Wednesday, September 14, 2011

What's For Dinner?

You may recall that I recently (ok, maybe not so recently) set this goal of a once weekly post about a new recipe. I suppose it was just another case of starting a goal incredibly excited and motivated but petering out as soon as other stuff, often referred to as real life, got in the way. The good news I have tried lots of new recipes and it has even been on a fairly regular basis, but I don't remember most of them. Here is a link to one that I do remember that was quite yummy (and simple):

Crock-Pot Stroganoff Loved that it was in the crock pot all day, but my big discovery... don't use the stew meat or whatever it calls for, use a roast. Pull it out when it is cooked through, shred it, and drop it back in the sauce for a while. So tender!

I recently purchases a new recipe book called Hungry Girl: 300 Under 300. I ordered it online after hearing amazing things about her books and glancing at a few recipes. I was sooooo excited when it came in the mail.... but I must admit, it wasn't as incredible as I had hoped. So far we have found a few recipes that looked good, sounded good, had reasonably inexpensive and regularly used ingredients and actually turned out tasting good. I think we have tried about 10 recipes. Most have been pretty good, but the ingredients were a tricky thing. Ground beef style soy crumbles... no thank you. So we substituted a few ingredients where the calorie count would only be slightly affected. Another little issue-many, of the recipes are designed for only one serving. I guess hungry girls eat alone. Maybe the biggest problem is that Jack hasn't liked much of it at all, and he needs MORE calories anyway. I have decided to try at least 2 a week from the book, but I don't promise to report on any of it.


The Best Boys!

This boy is always making me smile. I just wanted to mention two of the absolutely adorable things he does lately. First he says thank you for EVERYTHING. When I get him out of his bed and give him a kiss he tells me thank you, when I give him a snack he tells me thank you, and pretty much any other time that I do something for him that he likes he says thank you. In fact once he told me thank you when I wiped his nose, right after he finished screaming because he actually hates that. Thank you was actually one of the very first things he said, right after mama and daddy. We tried to teach him the sign, but he learned to say it before he learned to sign it.

The other super cute thing is being proud of himself. He has a "Little People" fire truck that is filled with building blocks that can be put in the back of the truck through holes that match the block shapes. He will pick up a block and put it in the right slot and then throw his hands in the air and shout "YAY" every time. It is so stinking cute!

Not to leave out my other two amazing boys I better say something about them too. I've nicknamed this one:
DASH! Because he is always going at top speed. The great thing he's doing lately is making lots of new friends. He is always wanting to stop by different neighbors' homes to say hi and he always wants to run across the street to play with one of his best friends.

He talks like he does everything else--super fast! Kind of like his mom. He does a lot of other things a lot like mommy and sometimes it drives daddy just a little crazy. He certainly has a mind of his own, and I love that about him! I prefer the word strong willed over stubborn, and boy is he :)

This guy is are sweet nature boy (I know Dash is in the background there, but he's kind of everywhere). He seems to be a never ending encyclopedia of knowledge about anything and everything in the wilderness. I am always surprised at the intricate details he knows about random animals and plants. So awesome.

He said the funniest thing the other day. Daddy and his uncles were teasing him a bit about a girl at school that he has had a crush on for a couple years. Daddy asked him "Is she a good kisser?" His response: "I don't know, I've never seen her kiss!" So cute. Glad to know he's still sweet and innocent considering his daddy was already thinking about kissing me when he was about that age ;)

I have the BEST boys!



Thursday, September 8, 2011

Balance

The last 4 years of my life have felt very uNbAlAnCeD to say the least. I have felt like every moment I have is torn between school work, housework, trying to enjoy time with my kiddos and hubby, church callings. You might be thinking yeah, yeah join the club, everybody is busy, and you are right, everybody is, but there was something else. With all the to-do's between school, work, home and church I was feeling like an epoch failure! I could spend tons of extra time on my grading and lesson planning at home and still feel like I wasn't reaching a single student but that took all my time away from being a good mommy which meant I was a grumpy mommy. So I would try to spend less time on school work and things got even worse there and I lived to dread every minute I spent with students in my classroom. That's not at all what I had expected for my career. It felt like a constant battle: make school survivable or keep my house semi livable and make sure my kids got some happy mommy time.

I had to pick. I could never choose everything! Something (or rather many things) always got dropped. I felt like I was dropping every ball thrown in my court. In addition my poor husband was having to fight the exact same battle and I could do nothing to support him because I was too worried about my own balancing act. We kept talking about the light at the end of the tunnel, but living in the darkness waiting for that light was just becoming too much to bear. I hated the person I was becoming and I felt like I was missing the time of my life I had been looking forward to most since I was a little girl!

Finally it just couldn't go on anymore. Thankfully that was about the time Tyler got a job with IHC that would offer benefits for a part time employee. We decided that, while it was maybe financially a bad idea, I had to be more there for my family so I needed to switch to part time. It didn't happen right away, and the process that it took to get there was emotionally exhausting, but it was the best decision we could have made. Yes financially it has been challenging (ummm, that is a massive understatement by the way), but the pay off has been amazing in other ways. Most significantly, we are experiencing something we had only dreamed of... BALANCE!

Balance is an incredible thing (ready for my inner nerd to vomit science on you...) When the forces on an object are balanced the motion of that object remains unchanged, this doesn't mean there are no forces, it just means they are balanced. Take the example of a hockey puck gliding along a sheet of ice. Unless it is hit by something, it continues along its path. There are still forces acting on the puck (gravity and normal force), but it just keeps on moving along... sometimes said: an object in motion remains in motion. And that is in essence what I am beginning to feel. There are certainly still a great deal of demands on me daily, but all in all they seem to be balanced! I am now a little like that calm disc, gliding along the ice, heading in a certain direction and moving at a steady pace. Of course the occasional (or frequent) external force comes along and takes me a bit off course. The big difference, was that before something always had to come first, there was always one demand that could knock all the others out of my plans for days at time, and usually that was school/work related. Now, I feel like I can give priority to everything when it is needed.

The things that I used to put off until summer or long weekends are now a constant part of my life. I can plan healthy meals, exercise, play outside with my boys for hours at a time, hang out with my man (when he isn't too busy), keep up with grading and lesson planning, work on projects around the house, keep up with my church calling, spend time with friends, and amazingly even enjoy some me time. No, I still don't have it all together. I forget things I'm supposed to do, there are usually several unfinished tasks on my to do list at the end of the day, and I still get cranky about all sorts of things that I should probably not worry about. But, I feel balanced and that is enough.