Digging holes, hiking hills, racing to a bowl of ice cream! = Brant

Brant is my big little brother! He was born on the same day as my other brother Alvin that I posted about just a couple of days ago.

Brant is married to Jana and has three wonderful children Ria, Heath and Bennett. As I write more and more of these posts I realize even more how awesome my family is. How many times can I say how wonderful they are.

I have lots of memories that I could share about Brant although he is not the closest sibling to be in age, I was closer to him growing up than to any other siblings. My two sibs just older than me were really close so me and Brant spent lots of time together. I think we had some great times together. I made these cookies to represent the Chevy S10 that I drove a lot during high school. We would go to movies together and back in the summer of 1990 just after I graduated from high school Brant and I went to Days of Thunder together. If you did not see that flick it was the one with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and it was about race car driver. Well there was some good car racing action in it and I vividly remember after leaving the movie house little bro and I hopped into the truck, turned up the music, revved up the engine, shifted gears quickly and sped the whole 3 blocks home!!! :) Pretty wild of us right?? :)



Brant played football in high school then went on to play college football and still to this day he is a major footbal fanatic! He loves pretty much all sports and he married the right woman, she is such a sports fan as well. They were made for each other!



Brant LOVES him some ice-cream. His wife thinks it is a Brown trait and maybe it is but maybe he is just like his old man. My dad loves ice-cream and my Mom always always has some in the freezer!



Brant also loves to go hiking and he loves to take his family on hikes. So he eats his bowl of ice cream and then works it off on the hike, he has got the right idea.



This next cookies represent his love of doing yard work. Now this is something I did not know about because growing up he sure wasn't doing yard work, well at least I didn't notice it. But his wife assured me that he quite the master of his lawn and has done amazing work around their home, she said he even dug a hole for their trampoline. I wish he would do that for me! To bad he lives 8 hours away from me.



I love you tons Brant and loved being our own little family with Mom and Dad for a few years. I loved our wrestling matches on Sundays, going to the movies, and listening to Depeche Mode and OMD together.

Happy Birthday little brother!

A Beastie Poet who can build things! = Alvin

Going to get all my August birthdays in this week so there will be at least three this week!

Alvin is my one of my older brothers and he is number 3 of 9 in our family. I have two sisters that were born on the same day and I have two brothers that were also born on the same day. Alvin is one of those brothers. Funny thing is that the other brother born on his birthday 18 years later looks so much like him, so much that if there were the same age they would probably look like twins.

Alvin is 13 years older than me and he is a tall manly kind of guy. I really don't remember if Alvin was mean but us littler kids were kind of afraid of him because he put a note on his door one Christmas morning saying that if he was woken up before 7am he was going to break their face! Of course he didn't and of course no one woke him up cause we were not going find out what would happen if we did wake him up.
But seriously he was a teenager I am sure I would have done the same if I had 6 younger siblings bugging me.

Alvin is such a gentle guy you would never think that the above story would have ever taken place.

Alvin has many talents and one of those is the amazing things he can do with tools! He wife, Tye, has commissioned him to make many things in their married life. Beds that look like play houses, a life size play house in their back yard and many more things that I could probably not even list! So a tool belt was in order for his amazing talents!



My brother is also and amazing cook! I know that if I get invited over to dinner at Alvin's I am in for a dang good home cooked meal. He is most amazingly talented with dutch oven cooking. We use to have an annual dessert dutch oven cooking contest at our family reunion and most people did not want to enter because we knew we would be shamed by the talents of Alvin. One year he made a dessert that I can't remember what the name was but it was a flaky filled pastry that you would not think you could attempt in a dutch oven! Pretty sure he won that year and many others. :)



Alvin is what you would call a Man's man. Sporty, handy and into hunting. He enjoys the bow hunt the most. So compound bow cookies were in order. My hubby even went bow hunting once with Alvin.  He was thinking he was going to be Mr. Hunter, bought himself his own bow and everything. I amused him and encouraged him to go with but knowing my husband I knew it was something he would not fully embrace and alas he realized that bow hunting is pretty darn hard and that it was not his thing and the bow was eventually sold. :)



I also threw in one little cookie that says Poet. Seriously Alvin is a Poet and you wouldn't even know it. I have not heard all of his work but I hear it is good. He says that he has not done that for years. He also is very good at reciting poetry. You can picture him as being a cowboy poet, he definitely fits that bill.



Now this pictures does not show it very well but this is Hotel California. This is my memory of Alvin. The song "Hotel California" by the Eagles has always and will always remind me of my brother. Back in high school they use to vote on kids for personalities such as most talented, class clown, best strut etc etc... Alvin was voted in as the Beast in "Beauty and The Beast". Not that he was ugly or scary looking he was very tall and I think intimidating. So onto the song, it was released the year Alvin graduated from high and it was played often in our home in the lyrics they talk about a beast....

"Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device"
And in the master's chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast"

Since they called Alvin the beast and the song talked about a beast I always think of my brother when I hear that song.

Happy Birthday Alvin! I heard you had a great time having dinner with your family up in the mountains. It was probably dutch oven!























If you want to see the cookies that I did for his awesome kids you can see them here, here, here or here.

Running, Writing, Shopping = Lois

Lois is married to my brother McKay. They have four wonderful children 3 girls and 1 boy. If you want to see their cookies you can here, here, here, or here. :)

Lois is funny, smart and talented. I did not cover all her talents in cookies because there would have been too many!

Her birthday was back in the first week of August and I was able to be visiting with her family before I made her cookies so I asked them what are things that she likes to do. Her older girls said that she loves to shop. That was something I did not know. Most women do of course so I thought I would do a cookie with a happy shopping woman!



Lois has always been a healthy person and very active. She has always been a runner, I think she is the one who got my brother into running. When I lived with them at one time she even tried to get me to run. I wish it would have stuck but ummm nope!



And one of the many amazing talents of Lois is her amazing talent of writing. I am pretty sure that she graduated in Journalism. She has written for a magazine, she has been a ghost writer for doctors, she has written self help books. Her latest adventures are that of her love of the youth and young adult genre. The titles listed in the stacked book cookies are most of all the youth genre books she has written.

If you want to check out her work which I suggest you do you can see it by clicking here.  I am not a avid reader but I am right now reading her book, Cycles, and enjoying it. You can down load her books from Amazon. I think that is pretty awesome.



These next cookies are the memory I will share of Lois. I have lots of memories of Lois since I had the privilege to rent the downstairs apartment her and my bother rented out to me while I went to college.
Lois was pregnant with their second daughter and one day she came down stairs to talk to me. She was freaking out. Being pregnant can really mess you up and she was experiencing a lot of insomnia at the time. She was crying and was worried that she was going crazy and was afraid that McKay, my brother, was going to leave her. I can't remember where the lavender oil came into the picture weather she asked me about it or if I suggested it or if she said she had tried it and it was not working for her. But lavender oil reminds me of that moment. I of course cried with her because if someone is crying then I will be. :) I reassured her that she was not crazy and that my brother was not going to leave her and things would be ok.

Fast forward to many years later and after I had my first child my emotions and hormones were all messed up and I thought I was going crazy I called Lois for advice. She was wonderful and gave me tips and told me it was normal and I was going to be fine. She even wrote a book about stress and anxiety you can check it out.

Be Still: Stress & Anxiety Management for Latter-Day Saints

It was a good experience for me to see Lois go through what she did to know that Stress and Anxiety is real and there are was to manage them. 

The last love I am going to share is the love of Pinatas!! She loves to do them for birthday's Christmas, New Years or just any day of the week!  They have done so many pinatas that my brother got tired of trying to rig them up. So he decided to just put in a permanent hook in their basement ceiling. Now they just thread through the rope and they are ready to go!!



There have been many pinata cookies all over the internet and most are made to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Since Lois makes her own pinatas and makes them in all different styles and shapes I chose to do a running shoe cookie pinata for her.



It was really fun to make and it actually worked out!



Happy Birthday Lois, I hope you had a pinata on your birthday to celebrate and then went out for a run afterwards to work off the candy you ate from the pinata!

Back To School

School in my area starts back up tomorrow! So I made these cookies last week for a back to school party that we had for our youth church group.

Pencils that were inspired from Sugarbelle. I don't have a pencil cutter so I used a birthday candle cutter instead like this...

and just chopped off the flame and reshaped to a point.



If you can't see the chalkboard from the back of the class like me, it is time to get a pair of these..... or maybe lasik that is what I want! :)



And some little conversation balloons of some things that might be said this year at school.



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It's Great to be 8

Cookies for a special girl name Ella, she turned 8 and was baptized this month. I was excited make some cookies for her special day.

CTR stands for Choose The Right!



Most religions have infant baptism but the belief in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is that the age of accountability is at 8 years old. Before 8 years old children are alive in Christ. Once you turn 8 you should know the difference between right and wrong and you are then accountable for your actions and choices. When LDS members turn 8 years old they can choose to be baptized a member of the church that is why it is "Great to be 8"!






Some cute white dresses, I was inspired by some cookies I saw on the Sugar Bliss website.



And of course a E for Ella!



It was so fun to attend her baptism she was very cute and so happy with the choice she had made to be baptized!

Nautical wedding photo shoot

Back in July while I was at the Downton Abbey Garden Party that I took part in a couple of local photographers who attended the party asked me to be part of a themed shoot they had coming up.

It was a nautical theme for a wedding photo shoot. I was excited to try out and practice some techniques. I did some airbrushing with stencils, which is proving to be hard for me. More practice.

I also did some rope for the first time, using SweetAmbs tutorial.



More airbrushing and rope.



Sand dollars and star fish.



The coral cookies were my favorite.

Anchors away!!

I am super excited to see the pictures from the shoot. I am sure they will look 100% better than the ones I took! :)

My nephew is getting married next week and I get to make some more nautical themed cookies for the luncheon. Glad I got to do a little bit a practice first,