our first breakfast

This morning Dan and I served our first official breakfast.  Jane and Ryan were pretty tired from traveling and said they would sleep in until 10 or 11, but I (of course) woke up at 7:30 (ugh) and couldn't fall back to sleep.  So, I went downtown and bought a fresh loaf of bread from the grocery store and stopped by a yard sale on my way.

I bought some good stuff! I paid $10 for it all, but only because all of the proceeds went to the American Cancer Society.  I'm sure it would have cost way less at a real yard sale.

I bought this lamp base, with which I am in love.  It's kinda hobnail, kinda milk glass.  I probably should've been alive in the 30s, huh? The shade is from a shabby chic lamp I bought from Target before my freshman year of college.  I have had it by my bed ever since, but about two weeks ago, I knocked it off the counter and broke the base.  The shade's a bit big for this base, but I love them both so much that I really don't care. 

I also got this little white vase.  Oddly enough, it is a perfect miniature of the vase we got from Dan's grandmother, which, even more oddly, perfectly matches a vase we found here that belonged to my grandmother.

Either this is a super crazy/awesome coincidence or somebody made about a gazillion of these vases at some point.  Also, that is the tan color that I painted the dining room.  It actually looks pretty good here and is growing on me by the minute.

And then there's this little guy.  I love him too.  Is it weird to love things from yard sales so much? In case you can't tell, it's a little blue fish.  It's probably only two inches tall.  When I cut that rose to put in it, I was convinced the stem would go all the way down to his tail.  Ha, just a teensy bit off on that calculation.  Of course, once I also told Dan that I thought Fenway Park seated approximately 5,000 fans per game.  Actual capacity? 39,928.  Maybe I'm not the person you should come to for size estimations. (update: Dan says the fish vase is actually about 4 to 5 inches tall. hmph.) And I bought a gold frame that is hinged and holds two pictures, but I don't have a picture of it.

Where are of those gorgeous roses from, you might ask? Well, let me show you:

Pretty good, huh? Too bad I can't actually take credit for any of this.  Oh well.  They're still beautiful and they make me happy and I like that there's so many of them that I don't feel in the least bit guilty about cutting a few to put in vases in the house.

So, when I got back to the house, I still had lots of time before people would wake up, so I decided to make strawberry muffins.  I had strawberries in the fridge from a farm stand on the side of the road and wanted to use them up.  I didn't have quite enough for what the recipe called for, so I added some blueberries too. 

There they are in the oven next to the cinnamon rolls we promised Jane and Ryan.

They're rising! Usually I find (and by usually, I mean the one other time I've made muffins) that homemade muffins fall flat and don't look in the tiniest bit like the store-bought ones.  So, I looked it up online and read two pieces of advice. The first is to fill the tins almost to the top, instead of half way. If you run out of batter for the muffin holes, just fill the extras with water so they don't burn in the oven. The second is to preheat the oven to 425 and then, when you put the muffins in, drop the temperature to 350 or 375 or whatever the recipe calls for.

Here they are out of the oven.  They still didn't rise quite as much as the muffins you see in the store, but they were better than the last batch, which I didn't even post because of how bad it looked.

And the main course: those super delicious Gordon Ramsay eggs. With bacon this time.  Yum. Jane and Ryan were really good sports about eating the ridiculous amounts of food we put in front of them.  Thanks, guys!