I have perfected easy oven-baked french toast

This is my new go-to French toast recipe.  It's easy and cheap.  Here's the ingredients:

• One loaf of french bread (I buy it on sale for just under a $1 at Ingles or Wal-mart.  I like to use the whole wheat loaf when I can get it.)
• 2 tbsps butter
• 3 eggs
• 2/3 cup millk
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon

Cut the bread into 1 to 1.5 inch slices.  Preheat oven to 400.  While oven is heating, put butter in your 13x9 pan and put it in the oven for few minutes to melt.  Whisk together eggs and milk.  Remove pan from oven and sprinkle sugar and cinnamon evenly on the bottom of the pan.  Dip bread slices in egg mixture and arrange in pan.  Bake for 10-15 minutes.

When you take the slices out of the pan, flip them over so you see the nice buttery, sugary, cinnamony crust on top.  Cadence takes hers with syrup.

I prefer powdered sugar.  I will probably never go back to frying french toast on the stove top.  This makes a lot, but the leftovers reheat nicely.  Yum!

Some fall stuff

We got some pumpkins.

The girls and I went to the mountains house a couple weeks ago and hiked in the woods.

The leaves were gorgeous - the pictures don't do it justice.

I'm so grateful to live in a place where the seasons display themselves so gloriously!  I regret my Florida childhood where it was just hot, rainy, hot, and a little less hot.

P.S. A recipe and pictures of Halloween costumes coming soon.

Piper is smiling for real!

We've been BUSY around here, and not sleeping much, to be honest, but having lots of fun!  I'll be back soon with pictures of our autumn adventures, but in the meantime, our baby girl started smiling for real.  She doesn't do it much yet, but it's a real smile, not gas, I promise.  This is the best pic I could get of it - unfortunately, she looks a little crazy, huh?  I was trying to get her to smile during a diaper change, which is a little crazy, I suppose!

Cadence's faves at 3

Since her birthday last month, I've been meaing to do a faves list for Cadence, like I did when she was 2.5 here.  I took this picture a few weeks ago while we were playing on the front porch, then added the faves (with some consultation from her) using picnik - a free web-based photo editor.

Besides her faves, we can also report that Cadence has a rich imaginative life, going entire days assuming the identity of another character and assigning other identities to the rest of the household.  I feel like she's eating better these days, and she's 99.9% potty trained, and has been for awhile now, after a few setbacks with the move and the new sister.  This summer she started to break out of her shell and actually talk to people, which was a relief, and a delightful surprise for many of our friends in this community.  She asks lots of interesting questions, like "Is your tummy small now, Mama?" and "Where does Jesus live?"  So, we're proud of her. 

My kid likes to roll in things on the floor...

Yesterday we got a surprise delivery of baby girl hand-me-downs - 3 diaper boxes and a big bag full!  Cadence was busy playing with playdough while Piper napped but she quickly abandoned that to tell me we needed to dump the clothes out on the floor.  And then she proceeded to roll in them.  While I tried to sort into neat piles.  Sigh. 

Looks fun though, huh?