Day 5 - Mom's Birthday!

Isn't she beautiful?

My Auntie Deb sent this balloon for me along with some flowers for my Mom.  Sweet!

The day started out with cooking and baking.

I was responsible for the gluten-free lasagna and the (also gluten-free) pumpkin bars.

I'm glad I remembered to copy and take along the recipes from my favorite cookbook!

I use the spaghetti sauce recipe to make the sauce for the lasagna because the lasagna recipe doesn't make enough sauce and I like my lasagna SAUCY!  (Gluten-free noodles soak up more sauce, probably.)

The organic tomatoes were MUCH better than non-organic.  Very tangy and fragrant and more like real fresh tomatoes.  Yum.

My Mom found gluten-free lasagna noodles at Target (hooray for Target yet AGAIN!)

and even though the box said they didn't need pre-cooking, I didn't trust it.  I have tried not cooking noodles first, and the noodles didn't seem soft enough.  So we cooked them enough that they were flexible, but not so much that they were mushy.  Then we laid them out on tin foil.

The finished product - it was delicious!

And I made lovely tasty pumpkin bars, too!

With cream cheese frosting (and M&M decorations!)

When the cooking was done, we drove over to my brother's (Mark) and his wife's (Jillian).

Cora was glad to see Grandma and Grandpa!

She calls them "Namma" and "Gampa".

Grandma and Grandpa snuggled Esme, too!

Esme is an adorable little pea in a pod, all swaddled up.

She's adorable when she's awake, too!

And yes, it was also Hallowe'en!

Cora dressed up as a tiger.

And Esme wore a little orange "my first Halloween" outfit with a tutu!!!

I found this book at the Phoenix airport and I love it!!!

It has pictures off all sorts of desert animals and the actions they do.

We took it to Cora & Esme as a little present.

Namma had to read it to Cora more than once.

Since the babies have been born, Cosmo the Rat Terrier has been feeling underappreciated.

He liked Greg.

And I love his long elegant snout and couldn't resist some funny photos of it!

Ha!

Here's what I wore: