Runaway October

I’ve always been a fan of peanut but­ter cook­ies. Well, except for hav­ing to mea­sure out the peanut but­ter — too much of a mess and very impre­cise. That’s way I can’t fig­ure out why so many peo­ple turn their noses up at them. This recipe should melt even the tough­est cookie critic. Tonight, I turned Hubby into a peanut but­ter cookie lover.

This is, by far, the best Peanut But­ter cook­ies we have had here. As a mat­ter of fact, Hubby said that the rea­son he never liked this type of cookie was because it was always hard and crunchy. These are just slightly crispy on the out­side and cake-ish on the inside. The chopped choco­late gives it a var­ied kick, some­times just a hint and other times a large chunk. Truly a beau­ti­ful cookie in the end.

These will def­i­nitely be gone soon, but the recipe will stay around for good. Try them, you’ll love them. Day two of these cookie proves them to still be soft and del­i­cate. We didn’t give them enough credit and threw all the cook­ies into a large Ziploc and crush the major­ity of them. That wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve done.

Par­don the blurry pic­tures. I’m using a bor­rowed cam­era and my pho­tog­ra­phy skills are a lit­tle dusty.

Not much hap­pened today. We had a nice mel­low day with one of my new day­care kids. He got along per­fectly with us and loved the dog so much that he was tuck­ered out enough to doze in the high chair at lunch. His mom is friendly and per­son­able as well.

On a less cheer­ful note , my cam­era has offi­cially died. It started act­ing funny a few days ago and would give me “Lens Error” if I zoomed in too close. Now the lens is per­ma­nently stuck, makes a shiver-inducing grind­ing noise and refuses to work. That’s what I get for buy­ing a cam­era because it was a good deal. I’m gonna take it in when we get the money and com­pare the cost of fix­ing it to the cost of buy­ing a new one. If I could, I’d buy this beauty, I’ve been drool­ing over it for months now (And it’s on sale too!), but I wouldn’t com­plain if this fell from the sky.

Check out some of the awe­some stuff I’ve found lately:

• 5 dan­ger­ous things you should let your kids do
• The 70 best life­hacks of 2007
• The pre­cious gift of parental neglect
• Cus­tom Watermarks
• Pear Crisps with vanilla brown but­ter — CANNOT wait until pears are in sea­son again.

Din­ner was Spinach and Ricotta Cheese Ravoli with a light Parmesan/tomato sauce. Yum!

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!