Family

I love December—full of holiday baking, parties and decorating. I also love the opportunity to buy a flirty and feminine holiday dress for Christmas parties or New Years Eve. At the same time, I try to find reasonably priced party dresses because I hate spending a ton on something I’ll probably only wear once or twice. Plus, most of us need to watch our budgets during the holidays with all the added expenses with buying gifts and traveling to spend time with family.

During the holidays, I always search for Italian-inspired recipes to try, as a way to connect to my heritage. Last year, it was Italian wedding cookies and Florentine lace cookies. This year, it’s homemade chocolate peppermint biscotti.

How this Green Bay, Wisconsin girl came to make Sock It To Me Cake from scratch is a bit of an interesting story. Jade and I were chatting about recipes that remind us of the holidays. He mentioned how Sock It To Me cake became a holiday tradition for his family because his mother loved it so much, his family often made it for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other special occasions. They even left it out for Santa one year!

Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away. I can’t believe it. As most of us are planning what we’re going to cook or bring to your family’s dinner, it’s about time you think about what to wear on Thanksgiving.

For me, Thanksgiving dinner is really about the sides. The turkey gets all the hype, but I could not care less about the bird (even though my hubby has a magical ability to make it really tasty). I’m a side dish gal all the way. As a kid, I would fill my plate with mashed potatoes (extra butter) and the fresh from the oven, still warm, dinner rolls. Yes, quite the healthy dinner plate.

My mom came to visit last week so she could spend Halloween with my kiddos. Just two weeks before she came, our friends at Toyota asked if we wanted to try out the 2016 4Runner. It couldn’t have been better timing, as it is pretty tough to fit five people comfortably in our Camry, with the two car seats in there. Having the 4Runner for a long holiday weekend was perfect because we had more space for the five of us to cruise around Phoenix.

My husband and I don’t eat very much candy. Our kids don’t eat much candy either — not just because we limit it, but mostly because they don’t like it. Crazy, right? This lack of candy-eating means that trick-or-treating yields a ton of leftover Halloween candy that we don’t really want around the house.

Making DIY Halloween costumes is a for our family. In mid-September, my hubby and I started brainstorming ideas of what the kids should be for Halloween this year. Since Gigi is old enough to walk on her own this year (I carried her in the Bjorn last year), we immediately began thinking about ‘couples’ costume ideas — in the sense of having two children, close in age, of both sexes (in case you’re looking for couples costume ideas). We finally settled on a homemade lion costume for my son and a Dorothy costume for daughter.

When October rolls around, I’m so ready for fall and all the flavors fall brings — especially all the pumpkin spice recipes I can find. I like me some pumpkin. I’ve shared my favorite pumpkin spice cookies, pumpkin nutella bars, pumpkin scones and pumpkin pancakes before, but I’m always on the hunt for different pumpkin spice recipes.