Meeting Baby Wesley

Our very good friends Mark and Laci Brandley had the most beautiful little boy last week named Wesley. We were so happy to go and visit the little one-day-old in the hospital. Well, at least I was. Ryder looked at the baby for about 3 seconds and then wanted to play trains with uncle Mark while also running to look out the window at the construction next door. We'll have to work on the whole "new baby" concept...

Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins

Hello Fall. It's nice to see you again. Wanted to try this recipe from Annie's Eats since it involved all things fall... pumpkin with cream cheese filling and an oatmeal streusel topping. Yum. Ryder definitely approves. It's all he's wanted to eat since yesterday afternoon. So there you go.


Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins
Annie's Eats

For the filling: 
8 oz. cream cheese (reduced fat is fine), at room temperature
2 tbsp. honey

For the muffins: 
3 cups white whole wheat flour
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 tsp. ground nutmeg
½ tsp. ground cloves
1 tbsp. plus 1 tsp. pumpkin pie spice
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
4 large eggs
1½ cups sugar
2 cups pumpkin puree
½ cup vegetable or canola oil
¾ cup unsweetened applesauce

For the topping:* 
4 tbsp. white whole wheat flour
7 tbsp. old fashioned rolled oats
3 tbsp. turbinado (coarse) sugar
½ tsp. ground cinnamon
3 tbsp. cold butter, cut into pieces

Directions

• To make the filling, combine the cream cheese and honey in a bowl.  Beat with an electric mixer until smooth.  Transfer to a pastry bag.  Pipe into 24 equal dollops onto a parchment-covered baking sheet.  Freeze until firm, at least 3 hours or overnight.
• To make the muffins, preheat the oven to 350˚ F. Line muffin pans with paper liners. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, pumpkin pie spice, salt and baking soda; whisk to blend. In the bowl of an electric mixer combine the eggs, sugar, pumpkin puree, oil and applesauce. Mix on medium-low speed until blended. With the mixer on low speed, add in the dry ingredients, mixing just until incorporated.
• To make the topping, combine the flour, oats, sugar, and cinnamon in a small bowl; whisk to blend. Add in the butter pieces and cut into the dry ingredients with a pastry blender or two forks until the mixture is coarse and crumbly. Transfer to the refrigerator until ready to use.
• To assemble the muffins, fill each muffin well with a small amount of batter, just enough to cover the bottom of the liner (1-2 tablespoons).  Place a dollop of the cream cheese mixture into each muffin well. Divide the remaining batter among the muffin cups, placing on top of the cream cheese to cover completely. Sprinkle a small amount of the topping mixture over each of the muffin wells.
• Bake for 20-25 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool completely before serving. (It may be hard to resist immediate consumption, but the cream cheese filling gets very hot!)
• *Topping is completely optional, and they are good both ways.  I think some chopped pecans or walnuts would also be very good mixed in with the topping.

Baby Bennett #2 !!

That's right. This little guy is going to be a big brother! We even have a picture of the new little peanut... growing on schedule and a strong heartbeat! The new little one is due on May 1st, 2014 and we could not be more excited!

Workday

We are on a roll for new things around our house. In the middle of September Chad started a new job with a company called Workday!! It was tough trying to decide what we were going to do, but after he got this offer with Workday, it just felt like the right decision. Workday is a software company that sells HR and financial software.... so this is a whole new experience for Chad! The office is in downtown Salt Lake City and after 2 weeks of making the drive from Cedar Hills to Salt Lake, he is now a pro at taking Frontrunner and Trax to the office. He is still in the orientation phase, but he's liked it so far and is really enjoying the people he works with. Ryder has had to adjust to not having his daddy around quite as much (we had him all to ourselves for 2 weeks before he started), but we are so proud of him!

Theses are some "first day of work" pictures....

What a stud!

Zoo Day

I don't know how much I've said about Chad's job situation on the blog, but to sum it up Chad is starting a new job tomorrow! He had accepted an offer with one company and then last minute accepted a job with a different company, this one in Salt Lake. As of tomorrow, he will officially be a corporate sales development representative with a company called Workday. We could not be more excited!! So, because he accepted the second offer, he ended up having 2 weeks off of just play time. Ryder man has been in heaven. Seriously, the kid is Dad-obsessed. I'm actually a little bit worried about tomorrow when all of a sudden Ryder man and I are back to our normal routine. I guess we'll see how it goes!

In the meantime, we've had ourselves a little "staycation" and done all sorts of things to take advantage of all the Dad time we've been having. So last week we made a little trip up to Hogle Zoo all together as a family and we had a blast. Apparently when you go to the zoo during the middle of the week after the school year has started, you get the zoo almost entirely to yourself. It was awesome.

In the first 8 minutes we were there, Ryder successfully got his foot hooked under the bar at the elephant enclosure, kicked off his slip-on sneaker, and had his shoe plop right in trees below. We then had to grab a zoo employee to jump the fence and save it for us.

This series of photos is my favorite... he LOVED the carousel and did not want to get off. The next 3 photos are "more", "again", and "please".

A successful zoo day if I do say so myself.

Moving Day

We moved. After 5+ years in our cute little house on Canyon Road, we found ourselves another nice neighborhood also right off Canyon Road. In Cedar Hills. Its a cute little basement apartment in a nice neighborhood with very nice landlords. All around a good situation. However, it turns out that in order to start living in a new place, you have to pack up everything you own, move it all, and then unpack it all again. Quite the process and SOOO much work. Thankfully we had some help on moving day from family and some very good friends. I don't know what we would have done without them.