The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here's an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 390 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 7 trips to carry that many people.
So my family has been egg free for awhile. For over a year now at least. It hasn’t been that hard at home, but when we’re out at restaurants, it’s a challenge. We’re not egg free by choice, it’s out of necessity for a family member. And now we’re retaking the next step and trying gluten free. Again, not by choice but necessity.
My little guy has had irregular bowel movements pretty much his whole life. It hasn’t been a huge issue, doesn’t seem to cause him much pain etc, but if I want any chance of getting him potty trained. Something has to change. Without going into too much detail, his #2 isn’t solid like a normal toddlers. If anyone that doesn’t know his situation changes him, they might think he was sick. 😦 He doesn’t seem to be bothered, but I am.
We’re not going to jump in with both feet on both things. We’re going to do the gluten free for at least a week if we see a difference in Josh. The vegan thing might be most of the time, but we still do love our meat. It’s just going vegan is the easiest option to avoid eggs along with eating healthy.
We’ve found a lot of recipe’s on vegweb.com and have made a few of them already with great success. Earlier this week I made a dish called Tomato, Basil and Pine Nut Penne that was really good. Stay tuned on here for that recipe and review later.
If anyone has any tips or recipe’s they would like to offer, please do! It’ll be a challenge but I think we’re ready.
I think more visits to PCC and Whole Foods are in our very near future.
If you know me, I’m not a huge football fan. I did go to every home game in my 4 years of high school though. I had to because I was in the marching band… but that’s besides the point. I went. I don’t fully understand all parts of the game, but I don’t really care. It’s still fun to watch the game and cheer. Last season, after only recently having moved here, my husband and were given the chance to go to the Monday night game between the Seahawks and the Packers. We had seats on the visitors side so we wore our Packer gear and hurried home after the loss. So having been at the stadium for a game, I knew how loud it must have been there and the excitement that was there last night.
So while we’re not super fans, I think we’ve lived here long enough, shown our WA pride enough to be able to cheer on the “home”team at the Super Bowl. Yay!!!!
I just witnessed my first true Seattle snowfall. And while I understand the necessity to close a lot of things due to the hills, coming from WI, it still seems crazy that 3 inches can shut this city down!
My husband and I are members of the Seattle Sailing Club, and today I was able to go on a day cruise as part of their women’s program. It was a great opportunity to go out and learn with/from fellow women! And.. it was a gorgeous day on an equally gorgeous boat.
We set sail from Shilshole Marina about 10:45am and headed for a pizza place across the sound. We didn’t actually get to do much sailing due to the wind and time constraints, but that’s just fine with me. On our way back, we learned how to make a monkey’s fist. It’s a knot that is named for it’s similarity in looks to a monkey’s bunched fist/paw. It is tied at the end of a rope to serve as a weight, making it easier to throw, and also as an ornamental knot.
They are pretty easy to make using just your hands. We made ours just around our fingers, but in most instructions that you can find online, they suggest putting something such as a marble, ping pong ball, or something else inside to help with the shape and weight. We used parachute rope and my color happened to be red. We came up with a few idea’s as to what to do with this knot… I have some plans for this knot so stay tuned to see what I came up with!
So, it’s been a busy week around here! With two kids, there is never a dull moment. This week kept with that trend. I didn’t have a new recipe to share because we had company over and I made the Easy Baked Ziti! Monday the 11th was a school holiday, so we went to the zoo! My brilliant self decided to walk, thinking that 1.6 miles wasn’t really that far. Well, I hadn’t pushed both kids in the stroller that far in a while. By the time I got home… I was tired. Tired me = no home cooked meal. Tuesday, was a preschool meeting at 6, Wednesday was a late night for the husband, Thursday too, and then me feeling sick on Friday resulted in pizza. Don’t even ask about the weekend! Sailing with friends and a birthday party = eating out for 3 meals!
Definitely time to get back in the kitchen. For both my stomach and checking accounts health.
I’m trying a new one today. In fact… it’s still cooking! I got this from one of my favorite sites. Get Crocked.
Ingredients are simple and minus the lemonade concentrate, I had them all on hand.
Please visit the website for complete directions. I can tell you though, that it is very simple. This one does require a little work before you can just turn on the crock pot and go though. I planned this for yesterday, but didn’t have the chicken defrosted, and by the time I would have gotten that done, and the chicken browned, it would have come out too late to eat.
I simply took 4 chicken breasts from the freezer and set them in the fridge overnight so they would be nice and defrosted for when I got around to making it today. Dropping my oldest off at preschool at 12:45 means that I could come home and start the prep and have 4 hours be perfect timing for dinner.
Here it is so far…
I plan to serve it over some rice. Maybe adding a little cilantro as a garnish. Tune in tomorrow for the review.
This week is/has been rough. We had visitors last week. One of the set of grandparents made the trek over here from WI for a week of play and visits to both the zoo and the toy store. It was a great visit, but thanks to all of that, I am done with the zoo, costumes and have a new set of toys to try and organize/not step on.
This is our typical Monday routine. Wednesday is pretty similar, except that I get to drop off Josh in the morning instead of staying there.
Monday: 9:15 – drop off Brooke at a friends house to be watched while I work at the preschool with Josh.
11:30 – finish working at school and race back to friends house to pick up Brooke.
11:45-12:30 – lunch
12:30 – drive back to preschool to drop Brooke off for her turn.
1:00 – 3:30 – ME TIME! Well, as me time as it can get with a 2 yr old in the house.
3:30-4:15 – changes, but usually playtime at the preschool playground.
4:30 – 6ish – try to both keep kids satisfied and cook dinner.
Now that I’ve finished (almost successfully) a minimalist challenge where you were to rid your home of a total of 496 items by the end of October, we have some more room in our garage. I plan to do an overhaul of that space as well as the closet that is located in the kids playroom. And as soon as I get my Amazon delivery of both ink and paper; how did I manage to run out of both at the same time? I will be printing and laminating more labels in an effort to make both more usable spaces. So it’s during this time that I will be researching some new dinner ideas, playing with Josh, writing blog posts or organizing/cleaning my house.
Yesterday was Sunday, and while I didn’t try out a new recipe, it was still one that I would like to share. There are some improvements to be made. So check back in tomorrow for that. Hint: It involves chicken
This isn’t exactly a new recipe, but I do not think we started making it until we lived in Washington, so it counts. 🙂
Last night was my daughters preschool Halloween social. They didn’t have their normal afternoon class in order for us to have this family pot luck in the evening. Sign up began last week. Since I am always running late in dropping her off for school, I got stuck with a main dish. I didn’t mind though, because due to trying to make more actual meals, I had some in mind. At first I was going to make a dish called Easy Baked Ziti. Sounds easy right since it has the word Easy? Well, it is easy, but takes 55 minutes to cook. The grandparents are in town and we had been out sailing during the day (and timing never works out when family are involved) so we didn’t have time to make that. Going through my recipe’s… I remembered this one. And since I have a ton of chicken, I thought it would be perfect.
This recipe is easy for us now since we usually have all of the ingredients on hand, minus the scallions. I know most people may not have all of the vinegars or sauces on hand, but they are pretty cheap and last a long time. Since the main ingredients are chicken and spaghetti, it’s a kid favorite. There is also minimal chopping involved so I can make this while I have my 2 kids running around. We also almost always double it since chicken usually comes in bigger packages then 1/2lb.
Source: Weight Watchers
PREP12 Min
COOK10 Min
Ingredients
The adventures of a Washington Newbie 