Manburger's Birthday

Manburger is one year older (and more handsome too)!  We had a lovely dinner of spaghetti alla carbonara, not with bacon but with the real stuff, pancetta, and a nice green salad.  The cake I made this year was the best yet, for many reasons.  One is that it stuck to Manburger and my no refined sugars rule.  After making it through Lent without eating sugar, we've decided to stick with it and this cake was sweetened exclusively with whole dates and bananas.  The cake was this awesome banana bread recipe, doubled and baked in cake pans.  The filling was dark chocolate brownie batter dip, which crazily enough is primarily chickpeas.  I add a banana and double the cocoa in the recipe.  Then it was frosted with a chocolate peanut butter ganache; two 90% Lindt bars, 1/4 c. peanut butter, 2 Tbs raw honey (this and the tiny but of sugar in the Lindt bars were the only "refined" sweeteners) and 1/2 c. cream.  Seriously amazing and very filling, which is a good thing.  Manburger got a sweet Avengers t-shirt too, just so he has the appropriate gear for when we go see the Avengers movie opening weekend.  And yes, I did drop the ball a little, because as we were sitting down to dinner, I realized that I didn't have any birthday candles, ack!  I ended up using one of our house candles instead.  Not as cool, but it worked in a pinch!

Dogwood Festival

We recently went to the Dogwood Festival. It is a little fair they have every year and it was very fun!

 We ate barbecue that was quite good. The coleslaw tasted like it had horseradish in it to me, but it was still okay. 

 Sabrina loved riding in this car. She was smiling and turning the steering wheel the whole time.

She also enjoyed the carousel, but not as much as her mommy did, I think.

Easter and Egg Hunts

 We hope everybody had a happy Easter! Ours was wonderful, though we forgot to get any family pictures before church with us all in Easter clothes. Oops. We do have tons of egg hunt pictures, though, since Sabrina had one on Friday (with Virginia Law Families), Saturday (with the ward), and Sunday (at home). Her Sunday eggs were filled mostly with non-candy surprises. The ones which had candy were actually filled with candy from her previous egg hunts. Someday maybe she'll read this and demand repayment for our vile trickery, but that won't be for a while.

 This is Sabrina with two of her friends who live down the street from us.

 A little chocolate on the cheek from hasty candy scarfing.

 Clark didn't get to hunt for eggs but he always has so much fun watching his sister.

Lessons from Little Red Riding Hood

This morning before the first session of conference, we took the kids out to a beautiful lake up the road and took a nice forest walk.  Since Sabrina loves Little Red Riding Hood, we used it to help her remember lessons in the forest...don't leave the path and don't talk to strangers.  It was beautiful to be out there in the woods and enjoy the quiet and see the lovely plants.  These ferns were so cool!  Do you like our "creative" family photo?  I was doing my best to get us all in there.  Clark is asleep in the carrier on my chest.

Our little heartbreaker and one big sweetheart

We have the cutest kids!  I think everyone says that about their own, but seriously, they are so darn cute!