Easter Bunny Cupcakes

Greg and I were craving our favorite cupcakes this past week, so I decided to mix two special memories this Easter and create "Easter Bunny Cupcakes." One memory is making yellow cake cupcakes with whipped chocolate icing with Mandi (my favorite college roommate). We would devour them together! The other memory is the traditional Easter Bunny Cake Mom would let Carrie and me help make each year (big version of below). We always had a blast icing and decorating it with Easter candy.

In retrospect, I should have chosen another icing color for the bowties, but I really just wanted the chocolate icing. And after I bought the M&Ms, I remembered that we used to use the pastel ones to make the bunny look more traditionally "Eastery" but I forgot that as well. Oh well. Here they are.

Naked bunnies!

All dressed up for Easter Sunday:

7 days to go!

We fly out next Saturday, and I can hardly believe it's so near! In fact, four years ago Tuesday, I was making the trek from Istanbul to Detroit (for Robin's wedding). I never would have imagined it would take FOUR YEARS to get back there! I can't lie; I do wish I were moving to Istanbul to stay this time and not just visiting for a little over a week.

Greg and I are taking six friends with us. We're hopefully going to show them our beloved city in such a way that they'll never want to leave as well! Actually, I know that the first moment they actually sit down with a Turk and chat, they'll fall in love with these people. They are just that amazingly friendly.

We're going to visit a lot of places, see a lot of things, likely experience some culture shock anew, hopefully meet some people. Part of the trip will even entail getting involved with a community center in a poor neighborhood. We're all excited to be about something deeper than just a tourist trip. We hope to leave a huge chunk of our hearts in that place, everywhere we walk, every person with whom we speak...

If you'd like to know more, send me an email, and I'll add you to our email update list - kimber.king@gmail.com.

Istanbul, Turkey - here we come!

Snow, flowers, cats, and more snow

I've had some issues uploading pictures to blogger lately. So this will be a random assortment of pictures from the last couple of months.

First, the flowers Greg surprised me with on Valentine's Day and my birthday. (They're the flowers from our wedding.) He's wonderful.

The next two pictures are from when we cat-sat at the beginning of January. The two cats went crazy together, chasing and tackling and playing hide-and-seek. It was quite entertaining. This is how I found them later one afternoon, both completely zonked out in the same room.

The following pictures are from Martin Luther King Day back in January. My friend Karen and I decided to enjoy the snow that had fallen the night before. We made a snowman, (It was practically impossible with the powdery snow, but we did it and had the ONLY snowman in Boston Common!) enjoyed Starbucks, made snow angels on a dock on the Charles River, and generally had a ton of fun in the massive piles of snow.







Lastly, and this was SUCH a huge treat, my Baylor friend Aubrea was in town for a couple days performing. She's an AMAZINGLY GIFTED performance violinist. We've been hoping she would get a chance to visit Boston, and the time finally came! Monday morning (in the midst of a crazy winter storm) we braved the weather and saw the sights in Boston (a whirlwind four hour tour concluding with lunch at Legal Seafood...mmmm). It was crazy but so much fun! I don't know how I made it out with only the following two pictures!

New Music to Enjoy

The last two months, I've had a lot of trouble downloading images to blogger. I think I've tried to post some pictures four or five times without success. How frustrating! Well, I have a post written, but it's centered around the pictures, so I will try from my work computer tomorrow over lunch and HOPEFULLY have success. :)

Until then, I want to pass on the word about an amazing guitarist we saw in concert last night - Trace Bundy. Quite impressive. Here's one of his youtube videos:



Of course, it's quite sweet that one of my best friends, Aubrea, plays with him often. And she's in Boston! Yea! More on that tomorrow. (Those of you who came to our wedding will recognize Aubrea!)

My favorite birthday card

I checked mail today (we check about once a week...when we're good). I had some sweet birthday cards which made my heart smile. This one was by far my favorite though:
The note on the plastic bag says this:

"WE CARE

"Dear Postal Customer:

"We sincerely regret the damage to your mail during handling by the Postal Service. We hope this incident did not inconvenience you. We realize that your mail is important to you and that you have every right to expect it to be delivered in good condition.

"Although every effort is made to prevent damage to the mail, occasionally this will occur because of the great volume handled and the rapid processing machine which must be employed to assure the most expeditious distribution possible.

"We hope you understand. We assure you that we are constantly striving to improve our processing methods in order that even a rare occurrence may be eliminated.

"Please accept our apologies.

"Sincerely,

"Your Plant Manager
Processing & Distribution"

I admit that I would have preferred Tom Hanks to have shown up at my door with a mangled Wilson, but what can you expect? Every one (and thing) makes mistakes. I do wish a real person had signed their name or something though. And I can't help but wonder, "Why did it have to be my birthday card from my parents instead of one of those stupid pieces of spam mail?!" Oh well!

PS -- Mom & Dad, thanks for the sweet card & note (what I could read, that is). About that check and giftcard...

Happy Birthday, Beloved!

When I asked Greg how we wanted to celebrate his birthday this year, he said he wanted a little dessert party. He really just wanted to have everyone sing him that "little diddy" on his birthday. So here he is in his moment.

Being Greg, posing for the camera before blowing out the candles

You probably cannot tell from the picture below, but our friends Nick and Deborah came wearing stickers of Greg with Happy Birthday written on them! They won "best dressed" award that night!

My beloved, I celebrate your life every day, but you know how much I love having a special day just to celebrate you! Happy Birthday (now over two weeks late on our blog)!

If only dreams could come true...

Last Thursday night, I had an amazing dream. In my dream, I was packing for a week-long vacation to Florida! It was wonderful... I remember trying to decide whether I should wear flip-flops to the airport so that I'd have them when I got off the plane in balmy Florida. (If only I could really wear flip-flops in Boston right now!) And I remember dreaming that I had arrived and was having a hard-time finding the place I was staying. But I didn't care because IT WAS WARM! This Boston winter is so brutal!

The view I wish I had right now...