Five for Friday

Hello! I am linking up with Della Devoted, Coffee With Caitlin, and Cup of Tea for another edition of Five for Friday!

1. We got to Facetime with my brother earlier this week. It is always nice to see him! Even though he has pretty much the worst wifi ever. I think third world countries have better wifi than him. 

2. Have you seen the new Star Wars trailer? I am pretty excited about it! My sister and I are SO excited for the new movie! And the trailer has Han Solo and Chewie. Um it's awesome. 

3. And continuing on the Star Wars theme, I came across this video and thought it was pretty hilarious. It's Darth Vader and four storm troopers dancing to Can't Touch This. It's pretty funny!

4. We tried a new church this past weekend and I think we might have finally found the church for us! We have had a really hard time finding a church here and we are hoping this one will be okay! We have only been to one service, so hopefully I won't jinx anything by saying something!

5. I apparently have a thing for baker's twine. I didn't realize I had such a collection of it! I just picked up the blue and green twine in the middle from Target yesterday. I use the twine a lot, so it isn't a waste. I just think it looks neat! 

Do you collect any random things?

Hope you have a great weekend! 

À bientôt!

A few of my favorite travel pictures

Alternate blog title
A delightful collection of pictures I already have on my computer and thought I would share with you today.

I am in the midst of working on some photography assignments so I didn't have as much time to work on this post as I had hoped. I was all proud of myself for finally getting the assignment done and was under the impression I only had three photos to submit for a project. Only to log onto the website to find out I need six total images.

(source)

So. Anyways, back to today's post. I thought I would share some of my favorite travel pictures I have taken over the years.

 Space needle - Seattle, WA

 Seattle, WA

 Las Vegas, Nevada

 Las Vegas, Nevada

 Sedona, Arizona

Sedona, Arizona

Florida Keys, Florida

St. Louis, Missouri

 Mt. Rainier - Washington

 Multnomah falls - Oregon

 Golden gate bridge - San Francisco, California

Golden gate bridge - San Francisco, California

I hope you have a great rest of your week! 

Poppy seed muffin recipe

I have always really liked poppy seed muffins. I have tried SO many recipes over the years and have never really found one I liked, so I kind of threw some ingredients together, did some revising, and came up with this recipe!

The ingredients. With the exception of the yogurt, which I forgot to include in the picture!

The wet ingredients. Looks so delicious. (Totally being sarcastic here.)

 Add dry ingredients to the wet and combine.

Poured into muffin tins.

All baked and ready to eat!

1 stick (8 tablespoons) melted butter

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp. almond extract*

2 1/2 cups flour

2 1/2 tsp. baking powder

3/4 tsp. baking soda

3 tablespoons poppy seeds

8 oz. vanilla yogurt*

1/2 cup milk

*You can also use lemon extract and lemon yogurt if you want lemon poppy seed muffins. Vanilla extract or plain yogurt is fine too!

1. Preheat oven to 375°F. Then line muffin tins with muffin liners. I get 18 muffins.

2. Melt butter, then let it cool to about room temperature. Then add the sugar and stir together.

3. Add the eggs and extract and combine.

4. In a separate mixing bowl whisk together: flour, baking soda, baking powder, and poppy seeds. Add dry ingredients to wet as well as the yogurt and milk. Stir just until combined. It's okay if it's a little lumpy, as long as there are no huge chunks of anything, you're fine. You do not want to over-mix muffins. Over-mixing will put too much air into the batter and create a dry muffin. 

5. Spoon batter into the muffin tins and bake at 375°F for 10 minutes, then after 10 minutes, lower the temperature to 350°F and bake for another 7-10 minutes. 

Starting out at a higher temperature will create the nice domed tops on the muffins. (This also works well for cupcakes!)

Enjoy!

Five for Friday

Hello! I am linking up with Della Devoted, Coffee With Caitlin, and Cup of Tea for another edition of Five for Friday!

1. I picked up these flowers a over a week ago and am glad to see they are still looking good! I learned a trick a few years ago to get fresh flowers to last longer. Just add a couple of tablespoons of sugar to the water and your cut flowers will last longer! I really like having flowers in the house, so the longer I can get them to last, the better!

2. I ordered this dress from Modcloth and I am really hoping it fits! I have had bad luck with dresses from them lately, so I am really hoping I won't have to return this one.

3. My sister came home from Tae Kwon Do on Monday...with a brown belt! She has worked really hard to get here and the only belt left now is black!

4. Ace of Cakes is on Netflix. I don't know how long it's been on there, but I am glad it's on there! So I have been watching that the last couple of days.

5. My friend posted this on Instagram earlier this week and I thought it was too funny not to share! 

Hope you have a great weekend! 
À bientôt!

Shopping finds

This past weekend my mom, sister, and I did some shopping. It had been a while since we had gone, and we had a few things we needed to find for our upcoming trip to Europe.

I was really hoping to find a casual black dress, but unfortunately I wasn't able to find one. Heavy sigh. Old Navy had some black dresses, but they were really lightweight and definitely not something you would want to wear while walking around a potentially windy city!

I did find three tops though!

From L to R

Old Navy / H&M / Kohls

I also found a bag to use for when we go to Europe. 

Target

I find purses kind of annoying so I was really having a hard time figuring out what kind of a bag to use. I have two camera bags, but one is too big and the other is too small. It is really hard to find a bag that has a cross body strap and isn't huge but will fit and iPad and a DSLR as well as other carry-on items. Hopefully this one will work!

Have you found any fun things while out shopping lately? 

Easter recap

Hello everyone! How was your weekend? 

Saturday night my sister Hannah and I decorated our Easter eggs. I had wanted to do them earlier in the day, but we were gone most of the day and then I spent all afternoon cooking, so we didn't get around to dying eggs until 9 that night. Oh well! 

Yes, that egg on the bottom right is a Dalek egg. Hannah has been wanting to make a Dalek egg for quite a while. EGGSTERMINATE!!!

Hannah likes to do a character egg. She has done a sumo wrestler and Wario in the past. They're always pretty funny! 

Anyways, the next morning Hannah and I got Easter baskets.

 Yes, we had kind of a European candy theme this year! My basket is on the left and Hannah's is on the right.

We had breakfast and then headed off to church for the Easter service. Church was pretty good and we had to stop by the store on the way home because I forgot the cheese for my spinach salad. 

It rained off and on all day so we decided to try going for a walk once it stopped raining. It ended up raining a little bit again once we started out on our walk, but it was nothing us Washingtonians couldn't handle ;)

Once we were back home, I started dinner. We didn't have a big dinner, just chicken, spinach salad, deviled eggs, and a baguette. It was all very good if I do say so myself!

For dessert I made a chocolate pie. Which was also very good!

My mom and I ended the evening by watching some tv. 

Overall, we had a nice, quiet Easter.

Did you have a nice Easter? Did you do anything fun or exciting? 

Five for Friday

Hello! How was your week? I am linking up with Della Devoted, Coffee With Caitlin, and Cup of Tea.

1. We pretty much finalized everything on my family's upcoming trip to Europe! We are SO excited! (I talked a little about that here.) I am so grateful to be able to go on this trip with my family!

2. We got tickets to go to the Harry Potter studio tour. My sister could hardly contain her excitement. It is going to be SO much fun! And I saw that they now have the Hogwarts Express, which will be really neat to see!

3. I got an Instax camera for Christmas this past year and I took it out and took a couple pictures with it earlier this week. The image quality isn't the greatest, but they are fun photos to display or scrapbook with.

4. I thought this video from The Tonight Show was pretty funny. My sister and I got a good laugh out of it! Madame Tussauds wax museum made five wax figures of Jimmy Fallon, so they all sing "Barbara Ann" together. Just watch it :)

5. My mom, sister, and I are going shopping today. We all have a few clothing items to find for our trip. Hopefully we will be able to find what we need!

Hope you have a great weekend!
À bientôt!

Exciting news!

We are going to Europe! We are SO excited! This is our first trip to Europe and it is something we have been dreaming about for a very long time! My mom and I have been spending a lot of time planning everything and making all the arrangements (which is a very time consuming process!) but I think we have it all figured out now! We will be in London, then traveling all over France, then on to Heidelberg and Frankfurt in Germany.

As most of you know, my brother has been in France going to school for the past year and we figured this would be a great time for the rest of the family to go over there and visit. 

We have so much fun stuff planned and I am really looking forward to taking tons of pictures and exploring! I am also planning on sharing about traveling as a family of five since there really isn't a lot of info out there on families traveling to Europe! It seems as though everyone travels as a single person/couple, families with little kids, or people with unlimited budgets. 

So look forward to a lot of travel posts soon!