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Crafty Plans

What happened to summer? How are the kids back to school and the trees turning already? HOW? Oh right … it went buy in a fabulous blur of swim lessons, weekend trips, sweltering days (still here, unfortunately) and frozen yogurt. It was nice! But it was busy.

Now I am looking directly at an entire three-day weekend … a weekend where we are not traveling, a weekend where we don’t have too much planned. YAY! I am hoping to get some things sorted out around the house, like my insane “office” (aka. the dump) or the ever-present evolution of children’s clothes and toys or Tabby’s still-broken shelf.

But I’d also like to do some fun little projects too: Continue reading “Crafty Plans”

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Breakfast Burritos for the Freezer

Daddy got to pick out breakfasts this week and (surprise, surprise) he chose breakfast burritos. Technically, I’ve already posted a recipe for breakfast burritos, but we’ve changed things up a bit since we first started making these bad boys, so here’s what we do now.

Breakfast Burritos

  • 18 flour tortillas (we buy Market Pantry low-carb)
  • 18 eggs
  • 1/2 package hashbrowns
  • 2 lbs chorizo sausage (if you can find Boulder Sausage Company, you win!)
  • 1 cup or so cheese
  • salsa to serve, if desired

We realized after years of making up all the ingredients and tediously filling each burrito with each ingredient that we could do this much more efficiently if we just mixed them together in a hash. So we prepare the eggs (scrambled and mixed in with the cheese at the last mo), chorizo (browned) and hashbrowns (browned) and then mix them all together.

Once we have the hash, we line up pieces of foil on the counter and lay out the tortillas, top them with the filling and roll them up for the freezer or fridge. Don’t forget to label. The whole process took us less than an hour to make 18 burritos. That will feed Matt and the kids all week with a couple leftover for me. When you want to eat them, you can just open the burrito and nuke it for about a minute. If you want to reheat for many, place in a warmed oven right in the foil. 400 for ~30 minutes.

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Cooking Sucks?

This past week really tested my cooking mettle. Last week, I ran the dishwasher every single night, even the night we didn’t cook; even yesterday when we’d been gone most of the weekend. Seems we’ve been getting off easy with the kids in daycare. Without having to provide them with 2 of the 3 meals they require four days out of the week, my life has been a vacation. Well comparatively anyhow.

We made bigger batches of everything so we’d have enough leftovers to send with the kids to school. I prepped tons of fruit, dispatching a giant watermelon with my chef’s knife and paring pints of strawberries with my paring knife. I did a bunch of cucumbers too – the kids love those dipped in anything. I took the easy way out and bought the “baby carrots” though I am much more fond of carrot sticks. We went through a family-sized thing of hummus, just parceling it out for the kids’ lunches.

The whole thing was exhausting, even though I had Matt right by my side, marinating meat and hulling strawberries along with me. Still, I generally enjoy it and know that even if I don’t, it’s important. That’s why, I think, this article from Slate struck a real chord with me. The author postulates that we need to stop billing home-cooking as “fun” and start labeling it the chore that it is (much in the same way that we’re not supposed to “lie” to new moms and tell them that motherhood is wonderful when really it sucks the life out of you). A chore that though it can be drudgery is really really important and we should do it anyhow. I find myself, as usual, both agreeing and disagreeing with this. I love the message that it is important but I truly don’t think it has to be drudgery. Now I have a lot of friends who hate to cook and chock my predilection for it up to a personality quirk, but I don’t think I always enjoyed it as I do now. And as I thought about this, I came up with some ways to make it easier:

  1. Plan!! I cannot stress the importance of meal-planning enough. We plan for the week, shop once and have everything on hand to make our meals. This eliminates so much stress. And the rest of the packet of bacon you bought to use when making Clam Chowda can be served with your French Toast. Plus, when you plan ahead, you can use your slow cooker. That is mighty nice too.
  2. Build a repertoire of easy meals. I have a host of favorite dishes that we make all the time and we pepper in a new recipe or two almost every week to keep our interest piqued. There is no need to do a new recipe every week, but building a good repertoire of things you can make almost without thinking about is really key to ease in the kitchen.
  3. Learn to use a knife. I’m not suggesting you study at CIA, but learning how to quickly chop up an onion, mince garlic and dispatch a watermelon in good time is key for keeping things quick. I acquired my skills through lots of practice and a few You Tube videos.
  4. Cheat a bit. Though I stand by my stance on knife skills, if you have the $$ there are a number of things that can make your life easier: pre-chopped mushrooms, frozen turkey meatballs, rotisserie chicken, canned beans, frozen veggies.
  5. Don’t take no for an answer. We serve two things at our house: take it or leave it. It may not be a popular stance, but we do not cater to individual food preferences. The kids have to try everything on their plate and whatever we cook for dinner is what’s available until breakfast time the next morning. To compensate at least somewhat for this, they do get a say in the menu for the week. Ben
  6. Employ child labor. The kids are required to set the table (sometimes with hilarious results), get their own cups of water and clear their plates. Tabby is also now spraying down the table after most meals.
  7. Clean as you go. Food is a helluva lot easier to remove from dishes if it hasn’t had time to harden/oxidize, etc. for an hour or 10. First mission when I step into the kitchen is to make sure the dishwasher is empty. I load it as I cook and we wash the dishes immediately following dinner or breakfast.

I know I’m an annoying evangelist for home-cooking, but I’m OK with that. I hope this helps someone somewhere get a good meal on the table.

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Anniversary Trip

Matt and I have a fabulous history of doing very little for our anniversaries. Gifts according to the fun materials schedule? Nope. Dinners out? Err … maybe once? But this was #10 so we were determined to do something! We had to reschedule … twice … but we did finally make it on our weekend. And it was wonderful!

We headed out for Vail after dropping the kids off on Friday AM. We had lunch (sushi!) and hit the grocery store for some provisions. Then we had a lovely nap, walked around the town and did a little shopping. Then we went back to the condo and made a simple dinner and chilled out with some Netflix.

The next morning we set out for our hike! It is so rare we get to do a “real” hike these days (we’re usually greatly limited by length and terrain) and we were really excited to get out and go. We picked Nolan Lake, a reasonable hike, 6 mi round trip and punctuated by a ghost town and a couple of waterfalls.

Continue reading “Anniversary Trip”

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Thoughts on the First Week

Goody gosh it’s been a crazy week. And it’s not quite over yet.

After two successful playdates and a very successful first two days, Ben had some setbacks today. He apparently cried for a good part of the day. Seems like the problems started when Matt dropped him off. He wanted to go back to his sitter’s house. It was like, “Yea, the preschool thing was fun, for a while, but now I’m ready to go back to my routine.” He just didn’t get that the game has changed and he’s not going back. He apparently started crying sometime after morning recess and then rallied a bit for lunch and then was nearly inconsolable heading into nap. They considered calling us for a while, then he finally went to sleep and slept 90+ minutes – long for him when he’s at home, let alone with other kids. After nap he was OK for a little while and then started up again. When I arrived he was quietly crying for Mommy and Daddy while he played with toys. Enough to break your heart. He was more than glad to see me and insisted on the way home that I stay with him at preschool.

After we got home, we waited on Matt to cook dinner – normally I’d just get on with things, but Matt had selected fajitas, his choice and his domain, but he was delayed by a call that ran late. This is normally Tabby’s climbing class night, but our rec centers are thankfully on shut down for the week (you know a parent orchestrated that!) so class is cancelled (along with B’s tumbling class tomorrow night). While we waited, the kids played on their plasma cars and then on the tablets. They were too exhausted to do much else. Finally we had dinner and not a second too late. The kids went right from the dinner table to the shower and to bed. Not a peep has been heard from them in quite a while.

Matt and I were supposed to leave for our anniversary trip tomorrow evening, but with how this week has turned out (house is still a mess, laundry isn’t remotely done), plus the obstacles presented by school pickup and drop off, we decided to leave after Friday drop-off instead. It just works better. This way my parents won’t have to do pickup Thursday and drop off Friday and it won’t make a huge difference to our weekend away and the kids will get an extra night in their beds. I think they’ll like that.

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Kindergarten Girl

This morning after a quick breakfast and the ceremonial “finding of the shoes,” we set off to drop Miss Tabby off for her first day of kindergarten. It was a nice feeling with lots of folks walking along the same sidewalks and paths towards our neighborhood elementary school and when we saw the pileup of cars, we were extra grateful to be within walking distance.

Tabby went right into her classroom and hung up her backpack and before any time at all she was happily ensconced in a coloring project. She waved us off without a glance back. The day must have gone well from there on because she greeted us with smiles and tales of her day. Best of all, she can’t wait to go back tomorrow.

The evening was a little dicey. She was clearly exhausted from her long day but not very inclined to rest. I think we will insist on the rest tomorrow.

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Ben Starts Preschool

This morning, with nary a glance backward, my baby headed off to preschool. He stashed his nap mat in his cubby, hung his backpack up haphazardly and went to sit on the rug with a bunch of other little boys who were assembling a giant puzzle. He asked to join and was soon working with them to put it all together.

Matt and I filled out some paperwork and deposited his lunch in the proper bins in the kitchen and took a few photos. Finally as we were ready to leave, he showed a bit of hesitancy, giving us extra hugs and kisses. Then it was waves and smiles and he was back to the classroom with all of its interesting things.

When I picked him up, he was happily playing outside. From all accounts he’d had a good day. Activities participated in, nap taken (50  min), food eaten. He was glad to see me and Tabby and we got big big hugs and rave reviews of his day away. By the time we got home it was clear he was exhausted. EXHAUSTED. He was acting out big time, getting into loads of trouble and couldn’t handle anything. Within seconds of us putting him to bed (early) he was out.

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Firefly 5K

When we signed up for the Firefly 5K a few months ago, I sort of forgot it was our anniversary. Not only that, our 10th anniversary. But it seemed like a fun thing to do with some friends and when the neurons finally fired and we connected the two, we weren’t upset. It sounded like a fun thing to do with a bunch of friends. We’re not really super INTO anniversaries (ignore that sentence when I post about our pending anniversary trip, hopefully next week) anyhow.

The Firefly 5K is basically just a 5K in the dark. They issue blinking reflective bands along with your standard issue race t’shirt and at the end you get a glow-in-the-dark bracelet (livestrong style).

Of course there were plenty of folks who blinged themselves out big-time. Costumes, LEDs, and lots and lots of glowsticks. They were our decor of choice as well.

Of course for us it was mainly an opportunity to run a fun race with some fun friends. It was a good group and we would have loved to have gone on to party a bit more with the group, but as we hadn’t eaten all day, we opted to head to Sam’s No. 3 to split a burger and by the time we were done and it was time to meet up with the group, Matt, who had worked until way too late every night last week, was done and we headed home. It was a perfect night and a wonderful 10th anniversary.

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A Day on the Job

 

So yesterday I got to go on a couple of jobsite visits. We visited two sites on CSU’s campus where we’re busily renovating a library and an arena. It’s cool stuff. The arena is very much a work in progress still, but the library is almost done and it is really neat.

It has many cool touches, like a water bottle filler. Continue reading “A Day on the Job”

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Red Dawn

Obscured Sun from Smoke by phidauex

For the past two days I have been absolutely dogging it at the gym. I was OK with strength work, but anything cardio (i.e. running) is killing me. I used my inhaler a couple times each session, very odd for me, as the asthma thing has almost always before hit me very sporadically with long breaks in between problem spells. I was mystified and somewhat nervous about this new development. But then on the way into work as I was looking at our bright red sun and the grey haze covering our city, it occurred to me: we are being inundated with smoke from the many wildfires raging in the western part of the country! And all of this smoke is irritating my lungs! I feel better knowing what’s wrong rather than just thinking I am losing my edge.

Matt’s little brother has been in town the past few days. He was originally staying just a couple of days for a friends wedding but he ended up extending his ticket a few more days so he could hang with the kiddos. We haven’t seen him (and most of our Nashville family) since February and it’s been nice to catch up. The kids have been conning him into reading TONS of bedtime stories and he’s been a fun playmate for them.

We’ve been doing better about eating at home. On Monday, we had pizza paninis which are just tortillas folded in half and filled with spaghetti sauce, cheese and pizza toppings and then smashed on the Foreman grill for a while. They have all the same nutritional info as a tortilla pizza, but they’re quicker and somehow I really like the crispy grilled aspect to them. Last night we had Tabby’s favorite, salmon bowls. We nearly had a crisis recently when we discovered that after Sunflower Markets merged with Sprouts, they no longer carried our brand of nori. Happily, Amazon had it, and we now have a CASE of the stuff winging its way to our house. That’ll be fun to store. Tonight we’re doing shrimp with pesto. Think I will also roast some zucchini and toss it with some parmesan. And tomorrow night is leftover quiche. The kids never get tired of quiche.

Our weekend is shaping up  nicely. Matt’s dad and stepmom get in late Thursday and will spend the weekend with us. Friday is our 10th (!!) anniversary and we are going to go to the zoo (after dentist appointments) and in the evening, we are doing the Firefly Run with a bunch of friends. Saturday is in the air, but I’ve promised Ben some chocolate chip pancakes, and in the evening we are going out to dinner at Matt’s dad’s favorite restaurant, The Fort. It is truly a uniquely Colorado experience. Sunday will have to be a work day, getting everything ready for the start of the work week and the SCHOOL YEAR.