Forget the dishes, we are having Sunday dinner!

I love to cook. Unfortunately, when I cook, I cook! That means I need lots of counter space and lots of dishes. Washing dishes in the bathroom: not fun! So I have really been cooking easy meals, casseroles, tacos, hamburgers. Things that take very few dishes to prepare. I bought a ham before Easter when they were on sale and I wanted to try and cook it in the dutch oven. So I finally just decided I was tired of casseroles and easy meals and I wanted to make dinner, a real sit down dinner. So we did. I had to wash three loads of dishes, but it was well worth it! We made spicy honey ham, cheesy potatoes, dutch oven monkey bread, and we had cantaloupe. That's like the kids most favorite fruit ever. It was awesome and such a nice change of pace. Everyone really liked the new ham recipe; that is going in the dutch oven cookbook for sure!
(I got the recipe for the ham and the monkey bread from Mark's Black Pot Blog, it is all about dutch ovening. I liked the recipes so well I put it in my blog list)


How beautiful and golden is the monkey bread! Excellent heat control by my cooking partner.


You'd have thought they hadn't eaten in a week!




Bobby ate three helping of ham.

Kitchen Remodel Part 3: What do you on Friday night?

We paint and grout! Okay when I say "we" I mean Mac does it while I sit on the stairs and get things for him and keep him company. So the final paint choice, envelope please: Dutch Boy; Map Paper! I find that I am very drawn to cool colors and all the paint samples I had taped up on the walls were very gray. So I picked a color that was close to a cool one I loved but in a warm family tones. It's ok I don't love it. Too yellow for my not yellow personality. However 78% of it is going to be covered. The dark brown grout we picked out is perfect. I'm really happy with how the floor turned out.


Our cabinets finally arrived. (Only a miny hurray) We had two cabinets that were the wrong size so installing them is on hold. But we did open them and I love love love the color we picked! Mac says they look nice. I think he had decided he wanted to go with a little bit darker wood and they are even lighter than the display piece at the store. I told him, its oak they will darken as they age. Of course we probably won't live here when they get darker. Closer every weekend! Next step: call counter top guy. With our luck he won't be able to come until July.

Growing so Fast!

The kids got their spring portraits back from school. They were good pictures. I just can't believe how fast all three of them are growing up. Eliza just shot up like a weed this last year. She is finally wearing size six! She jumped from a size 4t to six like overnight. I just can't get over how smart Taylor is getting. The other day I was telling her no to something and I said Because you can't read. She laughed and said, "Uh, yeah I can mom!" Sometimes I wonder where the time goes and other times it feels like I have been a mom forever. Bobby is finally finally sleeping in his own bed all night at least 4 days a week. He still wakes up some night around 3 or 4 and comes to get in bed with me.

My life saving meal

Since I am cooking in what I have now named my formal front kitchen, I have not been cooking a lot of large meals. Mac misses having the leftovers to take for lunch. The one thing that has saved my sanity and my budget is quesadillas. The kids love quesadillas, chicken, cheese or cinnamon. It doesn't matter. With or without beans? they like it both ways. Best of all, they actually eat them! They also love fresh fruit so we have eaten a lot of fruit. Just slice it up and its good to go. No dishes required.

Another Easter Sunday

We had Easter with Mac's family the Sunday after Easter. It was fun to get to extend the holiday. After having an Easter egg hunt on Easter Bobby was even more excited to have another one. We got together, ate a late lunch, and then turned the kids loose.

Bobby LOVES having another boy around to hang out with.

We had to make sure Bobby actually put his eggs in his bag. He kept dropping them back on the ground

This time around Bobby had a little bit of practice under his belt and found the eggs a lot quicker.

Eliza loved the fun shaped eggs Granny bought. She told me she really wanted the butterfly one.



The two little ones found all their eggs first. Of course it helps they had a head start and the older kids were told they couldn't pick up any eggs lying in the grass until the younger kids had found their eggs.

Taylor is the worst egg hunter ever! She will walk past eggs and not see them or she will just stand in the middle of the yard and look for them. As usual she was the last to find all of her eggs.


We had to take a picture of all the kids together. I took about 15 shots and this was the best one.

After we had opened all the eggs, the adults were sitting around the kitchen table just gabbing and laughing and we noticed Bobby had disappeared. He was in the back yard all by himself just pretending away. Meet the Iron Chef of the sand box!

Taste of Home Cooking Show

The Taste of Home Cooking show has been coming to Idaho Falls for like the last five years running and I have never made it. The first year they came Mac's mom tried to get tickets but they were sold out. Now that it has become an annual event it's easier to get in. When I saw the ad in the paper I knew I wanted to go and I knew just who i wanted to go with me. So I called up my neighbor who likes to try new things (like making gooseberry pies) and she said yes. I bought my tickets to go like three weeks in advance, but two days before the show Mac's mom calls and asks if I want to go because they had won four tickets to it. So we all finally got to go at the same time. Of course, none of us won a door prize! Go figure. That's okay it was still a lot of fun.


Honestly, a lot of the fun was the company. I had a great time sitting there gabbing with my neighbor and Mac's sister. Almost all of the food our instructor/cook made looked good and smelt awesome. (I still think that the breakfast casserole with cinnamon apples, bread, sausage and cheese just seemed wrong.) That was one of the prizes, they gave away all the food she cooked on pretty serving platters. Alas, no luck we just had to leave drooling. If I go again I will make sure to eat a really good dinner before I go!

Coppelia Pictures

At the girls dance recital Hymas Photography took pictures during the performance. Here is the link to access the gallery.
http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/11711205_vakJm#826444813_4yz8L
Taylor's class is on pages 3 -7. Picture number cb132 is an awesome one of Taylor. She is the girl in the middle of the line that seems to be flying with her partner. Eliza's class' pictures are on pages 16 & 17. Picture cb295 is the cutest shot of her! For those of you who can't be there at least you can see them in action!
So occasionally when I click on the link the pictures are on a different page. Just in case this happens: Taylor's class is wearing pink outfits and they have tambourines. Eliza's class is wearing brown and white outfits and they are holding parasols.

Hoppy Easter!

Easter Sunday was very nice. To be able to listen to the prophets voice was uplifting. We didn't go to church but the girls still wanted to wear their new dresses. So they wore their dresses all day. The kids got their baskets in the morning and then proceeded to eat candy ALL DAY LONG!



We went to Mac's parents for a while in the afternoon. The girls wanted to show them their dresses. I didn't make the girls dresses this year. I found such cute ones at the end of last year for a great deal. They've been in my closet since last March!

Then we went out to my parents for dinner and an Easter egg hunt. I truly enjoy living around family so that we can celebrate holidays with them. Having family around just seems to make the holidays so much nicer. I took a vegetable tray and a raspberry pretzel desert to dinner. This is my vegetable dip tray I took more than just these vegetables.

She finally found her last egg!

Bobby was an eagle eye at finding easter eggs.

Grandpa helped Bobby break open all his Easter goodies.


Dad teasing Eliza for not being strong enough to open an egg

Kitchen Remodel Part 2: Things never go as planned!

So the work marches on! We wanted to grout the tiles last weekend but we had a friend who used to do tile work professionally strongly suggest we add a product called Anti-Hydro to our grout. But we couldn't find it. When we finally did, the store had to order it from the warehouse in Salt Lake so we won't get it until Wednesday. Since the floor won't be done until next weekend Mac plugged in my new stove so I would at least have a cooking surface. Here is my new stove! We are trying to do the kitchen economically and this one was not a flat top but it has all digital oven controls, self-cleaning, and it was on sale! The first thing I baked in it was a pretzel crust for my Easter dessert. The first thing I cooked on the stove-top was eggs and hash-browns for Easter breakfast! It works awesome and heats up so fast. I burnt the bottom of the hash-browns because I am used to cooking on my 25 year old stove and I needed to turn the heat way down!



Because we couldn't work on the tiles, Mac pulled the old sheet rock down, filled all the holes that let in terrible drafts and then put new sheet rock up. That all went pretty smoothly and needed to be done anyway. Then he started to tape and mud the wall and noticed that some of the old texture was flaking off. He got his scraper and tried to get all the lose stuff off. However, the lose stuff kept going and going and going. Eventually the entire wall was scraped down and the sheet rock above the window was completely rotten so that had to be pulled out and replaced. Now he has the entire wall to mud, sand, and re-texture. Next step: pick a paint color!

Spring? Break

The kids had spring break last week. The term spring I use very loosely! It was cold and it snowed/rained almost every day of the week. I had told the kids we could go out to lunch and that we could go feed the ducks at the river. Wednesday while I was at work the kids colored Easter eggs at Mac's moms. When Mac went to pick them up Bobby proudly showed him his green eggs he had colored and then told Mac, "We put them in water and they came out colored but you can't drink the water or you will die!" He had heard Granny say that she had put dye in the water and thought that meant the water would kill you.
Well I kept holding out hoping that we might get one nice hour out of the whole week. If we did get one I missed it. So on Thursday despite the on and off snow I took the kids. We had decided to go to Arctic Circle because I had coupons but more importantly because they have a play set the kids love. However, on Tuesday the Arctic Circle with the play set had a fire and closed for repairs. So we went to the one on the other side of town which doesn't have a play set. The kids were disappointed but they probably ate better. Then we braved the cold and fed the ducks.




Later that day we decided to do some indoor activities and made string eggs as a craft. We made chicks out of pompoms to put in the eggs they turned out cute.