Sadie's Second Birthday

We had such a great week celebrating Sadie's second birthday! I took the day off on her actual birthday and after a nice breakfast at home, we headed to the Denver Children's Museum...one of my very favorite places for kiddos in the whole city. We got there early, and actually had the place to ourselves for about 20 minutes before it became a complete nuthouse.

Sadie loved playing in the little wooden cottage, and planting wooden vegetables in the play garden. Then we headed upstairs to the train room, the art studio, the bubble laboratory, and the treehouse area. When we were all thoroughly played-out, we headed outside for a picnic in the sun. After Sadie played on the playground a bit, we went for a nice walk along the Platte River.

We figured Sadie had had enough fun for one day, and it was time to torture her with shots at the doctor's office. Sadie is about average height and skinny for her age. Just where she's always been.

Sadie went home and took a VERY long nap after an exhausting, exciting day. She woke up to the pizzas she'd been asking for all week...her special request for her birthday dinner. Brian made the crust, and I assembled our buffalo mozzarella and basil pizza with homemade marinara sauce. YUM!!
Dessert were these decadent cupcakes from Gigi's Cupcakes. Sadie was in chocolate/strawberry heaven. The rest of Sadie's birthday weekend was spent at the Midwinter bluegrass festival with lots of our pickin' buddies and friendly faces.

This past weekend, we hosted a mellow, family birthday party at our house to celebrate Sadie. Everyone came over in the afternoon and Brian made a big pot of his delicious chili. Sadie thoroughly enjoyed her chocolate birthday cake and blew out the candles all by herself! She received so many wonderful, thoughtful birthday gifts and loved playing with her friends Camryn and Carter. (ps...check out my birthday banner...I've been wanting to make one of these for years!).

Tim For Dinner

This is my new favorite cookbook

and Dinner A Love Story is a great blog by one of its authors.

This book has so many great, cheap, and most importantly, QUICK and EASY recipes. I've been making one or two every week since I bought the book and it has helped my in my neverending quest to simplify dinner preparation. I really want to prepare a homemade, healthy dinner every night we're home, but I also want to spend quality time with Sadie when I walk in the door after work each day. These recipes allow me to do both! Hallelujah!

In honor of Sadie's second birthday....

These are things that Sadie loves and words that describe her.

(Make your own Wordle.)

The U.S. House of Representatives has just voted to bar Planned Parenthood health centers from all federal funding for birth control, cancer screenings, HIV testing, and other lifesaving care.

It is the most dangerous legislative assault in our history, and it cannot go unanswered. Planned Parenthood and the three million women, men, and teens who are at risk of losing access to basic care — need you to stand united now.

Sign the open letter to every single representative in the House who voted for this cruel, unconscionable, unthinkable law, and to every senator who still has a chance to stop it.

Please join me in standing with Planned Parenthood by reading and then signing this letter.

....making music the world needs

Tim O'Brien said that about the musicians who played our last house concert. I couldn't agree more!


On January 29, we packed more people than we ever have (~50!) into our home for a house concert with Cahalen Morrison and Eli West. We saw these two perform together last spring at the Soiled Dove in Denver, as openers for Darrell Scott.

We were impressed by them then, and SO excited when I received an email from Cahalen that he had heard about our house concert series and was interested in playing.

It makes us very proud that the word is starting to spread about our concert series among the acoustic music community. We're thankful to our music friends, and to the musicians who we've already hosted, for telling others about us.

I got chills as Cahalen and Eli started playing, and could tell that every person in the house was riveted. Their instrumentation is so intricate and perfectly synchronized with each other. Their vocal harmonies are perfect and haunting. And Cahalen's songwriting feels like it's from another time. It's vivid and inspiring and makes you yearn for a simpler lifestyle.

I could have listened to these two all night. And I have absolutely listened to their album, The Holy Coming of the Storm, every single day since the show. Cahalen and Eli have only been playing together for about a year, and I'm so excited to see what lies down the road for these two.

Here are some of my favorites from the night. You can see all of them on our youtube channel here.