Thunder Over Louisville

Thunder Over Louisville is a day long celebration geared to kick off the Kentucky Derby some of the highlights include continuous flybys of our U.S. military aircrafts, yummy carnival food, and the Nations largest firework display! We made our journey to the Bluegrass state, along with 600,000 others, this past weekend to get in on the events and celebrate my husband's birthday.

The Drive to Louisville Kentucky is beautiful, The highway weaves along the rolling hills of Eastern Indiana's Hoosier National Forrest and because I was driving it flew past in a blur of green, I hope to go visit someday but this particular trip had a different mission, "to get four adults, 1 infant, 1 toddler, and supplies parked along the Ohio River without having any major meltdowns and much to our surprise we pulled it off!

Behold Louisville
(The weather was nice despite the overcast conditions)

Bella enjoying herself

Andrew's not so secret talent

Look, there is an Apache helicopter stirring Ohio River water mist into my face, ewww!

I have about 100 pictures of random planes but I'm going to spare posting them since I couldn't begin to tell you what kind they are and leave you with this image. This is a representation flyby of the advancements in U.S Military aeronautical engineering.


Andrew and Mom decide to blow all of her Weight Watcher points on splitting a funnel cake with friends, yay funnel cake!
Daddy rocks tired baby to sleep
Family shot before firework begin
Fireworks, don't worry--Andrew loved the fireworks he was just scared of the camera!
And finally, a video of the firework show brought to you in high definition by David Harpe

Rainbow Fun

My latest project may not taste like Skittles but you can still, "taste the rainbow". Today's adventure is brought to you thanks to my husband's love for silly cakes. Speaking of silly cakes, there is some good stuff over at www.cakewrecks.com and now without further ado I present the technical process of baking rainbow cupcakes.

Normally, I would make my own cake batter but the 3month old requires me to budget time wisely so I had my dear old friend Betty whip some white cake batter up for me.



For taste test purposes I stuck my clean finger in the bowl, took a lick, and proceeded to pour what looked like evenly divide batter into 5 glasses.


...and now the real fun begins thanks once again to my friend Betty and her handy-dandy gel food color tubes.

I swirled the dye on purely for aesthetic purposes, ooh pretty!

As you can see in the picture below I created a ROYGBIV color spectrum with my gel color tubes minus the IV because I'm a busy housewife and don't have time to work with 7 colors, we are a 5 color household.

Toto, I don't think we are in Kansas anymore. Here are the beautiful mixing results!

Now that the primary rainbow spectrum batter is mixed it is time to move on to the layering process.
#1 Wrappers

#2 Layer the colors (I layered in reverse rainbow order BGYOR), just keep laying until you have used up all the batter


#3 Bake according to cake recipe directions


#4 While the cupcakes cool, take an adorable picture of nearest baby


#5 Slap on the icing(hopefully your better at it than me)








#6 Dissect




#7 Eat!

#8- Bonus! As I was writing this my husband sent me a photo of the beautiful rainbow he captured through his window at work!

Happy Birthday Bryan

I'm having anxiety over the suspense of not telling Bryan what his Birthday gift is so without further ado I'm going ahead and unveiling the "big surprise". Lets just hope he actually reads my blog!

Those of you that know Bryan may be aware of his annual trip to attend Thunder Over Louisville. Due to having a baby the chances of upholding his tradition have been slim to none, and I feel bad that we are not getting to go like we did in the past.

Thankfully, his creative wife came up with a back up plan...




A weekend getaway at a hotel that has its own waterpark! Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and 76 degrees, if its too cold to swim we still have the HUGE indoor pool to look forward too! Did I mention that the hotel is 0.76 miles away from...THIS?? Oh, and that these fine people are going with us?

Simply Organic Strawberry Pie

I'm a purest when it comes to the beauty of the berry and preservation of its natural deliciousness so I beg you to throw out those jello coma inducing recipes and try this.

The name of the game is Simply Organic Strawberry Pie and we start with the crust. I prefer to make my own because quite frankly its a fun thing to do plus I can control the ingredients and earn bragging rights. If time is of the essence you can kiss your bragging rights goodbye and buy a pre-made shell --shhhhhh, I won't tell if you don't.

Here is a little video tutorial on how to make a pie crust thanks to LiveGreen on youtube.



Blah, mine didn't turn out so fancy but that's my own fault for being cheap and getting a lame pan.



Now we need to fill her tank with some mother nature goodness, 2 cups of sliced strawberries should do the trick.


When you done slicing add a squirt of lemon juice and stick em back in the fridge, hum a show tune, and grab your sauce pan. In a small sauce pan stir to a boil 1 cup water, 1 cup sugar, and 3 tbs cornstarch. When the mixture stars to boil remove from heat and allow to cool. In the mean time kindly throw your strawberries into the pie shell.

When your berries are in place carefully pour the liquid sugar mixture over the berries. Better yet, for a prettier presentation add the liquid sugar mix to your berries before putting it in the pie shell. Clearly I wasn't going for pretty.

Simply yummy.

2 cups strawberries
1 cup sugar
1 cup h20
3 tablespoons cornstarch
9 in pie crust

1. Mix water sugar and cornstarch in small saucepan.
2. Bring to boil stirring often. When mixture thickens and turns transparent, remove from heat add strawberries and pour into baked pie shell.
3. Chill

Got Ears?

I don't think my husband even noticed what I did to his Easter Bunny!

It was supposed to look like this:

Not this:

MMmmm...bad wife, bad!

I hope everyone had a Happy and Blessed Easter, Love The Choisser's