This week has been pretty crazy. I thought that last week would have been the week that I pull my hair out. What with Dave's birthday on Monday and then Bradley's birthday AND the Iron Dickson Cooking Competition on Saturday. The amount of to dos was never-ending! Monday we had plenty of getting out and checking items off the "out of house" checklist. It was long and painful but we got through it. Frankly the rest of the week is a blur of monotony. Saturday came bright and early with Bradley opening his door and saying, "Hello? It's my birthday!" We let him eat cereal and watch a movie that he picked out for his birthday. I love that he is still young enough that it is a treat to pick out a movie and cereal. It makes my job a little easier. I was running around so much trying to get the house clean and organized for the competition that I didn't get to sit down and watch it with him. Before long (definitely before I was ready) it was 3:30pm and it was time to put the cleaning supplies down and move away from the kitchen. I ran upstairs and got myself presentable. Everyone filed in around 4pm and we all hung out for a bit and got cozy. The competition kicked off around 4:10 with an opening ceremony including "pre-fight doughnuts" for everyone. Then another 2 1/2 hours of blur. Here is my dish:



I made apple cornbread and southern fried apples. The secret ingredient was apples, if you couldn't tell. All of the dishes were amazing and my house smelled incredible through the next day. Lisa is compiling all of the videos that Dave took during the competition and putting the together in a video. Hopefully it went well enough that we can continue to do this on a fairly regular basis and maybe we will have our own mini tv series!

In the apple spirit, Shayla brought "Apples to Apples". It's a vocabulary card game. It was sooo much fun! I thought we were all going to kill over from laughter! It was the best!

On a side note, I made the birthday cake for all of the January birthdays. We have made carrot cake the traditional January birthday cake since Bradley turned two. We learned the hard, carb-overloaded way not to have a birthday cake for each birthday in January. Dave and Bradley are five days apart and I have tell you.... You CANNOT eat a whole birthday cake in time to eat another one five days later! We have tried it a few different ways. A cookie cake for one and a regular cake for the other, a pie for one and cake for the other, etc. We decided that it was in our best interest to just make one for the two birthdays and we just have it on Bradley's birthday. This year I decided to play with my recipe a little. We bought a coconut for Bradley to try so I used some of the coconut milk in the cake batter and I baked coconut flakes into the bottom of the cake. Of course when I had to take it out to ice it the coconut flakes were on top but I think it was still pretty good. I made my own cream cheese icing and was pretty proud of it.

Everything went pretty smoothly that day and I was very impressed with everyone's dishes. Plus my cake was THE BOMB! I was a bit nervous about it but I will definitely make that one again!! Bradley had a wonderful birthday! Thanks to everyone who made it happen!!