Two Weeks Later...

Hi Friends!

I am currently sitting in a creekside cabin in the beautiful mountains of Blue Ridge, GA waiting on the rest of my family to arrive. Sadly, Ben won't be able to join me until Saturday but I am already looking forward to him getting here! This is the annual Highfield family summer vacation and while we usually go to Sea Grove, we decided to change it up a bit this year. Anyway, pictures and more family fun to come but in the mean time I need to catch this blog up to speed with my life since May. It.Was.Busy.

Here are a few pictures of some of the highlights (more on births, anniversary, and freezer cooking to come):

So, as I (sort of) mentioned before, Ben and I joined our friends Josh and Shelley on a long weekend trip to Panama City. Josh and Shelley are two of my best friends from pharmacy school and Ben has grown to love them as well. We always have so much fun whenever we can find time to get together.

Here are Shelley and me showing off our jumping skills.

Here are Ben and Josh showing off their um, jumping skills...

Could this sign contain any more adjectives?

Oh, and what a pleasant surprise! We were there during Thunder Beach Week. What is Thunder Beach week? It is basically the week that anyone in the continental U.S. who owns a bike rides it down to PCB and drives it around for the entire week as loudly as possible. Awesome. This is what we found during our Wal-Mart run. Seriously, there were A LOT of bikes in PCB.

Here are some atypical Thunder Beach participants:

Here is a typical Thunder Beach participant:

Just kidding. We did, however, see a little bit of everything that weekend including a man wearing a "Cole Slaw Wrestling" tee shirt. Said tee shirt featured scantily clad cartoon women wrestling in cabage. I took a picture for the blog but decided against posting it because that picture definitely would've made this blog entry PG-13. Needles to say, Thunder Beach made our little weekend getaway very entertaining if not peaceful.

Upon our return home we found this:

A few special gifts from our friend Daniel. Seven hundred and seventy four of them...

We did what any other person would do. We played in them.

Then we put our poodle in the middle of them.

And he had no idea what to do. So he just sat there. The end.

Now that I am working the 7 on 7 off schedule, I only have every other weekend to spend with Ben. We took advantage of one of the few Sundays (ever) that we had no other obligations and took Pete and Berkley to play in the pond at Mimi and Pop's (Ben's parents).

Pete was pumped.

Berkley, not so much. Apparently he had forgotten how to swim since last summer.

Pete obsessed over his ball

While Berkley watched from a safe distance

Sometimes its hard to be a poodle.

Earlier that morning, Ben made us his special homemade doughnuts!

These things are awesome! My mom used to make these from time to time when we were little and Ben and I like to make them every now and then when company comes over. You just buy canned biscuit dough, ball it up, and drop it in the fryer.

Once the dough balls are nice and brown, let them dry (get off as much of the oil as possible for best results) and then drop them in the baggie of powdered sugar. Shake well and then serve. Yum!

We didn't let these dry enough before coating them in the confectioners sugar, thus they were a bit on the over-coated sugary side. Less is more in my opinion because the powdered sugar will kind of cake up in your mouth if you have too much on the doughnut. Also, we have tried different variations of dough shapes and have found the dough ball to work the best. Oh yeah, and you can't eat just one. Don't hate me.

I'll leave you with that but hopefully I'll be back before next month.