sandy mom's birthday.

celebrating birthdays are a wonderful thing. and that is exactly what we (daniel and i) did this weekend. we celebrated mrs. sandy chesnut. she is a dear, through and through.
the birthday celebration started friday afternoon with a fif-tea birthday tea party with her sisters, friends + family. becky and i had so much fun preparing all of the little touches for the tea, and adding all of the touches sandy would have done for us. the tea was a blast with yummy treats, soothing tea and lots of laughs.
the party continued on saturday afternoon with a family party at the house. it involved josh's game creation "mom charades-inary"--the Special 50th birthday edition. the two teams came up with sayings or actions that describe mom. a fun time. we also presented a book that we created for her with notes from everyone--expressing our love and adoration of her. she found the gift to be really touching. i actually created the felt book cover and provided pictures below.
it was an overall great celebration for a great person. :) happy birthday sandy mom!

wishing and hoping.

one of my favorite things to look at online is furniture. if i could have all of the thnings i dream about...our apartment would be on the verge of being considered for the "hoarders" show (one of our favorites--that we feel guilty watching and enjoying). but regardless, a girl can dream can't she?



this restoration hardware desk has me drooling. can you believe that it is actually one of their "child desks"? and half the price of their "adult desks"? awesome!

this bed is from restoration hardware, too. i just know that our bedding would look amazing on this bed. not to mention we need to upgrade to a queen size bed. :)

this chair caught the eye of my husband about 1year+ ago. and he's been talking about it ever since! of course, it's close to 2K, otherwise we would probably have 1, no 7, of them around the house. we get to thank anthropologie for this one :)

i think two of these chairs would suit our dining room table perfectly. intermixed with the two wooden chairs we have--i think it captures the flea market feel we like to embrace. just waiting for these puppies to go on the sale tab of crate and barrel.

it's fun thinking about decorating your home. funner when you can afford the "nicer pieces" that you want to accent with. :)

from the kitchen of katie chesnut.

at the recipe party that i blogged about yesterday, i shared two recipes with my friends: chicken and vegetable casserole crunch and Gramma's Banana Pudding. i've provided the recipe below for my Gramma's Banana Pudding. share and indulge :)

Gramma's Banana Pudding-this recipe is dear to my heart, because whenever i visited Gramma and Grampa, or it was my birthday, Gramma would make this for me! it's my favorite treat! about 10 years ago, she shared the recipe with me, and i've kept it close to my heart since then, and still have the paper she put it on! below is the recipe--Enjoy!
What you need:

2 instant vanilla pudding boxes+6 cups of cold milk

1 8oz. sour cream

1 8 oz. cool whip

1 box of vanilla wafers

4 bananas


What to do:

-layer bottom of bowl with wafers, and dot with banana slices


-prepare instant vanilla pudding and milk

-add sour cream and cool whip

-pour half of mix over wafers

-add another layer of vanilla wafers, dotted with bananas

-pour the rest of the mix over layer of cookies

-add remaining wafers and bananas in your choice of design to top of pudding

-serve chilled and enjoy with friends and family!

PREP TIME: 15 minutes

i love my Gramma!

first annual seal beach recipe party.

ever since the wedding, i've had an itch to plan something, anything actually. and katie b. has been wanting to do a recipe party-since forever. so we combined ideas and creativity and threw a really fun, yummy food party! so i've decided to post a blog with all the little details, tips and tricks we learned about planning a recipe party.

invitations: for the invites, we did actual recipe cards. i found them at michaels craft store in the dollar section. i love a great value. to fill out the invite, we put "instructions" for the perfect recipe party--well you can see in the picture below :)

games: since our girlfriends aren't very "gamey" we decided to non-activity games. we chose to do: "cutest apron competition" and asked every attendee to come in their cutest apron-which DeEtt won! we did "best recipe"-obviously. and we did a "how many" buttons game (which ended up being quite the task to count all 1,493 buttons. sorry again to my husband daniel who i nominated to count all of those--oops).
recipe cards:all of the girls invited were asked to bring a copy of their recipe for the other girls--so that we could make the recipe, too! one girl hand-wrote recipe cards for every girl. one girl stamped her recipe for everyone, and the rest of us just did the ol' computer print out :)

prizes: we splurged a little bit and got gifts for all of the winners of the games. which when the girls saw the prizes, said: katie, you set the standards high. which is kinda fun! but little do they know (until they read this) that i got all the prizes at ross!which means=money saved! love that!



drinks: the great thing about having a recipe party is that it means the girls all bring food (their recipe), so all we really had to provide was drinks and eating utensils, plates, etc. so i went to Trader Joes and got some fancy looking drinks, threw some lemons and water in a pitcher, and since we have limited space, i set up a drink station on our bookshelf.



recipes: now the part you're all waiting for--the food!i know you're just dying to know what food was made, well don't worry, i'll show-and-tell you!






one recipe that is not shown, but were delicious, are the yummy peanut butter cookies. but they all look great, right?! all so good-and the girls had a tough time voting for best recipe, but the winner was the chocolate yumminess in the little white ramekin that you see above. thanks to maddie for making that! we had such a fun time planning-can't wait for the next part-ay!

summer reading.

i love the opportunities i get to sit down with a good book and read. which isn't as frequent as i would like--but nevertheless i love it. always have. one issue i have with books is: even if the book is terrible, i can't not finish it. once i start it, i have to finish. even as painful or daunting as it may be.
this summer i've been able to power through a few books. so i thought i would give you a little synopsis on each of them.

Everyone Worth Knowing by Lauren Weisberger: a good girl book. talks about motivation for success and relationships. it was an easy read--and i enjoyed it.

Names My Sisters Call Me by Megan Crane: this book is about sisters (obvi). however, this book shared different "tense" relationships between sisters. something i couldn't relate to--but kinda made me sad for the main character. only because i know how important my sisters are to me.

Mathilda Savitch by Victor Lodato: I'm not gonna lie, i only bought this book because of the cover. however, i should have read the back cover before i took it home. it was kinda "off" and weird. it wasn't a "happy" book--in any sense of the word. moving on.

Whiter than Snow by Sandra Dallas: LOVED this book. not a book i would have chose for myself--it was referred to me by my mother in law. the first chapter was a little hard to get through, but i couldn't put it down after chapter two. it was great, i would lend it to a friend in a heartbeat.

hope you found interest in one of the books above, and i hope you have time to sit down with a good book :)

xoxo