Thanksgiving Rolls

Per request, I'm posting the most yummy roll recipe ever...give it a practice this weekend before Thanksgiving. I first tried it 2 years ago and made 3 batches before I realized my yeast was faulty...arggh! I make them 2-3 times a month. If you're afraid of yeast - DON'T be! Just give it a few tries! I would love to hear if any of you try it - we think they're delicious!

Lion House Rolls
2 C warm water (110 - 115 degrees)
2/3 C dry milk (instant or non-instant)
2 T dry yeast
1/4 C sugar
2 tsp salt
1/3 C butter (melted)*
1 egg
5 - 5 1/2 C flour

In a large mixing bowl, combine warm water and dry milk. Add yeast. Add sugar, salt, melted butter and the egg. Mix well. Add 2 C flour and mix on low till combined then mix on medium for 2 minutes. Add 2 more C of flour and mix on medium for 2 minutes (This process helps the gluten in the flour start working!) Add up to a cup and a half of flour till the dough comes away from the sides of the bowl and when you touch it, it's a little sticky. Let rise in a warm place for 45 min in bowl. (I often put it in a warm oven for 30 min to speed up the process.) Pull dough out of the bowl and place on a heavily floured surface. Kneed for 1 minute. Roll out into a rectangle 18" long x 8" wide and 1/4" thick. Brush with melted butter. Cut (I use my pizza cutter) in half to make two strips 4" wide. Cut in 2" strips - 18 strips total. (I often end up with 24 because I roll it out a little thinner for preference - even then, my rolls are still really big!) Roll up each strip and place on a sprayed cookie sheet a finger-width apart. Cover to rise 1-1 1/2 hours. (Again, I put them in the warm oven till the rolls are all touching each other - usually about 40 min. Don't forget to pull them out of the oven to preheat!) Bake at 375 for 12-18 minutes. Brush tops of rolls with butter. ENJOY!!!

*I use a whole cube each time I make them - 1/3 C for the dough, then I melt the rest to brush the dough with and there should be enough to brush the rolls with after they're all done.

Again - don't be afraid - they are WELL WORTH the work and everyone will love you for it!

Thanks Mom - Dinner was...zzzzzzzz

Shake it!

Emery loves the song "Shake It" - I don't know if that's really the title, but you all know what song I mean. Every time we get in the car she asks if she can here it - good thing we have it on CD so I can put it on for her!

Fun Fall Festivities

First, our fallen leaves - not sure they're a"fun" fall activity, but there aren't many things I love more than crispy fallen leaves under my feet on a cool fall afternoon. These are our 13 bags of leaves we picked up just in time for the big snow storm. This picture was taken 2 hours after we filled the 13 bags...we now have 20 bags that we are slowly puting in our garbage can when it has room. I absolutely love our shadey trees, I just didn't realize how much work they would require in the fall (Thanks Kev for doing the most of it!:).Here are my cute girls in their costumes - a frog and a jack-o-lantern. Emery had to wear her Ariel princess shoes for the picture - she is obsessed with them! I just love my sweet Jane - she is always smiling at me and is very mild-mannered - who can resist those dimples!?

It has been fun to watch Emery get into the holidays - she's already really excited about our neighbor's display of Christmas decorations and lights. On Halloween, Kevin and I both took turns taking her around to a few houses. She really had a good time, but when we ran into some of her friends, she just wanted to go play with them. So she only made it to a few houses for candy and unfortunately the kids she played with after raided her bucket and she was only left with a few pieces...great friends, eh? Oh well, but this is probably the last year she won't notice:). One of our favorite things was hearing her say "spooky" - her version - "sperky". Pretty cute!

Here Emery's ready to hop and Jane is doing her crunches - she's going to have a 6 pack soon!

Typical Lundgreen pumpkin - the "Y"

Our neighbors helped us serve doughnuts and hot chocolate out of our garage to trick-or-treaters on halloween. I think we had about 50 kids and parents come by. It was really fun to get to know a few of our neighbors a little better and a couple young teenagers came by a couple of times - I could tell they really liked it:) You can also see Kevin is wearing shorts and a t-shirt - Halloween was unseasonably warm - I think the high was 76 that day!

Here's our pumpkin-man...his head started to rot on Halloween and leaked pumpkin juice all over his body - pretty grose, but it added a nice touch for the evening - it made him look more scary!

This is the invitation I made for a halloween party we invited neighbors to - it's a severed finger...hee hee hee.
These are some of our new neighbors who came to our party. My friend Janna was an oven 'cause she had a "bun in the oven" - her husband was the baker:) We had a great time playing the candybar game and halloween scatagories. We had guessing jars and watched a sperky Alfred Hitchcock episode. ooohh... (yes, I was a wench again...I need to work on my creativity)
Happy Fall everyone! It won't last much longer - so let's enjoy every minute!

Fun Pictures

Here are a bunch of cute pictures that I wanted to share -

We found Emery had fallen asleep just outside her bedroom on the floor - we didn't even know till we went up to bed later that night!


This was not Halloween, but 5 minutes before leaving for church...she went to church with brown eyeliner in the corners of her eyes...

I think Emery was trying to make her feel better - not sure it worked.

Glamour Girl - I never thought I'd have one!:)

Just a cute picture of our cute girls together

Migraine Anyone?

Unfortunately, I think I've entered the world of Migraines. For the past few weeks I have noticed getting a terrible headache on the days I exercised, obviously discouraging me from working out as often as I should. Yesterday I did a 45 minute "Body Sculpt with Gilad" (Recorded from "FitTV") that I love. Gilad is my new best friend - except when his workouts give me headaches! After my workout, Emery was begging to watch "Ariel", so I decided I'd give us both a break and let her watch it if she helped me straighten up the house. While we were cleaning the Library, I started feeling a little nauseous and my vision was blurred and I could see some sparkly lights in my left eye. I didn't feel terrible, but I knew enough about migraines, that what I was feeling might be the beginning of one. I denied the fact that I might actually be getting one and continued cleaning. I took some Tylenol and showered and still felt terrible so I lied down. Long story short, Kevin had to come home with some Excedrin and I lied in bed for 3 hours before I felt better. I have very rarely had a headache that Tylenol didn't cure. I've done a little research on Exercise induced Headaches and know hardly anything about Migraines...oh, and I'm still nursing. Anybody have any good ideas or advice?

Pumpkin Cookies

WARNING: You may want to eat the whole batch. If you don't want that, then plan on giving some away!

1/2 C shortening (I used butter flavored Crisco 'cause that's what I had)
1 1/8 C sugar
1 small can pumpkin puree
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 C flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 C butterscotch chips
1 C chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 350. Grease cookie sheets
2. In a medium bowl, cream shortening and sugar. Stir in the pumpkin and vanilla. Sift together the flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, and nutmeg; stir into the creamed mixture. Then mix in the butterscotch and chocolate chips. Drop dough by teaspoonfuls onto the prepared cookie sheets.
3. Bake for 8-10 minutes in preheated oven. Allow cookies to cool for a minute on cookie sheet before transferring to wire cooling racks.
4. They are best eaten cool or even from the fridge!

(The above recipe is exactly how I do it. The basic recipe can be found at http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Pumpkin-Cookies-I/Detail.aspx - I wanted to use a whole can of pumpkin, so I added more sugar and flour and included nutmeg and chocolate chips for preference)

Tales from the Wife of a Second Counselor

On October 12, Kevin was sustained and set apart as the Second Counselor in our ward's bishopric. When we were both called into the Stake, we knew it had to be something serious:) My father-in-law told us that if they want to talk to the wife first, you know it's going to be a big calling. And I was called in first! We had a lengthy discussion with the Stake President and His first counselor about serving in the Lord's kingdom and were promised great blessings if we were obedient. So, on the 12th we had a combined meeting with the three wards who meet in our building and they combined our wards down to two and put Kevin in as 2nd Counselor of our ward. After the meeting, Kevin was ordained a High Priest and then set apart. President Signs, who set him apart gave him some really neat blessings and promises and even blessed me that I would never feel alone. I felt the spirit so strongly when he said that and I knew that our little family would be watched over in Kevin's absence. It has only been a week and a half and I have felt so close to the Lord. I know he is watching over our family. I feel at peace and comforted to know that Kevin's calling has come from Him. I am so blessed to be married to such a willing and able man. I love Kevin's humility and willingness to be obedient.

Now for the first "Tale"...
Last Sunday was our first week as a new ward and there were 240 people in sacrament meeting and our primary doubled! (Yes, we were hurting for primary kids, so it's OK:) That meant that my Sunbeam class had 8 kids (possibly 10). I was prepared to teach and was excited to meet our new kids. I just didn't really prepare for how crazy it was going to be! For the past few weeks, Emery has gotten really sad in Nursery and has had to go to Kevin. I hoped that she would do o.k. but there was no telling. Because of Kevin's responsibilities during church as a Bishopric member, I take Jane to primary with me and just pray that Emery will stay in Nursery. Well, she was doing o.k. till she ran into the corner of a table and got too upset to stay. So it ended up that there were 8 sunbeams, two teachers, both teacher's nursery-age girls and Jane in a maybe 12 square-foot room. It was almost impossible to sustain order and almost all the kids were upset or crying by the end...except Jane- she fell asleep luckily, as I thought I was going to have to leave in the middle of my lesson to feed her. I left feeling very haggard and tired, but very happy. The Lord really helped me feel that I did do my best and I look forward to new adventures!:) Stay tuned!

Family Room

Here's the family room wall finished...well almost!:) I still need to get a picture of Jane and me in the last frame! Thanks again Kristy!

Hot Mac N' Peas

I've been wanting to do this for a while now...I'm hoping to highlight a favorite recipe from my week of meals every week. We'll see how long it lasts. I just like to share good recipes and ideas. I usually get my ideas from other people, but this one came from my little brain - Hot Mac N' Peas. "Hot" for hotdogs, "Mac" for macaroni and cheese, and "Peas" for, well peas of course! It is Emery's favorite dish and she calls it "noodles". She tells me they're "licious". This meal is something I used to make in college and I secretly love it too:)

Just make the box of macaroni and cheese as directed and add 4 cut-up hot dogs and a cup of frozen peas toward the end of boiling the noodles. When the noodles are done, drain the whole pot and then return to the pot. I add half the butter called for (2TBL instead of 4) and the called-for 1/4 Cup skim milk with the cheese packet. Emery loves to help me stir and eats a TON of it. When we've finished what we want for lunch, I put the leftovers in individual portion sized ziplock bags to freeze. Its easy, a little more healthy, and fun! :)

Family Pictures

I love the classifieds on ksl.com. I often find myself perusing the merchandise there. I have found lately a $40 double stroller, a $25 kitchen rolling cart, $5 swimming pool, two $5 plastic drawer towers and best of all, free family pictures! A few weeks ago we went to "Expose Photography" in Midvalle to get our pictures done. All we had to pay for was the CD with all our pictures on it! Most everyone I talked to was sceptical that it was a legitimate place, but we're still alive and a nice girl from UVU was our photographer. :) Here is a sampling of some of the pics:

Decorating Updates

Here are just a few pictures of the new things we have done for the house. The Family room is still in progress and we're getting can-lights in the kitchen soon too. We feel very blessed to have had so much help in the up-dating process. (Thanks Kristy, Mom, Monique and Grandpa Barnes!)

My Mom made this quilt for Jane. She is amazing and we love it! It looks so good in her room over the crib

This is a shelf that I painted to go in her room - I think her blessing dress looks so cute hanging from the hook.

Kristy (Kevin's sister) has been helping design some things for us. She is an Interior Designer and was gracious enough to share her talents with us. She designed this wall and painted the sign you can see in the background (the unfinished family room part). She is AMAZING!

Grandpa Barnes made this box for me and I painted it to match the plaques on the kitchen wall...I still need some cute greenery to go in it. He's amazing too!

This is a shot of the front living room wall - my friend Monique has a Cricket and she helped me print out the vinyl lettering. Heather helped me pick out the curtains.

As you can see, I can't really do anything by myself...it's hard to trust my own judgement sometimes. Thanks again for all your help everyone!

BYU Football

As many of you know, we are HUGE BYU Football fans and are so excited that they're doing well. A couple weeks ago at BYU's season opener, we decided to take Jane with us to the game and Kevin's sister Kristy watched Emery for us. I made Jane a little "Y" onesie to wear to the game. Kevin was really proud of his little BYU-clad baby:) A few weeks before that we went to a Football opening party - mostly to pick-up Emery's BYU kids club packet and her football tickets. We didn't realize it was such a HUGE party - all the players were there signing autographs and there were game-worn helmets for sale...Kevin just had to put one on! I wish we could have bought one, but they were going for $250. Kevin was really tempted though:)

Here we are with Fui Vakapuna after he signed our game posters. We had a great time!

Bear Lake

So, I know it's been a while, but I'm finally in the blogging "mood" again...which means I have a few entries to catch-up on. About a month ago our family took a trip to Bear Lake for the Lundgreen family reunion. We stayed in a really nice condo in Garden City that had room for all 20 of us. Emery LOVED the beach and really liked to play in the water with her cousins. Of course, she had her moments though (she's two:). We went to the beach for three days and the first day was the only day we had any competition for our spot - there were only about 8-10 other families on the beach. The other two days were a bit cooler so there was only one or two other groups around. It was most school districts first week of school, so we think that lent to the vacancy of the beach area. The Kemp's (Kevin's sister) have 4 wave runners that were really fun to ride around and Grandpa Lundgreen brought his volleyball net. We had a great time playing in the sand and enjoying eachother's company!

Our Anniversary

August 10th was our 4th Anniversary and it was my turn to plan something. Kevin always makes elaborate and fun plans - last year we went to Lagoon and spent a night at the Anniversary Inn. My first time planning was 4 weeks after Emery was born and we were in New Mexico. I made meatloaf and baked potatoes for a candle-lit dinner on a card table in our studio apartment...that was it...I figured this year I needed to redeem myself. I'm still not sure it was complete redemption, but it was a definite improvement. We went up to my parents house to see the South Weber Days parade and left the girls with them to go eat lunch at Roosters and to go "Geo-caching". What a fun new hobby we've discovered! For those of you who don't know what it is, it's a high-tec treasure hunt you can do pretty much anywhere with a GPS unit. (For more info visit: geocaching.com) Basically you look up online where you can find some geocaches searching by the zip code or city you want to look in. Random people place their geocaches in sneaky places and leave you with the coordinates to type into your GPS. There can be many different things inside of a geocache. One of the ones we found had some DVD's in it. We took a DVD to exchange if there was one that we wanted to take. (If you take something from a geocache, you leave something with a similar value.) We had so much fun - even though we only found 2 of the 4 we went for. Here are a few pictures of us trying to find one of the geocaches:


Along the way we passed my Grandma and Grandpa's old house in Uintah that my family lived in for a few years while my grandparents were on a mission. The family who lives there now invited us to take a tour. It was so fun to see what they've done to the place as many childhood memories flooded my mind. After our geocaching adventure, we headed back to my parents' house to rescue them:) For dinner, we all headed down to the South Weber park for a hamburger and Emery played on a few of the attractions:
This is Emery in the bubble machine - every time she got some bubbles on her face, she'd try to wipe them away, only to find that there were more bubbles on her hands.


Emery has found a new liking to all the Disney Princesses. She can say all of their names and it's really cute. This picture is us in front of a big blow-up slide thing that she LOVED - can you tell? We had to have the worker drag her out when her time was up:)

Later that night, we returned to the park for the annual fireworks presentation. I think they are the best around because you sit right across from where they set them off. We were having a great time when about half-way through, the sprinklers turned on! My dad got soaked 'cause his blanket was directly over one of the sprinklers. It was definitely a night to remember. Emery loved it and talked about fireworks for a few days after. Anyway, we had a glorious time celebrating and remembering our 4 years together. What fun adventures we've had! I love you Kev!

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Bugged

I'm the first to say I'm grateful for insurance, but isn't their billing completely confusing? And I have a college degree! Since we had Jane we have had a myriad of bills sent to our house (I'm sure many of you can relate) that say we owe WAY more than we ever thought we'd have to pay. I have spoken to 4 different people today about 4 different bills and we only really had to pay one of them. I think that the snail-mail system, the insurance claims department, and the doctor's offices need to get on the same page! This is sooooo frustrating!!! I hate the feeling of owing money...

Anyone else in the same boat, or am I really as dumb as I'm feeling right now?

Blessing

We blessed Jane last Sunday. It was a beautiful occassion and a perfect day to remember. Kevin blessed her and others in the circle included: Grandpa Bob, Papa Mark, Great Grandpa Barnes, Uncle Ryan Lundgreen, Uncle BJ, Uncle Kris and Bishop Bowen. Jane was given some great blessings including the fact that she will have a happy life. We are so blessed to have her in our home - she is a very happy baby and I know she will do amazing things some day. What a great blessing it is to have the Priesthood in our home. Kevin is such a wonderful husband and father. We didn't get too many pictures of Jane in her dress... I hope to get better ones soon. Her dress was one made for me when I was a baby. We can't remember who made it...oops! Oh well, it was really cute on Jane! Happy 2 month birthday today! We sure love you!

Silly Sisters

Well, I guess we don't know how silly Jane is yet, but she started smiling at us at about 5 weeks. We thought that was early considering it took Emery over 2 months and even then, they were a little half-hearted. Jane smiles all the time and I thought I'd post some pictures to prove it! Also below you'll find some great takes of Emery and Jane together!

On the couch:


Jane's Smiles (2 month birthday):



"Just the two of us":

Emery and her noodles - she "just can't get enough" (I hope you're all singing now:)

Red

I have a few pictures I wanted to post and realized they all have red in them...Enjoy!

Emery at Ryan and Julie's wedding - we LOVE this picture of her:)


Jane at Ryan and Julie's wedding - we used this one for her baby announcement - only 8 days old here. Ahhh...


Baby booties I made for a friend in the ward. I made the box too and Kevin gave me flowers for our anniversary - so I thought it was a perfect chance for a photo shoot. I call this picture "Domesticating Erin Part One". I have a friend from a previous ward who has a website called "Project Domestication" and it is awesome! If any of you would like to see it, it's really fun and she is amazing! (Look to the left of this post for her blog under "Friends and Fun")


Red rose from the 24 Kevin sent me - he's such a sweetie! Happy Anniversary Kev!