Today I fell in love at first site. In love with this beautiful series of paintings focusing on women doing various domestic chores. I love all the details and especially the gorgeous vintage-style clothes that somehow seem to drip with glamor even though she’s sweeping?! It’s the kind of modest-yet-sexy clothes you only dream of finding nowadays. Although I have also recently stumbled upon this fun new line of dresses, but I digress.

In honor of domestication, I want to share my favorite (and of course easy!) pie recipe with you all.

Cloud-9 Pie

For the Crust:

1 package graham crackers
1/4 cup margarine
1/2 cup sugar

Crush up the graham crackers in a food processor then add the other ingredients. Mix well and then press into pie pan. Bake at 375 degrees for 7 minutes. Or take the easy way out (I usually do!) and buy a pre-made graham cracker crust.

For the Filling:

1/2 pint whipping cream
8oz package cream cheese, softened
1/3 cup sugar
1 cup sour cream
1-1/2 teaspoons natural vanilla

Whip the cream until it starts to form soft peaks. Add the remaining ingredients while continuing to mix. Mix well then fill into pie crust. Generally there is enough filling to make two flat-top pies or one fuller pie.

Refrigerate for a couple hours until set. Serve with blueberry, cherry or raspberry topping. Even a drizzle of chocolate syrup or just enjoy it with nothing else at all. Whichever way, this light, fluffy and heavenly pie will be gone in minutes. Enjoy!

I thought I was all caught up with our photos, but then I realized that I’d missed the photos from the month of April — all 1000+ of them. So I started going through them, deleting/editing, and I got all but our trip to California/Disneyland done. (yay!)

There was some super fun things, and since these are so far past I’m not sure if they’d show in the sidebar so here’s a little recap:

Piper’s Birthday & Easter Egg Dying. Piper’s birthday was the day before Easter this year so we combined her party with our egg dying festivities. Luckily she’s really into Hannah Montana so we did a farmer theme that tied right in with the egg dying. We had a great time!

Easter 2010. Easter was so much fun this year. It was also General Conference Sunday so we had Monkey Bread too! We also had two egg hunts — one in the morning and then a big hunt in the afternoon with the cousins.

Karaoke Dance Party. After Dana’s Surprise Baby Shower we had a sort of impromptu Karaoke Party. It was a blast! I think these pics of the girls all dressed up are my favorite in a while!

We hosted a “Movie Night Under the Stars” and showed one of my old favorites Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn & Cary Grant. We used a projector to show the movie on our makeshift screen — a white sheet held onto the block wall with bricks.

Our lovely concession stand stocked with lots of old-fashioned, movie theater favorites.

We even had authentic paper straws thanks to my friend Aimee!

I think Junior Mints were the crowd favorite.

Our big screen.

The party favors — stamps. If you’ve seen the movie this will make perfect sense. If not, you really should see it. By far my favorite Hepburn film.

The girls and I got out the hot glue gun and our craft box and made clippies today…

I woke up one morning to the girls joyfully squealing about a butterfly Daddy had caught. Heath brought it into our bedroom and it fluttered around our bed. Piper was brave enough to hold it although Attalie was sure to keep her distance. It was a really fun experience, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a butterfly quite so up close and personal. I’m glad I was able to capture this.

I love it when Atty got out the magnifying glass.

I threw a “Freshly Squeezed” Mother’s Day party for the ladies that go to Church with me. It turned out beautifully!

lots of yummy treats!

the party favors:

Piper decided to “help” me make pizza, and while my back was turned she made quite a mess out of herself and the countertop.

I just realized that I’d forgotten to make “public” all the photos from the baby shower I threw for Dana. It was a transportation them and a total surprise to Dana — we got her good! She thought we were having a small belated birthday party for Ryan. My friend Aimee and I went all out and it turned out fabulous. You’ve gotta check out all the pics here, and then these are a few of my favorites:

I borrowed the “Bump” sign from a local company.

Traffic cone luminaries.

We had road signs everywhere…

…yes, even in the bathroom!

Traffic Light Flair buttons were the fun party favors!

Lots of yummy food.

We certainly surprised her!

Our family was on the local ABC news this morning talking about the launch of our new magazine Playbook. You can read the article online here and below is the video.

Piper’s birthday was Saturday, which being the day before Easter is normally when we would color eggs. Luckily Pippy is borderline obsessed with the Hannah Montana movie, so I used it as a theme to work the eggs into her birthday festivities — along with BBQ sandwiches, karaoke and “Pink Pie” (more on that later).

Last month I was flipping through my sister’s copy of Martha Stewart Living. (I don’t subscribe because it is filled with too much perfection that would just bring me guilt, yet I still can’t help looking through a copy whenever I come across one.) So I was at my sister’s house looking at her Martha mag, and was loving this idea of putting vinyl onto the eggs before dying to make detailed shapes. Of course our eggs didn’t turn out nearly as perfect as Martha’s, but it is still one of the best egg-dying techniques I’ve come across in a while. Here are some of our creations:

Heath with his “All The World’s an Egg.”

Me with my egg after becoming the Easter morning Egg-Fight Champion!