A Post With A Bunch Of Random Stuff

  I planned on blogging about Cirque, but I still have a bunch of pictures and video to go through, so I will talk about it in my next post.

 This post will be a bunch of random stuff that doesn't really go together, but I will make it fit together somehow! 

As you can see above, I received Briana's edited senior pictures from my photographer and I am SO happy with them. Bri looks beautiful in them. I ordered a lot of digital photos which I will share here soon. It was a long photo shoot with a number of outfit changes and I am so proud of Bri for hanging in there!

Miss B got two new pairs of glasses recently and she looks so cute in them. They make her look quite grown up...

Then she went and got a super cute haircut with bangs which makes her look even more grown up...

 

Bri just finished fall semester on Monday and now she has one semester left until graduation. It seems super surreal right now. Everyone tells me it will fly by and to buckle up and enjoy it.

Bri on her last day of school before Christmas break...

 

For the last several weeks, Briana's culinary class prepared for their "cupcake wars" competition. There were six groups of four students and each group had to come up with a theme (her team's theme was Disney's Princess and the Frog/Mardi Gras). They chose cupcake and icing flavors and had to implement them. Briana worked her tush off for several weeks on this (including practicing recipes at home in her free time). 

 

Here is a practice cupcake she made at home - it was a caramel flavored cake, caramel buttercream frosting and gooey caramel in the center - so good...

She even fried mini beignets the night before to place on top of the confetti cupcakes...

 

Here is the display she put together...

Unfortunately, two of her team members minimally participated in the challenge, and Bri ended up having to pick up their slack. But, she really wanted to do well because she wanted a good grade and she is quite competitive. And guess what? She (her team) won!! She was really happy and relieved! I am so proud of how hard she worked on this and it paid off!

 

 She won this cute bamboo salt box...

Now let me talk a little about my furry kid.

 

Mei is doing great - which is fantastic because of the scare she gave us this summer. She has been even more spoiled (if that is even possible) since all that went down. She just goes from person to person in the house getting love and attention. If one person isn't available, she just seeks out another person...

 

A few weeks ago, Doug and Briana tried out a new Korean BBQ/Revolving Sushi restaurant - WITHOUT ME! I had told them about it and one evening when I had other plans, they tried it out together. For shame!!! LOL! 

Well, I made them feel guilty about leaving me out of the yummy-ness, so they went back again and brought me along. Heh. It was so good. SO much food, but so good. It was a lot of fun grabbing sushi off the conveyor belt. And a little truck delivered the raw meat/veggies for the Korean bbq cooking. We will definitely be going back...

 

Speaking of restaurants, I realized when I was blogging about our visit to Vermont and we stopped in New Hampshire to eat some yummy mac n cheese, that Doug, Bri and I have eaten at several restaurants recommended by Casey Webb on Man v. Food. Three were random and one we visited because he recommended it.

 

We visited "Cool Cat Cafe" in Lahaina, HI because of his recommendation (which sadly burned down). We also frequented Crabby Joes in Daytona, FL, The Crab Shack in Tybee Island, GA and Mr Macs in New Hampshire...

If we end up visiting another location in the U.S. he's visited, I will check out his recommendations for a restaurant. So far, he hasn't disappointed!

And I am going to wrap up this post with something I actually noticed a few weeks ago on my blog. Back when people actually blogged about things, bloggers would add a lot of fun little widgets and lists to the sidebars of their blogs. That included all different kinds of tickers. I had a Daisypath birthday ticker set up with Briana's birthday for many, many years. In late October, I noticed that the ticker had stopped and the website that hosted the ticker closed down. The end of an era...

 Briana was 17 years, 2 months and 10 days old when it stopped.

 

 I was sad. I know people don't really blog as much anymore (China adoption blogs are pretty much extinct) and that everyone has pretty much moved over to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. This just solidified it even more.

18 years was a pretty good run for them.

(*Update - I just realized that the site closed down in 2022 not 2023! LOL! So Bri was actually 16 years, 2 months and 10 days old when it stopped. I guess I didn't notice it for a whole year. Dang.

Here is the corrected image...)

  I am going to wrap this post up now and my next post will be about Cirque. I will probably post Bri's senior photos after then and then move on to all things Christmas!