Galaxy+ Constellations Cake

This was one crazy fun cake to do. Swirls of white, purple, dark and light blue buttercream, and flaked shimmery sprinkles did an excellent job of making it look like the milky way. I added some constellations, incorporating the birthday girls name and age and a few planets.

Happy weekend all! Take a moment to look up at the awesome summer sky tonight!

Corn Party

 Liam loves Nana and Pop's garden. In fact he would rather pick lima beans than ride bike. He gets so excited when he sees either of them in the garden, he goes running for his boots. The corn came in last week, so Liam finally got to experience a day of picking, husking, brushing, cooking, soaking and cutting off the corn to freeze for the winter. This was something I grew up doing every summer, so it was nice to share it with him. Although I will admit with the addition of a corn de-silker machine, it does take hours of the "fun" away. Hours I use to spend with my Grandparents brushing and listening to their childhood stories. Liam, however, diligently feed the machine with corn, when he wasn't busy trying to figure out how the thing worked. He even helped brush some of the extra hairs off, but his favorite task of the day was eating it fresh cut off the cob! Mine too!

29 weeks

 11 more weeks! Give or take, you know. Sometimes I really wish for about 11+ more weeks just to feel settled and get everything done we hope to accomplish. Then I start to ache more, toss and turn at night more and grow bigger, making me thankful for the pretty easy pregnancy thus far and realize I am right where I should be.

We did move the crib out of Liam's room and into ours this weekend. That felt like something! Liam has a big bed now and that's one thing off the the to-do list. We've had some pretty significant set backs with renovating that have felt discouraging, but we keep looking forward, because we are racing the baby clock and have come to terms that certain things will not be finished in time. But this wall behind me is pretty exciting. It's our dining room wall! It's primed, white and beautiful! We had a new window installed this week that is a little bigger than our old one and having it white, means it's gloriously light in there now. Anyone of you who has been in our dinning room knows how dark and dingy it felt with the exposed ceiling and dark torn wallpaper everywhere. So, that is pretty awesome!

For right now we spend our weeks apart while Jason works on the house and about 24 hours of the  weekend being a family again. Not ideal, but things are getting there. So for now I wait, binge watch netflix shows, eat chocolate and hang out with Liam while it's just the two of us.

Strawberry Shortcake Wedding Cake

 I recently had the pleasure of doing this simple, rustic strawberry shortcake cutting cake for the wedding of a sweet couple I know. They had a strawberry shortcake bar for their guests at the reception ( what an awesome idea) so for their cake we went with the same flavors, so they could get a taste. The cake was vanilla pound with a fresh strawberry filling and vanilla buttercream. Decorated with some burlap and fresh flowers to go with their beach themed decor. So happy for you Amanda and Tyler! Your day looked beautiful. Head over to Moody Photographers for more photos of this lovely wedding!

Before + During ... thoughts on renovating

So, as I write this we are two months into renovating our downstairs living and dinning rooms, staircase, and hallway upstairs. This is mostly a diy project and labor of love and sacrifice done by my husband.

Here's a little back story in case you know little about us and the house we bought 5 years ago. We had been apartment living for the first 3 years of our marriage. We started looking at houses and had been house shopping for over a year, with only a handful of houses being even close enough for us to consider buying. We wanted something older, something with character, something we could make our own and had a great neighborhood or surrounding land. We eventually came to walk through our house. Great, quiet neighborhood, old 1870's house, next to a rail trail, part of an old general store, historical, big front porch, yard, etc. Seemed awesome, seemed in our price range, seemed like a lot of work, but we're ambitious people, right? Well, then we got our home inspection report with over 100 pages of things that needed "fixing".  How ambitious were we???? We talked about it, talked to other people, prayed about it... and took a giant leap of faith when saying yes to it. A month later we were moving into a house that most sane people would have gutted first, renovated and then moved into.

We didn't really have that option financially, so we decided to tackle one big project, slowly at a time. But it wasn't so slowly. Upon our first year in moving in we replaced the roof on our own, heating system ( we converted to an outdoor wood boiler), and began gutting our kitchen and laundry room. We replaced 9 old windows. We cleaned out the basement, made a staircase into a closet, and cleaned out the old store stockroom. Major, major projects! Even the day we moved in we had to redo some major plumbing problems.
Every project back then and even more recently has thrown us a million curve balls, cost lots of extra money and stretched our patience to the max. ( My son and I have not been living there, only these last two months of renovations, because of all the mess )

Why do all this for a house? Great question! People asked us that before we even bought it. We have since asked ourselves that as well. The answer is, our Love for this house. We truly love it's bones,  it's location, it's ability to help us open a cafe one day ( remember it's bottom half is an old general store attached to the living space) and see it as a long term investment. This was never going to be a house we flipped, a first home, if you will. We really saw ourselves making it into our dream home, raising our family here and growing old in this house. I still see it, the vision is getting clearer and clearer with each new project we finish.

As of right now, we have about a  95% finished kitchen and laundry room of my dreams ( pictures, I promise, once they are done), our son's room which is finished, a completely redone, rewired and plumbed basement and hope to complete the above mentioned renovations in month or two. That's not even mentioning our yard and how much we've taken it back from the jungle that was once overtaking (almost) all of it.

Right now as we are in the middle of getting things done, it's hard to keep remembering some days why we are doing this, when things fall apart, people let you down, everything takes twice as long as you had planned, it's really tough. I won't sugar coat it, it makes you want to cry and scream and be the crabbiest version of yourself. Throw in being 7 months pregnant for me and changing jobs during the middle of it for my husband. It's been one big roller coaster ride this summer. One that just never wants to let us off. So I'm taking this time to reflect and be thankful for all that we have accomplished this last 5 years. To keep looking ahead to toward the progress.

  We had lived for a while with things that made life hard in this house:

- no overhead light or light switches ( one in the kitchen, dining room and hallway, that's it)
- limited outlets and none in the bathroom
- a downstairs toilet that was literally a toilet in a closet, so small you couldn't even properly shut the door.
- keeping our house at 58 degrees that first winter and still buying oil every month
- leaking roofs and showers
- the only carpet being in the bathroom
- plaster literally crumbling off our ceilings into big piles on the floor
- a ridiculously wet basement
- a live hornets nest in our walls

 ^^ and those are just some of the hardest things about the house. All of which have all been fixed now. Hallelujah! So as we plow though painting, trim and redoing our stairs we remind ourselves that it will get done, it will take longer than we thought and it will be Beautiful.

#rittenhouserenovations on Instagram for more photos

Liam's 3rd birthday

Liam's birthday was pretty laid back this year. With renovating and living at my family's house it just had to be. He requested to make and decorate his birthday cake, so that's just what we did. Sprinkles, fondant confetti and Flynn the firetruck were just what he wanted!!! We also got to go to the crayola factory with my family to help celebrate his special day. We all had a fun time making crayons, spin art,  and exploring all the fun, hands on exhibits. We had hot dogs and corn on the cob per Liam's request for dinner and enjoyed cake and presents back at our house, so that Daddy could be there too!

Family of foxes adoption cake

I was beyond thrilled when my client told me she wanted to order a cake for an adoption baby shower. The family was adopting a young boy and this little boy loved foxes. I thought it would be fun to do a fox family* to incorporate that theme and have a fun representation of their little family! 

* The fox cake toppers are handmade by me, with fondant