If cake were a person we'd be BFFs.

I am becoming quite the domestic lady.  I have baked cupcakes for the second week in a row.  Woo!

Now, to be fair, the first time I made them things didn't turn out quite the way I had planned.  The cake part tasted great (from scratch, baby!), but the frosting part left something to be desired.  It was a colorful, grainy goo that oozed its way off the cupcake until it had hardened enough to stay put.  Still tasty, but definitely not pretty.  And somehow I ended up with at least twice the amount I needed.  I saved it because um...that's what I do with food, but it's not like it was desirable the first time around so WHO KNOWS how long it will be just hanging out in my fridge, getting harder and harder and grainier and grainer.

Izzy didn't care.  Cupcakes are cupcakes.

Today, however, I had success.  I used the same cupcake recipe but tweaked the frosting a bit.  (Or maybe I just did a better job of following the instructions?  Pretend like that's not it.)  I used a pastry bag to frost the cupcakes, but it looked like pastel blue dog poop so I scraped it off and tried again.  This is what I ended up with:

(Makes me think of the circus.)

The pictures are blurry because my tiny helper likes to poke the lens.  And no, this isn't some weird perspective shot distorting the cupcake sizes.  That is one regular cupcake surrounded by midgets.  Sweet, delicious midgets.

Ham I am

Let's pretend like I was never missing so that there is no awkwardness in my resuming the blog, okay?

Today we baked a ham for Easter, and I'm pretty sure it will last us the rest of our life.  I'm very excited about this.  Although, a lifetime of ham will probably get old really fast.  But this next week will be super cool, anyway.

I don't really have any other profound thoughts that I am willing to share at this time, so that's all you get.

Almost forgot the title

No Sweat Log this week (obviously) because I am taking a break from the exercising for a bit, for reasons that are probably good and now enticingly secret.

However, I will show you pictures of the froofy dress that my mom and I made for Izzy.  We did not have a pattern, but this tutorial helped us figure a few things out.  It is a very pink dress.

I did most of the sewing, Mom did most of the cutting, and we both made a few mistakes.  I won't tell you what they were so that you can imagine that the dress is perfect.

 Bonus! Pajama pants with scalloped bottoms:

THAT'S RIGHT.  We made those too.

Skill swapping

My mom has been visiting me this week, which means that I have been too busy for you.  But I will take a brief moment (is that redundant?)  to tell you that she has been teaching me how to use my sewing machine while I have been teaching her about online coupons and (spoiler alert!) the result is pink and ruffly.

Yes, there will be pictures later.

Saturday Sweat Log: Goldilocks and The Treadmill

I think that I have run on a treadmill once, perhaps twice, in my entire life.  That was before this week, anyway.  Now I can chalk up another three times!  Woo...

It was kind of weird, I'm not gonna lie.  The machine came with some memory cards that had preprogrammed workouts on them narrated by one of the Biggest Loser coaches. So I tried one of those, and it was basically a power walk.  Eh.  I'm sure they get harder, but I don't like it when people who can't see what I'm doing tell me I'm doing a great job.  How do they know?

Next time I tried one of the presets on the machine: Burn 250 calories in 20 minutes!  It didn't sound difficult, but the pace was definitely too fast for me to really sustain.  By the end I was so tired that when the (desperately needed) cool down came up, I threw my arms up in gratitude and ended up yanking off the emergency stop key.  So instead of a cool down I just sort of bent over and stumbled around for a while.  Ah ha ha, no.

The third attempt went better.  I just pushed the 5mph button and put an episode of Futurama up on the Netflix, and ran till the credits were over.  Pretty much I picked Futurama because it is 22 minutes long.  When I get this treadmill thing down better maybe I'll move up to Monty Python episodes (30 minutes) and after that perhaps X Files (44 minutes).

Other notes:  I think I need to get some other barefoot running shoes. I normally wear my Vibrams, but they are sort of crusted in California sand so I do not wish to wear them inside.  The first day I just didn't wear shoes at all, but that made my feet feel funny in a hurty sort of way.  The other days I wore normal running shoes but those made my feet feel weird in a whole different way.  Huh.  Also, getting off the treadmill is like getting off a boat.  It makes walking feel kind of goofy.

To sum up: Day one was too slow, day two was too fast, but day three was juuuuust right.  And then I got eaten by a bear.

We sort of do this every Friday...

For dinner today we had April Fool's pizza.  That's where you have pizza for dinner, and then pretend you didn't.

Ha ha!  What a good joke!