Harmonica

Last week when we were at Paul's nephew's house for lunch for the holidays, we got a little gift for Sydney.  Danny and his family had recently been on vacation in Parksville on Vancouver Island and came across a kid's store with a ton of musical instruments in it.  They spent literally 45 minutes looking at all the instruments and deciding on a few to bring home for Sydney.

In the end this is what they chose, some bells, a hand clacker and a harmonica.  Now being that Sydney has been going to music class since she was three months old, I figured that the bells and clacker would be an obvious hit as we use them literally every week.  Who could have guessed that she would love the harmonica more than anything?  I tried to show her how to use it, blowing super hard into it to get my point across.  She looked at my oddly and hummed loudly into it and then chucked it across the room and started crying as it wouldn't make any noise.  So I showed her again and again.  She didn't seem to be getting it, so I put it away and figured that it obviously wasn't a hit.

Until the next day...she picked that thing up and started playing it to beat the band.  It was so funny, she loves it and is so good at playing it!  Paul was joking that he was hoping she would be a piano player but that he guesses the harmonica is going to be her instrument of choice!
 
We were very happy to get a few new musical instruments to add to the ones we had and will enjoy Sydney's harmonica recitals for weeks to come, I'm sure! 

And The Birthday Fun Continues....

I can't tell you how loved and encouraged I feel even a week after my birthday!  All throughout this week I kept getting messages from people wishing me a happy birthday and then this morning at gymnastics my friend Barbara surprised me with the most beautiful bouquet of flowers from Garlands Florists, one of my favourite flower shops here in Vancouver.

They are beautiful, pinks and purples galore!  My kitchen officially looks like a flower shop now with all of the gorgeous bouquets that I've gotten in the past week!  I love it!!  It really brightens up the house and makes me smile every time I see all the gorgeous blooms and think about the wonderful friends that gave them to me.

My brother Paul also took me out for lunch today to celebrate my birthday, we had a great sushi lunch at Sushi Mart, a super little spot on Robson Street downtown.  It was so nice to have a visit with him and such a nice treat to have him buy me lunch.  He got me two fabulous bottles of wine as a present, Painter Bridge, a Californian Zinfandel and Paul Mas Viognier.  I am dying to try both, he says they are both favourites of his, so they are bound to be good!

 
What a lovely day and birthday week it has been!  I am truly blessed to have such wonderful family and friends in my life and am so reminded of it at this time of year!

Wine Bottling Party

When I was pregnant, I decided to start my maternity leave from work three months before Sydney's due date.  This gave me plenty of time to immerse myself in 'Mommy World' and one of the things that I spent a lot of time doing, was signing up for different weekly newsletters from numerous sites about parenting and child development. 

One of the websites that I quickly began to love was the Yummy Mummy Club.  This site was founded by Erica Ehm, and has such great bloggers, articles and advice along with awesome contests.

I enter a lot of contests but rarely win anything, so was thrilled this summer to hear from the gals at Yummy Mummy that I was one of a few moms in Vancouver that had won three free cases of wine from a local wine making shop, Broadway Brewing.  So a few months back, I took a trip down to the wine shop and chose the wine I wanted to make, sprinkled some yeast on the giant vat of grape juice and waited for a few months until it had turned into wine and was ready to bottle.

So last week, myself and ten other Moms got together for a wine bottling party at Broadway Brewing.  It was such a blast, there was food, and wine tasting and we worked together to bottle 360 bottles of wine in just a couple of hours.  At the end of the night, we each got to take home three cases of our own wine, which was marked with our own signature label bearing our name.

I made an Australian Cabernet-Shiraz blend.  I have to say that I was actually pleasantly surprised at how good this wine was for a 'home brew'!  It was quite palatable and will be great to have with dinners any day of the week!

A couple of the Moms that I met there and I did a little trading, I swapped a few of my bottles for some of theirs, so also have some Argentinian Malbec and a Valpolicella to try as well!

It was a super fun evening out, so nice to meet some other Moms and to come home with a few cases of wine to last me over the winter! 

Pumpkin Spice Bundt Cake

This time of year I am always looking for hearty fall recipes to make.  I'm not sure what it is about October, but it always triggers the nesting instinct in me and I get inspired to spend many an hour in the kitchen whipping up yummy treats and hearty fare. 

One of my favourite blogs that I've been following for a while is 'i am baker'.  This woman continually inspires me with her amazing creations and decadent treats but what I find most amazing is the fact that she accomplishes all this incredible baking and blogging with four children, one of whom is a newborn!!  Inspiring to say the least!  She recently had a guest post an amazing recipe for a pumpkin bundt cake, I knew I had to try it when I read the recipe.

It was so yummy!  Very moist and dense with a great pumpkin flavour.  I made the glaze a little too stiff so I ended up lightly icing the cake with it instead of drizzling it over top as I was supposed to.  It worked out great though as the glaze was so yummy, this way there was some in every bite!  I took the cake to my friend Lori's today for a play date with her and our friends Christina and Michelle and their babes.  Sydney even loved the cake, ate two pieces today and kept asking for more just to eat the icing off of!

Here's the recipe copied straight from 'i am baker' if you want to try it yourself:

Pumpkin Spice Bundt Cake with Creamy Pumpkin Glaze

For the cake:

• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 1 cup butter, softened
• 4 large eggs
• 1 cup canned pumpkin
• 1 cup sour cream
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt

 For the glaze:

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1 tablespoon milk
• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons canned pumpkin
• ¼ teaspoon cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled

For the cake:

1. Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease and flour a 12-cup Bundt pan (I use Pam Baking spray).
2. Add sugar and butter to a large mixing bowl. Beat on low until light and fluffy.
3. Slowly add the eggs, one at a time, and continue mixing until well incorporated.
4. Add the pumpkin, sour cream and vanilla, mixing on slow speed until well blended.
5.  While mixer is still going on slow, add the flour, one cup at a time. Next, add the cinnamon, baking soda and salt. Blend until well incorporated.
6. Pour cake batter into prepared Bundt cake. Bake for 60 minutes or until a knife inserted into the center comes out clear.

 For the glaze:

1. Place powdered sugar in a medium bowl. Slowly whisk milk into the powdered sugar. Continue whisking until no lumps appear.
2. Continue whisking while adding vanilla, canned pumpkin, cinnamon and melted butter.
3. Once glaze is smooth, gently pour over the top of the Bundt cake, allowing to drizzle down the side of the cake.
4. Slice, serve and enjoy.

Dinner Out with The Moms

Tonight was a very special night out with some mom friends to celebrate three of our birthdays.  My friends Sarah and Stephanie and I all have birthdays within five days of each other so we had a joint celebration tonight with a few of our friends at Novo restaurant. 

Novo has just recently opened up and specializes in thin crust pizzas and wine....I had this amazing truffled mushroom pizza and a wonderful Italian red wine, the name of which escapes me right now!  The server surprised us all by bringing us complimentary champagne when she heard that three of us were celebrating our birthdays!  It was a very nice treat!

The Moms really spoiled all of us birthday girls, I came home with an armload of presents!  My friend Cindy got me yet another beautiful bouquet of flowers, so bright and cheery.  My kitchen is starting to look like a flower shop with all of the beautiful flowers I got for my birthday!

My friend Katrin gave me this very unique gift, a set of silver plated cheese picks.  They are like toothpicks in a silver slice of cheese used for the centre of a tray to pick up cubes of cheese, very cool!  It will get used a lot when I have friends over for wine and cheese, I love it!

Nicole brought me some yummy treats, decadent cookies from Cafe et Gateau and some chocolate from Purdy's.  Both will not last long, I'm sure!

 
Stephanie, one of the other birthday girls, got me a very funky necklace from Ten Thousand Villages and a gourmet chocolate bar:

And my friend Sarah, whose birthday is tomorrow, got me this amazing silver cuff bracelet.  I adore it!  I was just thinking the other night when getting dressed up to go out for dinner that I could use a wide silver bracelet, it was as though she was reading my mind!

I left dinner feeling so loved and encouraged!  It was a nice pick-me-up after a long day with Sydney sick with a cold, and a crying fit to beat them all when I left the house to go for dinner.  I feel very blessed to have such amazing Mom friends to share the good, bad and ugly of motherhood with and it was such a pleasure taking some time to celebrate our birthdays together!

October

I simply can't believe that it is October already!  The fall is just flying by.  It really, really feels like autumn outside, leaves everywhere on the ground, windy days and it's dark outside by 7:00pm, winter is on it's way!

Last week was Rosh Hashanah, the celebration that marks the start of the Jewish New Year on Yom Kippur which happens this Saturday.  It is such a fun time of year, we had several days in a row of dinners and lunches with family and friends last week.  Sydney had such a fun time with everyone too, I could tell that she knew we were celebrating something special.  I enjoyed having a few days break from having to prepare meals as we were out at other people's houses.  Everyday, Sydney and I would take a walk up to Gardenia Florists, our local flower shop and pick up a beautiful bouquet of flowers for our host that day.  Here are a few of the beautiful bouquets that we gave away this year. love the vibrant fall colours!

Gwyneth Paltrow's blog, GOOP, had a great write up on Rosh Hashanah this year, I especially liked these thoughts from Michael Berg as he reflected on the new year:  

"Rosh Hashanah is considered the seed of the coming year. We know that the seed of a tree, even before it is planted, holds within it all the potential that the tree will become. It will take time even after the seed is planted for the tree to manifest its complete growth and potential. Nevertheless, the seed that was planted already determines much of what will grow and happen next. If you plant an apple seed, no matter what you do afterwards, you will not be able to grow an orange tree. This is what occurs on Rosh Hashanah; we are creating and planting the seeds for the coming year. We want to have a year filled with great blessings and happiness so we take the opportunity through our thoughts and actions now to draw all of the energy that we will manifest later. Everything that we do on the days of Rosh Hashanah is meant to assist us in planting the right and best seeds for the blessings that we want and will need in the coming year."

I also love October for Halloween, I have never enjoyed this holiday so much as I do now that I have a child of my own!  I managed to round up this super sweet ladybug costume for Sydney this year in keeping with the theme that her birthday will be as well.  She is going to look like such a sweet little bug!  I am so looking forward to taking her around to a few of the neighbor's houses to trick-or-treat.

Here's hoping that this month goes a bit slower than September!

Hawksworth

Yesterday night my cousin Mel came over to babysit Syd and Paul took me out for dinner to celebrate my birthday.  It was so lovely to have an evening out together!  Poor Sydney has been going through a period of major separation anxiety lately.  She is just lost when she is away from me.  It's been very stressful trying to leave her lately!  I was feeling nervous about how she was going to be while Mel was watching her.  She did give her a bit of a hard time, cried quite a bit and asked repeatedly for Paul and I.  Mel is so great at dealing with Syd, it didn't faze her a bit, she took great care of her and had her sleeping like a baby within a couple of hours of us leaving!

Paul took me to Hawksworth restaurant in the newly renovated Rosewood Hotel Georgia in downtown Vancouver which seems to be the in place to dine right now! The restaurant is lovely, very chic, almost New York like!  We had a lovely wine, shared a 22 oz rib eye steak and enjoyed the special birthday dessert that they brought to the table for me at the end of dinner!  The only disappointing thing about dinner was the fact that the restaurant was so incredibly loud, it was like dining in the middle of a crowded bar!  We spent our entire dinner yelling across the table at each other to be heard...wasn't exactly the quiet intimate dinner that both of us had imagined but we made the best of it and enjoyed ourselves in the end.

After dinner we took a quick walk upstairs in the hotel to check out the rooftop bar Reflections.  What an amazing space this is, up top of the hotel overlooking the hotel pool and a flowing waterfall!  We will definitely come back to go for a drink here soon!

It was a lovely evening out together and nice to have a bit of one-on-one time with my honey as we don't seem to get a lot of it these days! 

Melanie brought me a lovely birthday gift yesterday too, some treats from the Squamish Farmer's Market, homemade honey and some organic hazelnuts!  I am so making some hazelnut bark with them, love the combination of hazelnuts and chocolate!