Apples and blackberries!

We recently had a wonderful Saturday afternoon picking apples and blackberries. I look forward to this every year! This year L was old enough to enjoy it too.

When we got home I made us all apple juice using the juicer. I LOVE our juicer it gives me instant energy in the morning when I make fruit and veggie juices

I also made 3 apple pies, applesause, and apple doughnuts. We  just ate the blackberries by itself and I also used it to flavor our water kefir (healthy soda)

Birthday part 3 (cake and dinner)

On our summer vacation L fell in love with fish and chips. So that is what she had for her birthday dinner. We try to make most of our meals from scratch, but this one ended up being frozen premade stuff.  Thankfully I found organic fries and ketchup!

Her birthday cake came from the Festivels Family and Food book. We used the apple cake recipe and I just made up a maple cream frosting..  It took some thinking to figure out the apple cake recipe because I needed to double it, and it was written in the metric system so the flour  sugar, and butter were by weight. Luckily I had a mail scale.  Im not sure if I did it the right way...  but the cake turned out very rich and yummy, but from what I
remember it came out to 1 1/2 cups of sugar! and 1 1/2 sticks of butter!

Birthday part two (the birthday ring)

This was our first year using the birthday ring. I decided to have L pick out a new ornament every year to place on the ring. Some people buy them all at once and just move the ornaments to the center as the ring gets filled up with candles. The ring and ornaments came from Nova Naturals . I went ahead and picked a baby carrige to represent L's first year. L had no trouble deciding what she wanted for her second year She said very quickly, "oh mommmy I want the star" (it's really a sun) I think they even sell a actual star but this is the one she pointed to.

We lit the first candle and told her that when she was one years old she liked

• airplane
• sun, moon, and stars
• all animals
• her da and neigh
• hummus, mangos, apples, and peanut butter
• nature walks
• beach
•  jumping (pretending to be a bunny)
• making food for mommy and daddy in her pretend kitchen

we talked about what she disliked

• oatmeal
• spiders
• having her hair brushed
• naptime

Then we let the second candle and told her now she is two! and she got to blow them out