Sunday, February 14, 2010

A Woman's Heart.

The quickest way to a woman's heart is to love what she loves. When I see my hubby loving our babies, I melt. I am completely in love with our girls and they have captured my heart in a way that leaves no escape. So when the man that I chose to love, loves the babies that I can't help but love, I fall in love with him again.



Erin has started doing chores. As of now she loves to help, and I give her a dime when she does. When I do laundry I ask her to sort our her and Izzy's clothes. She thinks that she needs to "dive" into the pile to find them. I think she believes that she can dive in like she sees in cartoons, but at least she has fun.


Then she pretends that she is a baby and that is her crib. Such a great helper. . .now get off the clothes!! If she wasn't so cute...

Erin showing me her funny faces. Her nose is so chapped and raw from her recent cold. This one started out with croup at 1:30 am. She was having such a hard time breathing that Scott started up the car while I called the 24 hour nurse line. Thankfully, taking her outside in the cold air helped her breathe better. She slept with us the rest of the night just in case.


And as sisters should, Erin shared her cold with Izzy. So here Izzy is with her red, chapped nose. We got to skip the croup part with her! However, she did not sleep much when she was just starting this cold. She did better for a couple of nights sleeping with me, which allowed both of us to get some sleep.
Even with the snot, she is still so happy. No teeth yet, but hopefully that one that has been giving her so much trouble comes through soon!
Here is our fireplace.
There is no fire in it.
There are ashes and. . .
A huge mountain of snot-filled tissues.
Good for kindling I suppose, but gross to think about how much mucus is in there!

Monday, February 01, 2010

What I do everyday.



I feed the children, and clean up the kitchen. Rinse and repeat three times a day. My hands are chapped from having my hands in water so many times a day. Hands in the water to get the washcloth ready to wipe faces and hands, wipe up the table, wipe up counters, and doing dishes that don't wash well in the dishwasher. When we get to remodel the kitchen I am seriously thinking about installing two dishwashers. One for plates and cups and such. The other for pans and heavy duty stuff.



I don't buy many other cereals besides Kix and Cheerios. I am not able to get past how much sugar is in everything else! I do buy some over-sugared cereal once in awhile and let Erin have it in moderation. However, I find that when the supa-sugar cereal is had for breakfast she gets hungry again fairly quickly which leads to more food prep, feeding, and cleaning up.

I do find it odd that there is a generic for nearly EVERY cereal out there, but not Kix. Hmmmm....very interesting.

This is my stress relief. Not just bread necessarily, but baking and cooking. These beautiful loaves of bread were so so very good, that I was sorry that I have a freezer of bread from the bread store. These are incredibly easy and cheap to make. They taste so much better than store bought bread. Also, they are full of wheat flour and flax seed. Flax seed is a great source of Omega 3's! I used a recipe from another blog that I read. the Frugal Girl http://www.thefrugalgirl.com/2009/03/wednesday-baking-whole-wheat-bread/

I adjusted the recipe to make three loaves because I have three bread pans. =)



I also like to embark on culinary adventures. Trying things that I haven't attempted before. Since I have mastered the White Wine Cream Sauce (which gave me some trouble for a long time) I have turned my focus to the baking world. The baking world seems to be a lot more temperamental than the cooking world.

Pictured above is my first Lemon Meringue Pie from scratch. I was surprised how very few ingredients are used in this pie! Basically the only thing I needed to buy was lemons! The biggest trouble I had was pre-baking the pie crust. Having never done it before I took the pie weights out too soon and when it went back into the oven, it slumped....a lot. It still tasted good and the rest of the pie hid my slouchy crust.


Some of my trees! I love having oodles and oodles of trees that I own. Our first house had 2, which is a good amount when you live in town. It just boggles my mind to think that I can't count how many trees I have here. I absolutely LOVE it and feel so very fortunate and lucky to have what we have at 30 years old.

We had a week where there was such dense fog at night that this is what our landscape looked like in the morning. A frosty wonderland....gorgeous!