Jon & Kate + 8

Have you seen this show? We haven’t watched much prime time TV in the last few years; I resisted getting interested in anything new. I don’t have time for that. And reality TV has never appealed to me much; reality trumps TV anytime. However, a student asked me this spring if I’d seen Jon & Kate + 8. I didn’t know what she was talking about. And then I saw the show, and now I’m hooked!

David walked in one night and asked me, "Why are you obsessed with this show?" I said, "I'm not obsessed, I'm just interested. There's nothing else on on Monday night, anyway." He started watching and then he got hooked, too.

Jon & Kate explain in the open of the show that first they had beautiful twin girls who they enjoyed so much they decided to try for one more, but instead they got 6: sextuplets: three girls and three boys. So in the episode I first saw, they were taking two 6 year olds and six 3 year olds on an airplane. Crazy! Watching that show makes our household seem so much easier. I just looked, and you can read Kate's story before the show here.

Another show we’ve recently become interested in is Ace of Cakes. The first (and only) episode we saw so far showed a chef named Duff making amazing cakes that looked like, among other things, a Delta airplane on a Godiva tarmac, a Noah’s ark cake, and my favorite, a subway car wedding cake complete with graffiti.

My mom is the cake decorator in the family, but occasionally we need to make a cake too. We don’t want to burden her. She stays busy enough doing a cake for each grandchild’s birthday every year. So for Gabriel’s birthday party with his classmates (he wanted to invite the whole class, so we did a separate thing) we made cupcakes using fondant for the first time.