First Deer!

Spoiled for life. Here is the crocodile hunter (deer hunter this week :) after his first deer hunt. It reminds me of the first time his Grandpa took him fishing - he was about 4 years old and cast his rod, and caught a fish on his first cast. From then on, the expectations were a bit high~he assumed that you were supposed to get a fish with every cast. Well, here he is, his first afternoon out with Dad deer hunting, and he came home with this! Guess I will be cooking venison in the weeks to come :)

The Queen's Birthday Party

Right now, the queen is completely obsessed with the Beatrix Potter stories, so of course the birthday theme was Peter Rabbit. Above is a photo of the guest's goody bags - this year around Easter T*rget had Peter Rabbit books, candies and fun treats in the $1 section, so I stocked up.

Here is the table set up - I went a little crazy with the rabbit food theme - we had salad, berries and cream (just like Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail!), blanched asparagus, tea sandwiches, scones and devonshire cream, and those cute little champagne grapes. We served lemonade in pretty tea cups. For flowers I used some potted plants and herbs I already had, a few bunches of inexpensive glads, and best of all, several bunches of Swiss Chard in vases.

And here is the cake - complete with sugar pansies and garden fence, sugar vegetables and butterflies, and a sugar Peter peeking out of the watering can. I don't have a good picture of the girls in their dresses, but I made them all three little dresses out of the Beatrix Potter fabric. The queen loved it, and thought it was the best birthday EVER! (of course, she only has last year to compare to, since I am pretty sure she doesn't remember the first two!)

A peek at what I have been up to!

The past few weeks I have been busy preparing for the marriage of my brother-in-law to my god-daughter. It was a small wedding with only family in attendance. It was a lovely wedding, and I was honored to spend many hours in the past few weeks helping with the plans. Standing up beside them, looking over at my husband through the service, it brought tears to my eyes as I remembered the day nearly 15 years ago that he and I were married.

Here is the wedding cake I made for them. In my previous life (ie "BC"-before children) I was a cake decorator :)

And here is "the queen" who served as a flower girl. She is modeling the bride's veil! Now that the wedding is past, I should be posting more - I have had a bit of a computer vacation over the past few weeks. But school is back in full swing Monday and I look forward to sharing our latest plans!

Booklist - How many have YOU read?

A Booklist from Angelina's blog

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
The Rules:
1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) Post.

**1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
**2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
**3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
*4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling (read the first 3 - decided that was enough)
*5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
**6 The Bible
#7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
**8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
*10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
*11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
*12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
#13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
*14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (most, not all)
*15 Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
**16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
#18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
**21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (one of my favorites)
*22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
**25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh -
**27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
*28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
*29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
**30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
%31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
#32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
**33 Chronicles of Narnia- C.S. Lewis
**34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
**36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (read this at least 6 times :)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Bernières -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
**40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
**41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
*46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
*47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
**49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (this one always fascinated me!)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
**54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
**57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
**58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
**61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
**65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
###67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (this was torture in college lit class)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
*71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
**73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (parts)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78Germinal - Émile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A.S. Byatt
*81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
**87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
**89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
*91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
#92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
**97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
**98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
**99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
**100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I was surprised by how many I had not heard of on this list. I can say I definitely beat the average of 6 though!