Nuttin' like good friends & good food...

Michelle had been planning to visit for quite some time, but finally... it happened! Daddy Dude and I had chicken that we wanted to cook with... had a craving for pasta... and searched the Food Network website for ideas. We decided to make Chicken Carbonara, a recipe by Giada De Laurentiis. It wasn't a recipe for the faint-of-heart, simply because it had lots of cream, cheese, egg yolks, and pancetta.

Now, I have to admit - I'm a very lucky girl who is married to a fabulous man. While I was cleaning the house, he started dinner all by himself. The girls helped him a little bit and voila! Our dinner was ready minutes after Michelle arrived in the pouring rain. It would have been nice to have fresh herbs (not his fault) but the dish was delicious! A real winner! (and as Marika would say, "Yummers!")

Michelle has been stressed by graduate school (as she is supposed to be - if you're not stressed, you must be doing something wrong!) so I thought she might find it relaxing to do a little bit of baking. I'm not a baker, but she LOVES it, so I made her give me a lesson cookie-cutting. No, I didn't make her do ALL of the work (that wouldn't have been nice!) but I tried to learn as much as I could from her.

Here's Michelle, demonstrating her cookie dough rolling technique ("use flour!").

And now here's everyone (but me) cookie-cutting... (it's not as easy it looks!)

I tell ya, the amount of work is (grossly) inversely proportional to the yield!

Voila! Here are some of Michelle's iced creations. Pretty, aren't they? So festive!

The only reason I had been baking sugar cookies, too, was to get a trial run of a new recipe, since I was scheduled to bring in 52 un-iced sugar cookies to Mika and Marika's classrooms on Thursday (tomorrow).

On Monday, I was told that the cookies HAD to be store-bought, that the school was enforcing their policy. *sigh* So today, I went to buy 5 dozen un-iced sugar cookies from Albertson's. Do you know what the really scary part it? The label on the bakery carton said that they should be eaten by 1/23/10! And I was worried about them being fresh enough... sheesh!

You know somebody's a really good friend when they come to visit, even though they know you have a soccer game the next day - and they agree to come. Michelle even offered to take pictures, which was really nice of her. I normally hate being photographed, but I didn't have ANY pictures of me playing soccer at all, even in high school.

I like this artsy picture of Mika with the soccer ball... we were lucky to have beautiful weather (it'd been raining the 7 days previous).

This picture was on my camera and taken from far away (so it's a little blurry), but I thought it made me look pretty cool... even though this girl kept pushing and knocking me on the ground. *sigh*

And here are the pictures from Michelle's camera. She made me look good, didn't she? Thanks, Michelle!

So it was grand to see Michelle... but sadly, we probably won't see her again for another few months, since she'll be buried in grad school stuff. Wow, am I glad to be done with all of that! =)

And last but not least... since we knew the rain was coming, I had purchased some umbrellas for the girls. Marika was rather miffed that the store didn't have any "cute" ones (as the 99-cent store usually does), so the compromise was to give them a bunch of colored Sharpies and let them decorate their own umbrellas. They enjoyed doing that, but I have to admit - I was very surprised that they only wanted to draw little things and only on the very top part of the umbrella. What's up with that???