Runaway October

Well, hon­estly not the greatest.

• Did I cuss? Yes. Did I give up? NO!
• Did I smile more? Dunno, no one else but the boys were home with me.
• Did I spend more time with Declan? We did some laun­dry together, but noth­ing special.
• Did I do any crafts? Nope. I did try a new eggsalad recipe though, with a few touches of my own every­one really liked it. I also signed up for the Daring Baker chal­lenges. Seems I missed out on Jan­u­ary, but hope­fully I’ll get in on February’s chal­lenge. Yay! I am really excited about that.

I also had my final 10 week visit with my won­der­ful and adorable Mid­wife. Every­thing is good, Rowan has dou­bled his birth weight and then some, etc etc.

All in all it was un unevent­ful day. Tomor­row a have a lit­tle guy com­ing to play for awhile so that he’s used to us when he starts day­care with me on Tues­day. Excit­ing!

Well, here we go!

I’ve grad­u­ated from the world of MySpace blogs and here I am. Decid­edly unhappy that I can’t have a cus­tom theme until I set up my own domain but oh well, no need to get picky over lit­tle details.

My main rea­son for start­ing a free­stand­ing blog was to help me stick to one of my New Year’s res­o­lu­tions — to do more dar­ing cook­ing adven­tures and com­plete more crafts. I’d even like to get some stuff com­pleted and sold through my Etsy shop. I’m con­tem­plat­ing chang­ing my shop name though. Such tough deci­sions.
Today break­fast was Sausage/Egg/Cheese/Potato/Onion break­fast bur­ri­tos. Noth­ing new or fancy but tried, true and deli­cious none the less. Lunch was home­made mac­a­roni from a recipe off the Car­na­tion Evap­o­rated milk can. It was alright. I was hop­ing it would be like the Out­back Mac&Cheese, but alas, no such luck. Some­day I’ll get it.

I spent a bit of my super early morn­ing nurs­ing and read­ing oth­ers res­o­lu­tions, cour­tesy of decor8. Bad idea. Now I have 6 mil­lion I would like to add to my own list and whit­tling it down is hard. So here it goes.

1…) Stop cussing, com­pletely. No “shoot”, no “Christ on a pony”, no “son of a bis­cuiteater”. The sen­ti­ment is the same, so tech­ni­cally it is swear­ing, just not using the actual word. This is going to be a super tough one.

2…) Smile more. I have one of those faces that in it’s nor­mal state can be mis­taken for a scowl, which in turn makes peo­ple think that I’m surly. Really, I’m not. Also a smile can make a per­sons day.

3…) Spend more indi­vid­ual time with Declan and treat him like an adult. This was great inspi­ra­tion for that and it truly makes sense. If we want our chil­dren to grow up as respect­ful adults, we need to model that behav­ior always. Some days I go to bed and can­not think of a time that I sat down and played with Declan, or did more than fill a sim­ple request for a glass of water. Poor lit­tle man.

4…) Cre­ate and add some items to my Etsy shop. It’s been open for almost 2 years now and I’ve never put a sin­gle item up for sale.

5…) Along with num­ber 4 goes do more craft projects — for myself and with the kids. Declan is get­ting big enough that a lit­tle struc­tured craft time would be fun for both of us. Also, send­ing home neat lit­tle crafts with my day­care kids would give me a great sense of satisfaction.

Of course there’s the manda­tory ones — Lose weight, make more money, get orga­nized, buy a house, get rid of debt.… blah blah blah.

So, that’s the long and short of it.

Good Luck on your res­o­lu­tions and have a Happy 2008!

I don’t think that I’m a good cook. Not even a decent one, really. Some­times I get the urge to cook some­thing I find… like this potato soup… and I just get this nag­ging feel­ing in the back of my mind that it’s not gonna be any good.

Mom and Matt always say what I cook is great, good or alright, but they kinda have to say that if they expect me to keep cook­ing. Declan’s taste is so fickle that he doesn’t count. I’m kinda sur­prised that they don’t cringe when I say I’m try­ing some­thing new.

Maybe it’s because I’ve had some colos­sal dis­as­ters in the kitchen or because even things that peo­ple fawn over are just “Meh” to me by the time I’m done cook­ing. And noth­ing ever looks good. I should really work on my food pre­sen­ta­tion skills.

While on the topic of cook­ing and con­fes­sions… I’m hope­lessly addicted to Cook­ing­Blogs. Don’t even get me started on Craft­Blogs. I horde them in my del.icio.us account and get some weird, sweet sat­is­fac­tion when adding them to my Google Reader. Maybe because I wish I could be tal­ented enough to be the pub­lisher of one of these awe­some blogs, but it’s highly unlikely that will ever happen.

Mmmm… we just picked up some awe­some pork tamales from Costco of all places.