Hudson found this in the neighbor's yard the other day. Luckily Jamie was with him and not me cause I would have freaked out! Jamie said he said "look, a snake" and just leaned right over and picked it up. Jamie was worried till he realized it didn't have a head anymore! Then he just let him play with it.
Hudson had a great time at his birthday party. He doesn’t quite understand the fact that he isn’t going to have another one for another year. He keeps talking about “those people sang Happy Birthday to me” and asking when he can blow out his candles again.
Here’s some pics/video from the big day:
Unfortunately it was cold and rainy out on Saturday so only a few people braved it outside, so the house was packed!
Hudson loved the pinata. What he didn’t love was when his cousin Nate broke the pinata. He was pretty upset. I’m still not sure if it was the noise when he was hitting it or just the fact that his pinata was breaking, but he cried for a little bit. Till he realized he was missing out on all the goodies!
The awesome cake and cupcakes my sisters made for him. I had to light the candles 3 times because he kept blowing them out as soon as I lit them!
And my favorite gift – this painting that my sister Christin did for her art class. It’s already hanging on the wall in the room and will go perfect in his room when I redo it was a sports theme for his BIG boy room! She did an awesome job! Hudson likes it too, if you can’t tell by that grin!
Thanks to everyone who came and celebrated our little man with us. It was great to see everyone and Hudson got way too many toys to play with. he has a hard time choosing between, baseball, basketball and golf these days!
Here’s the recipe for the chicken salad I served at Hudson’s party the other night – for all those who asked..
from The Sisters Cafe – my favorite new food blog. Lots of yummy recipes here!
Chicken Poppy Seed Salad
Salad:
Spinach leaves
Romaine leaves
Grilled chicken, sliced (Best if marinated in Lemon Grilled Chicken Marinade*, but if you don't have time then grill with lots of lemon pepper seasoning)
Red onion, sliced thinly
Crispy bacon, crumbled
Shredded mozzarella cheese
Toasted almonds
*Lemon Grilled Chicken:
Juice of one lemon (~3 Tb lemon juice)
3 Tb oil
1 tsp minced garlic (~2 large cloves)
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp oregano
1 lb chicken breasts
Marinate the chicken overnight. For salad, dice the raw chicken and marinate it that way so there is more surface area to marinate. You can get away with marinating for a shorter amount of time this way. Grilling is best, but cooking in a skillet is great, too.
The best part... The Dressing**:
1 1/3 cup sugar
2 tsp salt
2 tsp dry mustard
2/3 cup red wine vinegar
3 Tb Maui or Vidalia onion, chopped
2 cups canola oil
3 Tb poppy seeds
Mix the first 5 ingredients in a blender, then slowly add the oil, blending until thick. Stir in poppy seeds. Toss all ingredients together with generous amount of dressing before serving.
This makes A LOT of dressing so be careful and use sparingly. I probably only used 1/4 of this for the salad I served Saturday night. But I like to keep some in the fridge and just sprinkle on for a quick salad at lunch…
I CANNOT believe my baby is 2 years old! That is absolutely crazy. Despite the tornado that blew through town on Monday, Hudson had a great birthday. Pancakes with candles in them for breakfast, story time in the morning, playing with his cousins and Binga all afternoon and his favorite, macaroni and cheese, for dinner! He woke up Wednesday and asked me if he could blow out candles in his pancakes again!
His basketball birthday party is Saturday and he’s pretty excited about it. Most specifically that he gets to blow out candles again and the basketball pinata that we bought. It doesn’t dribble though – he quickly found that out! But he knows candy goes inside and he gets to hit it with a bat to make it come out so he’s excited.
We are sad to announce our baby birds did not survive the heat in our barbeque grill. They went to birdie heaven sometime Friday or Saturday. Services have already been held (i.e. – Jamie dumped them in the trash and we are hoping Hudson forgets about them!). So far so good but we haven’t been out back in a few days cause of all the rain. I am sure he will remember when he sees the grill next.
Saturday we took Hudson out to El Dorado lake and went fishing. We borrowed a row boat and fishing pole from my brother-in-law and spent a few hours out on the lake. It was beautiful out and Hudson had a wonderful time. He loved the “fishing”. He has wanted to go fishing every day since.
We threw a whole bunch of rocks in the boat before we left shore so Hudson could throw them in the water. That was the cause of our one and only injury of the day - the rock in the face that I took. Split my lip open and it bled for a little bit. Hudson has watched Jamie skipping rocks and now he is starting to throw them sideways instead of overhand. That time he let go of it way too late and it flew 3 feet and hit me in the face. I was rowing the boat at the time and didn’t even see it coming!
I still can’t believe that we took this pile of lumber and with our own hands (okay, mostly Jamie’s hands!) built a new bed! I am so excited to build more – I have a whole list of projects from Knock Off Wood.
Here’s a picture timeline of our progress. It took us about 2 weeks all together – including painting and finishing – to build it.
Hudson would cover his ears each time Jamie started the saw! 
This similar bed at Pottery Barn costs $2195.00!
We built our bed for about $150 of lumber and a $5 gallon of OOPS paint I lucked out on at Home Depot!
I am still not 100% completely done with the bedroom makeover but parts of it are at least finished enough to finally show off. It takes me a ridiculously long time to use a sewing machine – hence the 3 week delay! But I did get the stuff done I was working on – so here goes:
I will make a separate post about our new bed so you can see all the pics I took as we were building.
The pillows I made. I just recovered the old pillows we already had. If you don’t look too closely at my sewing they look beautiful!
Our new nightstands.
Would you believe that I bought these off of Craig’s List for $10 -
and turned them into this? I love it!
And some old lamps had got a coat of spray paint and glaze and the shade got some new fabric and this:
now looks like this:
And my curtains. Definitely adventurous for a novice sewer such as myself. Seriously, my experience/training on the sewing machine was my mom taking 2 minutes to show me how to thread the needle and fill the bobbin. That’s why my sewing takes SOOO long! They are definitely not perfect, but I hung them up anyways!
But it makes me laugh every time he does it! Hopefully he figures it out before he’s old enough for t-ball or everyone will be laughing at him when the coach tells him to “choke up”.
Every summer the birds try to build a nest in our barbeque grill by going in through a little hole in the side of it. We usually catch them in time and throw all the stuff out so they’ll go somewhere else but we missed it this year…so now we have this! Aren’t they cute? There were 4 eggs on Saturday when we found them and then Sunday 3 of them had already hatched. I’m guessing the other one probably won’t hatch but maybe it still will.
So far we haven’t scared the mom off looking at them but we try to not look very often or keep the cover open very long. Jamie’s afraid they are going to get too hot in there and croak – hopefully not! Plus Zeus has discovered them so they are going to have to be careful when they start learning to fly! We aren’t sure how long it’s going to take for them to leave the nest but we aren’t going to be using our bbq grill for awhile!
Hudson loves to tell people that we have “baby birds in our bbq sauce!” He doesn’t know the word grill so he calls it the only thing he knows…bbq sauce!
Last week we went out to the driving range and hit a bucket of balls (well, Jamie did). Hudson practiced on his swing and I took a book and read! Golf is definitely one of the harder sports – it’s going to take a lot of practice for Hudson (and Daddy) to get good at it! But Hudson keeps his tongue sticking way out there so you know he’s working hard!
Time for a little water break…
Garret (now preferrably (to him) known as Clint Mckeever –WSU’s 1st baseman) is playing BLAST ball this summer. It’s the 4 year old version of t-ball. There are 6 players per team, every player bats once and plays the field every inning. There is only a 1st base. The players hit the ball, run to first base, then run back to the dugout. The only fielding they do is stopping the ball and then picking it up and yelling “BLAST”. They don’t try to throw it to first base to throw the runner out – and if the runner jumps on first base hard enough the base even makes a noise!
We went to Garret’s game the other night – it was SUPER windy out so you’ll have to excuse the poor video! Hudson had a lot of fun watching them play – he’s been into baseball quite a lot lately. And I might dare say that Garret might be more into baseball right now than firefighters!
Garret picked out his socks himself – these are his Christmas socks, they match his hat, obviously.
