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Back in the Saddle Again

I’m getting us back on track with cooking! I swear it! We’d been doing so well, but the past couple of weeks we fell off the wagon big time. Life got … busy. Real busy! We have had parties galore, events of all kind, and plenty of little in-between projects. Meals this week have mostly been OUT. We never do that! Except this week and sort of last.

So … this weekend and next week we’re getting reacquainted with the kitchen. YAY. Here’s what I’m planning to cook up:

Thursday: Lime grilled chicken with mango quinoa salad

Friday: Pizza Two Ways; that would be with buffalo chicken and bleu cheese for us and something boring (bacon and olives, probably) for the kids.

Sunday: I think we have people coming over, so I will probably make Pork Ragu

Monday: quiche! – we need to use up the innards a bunch of our Egg-Bot Creations, so I will make a couple of quiches, probably one with crust (since I have one in the fridge) and one without. Fillings will be whatever I’ve got hanging around the fridge/freezer/pantry.

Tuesday: Mediterranean Meatball Pockets

Wednesday: something from Indian Slow Cooker, TBD

Thursday: creamy chicken taquitos or maybe this chicken tamale casserole since it’s Cinco de Mayo!!!

All right … now that it’s planned. I just have to EXECUTE.

 

Speaking of which, I have a brand new training plan I’m working on. I have a half marathon in August that I”m training for and I decided I wanted to do it up right. I’m not particularly invested in this specific race (though I did enjoy it last year), but it’s about the right time frame to execute a good training plan. I am using the FIRST method, made popular by the Runner’s World Book, Run Less, Run Faster. The “less” thing is all a matter of perspective it turns out since it’s more running than I’m used to. You do a speed, temp and long run each week and it’s supposed to improve your performance. To which I will say … we’ll see. I had to start in wk 2 because I miscalculated the start date (oops) but my first workout went OK, so I will keep at it. Actually, even if it didn’t go OK, I’d probably keep at it.

I made up a spread sheet for my training that calculates all the minutea associated with a training plan like this: speed, pace, km vs. miles, etc. It was a pain in the butt, but now I have it in all nicely digitized and I can change it based on my speed improvements by just changing my 10K pace. If you are interested, you can check it out: FIRST Training for Half Marathon.

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Tabby and Me

The last couple of days it’s just been Tabby and me. We’ve had two evening social engagements and since they have been more with my friends than Matt’s and Ben hasn’t been feeling well, Tabby has been my date. Or maybe I was her date last night to her friends’ birthday party.Whatever.

I love both of my kids equally dearly and I love them together. Their interactions are one of the best things about being a parent. But it is also a very nice treat to get to hang out with my kids one-on-one. I get to hear their thoughts and only their thoughts, without interference from others. I get to focus all my attention on just one kid instead of having it split between two. It is a very relaxing change of pace.

So after two days of hanging out with my sweet FOUR year old. I realized a few things.

1. She remembers EVERYTHING. She repeated back to me all the details of our planned visit to NYC pretty much verbatim. She correctly identified three types of birds and four different flowers. She remembered the correct names (not just the silly lyric names) for the songs on her Beethoven’s wig CD.

2. She is super sociable. Both parties put her in close proximity with people she did not know very well if at all. With very little prodding if any she was able to politely ask the hosts for things she needed (a cup of lemonade, directions to the bathroom). And at the first party she gamely played photographer, taking my mom’s point and shoot around and capturing loads of images of people.

Granted these are things I knew on many levels but spending these evenings with her have crystallized these parts of her being for me. I really really enjoy hanging out with her. She is fun and funny. She is smart and silly. She’s pretty dang wonderful. I’m so proud.

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Two Cute

It’s official! My baby is TWO. How did this happen so quickly?? I blinked and here we are. Well enough waxing nostalgic, here’s the skinny on Ben’s birthday.

For one of only TWO TIMES likely to occur in his lifetime, Ben’s birthday fell on Easter. The next time this is supposed to happen isn’t until 2095 on his 86th birthday. He woke up early and got to check out his Easter basket. He was happy with the books, but THRILLED with the teeny trains. He also got to open a new book from Grandma Dorothy, Goodnight Train.

After that, we packed everyone off to my parents’ house. The kids got to hang out with Grammy and Papa while Matt and Kelly and I went for a run. I have run on both of Ben’s birthdays, but last year it was my first half marathon. Weird. This time it was just 6 miles at a nice clip.

After showers, etc. we went to Gigi’s house to meet up with the entire extended family. Breakfast was delayed and so while he waited, Ben got to open a gift from my parents and Kelly, a play set for cars with tons of ramps. He was something of a fan.

[flickr float=”right” size=”small”]5653693660[/flickr]After breakfast, we did our annual Easter Egg hunt. It took Ben a few to get the hang of things, then he was an avid egg-hunter within minutes. He even took to grabbing pine cones (one of his favorite projectiles) off the ground and stashing them in his basket. It was a super great game for him. But his favorite thing of all were the cascarones my Aunt Peggy always makes. They are blown out eggs filled with confetti and Ben was THRILLED to see them being smashed on others’ heads or on his own, cheering and reveling in the confetti downpour.

Because clearly we hadn’t had enough sweets, following the egg hunt (and some other misc. time elapsing activities), we brought out the cupcakes. I made angel food decked out with cool whip and strawberries since berries are on of Ben’s favorite foods. They turned out well if a little more done on the bottom than normal.

After some more playing, we headed for home. Ben got to hang around and watch a new DVD, eat some more berries, and play with Sissy before taking a Skype call with his grandparents in Nashville. After his evening bottle of milk he went to sleep pretty easily … a happy, darling little guy.

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Egg Bot – it’s Eggcellent!

Alright, that’s the end of my egg puns, swear. Sorry ’bout that.

So Tuesday night Matt finally cracked open his Egg Bot and assembled it. According to him it was a pretty easy, straight-forward assembly. No soldering or any of that variety of monkey business, just some screws here and there. You hook it up to your computer and install some software (drivers for the bot itself and then Inkscape, a relatively nice open-sourced vector graphics program for the data to send to the egg-bot). All told, he got it up and drawing in under 90 minutes.

The drawing process is pretty simple. You make vector drawings, each color separated into layers. You then tell the bot to print this layer or that layer. You can swap out pens and get your different colors. The one thing that makes it complicated is that you can’t just “fill” an image. You have to hatch it (draw lots of little lines) for fill, but the bot comes with some good extensions for Inkscape that greatly simplify the process.

The single real “issue” we ran into was with one of the motors. The pen kept falling off the end of the egg and he motor didn’t seem to have the power to bring it back up. It was also making jerky movements and made the first drawings look pretty sloppy. Some online searching netted the answer … we had to increase the voltage to the step motor by adjusting a potentiometer (all that sounds hard, but it just requires a small turn of a screw-driver). Instantly, we had smooth strong drawing.

So instead of cleaning the house last night, we played with the Egg Bot. We made our own designs, simple lines, etc. and downloaded a couple from Thingaverse. It was pretty magical to see the bot do its thing. Tabby was particularly fascinated by it … Ben mostly tried to grab at it.

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Of course it is not without its drawbacks. Matt is claiming that this is his “gateway robot.” Now he wants to build a Maker Bot, a 3-D printer. Pricetag $2K. Yikes.

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I’m NOT Tired!

It’s been such a rough week. I think between the past two weekends with the race and the party, I have absolutely worn myself down. By 8 PM every night, once the kids were tucked away, I’ve wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed. And mostly that’s what I’ve done.

But today I actually managed to get my butt out of bed, close to when the alarm said I should. I actually dragged myself to the gym AND worked out before work (first time this week). Last night I actually managed to get to the store so we have something available to eat besides leftover party food (cheese, crackers, fruit, M&Ms, cupcakes).

I am going to have more energy today.

I am going to make my family a delicious dinner (panko crusted salmon).

I am going to enjoy hanging with my kiddos and reading them stories.

I am going to help Tabby finish writing thank-you notes.

I am going to finish cleaning the house.

I am going to check out the Egg Bot that Matt built last night.

I am going to stay up until at least 9!!!

Pinky promise.

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Dialing it Down

[flickr float=”left” size=”small”]5629091105[/flickr] [flickr float=”right” size=”small”]5629085829[/flickr]

 

 

 

 

 

It has been a big huge couple of weeks. What with the race  and the party, we have been going at a rate even a bit nuts for us. So contrary to my take no prisoners general attitude about life, I’ve been letting things go a little bit. There is laundry all over the place in various states of completion. I have not yet made our weekly grocery run, so we had nachos for dinner last night  (with fruit – we’re not savages, after all). I did finally get fed up and force the kids to clean the playroom last night when there was so much junk on the floor I couldn’t even open the door. But overall, it’s going to be a much more chill existence than normal this week. There are but three little items on our to-do list:

  1. get the house back in order
  2. construct the eggbot (Easter’s almost here!!)
  3. host a dinner party (on Friday)

Totally doable, right???

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Big Birthday Bash Recap

Saturday was THE DAY – the kid’s big birthday bash. It was incredibly fun, terribly exhausting and also probably way too expensive, but as I have promised myself, we do not (WILL NOT) do this every year. And it was a great time and overall SO WORTH IT.

I will do a recap Tonia style here …

The Good

  • The AMAZING HELP Our family was so instrumental in getting all of this done you can’t even imagine. My mom hung with me all day Friday buying food and then prepping it and my sister joined in on that action as well and BOTH helped out at the party (my mom hardly left the kitchen). My dad did balloon and ice pickup and helped with the whole party. Our best friends, M&H and their boys were there for the long haul and helped out hugely from setup to cleanup. And my aunt and uncle did tons in the way of help during and afterward. We seriously could not have pulled it off without everyone’s help!
  • The Photo Booth The photo booth Matt and I built was awesome. EVERYONE loved it. It performed just as it should and everyone got some really great souvenirs from the party. It was a huge hit and folks want to rent it from us! Ha! Here’s the jist of it: we built a surround out of standard 1×1 boards for frame and thin sanded plywood in between – including a bench which my mom and sister upholstered and a shelf on the opposite side. We put a laptop running Sparkbooth inside and a printer printing the results outside. We used a couple of gooseneck lamps for light and had a curtain (stolen from Ben’s room) on the outside to keep out interference. We went through some ink and paper, but otherwise, it ran so smoothly and we barely did anything.
  • Costumes As I mentioned before, the theme was pirates and mermaids. Both kids had costumes that I just loved. Tabby’s came from a local costume shop and was around $35 (she wanted it badly and she has promised she’ll want it for Halloween too). Ben’s came from Amazon and cost me under $7. Hehe. I really loved it and he wore it all day after a pack of fruit snack bribery. Quite a few of the kids came in costume too which was SO MUCH FUN.
  • The WeatherIt was a beautiful day and so the porch on the back of the space was much utilized and loved. My brilliant sister even took the kids outside to eat their cupcakes (probably singlehandedly saving our cleaning deposit). We also got to do the treasure hunt game out there.
  • Treasure Hunt We filled a small (3′) kiddie pool with sand and hid stuff in there (pirate spy glasses, pirate finger puppets, candy, pirate girl bracelets) and then lined up the kids and let them hunt for 3 things each. We probably could have done five.
  • The Food (type) We did KID food for the party: cheese & crackers, fruit, M&Ms, Pirate Booty, hummus & veggie and of course … Pigs in a Blanket. We cut hotdogs into fourths and made 8 trays of mini pigs-in-a-blanket. They went over quite well.
  • The Venue I loved using the HOA common space. It was close and so easy to run back and grab candles (which we forgot/lost) and it was large (including the kitchen) and felt homey and comfortable. It was also really priced well at $40/hour.
  • Presents We made the decision to request no presents for a variety of reasons, but besides the obvious,  the number of people we wanted to invite would have made presents fill up the playroom and also we invited a lot of common friends but then a bunch of friends from Tabby’s school who are solely hers and I didn’t want them in the position of feeling like they needed to bring Ben a gift as well to keep things fair. Mostly, people honored our request and those that didn’t were very low key and respectful about it. The kids received mostly cards and a few gift cards (they LOVED $5 giftcards to the ice cream shop in our neighborhood) and one of Tabby’s classmates brought her an especially pretty balloon with his card. They also got just a few toys, plenty to make them feel like they had a birthday.

The Bad

  • Food (quantity) I am LOUSY at guessing food quantities for something like this and Matt is worse. ;)We had WAY too much except for the pigs-in-a-blanket. We will be noshing on leftover party food all week.
  • The Cucpakes I made a chocolate version of the strawberry milk cupcakes and they were good, just not GREAT in the same way the strawberry milk cupcakes were. But everyone liked them well enough. I also didn’t have to decorate them … just stuck some little plastic guys on top.
  • Crafts I had quite a few crafty things for the kids to do … picture frames ($2.50/doz @ Oriental Trading), necklaces, art station, etc. and they hardly got used. Some kids towards the end when they’d expended most of their energy did do some, but overall it was kind of wasted. As my mom pointed out though, if the weather had been crappy it might have been a different story.
  • Decorations This is just not my thing. I would always rather spend $$ on food and fun than decorations that don’t last. The room is also so large that any decorations kind of get lost in it. We did balloons and a huge pirate flag over the fireplace. They were fun but didn’t really change the character of the room.

The Ugly

  • Photos I was terrible about photos!! I didn’t even get a picture of the completed photo booth (I can’t believe it!!). I did OK with a few snippets here and there, but overall awful. I’m still quite mad at myself about this.
  • Cost I will not go into what everything cost, but I know we spent a bundle. It could have been way worse, but it was bad enough. Still, we can afford it and I wouldn’t change it. It was worth it.

Yesterday was 90% about relaxing and we definitely needed it. Tabby’s birthday is officially over. Ben will be our Easter Birthday Boy this weekend. Then, I think, we really are done.

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New Kicks

When I got up this morning, our lovely rain from last night had turned to snow.

But NOTHING was going to stop me from wearing these babies on my casual Thursday.

NOTHING.

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Working For the Weekend

Every week is BUSY. I just accept it. But this week … we have to build a photo booth.

 

Yes, you read that right. We are building a photo booth. So after workouts, work, commuting, swim lessons, dinner, errands, cleaning up the kitchen, folding laundry and all the other mundane day-to-day crap, Matt has been (and I will soon be too) heading down to the shop to work on the photo booth. Clearly, we’re insane.

This is one of a few projects and to-do list items for the big birthday bash (or The BBB) this weekend. Last night we ran errands (with four kids in tow) to Toys R Us, Babies R US, Michaels and Wal-Mart. I also still need to figure out food and drink. I predict a large, expensive trip to Costco. And someone’s got to make like 5 dozen cupcakes.

Clearly. We’re insane.

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The Garden Starts

For the past few years, we’ve done our garden from seedlings purchased at the nursery. There’s nothing really wrong with doing so – we get a reasonable variety of heirlooms from them – but we have always wanted to try growing our own. This year we finally made it happen. I ordered seeds from Seed Savers at the beginning of March. They came and at first I despaired because getting them started seemed like such an easy yet complicated task. There were so many rules and colors of light and recommendations. But I happened upon a great article that really broke it down for me and I made a trip to Lowes and (all by myself) got everything we needed to do the indoor starts. Matt helpfully followed up with another trip for shelving.

Continue reading “The Garden Starts”