Adventures In Larsonland

Adventures In Larsonland

Friday, April 29, 2011

Keri's Bday and Pre-Wedding Festivities

The long weekend (well, long because I'm pretending I don't have any schoolwork... ha!) got off to a terrific start last evening as we celebrated Keri's birthday and later began our celebratory festivities for Kristyn and Andrew's wedding!

We started off at Taste, a wine bar in Denver's Uptown neighborhood. Delicious wine (and on happy hour special til 6pm) combined with fun friends and tasty cupcakes from Cake Crumbs (a Park Hill bakery with the infamous cupcake truck!) made for a great celebration of our favorite girl!







After Taste, we headed to Uptown Tavern to meet up with Kristyn and Andrew's cocktail hour for guests (and meet up with our husbands).  We had a great time continuing the celebrations and meeting some of the soon-to-be Campbell's out of town guests.  We are all so excited for their wedding tomorrow!  But for today, off to take some pics of the mani/pedis with the bridal party and later at the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner!  It'll be a fun-filled (and busy!) few days.  Nevermind that I don't even have any idea what I'm going to wear!  Oh the joys of being a girl.  :)





Love this pic!

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Easter and some cooking...

Spring is still busy as I'm trying to wrap up a busy semester while squeezing in as much subbing as possible, and Matt's working hard being a rockstar at work winning things like "Recognize Points" (never heard of them?  Me either.  All that really matters is that they are redeemed for cool gifts!  Yay Matt!).  We've also been busy getting ready for our friends' wedding - Matt is hard at work putting together play lists, fooling around with DJ software, practicing piano tunes for the ceremony, etc... he literally is a rockstar ;)  It's going to be an amazing wedding!

This past weekend was Easter, and it was another great one here in Denver.  We spent the weekend relaxing (we went to bed at 8:30pm on Friday.  Yes, you read that correctly) and catching up with Keri/Joe at Stoney's on Saturday evening (thank you Groupon!).  We caught the 8:30am service at church (which was great, as usual) and saw some dear friends, reminding me once again how much God has blessed us here.  We are so thankful for all He's done - most of which being sacrificing His son for us - we who most definitely do not deserve it.  We enjoyed celebrating His resurrection in a church that has been so good to us with friends who we love so dearly.

After church we rushed home to clean/cook for our guests' arrival (the usual ritual is me frantically trying to cook while Matt is frantically trying to clean the first floor... it's quite the scene).  We served a nice brunch for my dad (my stepmom is out of town taking care of my grandma in Chicago), sister, and DJ and had a great time catching up and practicing some tunes.  Since my dad is doing dubdub too, I made some very WW-friendly recipes (well, experimented with is more accurate).  They turned out to be pretty tasty!  I will definitely make them again.










A delicious turkey sausage and reduced fat cheese strata:

My own weird low-fat cheesy potato concoction (would've been totally awesome had they cooked a little bit longer):



Peep pre-mircrowave.  Better than eating it, huh? :)



In other dubdub news, things are going pretty well for me - down 18 lbs in two months!  It is no easy (or fun) ride, but it is most definitely worth it.  I'm having an off day where I just feel like grabbing some candy or some chips or something... sometimes fruit and whole wheat stuff just doesn't cut it!  But thankfully dubdub allows for some cheating :)  All in all, I'm trying to just change my mindset more than anything.  No easy fixes unfortunately.  So - I've been cooking a lot more lately (poor Matt is my guinea pig!).  Some hits, some misses.  One miss lately was a soup I saw made on the Today Show.  It looked SO easy when Kathie Lee and Hoda were helping out (maybe they were tipsy...), but oh no no.  Not only was it EXPENSIVE to make (strike one, well, that would count as three strikes in and of itself), but it was not easy, and the end result was nothing to write home about.  Well, since I'm writing about it, I guess it's lack of being something to write home about actually made it something to blog about.  But I digress.  Here are a few pics of the "easy" parts.  If you come across a recipe for Orange Pepper Soup, skip it.




But in successful recipe news, I tried a recipe for Chicken Rollatini with Spinach alla Parmigiana and it turned out fabulously.  Totally a keeper. And super WW-friendly!!





Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Celebrating a Bachelorette!

This past weekend was spent celebrating the upcoming wedding of our fabulous friends Kristyn & Andrew.  The boys spent the day playing paint ball (Matt was proud of all the welts he received, and I heard that the groom got a nice one right on his forehead...), doing dinner at the Yardhouse, visiting a piano bar, and I'm sure having a blast... though of course, I have no photographic proof.  Boys.

The girls, on the other hand, do have plenty of photographic evidence of our fabulous Saturday showering Kristyn with all the love she deserves!  We spent the morning helping her with some crafts for her wedding (she is SO good at this stuff, her wedding will be simply amazing.  Seriously - I'm talking homemade programs with actual stiching on them and individual name plates made with decorative stationary, fabric flowers, and buttons... and these are just a small taste of the amazingness awaiting us all at the wedding!).  After taking a brief break to head home and freshen up, we all met up downtown to surprise Kristyn with a night at Hotel Monaco!  There were nine of us (in a room for two-ish), and we spent the evening drinking wine and champagne, eating delicious appetizers that Keri, Bri, and Rachel made, doing hair (thank you Ms. Bri), dancing (yes, lots of dancing occured right in the room... who needs a DJ and a dancefloor??), opening gifts (and yes, Kristyn tried on all of the fabulous attire for us - Andrew is in for a fabulous honeymoon... hehe), and generally just having a great time.  Sometime around 9 or 10pm (I was distracted with all of the dancing), we headed out to hit the town.  We got our dance on at about three places, rolled an ankle walking in heels (oh wait, that was just me), jumped on a firetruck (oh wait, that was Jill), grabbed some late night pizza, and headed back to the hotel.  It was a perfect night with a beautiful bride-to-be! 

Here are a few pics from the day/night:
























Perhaps my favorite pic of the night (thanks Rachel!):

 Excellent night ladies!