless, I love it! It was my favorite gift I gave this year.

So here are a couple of pics from when Leslie came to town. Leslie I picked only the good ones!