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Or are you just happy to see me?

HA! Sorry couldn’t help that! “Uncle Peeder” came over last weekend and we had a BBQ. Both Sienna and Skippy were very happy to see him. Poor Pete kept getting harassed by Sienna to play with her. We told her after he finishes eating so practically every 5 minutes she kept asking if he was done yet. Fortunately, Pete got a kick out of her harassment. That’s why we love him! They played with chalk  in the driveway and Skippy sat right on a drawing, hence the pink butt! Too funny!

Somehow, Sienna convinced Pete to mimic her running down the driveway (those are bowling pins under their arms). I missed the going down the driveway but I caught the coming back up:

Yayayayayayayayaya from Lisa on Vimeo.

I made basil pesto pasta salad (basil fresh from our CSA!) and salsa (heirloom tomatoes fresh from our CSA!) and apple potato salad (apples fresh from our CSA! and potatoes from the supermarket). I used rice pasta for the salad and it did not do well cold. The pesto also did not have enough salt so it stunk all around (thankfully, it heated up well and Yves loved it and took it to lunch the whole week!) I also made some pickled cucumbers with kirby cukes we got from the CSA. They were a tad too vinegary but I thought it tasted well in the burger.

We went upstairs for the dessert portion. Pete bought donuts from our favorite donut shoppe and I also made a blueberry peach crisp and I asked Pete to bring ice cream as well.

Pete did well to wear Sienna out because she really did fall asleep on him! (Pete was pretending for the photo’s sake)

Nate met Pete at our house so they could walk to Williamsburg! It’s 10 miles and Pete is warming up for his 12 miles walk for the Jimmy Fund Walk he’s doing in a couple of weeks. So he had to leave Sienna sleeping on the sofa. We tried to wake her up to say goodbye but she just didn’t budge. Wouldn’t you know it, she woke up fully a few minutes after he left and when she learned he had gone, she was so sad, she cried!

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Went to the aquarium a couple of weeks ago with Heather and her daughters Caitlyn and Hailey and Shirley with her son Daniel. It was a pretty warm day. After the aquarium, Shirley and Daniel went with us to Nathan’s and then me and Sienna went to the little amusement park next to Luna park (I think it’s Deno’s Park?).

There are a lot of photos of Sienna and Caitlyn, can’t help it, they look so cute together!

Holding hands

Stingray

Shark!

So many fishes!

Look at that fish!

Surprisingly Sienna wasn’t that into the penguins!

I caught Heather’s flash on this (purposely) so that’s why it looks a little funky
The girls posing and being silly in front of the fish

I love that I caught the light rays in this shot

I wasn’t lying! Shirley and Daniel were there too!

He’ll be a ladykiller when he’s older!

Here’s a video if Sienna dancing at Nathan’s after lunch. I swear, I don’t know where she learned these moves from!

Nathan’s Dance from Lisa on Vimeo.

I told Sienna she could pick 2 rides and the first one she picked was the roller coaster! She is my daughter after all! The first 2 go arounds she was having a blast laughing and screaming. By the 3rd and last go around, she was ready to get off. I could tell she was saying stop around the 3rd turn. Good thing it only went around 3 times or it would have surely ended with Sienna crying.

She’s ready!

I know it’s blurry, I was just snapping away!

Almost over!

I was surprised she picked the merry go around for the 2nd ride but I suppose after the craziness of the roller coaster, she wanted something more calm? (Of course after the merry go around, she wanted to go on the tilt a whirl!)

And I couldn’t resist taking yet another photo of the wonder wheel. I applied a lomo effect on it. I promised Sienna we would come back another time to ride it.

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We joined the Wildlife Conservation Society and went to the Bronx Zoo a couple of weeks ago. We didn’t even do the whole zoo and we were completely exhausted at the end of the day! Sienna fell asleep on the way home for just 40 minutes and her energy level went back up when we got home (ah, to be young!) We haven’t been to the zoo in about 6 years and I was a tad disappointed because I feel like we didn’t get as close a view as last time (see here and here) or maybe because I haven’t been taking photos as much I lost my touch!

I think these are gazelles but I can’t be sure!

“Melvin” (we were on the lookout for the Madagascar Movie animals)

I love the look she has here at the turtles

“King Julien”,”Maurice” and “Mort”

Climbing up the rope web

I think Sienna’s favorite part was the petting zoo!

She was having a conversation with the alpaca!

This chicken in the tree cracked me up!

Sienna big ears

When I tried to show Sienna this cool porcupine, she replied “We don’t have time to look at that”

I love the contrast of the bird with it’s neutral surroundings!

We saw these elephants on the Asia Monorail ride, something we saved for last because I thought it would be nice and relaxing while seeing a bunch of animals. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see much. 🙁

I saved the bug carousel photo for last because I’ve been playing around with some vintage photo filters and picture frames.

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Earlier this month, we went over to Erin and Mikaela’s for a dress up playdate. It was a real muggy day but I don’t even think the girls minded at all. Mikaela has lots of different outfits and jewelry to dress up with. It was really fun for Sienna especially since we don’t do dress up at home. I don’t think Sienna even noticed that we were at Geneva and Phoenix’s old apartment.

It really amazed me how much older Sienna looked while playing dress up! They also rented a real hokey and fun disco party dance video from the library. The girls enjoyed dancing to it while me and Erin cracked up (not sure how old it was but a very young looking Jamie Lee Curtis made a guest appearance).

Sienna really liked the first princess outfit. Mikaela dressed as Dorothy.

Erin made yummy cucumber sandwiches and antipasto for lunch!

Time for another outfit change for the dance party!

Waiting for dance instructions

Sienna liked this hat!

Mikaela gets in on the hat wearing!

And sharing necklaces too!

Water Bottle singing (it was actually an exercise video so MK was copying the moves!)

All tired from dancing, a super quick game of Candyland because Sienna was getting tired.

Mikaela was sad because it was time to end the playdate.

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The last weekend of July turned out to be beautiful. The weather was not too hot and we had a break in humidity so we were able to enjoy the fresh air. We started out the weekend by having a picnic at Owl’s Head Park. The first picnic we’ve had since Geneva and co. left for Maine. We tried to get a band started and brought a bunch of instruments to the park. I’m sure you can imagine how well that went with toddlers! I posted the “band” photos up on Facebook, if you are not on FB, you can still see them here. This is a shot of Sienna doing a ballerina twirl with a skirt borrowed from Mikaela.

Saturday we headed out to Siam Orchid for dinner. It was really cute that Sienna wanted to bring her camera, just like her mom and dad! We took a little walk before heading over to dinner. Besides the boats in the marina and some swans in the water, there really isn’t much to see. I couldn’t decide which photo I liked best so I am posting both.

Here is Sienna calling after the swans:

Yves with gorilla on his shoulders:

And on to dinner! Funny how Sienna loves satay but claims to not like peanut butter (satay is usually marinated with some peanut butter and soy sauce, among other things). One steak skewer escaped before I was able to snap this photo!

It seems as if Sienna is saying, you’re coming into my mouth steak satay!

I forgot the name of my dish but it was basically chicken with mixed veggies:

Yves’ Pad Thai:

And we even got dessert! Coconut custard!

Everything was yummy!

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Continuing on my t-shirt kick, I made one for Sienna. I was excited to combine some stenciling and heat vinyl on her shirt. I don’t usually do step by steps but I thought it would be a good reference. I used Sienna’s favorite color, pink!

For the stenciling, I used one of the fabric sprays I made with the Earth Safe Finishes product. I wrote a post about it here (I have since gotten some tips from ESF for a truer red, more experimenting to come!)  For the vinyl, I used heat vinyl I bought from Nick at Craft Vinyl earlier this year. He is really an awesome vendor! My vinyl arrived the same week (I ordered regular vinyl, glow in the dark vinyl and the heat vinyl.) I was really excited to try the heat vinyl (initially with my Sizzix to cut) and was totally bummed when the instructions say not to cut through the protective layer of the vinyl. Drat! All the fancy digital die cutters can do that (none of which I have but feel free to buy me one!)  but certainly not a Sizzix machine. I tried looking online for some helpful tips or videos. There was nothing. I finally wrote to Nick and he asked me to call him on his 800 number. He was so very nice and informed me that it was ok to cut through that layer and just use my nails to take it off that layer. I was still reluctant so had done a test on a scrap shirt. It was easy to come off! And if you don’t have nails, you can also put it through the wash and it will come off there too or at least loosens it up to make it super easy to come off. What a relief!

For the heat vinyl, I printed out her name on my computer, cut those letters out and then traced it on the heat vinyl. Because of the plastic protective layer on the vinyl there were no worries of my marker transferring to the shirt.

I did an initial layout:

Then started spraying! I used ESF’s tackifier to keep the stencil down. Stencil is from The Crafter’s Workshop. I learned while doing my test shirt to do the spraying in layers

and to dab off the excess between each spray

the spraying is done!

Now on to the vinyl!

I’m not very patient so did all the letters at the same time. Here is the teflon sheet you should use over it and then iron. You don’t need to iron for very long but make sure you keep it moving! Let it cool before peeling the protective layer. If you see the vinyl coming off when you try peeling it, don’t worry, just iron it some more.

You can see the layer that I peeled off. I may keep them to use as templates or stencils for future projects.

All finished!

And Sienna was kind enough to try it on and pose for me!

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My birthday was 2 weeks ago and I’m finally getting around to showing the eats!

Yves took me out the Saturday before my birthday. Since I didn’t satisfy my seafood craving while in Florida, I thought going to Randazzo’s would fill the need. I believe my dad took me there when I was younger (although he doesn’t remember) and I figured that it must be a somewhat decent place in order to still be in business. Unfortunately, I was not really impressed. To be fair, I wasn’t very hungry since we went out for lunch to Jay and Lloyd’s earlier that day and Yves isn’t a big seafood person so I didn’t get to sample too much. We shared fried calamari (they didn’t bring a lemon with it! What’s up with that?), Yves got a crab cake sandwich and I got stuffed filet with fried zucchinis. All I could say was eh. I am willing to go back and try some other dishes.

For my actual birthday my parents took us out to a new place in Brooklyn’s Chinatown. I don’t recall the name but it used to be Ming Gee’s on 6th Avenue and around 63rd. Sadly, not impressed here either. We got peking duck to start and it was a bit chewy. Sienna didn’t care for it. The other dishes were Japanese style short ribs (I ended up being the only one eating this!), the usual Hong Kong style steak,  sauteed snow pea greens and fried rice (that took forever to arrive!). It wasn’t terrible but we definitely had better. Probably won’t be going back there anytime soon.

Later in the week, Joy took me and Sienna out for lunch. I was still trying to satisfy my seafood craving and read that Rocco’s Calamari was good. When we got there, the gates were down as they were closed for vacation! Joy’s suggestion of Spartan Souvlaki turned out to be a great back up. As per usual, me and Joy ordered too much food! I ordered a cheese pie for Sienna and then we got grilled octopus and a salad to share. I ordered the Greek sausage pita with fries while Joy got the gyro sandwich with greek fries. I think Sienna filled up on pita bread and feta cheese because she didn’t even try the cheese pie plus she probably was leery of us as we got her to try the octopus and she didn’t like it. The octopus was absolutely DELICIOUS!And it didn’t matter that Sienna didn’t even eat the cheese pie because me and Joy chowed down on it! It’s made fresh to order! Feta and ricotta cheese in a flaky phyllo dough. MMMMMMM. The greek fries come with lemon, feta cheese and oregano. YUM! We didn’t finish the salad and Joy ended up taking one bite out of her sandwich before calling it quits. I only ate the insides of my sandwich and was quite satisfied. I liked the place so much, I went back the next night with Yves! So these photos are from that night.

This salad came with Yves’ dish! I was expecting a small scoop on the side of his main dish. We were able to share this.

Yves enjoyed the octopus as much as I did and asked why I ordered the small plate.

Yves got the sausage and unfortunately did not care for it. There was something in the sausage that he didn’t like and that I did not taste in mine the previous day. Plus they didn’t cut it up like that in my sandwich. I wonder if they were different, well they must have been because mine didn’t taste like this did. Hmmmm…

Every Saturday in the summer they have a pig roast. When we arrived, we saw the pig roasting outside in the front. I didn’t take a photo of it because I thought I would take one when we left. It was done by the time we left! Just the head was laying there.

Oops! I totally forgot to take a photo of the greek style fries! Oh well!

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Who knew under all that hair that Skippy was really a chihuahua? HA! I took him for a long overdue haircut yesterday and told the groomer to cut off as much as possible. It’s just been so hot here that poor Skippy is constantly panting. I don’t have a recent photo of Skippy with his long hair, which is probably best as I might get reported for animal abuse! I took him to the local groomer, a place I’m not totally crazy about (apparently it has been 2 years since I took him there!) because I don’t really like how they cut. But I spoke with the groomer and she was very friendly and seemed to generally care about her clients. I told her she could cut it all off, even the face. I wasn’t aware that they could cut off his whiskers! I think he looks super cute! We took him to the park afterwards and Sienna was so very responsible with him. She didn’t let go of his leash at all and didn’t even go play at the playground because she just wanted to stay with Skippy.
It’s hard to work with kids and animals! I couldn’t get them both to look at the camera at the same time. I tried again this morning:

Now if only I could get Neo to pose! HA!

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On July 7th, we had a band meeting with all the members! Woot! It’s hard to get everyone together. We went to Stand. I was craving a root beer float and they had that, along with lots of other goodies. We started off with some fried pickles in tempura batter. Quite yummy! I really liked the dipping sauce too. I opted to get the grilled shrimp po boy. I liked that it was grilled and the chipotle mayonnaise was delish but I hesitate to call it a po boy when it is served on a brioche bun. Pete got the mushroom beef burger and Tammy and Joy both got the bacon and egg cheeseburger. We also got sweet potato fries and onion rings to share. Their homemade beverages were awesome! We all ended up getting the fresh blackberry soda. I’d go back just for that! I got my root beer float that I was craving (and wolfed down as pointed out by Pete! ha!) Pete tried the ricotta pistachio shake (MMM! and I don’t see it on their online menu) and Tammy and Joy shared the cola float. Fun times. Hope to do it more often!

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Our dear friend Geneva and her family have made the move up to Maine. Starr and I threw a send off party for her and to also welcome their new addition, Lennox Ava. We threw the party on the 13th of June and I had posted the photos on flickr here. I baked some cheesecake cupcakes (with a gluten free ginger snap bottom!) and flourless chocolate cake (no one seemed to notice/mind the couple of pats of butter that did not mix in well). There was other delicious food there too. I made Geneva a collage and Brooklyn shirts for the whole family (I will show them in another post). Here are some shots of what I tried to do for the cake (due to the condensation, it melted into the cake, which you can see here). I cut out the letters with my Sizzix machine. Sienna helped me too.

I just drove Geneva, Phoenix and Lenni to the airport last night. They stayed with us for a few nights. Layne and a friend had loaded up a truck and drove up to Maine on the 30th and they had to vacate the apartment. We were happy to have them here and Sienna and Phoenix had such fun together. Most nights they stayed in the basement but Friday night we had a slumber party. The girls watched Alice in Wonderland (the original) and the adults later watched Up in the Air. Here are some photos from the stay:

Let Loose!

Watching Alice in Wonderland

Storytime

We also had one last picnic all together Friday afternoon.

The cool hat gang (if Sienna was wearing one of my shirts, it would have been the cool shirt gang!)

I made chocolate banana cupcakes that could use more banana flavor (altho I did not make the banana chocolate frosting, which probably would have made it better)

I forgot what we asked Nico but his answer was Nooooooooooo!

Hugs

Ride home from the park

Me Me First! from Lisa on Vimeo.

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