Cup Pies and Piemaker Love.

Anyone who knows me well can tell you that most of the shows I like never made it past 2 or 3 seasons. Poor Bryan Fuller. He's my TV producer hero, and over and over his work is never realized or understood. I loved Dead Like Me, but I LOVED Pushing Daisies. A show about a nerdy pie-maker who brings his childhood sweetheart back to life, whom he also can never touch again or else she becomes dead again? What isn't to love? Did I also mention that theymoonlight as crimefighting P.I.'s?

A few weeks ago, I starting watching this series from the beginning again, with Ben. Tomyabsolute delight, he likes it! Re-watching this series also inspired me to start baking. A few weeks ago, I attempted a blackberry pie. It looked beautiful but the filling was off. Tonight, I made Cup-Pies, miniature, single-serving pies! I decided to make apple, since I had snagged 2 large Fuji apples this afternoon at the store.

The filling:

The Cup Pies, right before putting them in the oven:

After!

I was pretty excited they came out so well. Definitely room for improvement, but not bad forthe first go-round. Ben was pretty excited to eat his, which is a pretty big deal, for anyone who knows him--he hates anything sweet! He was very sweet to try them. He's always my #1 supporter, no matter how ridiculous.

Also, please ignore the funny looking hair-cut. I had...let's call it an unfortunate episode at the Paul Mitchell Beauty School. Albeit, it was my first bad experience there, I wasnonetheless very upset by it. Still trying to figure out how to make it look decent. Sigh.

Dee wanted in on the action. She pleaded with us to give her a cup-pie, stating they must be for her since they were, after all, her size.

Daisy Love

This weekend, I'm going to be showcasing some of the blogs I follow that mainly focus around awesome parents and their kids. Every time I read these blogs I am inspired to see my generation yielding families and relating to their kids in entirely new ways. This blog I speak of here is one of those blogs.

Beyond being an amazing photographer, Sarah Rivera is an amazing, compassionate human being. It did not surprise me when her latest status update on Tuesday was about this little girl, requesting prayer for her and her family. Ben came into the living room on Tuesday night to find me on the couch, watching this video and bawling my eyes out.

I would encourage you to read the entire blog, but right now, this family needs intense prayer. Sweet Daisy under went surgery yesterday and they were only able to get 1/3 of her tumor out. And today, her parents were told that even with chemo, Daisy Love only has 30-50% cure rate. This beautiful family is God-fearing, and they are in the middle of the unthinkable. Luckily, our God isn't held by statistics, by diagnoses, by medical doctors. PLEASE PRAY earnestly for this family in the next 24 hours, as tomorrow morning they get the pathology report back.

As one commenter on Daisy's blog put it: There was a zero percent chance that Lazarus would be raised from the dead.

Sweet, Sweet Dee.

We got our puppy in December, when we first got back from our Christmas Vacation in Cali. Needless to say I needed some cheering up after leaving family again, and Dee was the perfect way to start off getting back to the daily grind.

First of all, every one always asks us where we got her name. We attribute her name to this show, and it's unbelievable ability to be awesome:

Specifically, she's named after the female lead, Deandra "Sweet Dee" Reynolds. And yes, we do refer to our dog as "Deandra" when she's being bad.

It's incredible to me just how much she's grown over the past few months. She came to us looking like this

And now, she looks like this

That bow in her hair lasted about 4 seconds after we got her back from the groomer. She turns 1 on October 22, and there will definitely be a puppy party!

Uh, no, it's not.

So when we moved in, I started a system with cleaning and our sponges. A little back story while I was growing up, one of the biggest issues my mom had with the kids and cleaning was that sometimes we’d use “cleaning” rags (ones that were mixed with Pine-Sol, Comet, things of this nature) and dry dishes with them. And sometimes we’d ruin good dish rags when we’d use them to clean. Having this background, I decided I needed to start out with a strict system. Decorative dish towels (always seasonal, hanging on the oven) are used only as pot holders, and as dishrags only when they are getting close to needing to be cleaned. We also have two sponges, which are the subject of this controversial post.

I bought two sponges, one green and one pink. I designated the pink one as the “cleaning” sponge, and the green one as the “for dishes” sponge. Exact conversation that occurred tonight as I see that the pink sponge is out, and concluded that Ben was cleaning our George Foreman Grill with it (an obvious no-no).

Crystal: Babe, I’m going to wring out this sponge and put it away, just remember this pink one is for cleaning the bathroom, wiping down counters, etc. It’s our chemical sponge. The green one is for dishes.

Ben: I thought the green one was for cleaning.

Crystal: No, the pink one. It matches my cleaning gloves, that’s how I remember pink is for cleaning. Green is for hard-to-clean dishes. If we mix them up, we’ll get chemicals in our food.

Ben: I’ve been using the green one to clean up Dee’s poop when I can’t get it off the floor.

Crystal: What?

Ben: Yeah, I’ve been using the green sponge to scrape up Dee’s poop when it’s too hard to get off of the kitchen floor when we come home at night.

Crystal: …I’m getting new sponges tomorrow.