Like all years, I made Chris’ his traditional (and FAVORITE) chocolate chip cookie cake. This year it had 39 candles in it and he blew them all out in one breath!
Happy Birthday Chris! We love you very much!!! Hope you have a super fantastic year!
This year’s youth group Valentine’s Banquet was bigger and better than ever before thanks to Andy Bernard’s fantastic catering skills and a terrific youth group! We had 54 people RSVP and raised a lot of money for the Acquire the Fire and Great Escape trips this spring and summer. Thanks to everyone for all their hard work and to those who supported our youth group! (I also want to thank those of you who posted pictures that I could “steal” from FB, since I didn’t take very many)
Although it was a bit harried at times (thanks to the fact that the ovens tripped about every 2 minutes or less when we had the stove working, we could never make coffee fast enough, and getting about 50 meals out all at once) and Chris and I (mostly Chris) did dishes for about 4.5 hours, we had a BLAST!!!
orange chicken
roast pork
Renee also did a good job with the entertainment
everyone enjoyed the “Valentine’s Game” (a version of the Newlywed Game)
Chris and I are still doing dishes…
the chocolate-strawberry cake was beautiful and delicious
thanking everyone for coming
our AWESOME cooks: Andy & Shawna!!!
Will and Tia are enjoying the bucket ‘o cake that Andy made for the youth from the scraps
but bucket cake and all that hard work makes ya thirsty :o)
William had a bit of trouble deciding on what to do for his birthday but finally settled on going to Wong's King for lunch on Monday.
We took the whole day off and spent the morning going to Powell’s City of Books and Apple Music to use Christmas gift cards. They are both really fun places to go and see all kinds of things you would like to have! Chris bought a few books, I bought a book on preserving foods and chickens and Andy bought a cymbal for his drum set.
Then we headed to lunch. They sat us at a large round table with a lazy susan in the middle. Perfect for dim sum! As soon as you sit down, they carts start coming! They tell you your choices so quickly as they flash you a quick peek at what’s under the lid that you often have no idea what it is you just caught a glimpse of. So we went with the safe bet and only took items that I had last time, recognized, or had a pretty good idea of what was said. We did pretty good! We passed on the chicken feet more than once, despite the fact that Will was kind of curious about trying them and they didn’t look that bad. Most of us liked everything we got. Our favorites were the sugar cane shrimp and the sticky rice wrapped in leaves. My favorite was the red bean dumpling dessert! Yummy! And we got better with the chopsticks by the end of the meal (no silverware at all)!
As we were leaving, we took a peek at a menu and discovered that they had a menu for dim sum. After perusing the dishes, we were relieved that we didn’t accidentally order the pig intestine (it actually didn’t look that horrible in the picture) or the preserved egg & pork soup (so that’s what she kept trying to tell us…). Next time, we’ll definitely take a menu. Not as adventurous, but a whole lot safer… :o)
Great choice Will! We had a great time!!!
