Cupcakes

Last October, Bryan’s school had an auction fundraiser and they asked Derek if he would contribute something related to his famous cupcakes. So he made the haunted house and a gift certificate for 1 cupcake creation. The family who won it called and told him that their daughter was turning 9 and she was going to have a horse themed birthday party at Bartley Ranch and asked him to come up with an idea that would go with that. So this is what we came up with. I think it turned out really great!!

Date Night

Derek and I got a babysitting gift certificate from Mel for Christmas so we went out on a date last night. We went to Famous Dave’s for dinner. Neither one of us had ever been there and we both loved it! Derek got ribs and I got beef brisket! After dinner, we went to Michaels to get a few last minute supplies for some cupcakes he’s working on for a birthday party this afternoon and then we went next door to Babies R Us to pick up some baby food for Tyler. I had a $5 reward that expired today so I wanted to use it. After our errands, we went to the movies to see One for the Money. I thought it was good, Derek thought it was just ok. Then we stopped by Savemart to get some cookie dough for dessert and then went home to finish decorating cupcakes and snack on our treats! I didn’t decorate cupcakes but I did separate all the white sprinkles out of a huge pack of multi colored sprinkles. It took forever and I didn’t even finish them all! Derek’s cupcakes are awesome so I’ll post them later on tonight or tomorrow. Anyways, it was really nice to go out together without the kids!! I hope we can do it again sometime soon!

I wish we would’ve taken a picture together but we didn’t so here’s a cute picture of Tyler instead.

Bryan funny

Bryan has a crush! I have to sign off on his reading homework every night so when I was looking at it yesterday, I noticed that something had been erase at the bottom of the page. I looked at it and I could see that it said I love Madison. Madison is a girl in his class and she also lives on our street so they play outside together all the time. He told me about a week ago that he liked her but I didn’t really think anything of it so I thought it was really funny when I saw that he wrote that he loved her on his homework. I know it's hard to see, but I had to get a picture of it.


I told Bryan to come over and I told him that I could see what he wrote and he grabbed a pencil and tried to erase it even more. It was really cute how embarrassed he got!

Baby Bryan

I love looking at the kids’ baby pictures. I scanned some of Bryan’s baby pictures onto the computer and I wanted to post them. He was such a cute baby and it’s so funny how he still looks exactly the same now. He’s probably over the age of 1 in some of these, but I still consider them baby pictures.

Best. Night. Ever.

Tyler slept last night from 11:30 until 6:00 this morning!! I really hope it wasn’t a one time thing and he continues to sleep well at night!!

Here’s Bryan and Tyler playing on the floor this morning before everyone else woke up.


When Derek got home from work this morning, there was a bag of clothes outside our front door from his aunt. I went through the bag this morning and Malaya really liked this watermelon hat. She loves hats right now and she insists on putting them on herself.


Tyler has been spending a little more time on his tummy lately. He still doesn’t like it for more than a few minutes but we’re trying to do it more often so hopefully he’ll get used to it.

Let's get organized

I started working on the playroom, but couldn’t finish actually putting everything where I wanted it. Uncle Chris left his huge tv here so it’s sitting in the playroom in a box and until it’s gone, I can’t really do anything. But I did go through all the toys and got rid of the ones that are broken or missing pieces. I found a DIY toy storage shelf on pinterest that Derek is going to make for me so hopefully we’ll get that started in the next 2-3 weeks. The toys in the kids’ bedrooms also need to be gone through so I’ll do that this week.

I’ve wanted to make a daily schedule for Bryan so I finally did that and got it printed out, now I just need to decide where to put it. Somewhere that I know he’ll see it because I know he’ll never actually remember to look at it every day.

I organized our pictures which wasn’t really on my list of things to do, but I have a couple photo albums so I filled one for Bryan and one for Malaya. And organized the rest of the pictures in the box.

We got a freezer for the garage a few weeks ago so our freezer is organized! We always have way too much food to fit in the freezer so it was really nice to get the big freezer for the garage. Here’s all the meat we had that wouldn’t fit in our freezer with everything else. Safeway had a really good buy one get one free sale on meats a few weeks ago so we stocked up a little. Now we have our freezer stocked full of steak, steak taco meat, beef stew meat, Mongolian beef meat, beef roasts, pork roasts, chicken breasts, pork chops and ground beef. I think we have some chicken legs too.





My goal for this week is to go through the toys in the bedrooms and clean and organize the bedrooms. I’m going to try to motivate Derek to finish Malaya’s bed because I really want to get Tyler in his crib and out of our room!!

Congratulations Dave!

After 25 years of service to our country, Dave is officially retired from the Air Force!! I read about his retirement ceremony on Rachelle’s blog and I so wish I could have been there to hear about all of the great things he’s done for our country! Thank you for all your hard work and for everything you’ve done for us! We love you! Congratulations!

Let's Get Organized!

I’ve been reading Megan’s blog about getting organized and I’m so excited about getting organized this year too!! I don’t have an exact plan yet but I like her weekly planning idea. That’s what I’m going to do for now. I know we need to re organize the playroom and the garage. The kids’ rooms need to be finished and organized so my goal is to do one room/area each week. I’m going to start on the playroom for this week and I have a few smaller things I want to get done this week too so I’ll post an update next week with everything I did!

Catching up

I haven’t posted in a while so here are a few pictures from the last week.

Bryan got baptized on January 7th! He had to go under 3 times and he said the water was freezing! He got a quad set of scriptures for his baptism present and he bought himself a CTR ring. The baptism was for our whole steak and there were 7 kids that got baptized that day with him. He was really excited about it all!


Malaya got a princess dress up set for Christmas so here she is dressed up like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Bryan’s wearing his wig that he got from his doctor a couple months ago.




I had to wake Malaya up from her nap the other day and she looked so cute asleep with all of her baby dolls so I had to take a picture!

DIY picture frame

Our Rader family picture was too big to be ordered in a regular size like an 8x10 or 11x14 so we talked to Megan and she ordered us a 10x20 from her print company so we could give it to Derek's grandparents. We couldn't find a frame in that size so I found a tutorial on how to make your own frame and Derek made it!! It turned out really nice and his grandparents loved it!

Tyler has a few new things going on. He got his first 2 teeth! He’s been a little more fussy than usual and he’s been drooling a lot and chewing on his hands for the last couple weeks so I thought that he might be teething, but he seems so young so I wasn’t expecting it. Derek was holding him the other day and then he goes “Ouch I just got bit!” Then he felt in his mouth and he has his 2 bottom teeth in!

Yesterday he ate rice cereal for the first time! He loved it!! He gave me a big smile after each bite and then he would open his mouth and wait for the next bite. It was really cute!

He also rolled over for the first time yesterday!! It was kind of funny because he seemed a little surprised when he did it like he didn’t know what just happened.

Here are some pictures of him eating yesterday.

Platelet update

Bryan had a CBC yesterday and his platelet count went up to 55,000! We are all excited to hear that! He’ll go back in another month for his next appointment.

Tyler had his 4 month doctor’s appointment on Friday. He’s 19 lbs 6 oz and 27 inches long. He’s over the 100th percentile!!! I can’t believe how big he is! He’s ready to start eating rice cereal and fruits and veggies now so we’ll try that in a few days.

Jesse also went to the doctor because his eczema is really bad again. He got a new prescription for hydro cortisone cream and the doctor said that he can’t use soap anymore. We have to use cetaphil on him instead from now on. I hope it helps and he doesn’t have any more break outs!

Here are a few pictures from last Friday and this afternoon. Great Grandma and Grandpa Rader gave the boys matching sweaters for Christmas and Malaya got the most adorable sweater dress ever!! It’s not the best picture of her or the dress because she didn’t want her picture taken. And the flower clip that she’s wearing was one of her Christmas presents that Aunt Megan made for her!