Losing my mind

How to know you're losing it....


Wake up late and decide to make banana bread before breakfast.



Then make pancakes for breakfast.



Then make a grocery list and make phone calls to hire friends to gut your basement.


Go to the store and decide that you will be making all your Christmas gifts this year for all 20 people on your list, and buy all the supplies at the store.


Come home and make a hot lunch, but get distracted by printing out patterns for said Christmas gifts, burn lunch and start over.


Rent a movie to watch before going to work while working on Christmas gifts.


Stop all productivity to check email, surf the internet for patterns, blog, and take pictures of Lilly and Julia pretending to be Rapunzel.



All before 2pm.

Two posts in one day? There's a reason

While I was at work tonight Jim and Lilly picked apples from our neighbors tree and then spent a few hours making their first pie...100% from scratch.

I came home from work to find the most delicious apple pie. Seriously, those tart apples from our neighbor combined with Jim's baking ways were delicious. We might have to start stealing bushels of apples (although these apples were NOT stolen).






I don't know if you can tell, but my shirt says "Get Fit." I thought it was very ironic next to the tub of ice cream and my plate full of pie.

Fall musings.

Are you excited about fall? It's my favorite season. As soon as fall hits I want to eat apples, winter squash, soups, and drink cider. Every single fall I make at least one attempt at a butternut squash soup, and every single year it turns out wretched. I use a different recipe each time and each time it tastes exactly like baby food, not matter what I do. I am starting to think that I don't really like butternut squash. Does anyone have any butternut squash recipes that don't taste like baby food??

On another food note, I come to the topic of pies. I am not a pie maker - at all. Oddly enough this is the only thing Jim has ever asked me to make. He has even lamented over the fact that I don't make him pies. He even used the mom card one time (you know..."My mom makes pies"). You can imagine how that went over. Pastry and pie crusts just don't interest me enough to properly learn the right technique or to practice enough so they don't look horrible.

Last night Jim announced that since I wont make him pies he is going to become a master pie baker. Now, that is the exact reason I married him. He knows it's smarter to do it himself then to try and make me do it. I told him I had a no fail pie crust recipe that I had not tried because I was pretty sure it would fail. He looked right at me and said "I want my pie crust to fail over and over until I get it perfect. I need Martha Stewart's recipe."

That is determination. It's about time someone made some pies around here. Just in time for fall!

I realized that this weekend I am enjoying the benefits of small town life, shhh....don't tell anyone.

Last night we all went to the drive-in movie theater (the only movie theater in town) and while Lilly slept on pillows between us, Jim and I watched Julie and Julia. It was a very enjoyable movie and I loved watching it from my car. The movie totally inspired me, but to do what, I am not sure. It made me wish three things: that my name was Julie; that I had come up with the idea to cook my way through Julia Childs recipes that inspired the film, and that I could cook at all (I mean really cook, not assemble casseroles). Jim and I both agreed that we need to find a passion that both Julie and Julia had. Although, at my current quarter-life crisis I have no idea what that passion is, nor do I have any idea what to do with my life.

After a very late night we woke up and went to a local cafe to eat quiche and scones for breakfast. That made me wish that I owned a fabulous little bakery/eatery in town, or that I could at least make delicious quiche and scones.

Both of these events made me appreciate my small town and inspire me to find a passion.

For today I am going to work on a hat for Lilly, enjoy the sunshine, and make smores in our fire pit tonight. My quest to find my life calling continues, but in the mean time I have plenty to keep me occupied in my small town life.

Sick Week

I've spent most of the past week sick in bed, but I actually spent that sick time quite constructively. Thanks to YouTube I taught myself to knit (only one type of stitch) but it was quite an accomplishment. Knitting boggles my mind a bit. I decided that it would take me a really long time until I could knit well enough to make something to wear, so I found this cute little crochet pattern for a baby hat on etsy from holland designs.


The pattern was this darling unassuming baby hat that looked so sweet. I finished it and can now tell you that it was one of the hardest projects I have completed. I think I could have finished an afghan in the time it took me to make this hat. Here it is in all it's imperfect glory, but trust me when I tell you my little boy will wear this every day until his head stretches it out and breaks it.


I say it was sick time well spent.
Since we have all been sick, I am behind on everything - including blogging. I never put up pictures of our trip to Boston to visit my brother-in-law, his wife, and two adorable children. So here is one photo of Lilly with her cute cousin Abbey from our lunch break at Mark Twains house. They had a great time together.

My day with the swine flu

This past Sunday morning I woke up with a sore throat, which developed into coughing and sneezing, a.k.a. your common (miserable) cold. By Monday I was full on miserable and by the time Tuesday rolled around I was in serious sick mode.

On that very same Tuesday I went to my previously scheduled pregnancy appointment to check on the baby. I told the nurse that I had been feeling sick with a sore throat, coughing, and sneezing with a very low grade fever.

She backed her chair up from me and said "Did they give you a mask at the front desk?" I clearly had no mask on my face, and said, "No." She said, "I'll be right back" and almost ran out of the room. Only to return with a mask for me. She kind of threw the mask at me from a distance and said, "You need to wear this since you have the symptoms of swine flu. I would help you put it on but I don't want to mess up your hair."

What? Really? I saw the swine flu fear in her eyes.

Then my doctor came in to tell me that my primary clinic was totally booked checking people for the swine flu so I needed to go straight to the ER. What? Seriously? No, I just came in to hear the baby's heart beat. I asked her if I really had to go to the ER and she said I did. I asked her again just to make sure she wasn't confused.

Fine. Lilly and I walked over to the ER only to be taken to a special room for suspicious swine flu victims. Then over the next three hours I talked to various medical professionals who all had the same question. "Why are you here? Did someone tell you to come here?" I explained that my OB made me come and that I would NEVER go to the ER in the middle of the day because I had a cold. As I got crankier and hungrier waiting for the stupid swine flu test, Lilly asked more and more questions. "Why is there a bed in here? Why are the outlets red? Why does that man have to come here? Why do you have to wear that mask? Why do you take the mask off every time they shut the door? Why do they have a sink in here? Is this a kitchen?" You get the point.

They finally did the horrible swine flu culture tube-down-the-nose and released me home with a discharge summary for the common cold and a promise of lab results in 24 hours. Even they knew it wasn't swine flu. Although they could have had the decency to print out information on the swine flu since I had just wasted the last three hours of my life wearing a mask to keep my filthy swine germs to myself.

We had to wait all day today for the test results to come in. All of us had to stay home so we didn't infect anyone with our possible swine flu virus.

In the end, shocking to all, I tested negative for any flu virus whatsoever (even swine). I am still sick with my common cold, Jim and Lilly are sick, and we are a house full of germs. However, we no longer need to worry that we infected our entire church congregation and the shoppers at Babies R Us with our swine flu last weekend.

After all was said and done, I would have preferred to have the swine flu. Would have made for a much better ending to my story.

Knit

Jim told me I had to take down his birthday post; so I will just put a new post up that pushes the birthday post down the page.

When I was 12 I learned how to crochet, and ever since then I have dabbled with it here and there. I have made blankets and some hats, and even some teddy bear clothes (when I was 13). The truth is I have never been that crazy about crocheted items (I love baby blankets and baby accessories, but that is kind of it). What I really want to do is knit. Why you ask? Because, from my view, all the cool patterns involve knitting. You know, the patterns that don't involve a granny square afghan, or a tea cozie, or a hot pad.

Then a few weeks ago a friend loaned me "The Friday Night Knitting Club."

I am really enjoying this book and it made me want to knit even more. I have asked a lot of friends and neighbors near by to teach me, but no luck. So today I took the plunge and bought a pair of knitting needles. I am determined to learn via the library and youtube.

I just thought it would be the perfect new project/procrastination tool to avoid housework, house maintenance, responsibilities, etc. I'll let you know how it goes.