Giant S'mores Cookies

Brandon had seen an idea on Pinterest (it cracks me up that he likes to look around on Pinterest) to make s'mores inside of a chocolate chip cookie.  I wasn't so sure it would work and tried to talk him into making it more like cookie bars, but he insisted so I looked it up and found another blog that had an idea close to what he had in his mind.

We had already made some chocolate chip cookie dough earlier that day (I use the Ghiradelli semi-sweet chips since they're all natural, so we use the recipe on the bag for those), so there was plenty left.  Timothy thought it was the coolest thing ever, I'm not so sure the girls cared what was happening, but they did fuss and cry a lot when they saw the ingredients and found out they had to wait to eat a cookie till it was all baked and done.

So we started with a ball of cookie dough and flattened it out on the cookie sheet.  Next we added a smaller version of a s'more (like a quarter of a large graham cracker, 3 small squares of chocolate, and half a marshmellow)

Then we added another scoop of cookie dough on top and molded it all around the s'more

We put them in the oven and I think they baked for 15-20 minutes, they turned out quite large!

Everyone seemed to love them (as you can tell from the chocolate on the faces)!!

Summer Time

Woohoo!  VBS is over!!  Not that I didn't enjoy it or look forward to it or anything, but it's a relief to have it over and done with and we had so much help, it all turned out great!!

I meant to blog about a new park that we went to last month.  We had a nice Saturday with not too much to do and I had read about a park about half an hour away that sounded pretty neat so we loaded up the kids and the backpack and lunches and swim suits and headed out to Enumclaw.

The park was really nice, they had three different playgrounds and one was for young children, so Caroline could actually climb up and slide down by herself, she loved that!  They had a big open field to run around in and a lot of nice picnic and grilling areas.  The best part for the kids was the splash pool.  It wasn't really large, but it was hot outside and the water was FREEZING cold, so it was nice to cool off.  I'm pretty sure it was glacier water, it was so cold! 

The best part for me was the view!  It was so high up in the mountains and so beautiful, it made me want to sell our house and buy a farm in the mountains!  And, as a side note, I seriously want to do that, to just scrap it all and buy a farmhouse and have cows and chickens and grow all our own food...I would love to do that!  But anyway, they had a short hiking trail but it was steep, so Brandon wore Caroline in the backpack and I made sure to hold Charlotte's hand and we braved the trek down to the view site for the dam and back up again.  Timothy spent the hike looking for Bigfoot and Charlotte looked for fairy houses.  Caroline almost fell asleep.

It was such a fun place, I wish it was a little closer, but not too bad for a day trip.  The kids loved hiking, so we're hoping to do more of it while the weather is nice.  I've been checking out other places to go, I'm excited to take them!  Anyway, hopefully now that my crazy month is over, I can do more normal blogging and updating on here!