Mommy's Recipes

I like to eat. So does my family.

Naturally, I started collecting cookbooks. And cooking magazines. And recipes scribbled on 3x5 cards. And ideas printed off the internet or jotted down on scratch paper. I even have a recipe that I found tucked between the pages of one of my grandma's cookbooks. It's a newspaper clipping ... in Spanish.

By 2008, the collection took up an entire six feet of shelving. I was just a little bit overwhelmed.

So I started a blog to help keep track of our favorite recipes. It serves many purposes.

1. Our favorite recipes are preserved for posterity (or at least for as long as blogspot's server lasts) on the internet, where

2. I can access them even when I am not at home.

3. It makes it very easy to share my recipes with friends when they ask. (Hi Amy!) :)

4. And if anything ever happens to my recipe notebook (see below), I can very easily put together a new one.

The blog is handy, all right, but it wasn't helping any with the cookbook clutter. However, moving was a great excuse to purge the cookbook shelves. I recycled magazines, took some cookbooks to a used book store, tossed scraps of paper in the trash...and stuffed two folders full of recipes to try.

Once most of the boxes were unpacked and we felt kind of settled in here, I started another serious purge of the remaining recipes. I typed up and posted on the blog the ones that we've tried and liked, then went through the whole blog and printed out every recipe. I stuck those pages in a binder filled with page protectors and now my recipes are legible, organized, and protected from spills.

Unfortunately, I still have a whole box of cookbooks to unpack.

I have no idea where I'm going to put them.

Which is why they are still not unpacked.

But I can still cook my family's favorite meals, thanks to Mommy's Recipes!

(Does that sound like a cheesy infomercial, or what?!?)

A Tale of Two Shirts...The Saga Continues

I haven't decided which I prefer...all four at once or one at a time.

Can I pick neither? No? Well, I'm sure there will be another round at some point, and I'll get another chance to consider the issue.

Really, though, I'd rather not.

It started Saturday morning with Mr. Adorable. And it was the full deal. Fever, headache, and hurting tummies (complete with messes from both ends). This time around, the kids tried it one at a time, and every one of them did it differently.

It was a very long nine days.

A Tale of Two Shirts

Although we are in Seattle Seahawks country, I am not (yet) a Seahawks fan. So of course my cousin bought me a Hasselbeck jersey. (If you don't speak football or NFL, Hasselbeck is the Seahawks quarterback.)

Wonder of wonders, the Seahawks made it to the playoffs, so yesterday morning when I got dressed, I put that jersey on, because after all, we are in Seattle Seahawks country and the first game of the day was actually in Seattle.

Five minutes after I put it on, Mr. Adorable, who wasn't feeling very well, asked to be held. I picked him up and cuddled him in the middle of the kitchen. Thirty seconds later, I was not only wearing my Hasselbeck jersey, but I was also wearing the remnants of what Mr. Adorable had eaten for dinner the night before.

I threw all of our clothes in the washing machine, and after a shower and a change of clothes for the boy, I got cleaned up too and came out of the bedroom wearing a Tennessee Titans t-shirt. Mr. Adorable took one look at me and announced:

"That's a better shirt!"

I'm pretty sure he meant because it was clean.

(And just so you know, when the Seahawks won their game, I was wearing my freshly laundered Hasselbeck jersey. Because I support my local NFL team. Kind of. At least when they're not playing one of my favorite teams. And when their quarterback is doing a decent job. And for sure when they're the only game on. And absolutely when they're playing against the Saints. Who beat my beloved Colts in the Super Bowl last year. In which my beloved Colts will not be playing this year. Maybe it's time for me to put my money where my mouth is and buy a Manning jersey. So it can get thrown up all over on game day. And then I could change into my Hasselbeck jersey...)

So Here We Are

We did it! With a lot of help from our friends and family, we loaded up the 26 foot rental truck, the van, and the back of the Ford F150, and drove from Tennessee to Washington. We went the southern route to avoid snow complications, so it took us five days instead of four, but we made it!

Moving is always an adventure, but this move has been more eventful than I expected, which is why I am still unpacking boxes (and not blogging) all these weeks later. We also took a week-long break from moving in and went home to Oregon for Christmas. We brought even more furniture back home with us...and inherited a piano too!

And now we are officially living in beautiful, wet Washington. We're not quite settled in, but we're not exactly living out of boxes, either. My kitchen is functional, even if it is not quite all put together, the bedrooms and living areas are set up and mostly clutter-free, and there are only a few more boxes left to unpack.

Unfortunately I am finding that even in Washington, the laundry, dishes, and grocery shopping do not do themselves. But that's something I'm learning to live with! :)

Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay...aka AAAACCCKKKK!!!!

We were going to move ourselves, so I started packing (slowly) in September.

Then our plans changed, and we decided to have the movers do most of the work and only take some of the stuff ourselves. So I unpacked a few things, rearranged others, and quit packing.

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay.

As happens more than occasionally in this household, we then changed our minds again and decided to move ourselves. No movers.

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay.

I have two weeks to pack up the house.

AAAACCCKKKK!!!!

Almost Alexander

Remember Alexander and his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day?

My Thursday was only slightly better.

Our day started at 5:00 a.m., with excited whispering from four little voices upstairs. Only four more hours until their dentist appointments! I made them go back to bed, but none of us went back to sleep, so an hour later we officially started our day. It was gray, cloudy, and cold.

With beds made, rooms straightened up, and all four kids dressed, we started school. While they were working on their math, I started my coffee and the laundry. In hindsight, my first attempt at pouring a cup of coffee was the first warning that my day was NOT going to go as planned.

It was cold. It was clear. And it most definitely was NOT coffee.

So THEN I poured the pot of water into the coffee maker, and waited a little longer for my first cup of coffee. I should have just gone back to bed.

The girls finished their "at the table" schoolwork before we had breakfast, and after we ate, they finished their chores and got ready to go, finishing schoolwork "on the fly". We were planning to leave the house at 8:30, leaving plenty of time for the 15 minute drive to the dentist's office and our 9:00 appointment. At 8:25, I finished getting dressed and ran upstairs to do my final "leave the house ready to be shown" check.

On my way up the stairs, my skirt fell down.

I made a very quick decision to go with my back-up outfit, and ran back downstairs to change. Of course, I couldn't just throw the first outfit on the floor, because the house had to be left "show ready", so I hung everything back up neatly and scrambled into jeans and a sweater. After a hurried final, final check, we loaded up the van and pulled out of the driveway at 8:40.

Halfway down the street, I asked my eldest daughter if she had locked the front door when I asked her to..."Oh, no, Mom, I forgot!" Growling, I turned around and went back to the house. I ran through the garage and into the house to lock the front door from the inside, only to find that it was already locked. I chose NOT to scream, took a deep breath, and got back in the van.

We pulled out of the driveway at 8:45, and signed into the dentist's office at 8:58. Whew! I hate being late.

An hour and no cavities later, we piled back into the van and headed to Goodwill. I am a big believer in combining errands once we're already out of the house. I should have just gone home.

Two hours and an overflowing shopping cart later, we were all starving. We had one more stop to make, so we went through the drive-thru at Chik-Fil-A to get lunch.

With a horrible grinding, crunching noise, my window refused to roll back up. Not with the automated up and down button. Not with pure willpower. Not even with all the elbow grease my already tired arms could muster.

So with the window rolled up only a quarter of the way, and sunglasses on to keep stuff out of my eyes, we headed to our last stop. By necessity it turned from a let's-all-go-in kind of errand into mom-will-just-drop-stuff-off-outside kind of errand, and when I was finished unloading the van, I managed to muscle the window up to at least halfway closed, and then we went home.

In the driveway, I managed to push and pull and coax the window up within a few inches of being closed, then took a break to put Mr. Adorable down for his nap. While I was inside, I called my husband to confirm which repair shop I should use. He answered his phone (a small miracle, that...to actually get through to my pilot husband on the first try) and confirmed that I should take it in to the repair shop that we've used before. I called the repair shop, hoping for a Friday morning appointment.

Could I bring it in now? Well, my son just went down for a nap... They close at 5, and it's already 2, and it may take a while to get the door panel off, diagnose the problem, and get it repaired, so it's really up to me... A short nap is even worse than no nap, but it looks like it could rain again at any minute...

I got everyone ready to go again, and 10 minutes later, we were on our way to the shop. After sitting in the waiting area for an hour, the news came. It's an easy fix, but they'll have to order the $158 part, and it won't be in until Monday. Which is when we can pay the rest of the $378 total. Great.

They jimmy my window into a mostly closed position, which whistles horribly, and a tiny stream of cold air is directed straight into my eyes. At least it wasn't too dark yet for sunglasses.

Since we were already out, we stopped at Walmart to pick up a few groceries, then headed home for the second time that day. And for the second time that day, I forgot to stop at the gas station.

It could have been worse.

And for the record, I have no plans to move to Australia.

The Beginning of the End

It's finally here. The beginning of the end of my time on Facebook. Well, actually the beginning of the end passed by unnoticed (by most of you) some time ago, when I mentioned on Facebook that I was thinking about downsizing my list of friends. I was feeling just a little overwhelmed at the time, but I didn't actually do it then because I didn't want to hurt any feelings.

A few weeks ago, I read a news article that claimed that any of your Facebook friends could add you, without your knowledge or consent, to any group they wanted to, unless you changed your privacy settings so that they couldn't. I couldn't believe it, but it turns out it was true, so I changed my settings and started to think.

How well did I actually know some of my "friends", or the people looking over their shoulders? Um. So I bit the bullet and without announcing anything, deleted over half of my friends. I felt much better.

Until today.

Today I got an email (from a source that shall remain anonymous) about that little feature on Facebook that tracks and maps when and where you log in. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I changed my settings again, and finally made the decision.

I am done with Facebook.

It may take me a few days to collect and catalogue all the email addresses of people I'd actually like to stay in touch with, but once I'm done with that, I. Am. SO. Done with Facebook.

This blog is going to see a lot more action. It's happy about that. I am too.

And shoot, if you really care about what's happening in our lives, you can read all about it on this blog. It'll be just like Facebook, with status updates and a comment section, but way less complicated.

Yep, read my blog; stay updated! (I promise not to sign you up for the Underwater Basket-Weavers Association of America Group without your permission, and I won't cyber-stalk you, either. You're welcome.)