Getting things back to normal

My main goal in life is to get things back to normal right now. I’m on the right path, but not there completely yet. Since the move we have gotten back to normal for our works lives and bedtime stuff, and mostly our eating. I know that sounds pretty good and I swear if I stopped there we would all survive, but I want more. I want my frozen homemade food back so we can eat something yummy and somewhat healthy at a moments notice, I want more things unpacked and I want our homeschool area ready. One thing at a time.

I can only do so much at once so I’m stating slowly with the frozen food. Last week I made our favorite tomato soup. I always make a double batch and freeze the leftovers, so now I have just about 3 meals worth of frozen tomato soup ready to go. I had never done it with the cheese sandwich croutons before, but this last time we had the soup I made grilled cheese sandwiches on our new panini press and we finally figured out why people eat grilled cheese with tomato soup. It was awesome! Due to my lovely gallstones I only had a bite or two of sandwich, but loved it. Waldo and Lily were sold and I think I’m never going to get away without the cheese sandwiches.  So now I’m going to have to make sure I always have cheese slices in the freezer.  What we did this last time worked great. Waldo sliced the leftover cheese from our Costco blocks of cheddar and Gruyere and put what he felt was one sandwich’s worth in a slightly offset stack and wrapped them in parchment paper (next time I think we’ll try freezer paper as I just found it in a box) and then he put them in a freezer bag. We took them out a few minutes before we were ready to grill the sandwiches and they worked out awesome.

Today was a big day, I made banana bread just for fun and because our banana started to look really sad. I have read that you can unpeel the bananas and put them in a freezer bag for later bread making (or whatever floats your boat), but I’ve never tried it myself. I always just make the bread. I don’t have a link for the recipe I use because I didn’t note where it came from and I’ve changed it quite a bit. I will try and remember to post my recipe at some point.

After I finished the banana bread I made southern biscuits and froze them unbaked, now when we want some biscuit love we just have to pull them out and bake them. I’ve never done this one before, but it’s noted on the recipe so I have high hopes and I’m looking forward to a surprise of buttery biscuits for breakfast one day. Side note: these are buttermilk biscuits and I never have buttermilk at home. I use powered buttermilk and it works out fine.

Now I’ve got pasta sauce simmering on the stove. That is again a double batch and I’ll put it in freezer quart bags and we’ll have months worth of easy pasta dinners almost ready to go. I don’t change much with this one, except that we don’t like chunky tomatoes so after this is all simmered I use my immersion blender and make it fairly smooth. I think I need to start simmering this sauce longer because once we put it on our plates the sauce kinda leaks water that drives Waldo crazy. It’s still delicious, but he hates the water portion. Our cook friend suggested that I cook it longer. I’ll try and remember to report back with how this works.

Next week I plan to make pizza sauce and chili. Whew, I’m tired just looking at all of this.  We love this pizza sauce, it’s the BEST. Much like a lot of Alton’s recipes it’s a lot of steps and fiddly, but I think that’s what makes it so perfect, it’s very tasty and full of flavor. I use my immersion blender on this too and we make it fairly smooth. I think you’ll see a trend when it comes to tomatoes and us. I can’t recommend this sauce enough.

**I started this post a few weeks ago and have been trying to get it finished this whole time. At this point we have polished off the soup and pizza sauce. Waldo has informed me that he wants us to try and find another chili recipe. The one I use is good, but not knock-your-socks-off.

We’ve moved…again

Four years ago when Waldo’s Mom called him and told us that she had cancer we decided that we had to move to be closer to her. We were renting so it was a pretty easy decision. Also making it even easier, Waldo’s parents lived in the same town that most of my family lived. So Win Win. Within I believe 3 weeks or something like that we had packed up all of our stuff, worked it out with our jobs to work from home while we were gone and we left. We had figured this would last a year or two. The cancer was very advance and we knew that we hated California (or at least the Central Valley) so we wouldn’t be staying any longer than necessary.

A year after moving to California Waldo’s parents decided to move to Idaho. Rita (Waldo’s Mom) was still going strong and felt that the clean air and better people of Idaho would help her recovery better than the nastiness of California. Since we lived with them and as stated before hated California we decided to give Boise a try. I was sad to leave my family after only 1 year, and not nearly as many visits as I had hoped, but it was the best thing for us so we packed up again and headed East.

As it turns out we loved Boise. There was a zoo, aquarium, kids science museum and great places to shop for natural foods. Everything we could want. We ended up spending 3 years in the Boise area. Waldo’s Mom loved it too, not for the same reasons as we did, but she liked it. To all of our surprise and happiness she lived another 2 years before the cancer finally got the better of her. 2013 was a hard year for our families. In the Spring we lost my paternal grandmother, in September we had our miscarriage, about 2 weeks later we lost Waldo’s Mom and then 6 weeks later my maternal grandfather Pop suddenly died.  Other little things also happened to us, but those are the biggies.

After losing Rita we couldn’t leave Waldo’s Dad right away so we stayed. We knew it wouldn’t last forever, Waldo’s job would need him back at some point. Well that point came a few months ago. We got the phone call or email, honestly I can’t remember how it came, but the end result was that we needed to move back to Montana.

Now don’t get me wrong, we love Montana. We have friends here. Do you know how hard it is to make friends when you a) work at home b) don’t do church c) don’t go out to clubs/bars and the like? Well it’s nearly impossible. We finally made friends with 1 very nice couple right before we moved back, I hated to leave them, but had to do it. Anyway, back on track. We also love how beautiful Montana is and while I haven’t visited the East side of the state, I’ve seen pictures so I can say this with some certainty, the area we live is the most beautiful part of all. We are also aware that there are down sides, such as we aren’t really outdoorsy people, and there’s no zoo and such here so being outdoors is how people live here. And there’s like 6 months of winter here. Winter is coming. People it’s no joke. There will be snow. Sure there was snow in Idaho, but not like here. It’s like never ending. But we have friend and friends with kids so YAY!

After the call (whatever) came we started to put all of our ducks in a row. We didn’t have a set date that we had to be back, but it had to be reasonable. We started packing up the things that we could live without and started to look for a rental. A major problem quickly because apparent, rentals in the Kalispell, MT area didn’t last long and because we have a cat that cut out about 9 out of 10 of the possible places. I don’t understand what so many people have against cats, but it’s a real thing and really started to get us know. One day while telling Waldo’s Dad how hard it was turning out to be to find a rental he suggested we try to buy. And thus the seed was planted. Waldo talked to a friend who had recently bought a house with a Rural Development Loan and after getting the name of his mortgage loan person and his realtor we were off. We applied and got the loan. We called the realtor and got to look at the listings. On the second day we had access to the house listings we were narrowing down the ones we liked and came across a new build in a nice neighborhood within our price range and we loved the kitchen. We called the realtor and because it was a new build and had only been on the market 2 days and they were doing showings daily she suggested that we put in an offer. We did and it was accepted. We packed up the car the next day and drove to Montana to see the house that we put an offer on.

It’s a townhouse which isn’t ideal and it’s about 1200 sq ft so it’s smaller than we really wanted, but we loved it. We were very happy about putting in our offer. While we were looking at the house we realized a guy Waldo worked before lives across the street and we met the wonderful woman that lives next door. Between that and the view out the backdoor I’m pretty sure we would have bought it no matter what, but we did like just about everything else luckily.

We went back to Idaho and started the whole process of getting the things the inspector fixed and closing on the house. We also pack like mad. It all worked out because just about 5 weeks after starting the whole loan process we were opening the garage to our first home and while we miss Waldo’s Dad, we couldn’t be happier.

So I started this with stating that we had moved again, but I’m putting it down here that this will be the last time for quite a while.

Our ride.

Lily and Daddy at a rest stop in Idaho.

Our new home.

OUR VIEW!

The first tooth

I was standing in the kitchen when I heard Lil say oops at the sink. She was pouring out the bit of milk left in her cup so she could finish cleaning up her dishes from her afternoon snack. I walked over and asked what was wrong. She informed me that she had been hiding her mouth since lunch (something I hadn’t noticed) because she was pretty sure that her apple (which was cut into the thinnest of strips) had broke her tooth and she didn’t want me to see. I ask her to show me and low and behold she didn’t break her tooth, she lost it. I asked her where the tooth was and she informed me that it was in the sink, but not to worry, it was too big to go down the sink stopper so it was sitting there. I was so caught up in the fact that my baby had lost her first tooth that it just now occurred to me that I didn’t know if it was in the sink because she was trying to get rid of it and the oops that started it all had been because she accidentally dropped it in the sink or if it was because she realized she was busted because it wouldn’t go down the drain. Oh well, either way I would have noticed the hole in her teeth eventually.

After thoroughly examining her mouth I made her some warm salt water and we headed to the bathroom to swish her mouth out*. I walked out of the bathroom to get something else and when I got back Lil was in tears. When I asked what was wrong she informed me that she didn’t like how she looked with the hole and  wanted to be 4 again because she didn’t loose teeth when she was 4. I did my best to hug her and assure her that she was still beautiful, all kids go through it and I thought the hole was cute.

Once she was calmed down from that I had to convince her to swish with the salt water. This took some doing, but somehow I said the right thing and it happened without any further drama. Then I made her pose for some pictures, because that’s how I roll. She had made me swear not to share the pictures I took so I’m just going to note here that it’s her bottom left front tooth.

She assured me that she had not noticed the tooth loose at all before lunch today and that she was in no pain.  This evening while she was getting ready for bed she informed me that the holes next door neighbor was now loose. I checked and it only wiggled a tiny bit, but this is the start of a whole thing. One that I have been looking forward to and dreading all at once.

*After telling Waldo about all of this I don’t know if the salt water was necessary (because he said he never did anything like that) I’m still going with it. I mean she now had a openish wound in her mouth and I want to make sure it’s clean. Also when Waldo’s Dad had a tooth pulled he was told to swish with warm salt water so we are going to be doing this for a few days.

 

My favorite things about Lily at this moment

I just don’t ever want to forget some things so I’m sharing them here for everyone’s amusement.

I love how she will just burst into song. They are usually songs that she’s made up and more often than not she will sing what she’s doing. It’s just so cute and sweet. All the sudden I will hear what Lily Kitty and Me0wers are up to or that she’s grooming Bell her little stuffed puppy for the third time today. I just love it.

Lily can’t start the day out without snuggling with me. I can get up to go potty, but I have to hurry back and we “snuggle”. I’m putting that in quotes because usually there’s no actual snuggling happening, we just hang out in bed talking and tickling and if Lil’s really lucky Kitty will join us.

Lily is all about Minecraft. She refers to it as “her (and Daddy’s) favorite game” and won’t actually call it anything else. I have managed to make this a Lily and Daddy thing and I don’t know the first thing about the game and don’t have to play it, this really works for me. I like video games, I just got my druid to level 90 in WoW the other day for goodness sakes, but I have no interest in Minecraft.

There are hundreds of other things that I love about my girl, but these are the main things I’m going to mention today.

Throwback…Monday

I don’t usually do throwback Thursday on Facebook, but really wanted to share these videos. So here’s throwback Monday.

Waldo was organizing some of the folders in his backups and came across videos and pictures from his phones over the years. He called me in to the office to see this gem.

It almost made me cry. It’s a little bitty Lily Bean and I could just smoosh her.

I had him send me the link to the folder he was putting them in so I could share a few. Both of these videos are from May 2011 so Lily was about 2.5.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...