italian pasta salad…

The weather is really warming up around here. The boys were in shorts and t-shirts today, and I’m aware of the dire necessity to start hunting for boys summer shoes, etc. Ahem.

I’m looking for cool, simple foods right now. And I’m all about carbs at the moment… =) Enter pasta salad!

I found this recipe for Italian dressing seasoning at All Recipes… I subbed in garlic powder for the garlic salt, eliminated the celery salt because I didn’t have any, and lowered the salt to just a dash. Lots of flavor… little sodium. And I used red wine vinegar instead of white… and olive instead of canola oil.

I cooked up a little less than half a pound of rotini, added in the dressing and a cup of cooked chicken that I’d thawed, and tossed in some chopped green pepper, (a little sharp cheddar for my portion), and some sliced pepperoni. I can make this in a few minutes after the kids go down for naps, and it’s nice and marinated by dinner…

I like those Suddenly Salad box kits, I must admit, but I don’t like all the salt and preservatives. And they’re much pricier and less tasty than homemade… Now that I have this Italian seasoning on hand in the pantry, I can make up my own just as quickly and more cheaply… Enjoy!

E is for Elephant…

Ok, I’d fallen off the wagon for awhile with doing any “formal” preschool. Lately, we’ve been doing little activities here and there without a theme… coloring, cutting, puzzles, alphabet flashcards, etc.

Today I got back to the alphabet…

E is for….

- Fill a bag with items that start with letter E, both long and short sound- egg, eggplant, earrings, stuffed eagle. Let kids pull them out.

- Print out a couple of E worksheets from First School. Let Seth and Evan both color one- S. with washable markers, Evan with crayon. Seth cuts his up afterward.

- Make this craft together- an awesome elephant! Identify the shapes and colors used and talk about which are bigger or smaller. Add googly eyes for fun… and let Evan help with the glueing and placement as interested…

- Watch this video on elephants. There is great footage of elephants playing in the water together… Point out the body parts we just glued together.

- Make elephants out of Play Dough… as well as other things that start with E. Let them come up with ideas…

- Puzzle time….

Simple woman’s Daybook… hmmm…

Ok, so I like these prompts from the Simple Woman’s Daybook blog… but I don’t really like the name. I mean, how many really simple women do YOU know? And who wants to be thought of as simple, anyway? It makes me think of a Victorianism for slow-witted. So, I may post a version of this from time to time, but I may not call it by its original name.

Outside my window . . . gray, cold… the kind of day that makes me want to curl up under blankets and read…

I am thinking . . . that I love being home with my little boys surrounding me. Years from now, we’ll all be scattered, so I don’t take this for granted now.

I am thankful for . . . rubber snakes, umbrellas with cars all over them, and roller coaster ride squeals coming from the backyard…

From the learning rooms . . . I have my reading curriculum picked out, but we’re not really close to getting started with it. Doing lots of upper and lower case flashcards and talking about letter sounds right now.

From the kitchen . . . Frozen homemade breakfast burritos for David and Seth tonight, and a Trader Joe’s frozen gordita for me. I’ve got a hair appointment tonight, and I don’t want a lot of cleanup for David.

I am wearing . . . bulky, warm clothes… huge cast off college sweatshirt of my brothers that totally conceals my 16-week baby bump and gray sweatpants.

I am creating . . . fingernails and hair and ears right now… or so the baby book tells me. =) This is why I tell myself I have no energy to create anything else.

I am going . . . to the zoo soon. The boys have never been, and we want to go before it gets hot. That can happen without warning in the South. Maybe in a couple of Saturdays…

I am reading . . . To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I’ve never read anything by her before. It’s interesting… different.

I am hoping . . . for some sun and warm weather this week so we can enjoy a new park I’ve heard about.

I am hearing . . . Seth humming to himself. He does this quite a lot. I love it.

Around the house . . . the laundry is folded. It’s early for this week. Not put away, though…. Hey, we aren’t out of underwear yet. =)

One of my favorite things . . . Trader Joe’s dark chocolate covered caramels.

A few plans for the rest of the week . . . Nothing unusual… CBS, park playtime, finishing up a fun craft…

Spring project for multiple ages…

 

This morning, the boys did their first art project together… well, sorta. =)

Here’s what you do:

Take out a sheet of white posterboard. Lay it on the kitchen floor on top of a couple of old towels.

Put your 4-year-old at the table with green tempera paint, 8-10 popsickle sticks laid out on paper plates, and a paintbrush. Tell him to paint all the popsickle sticks green. They will be daffodil stems later on.

While he’s working on that, have the toddler fingerpaint with green paint on the bottom of your posterboard (grass) and on the top of the posterboard with blue (sky). Attempt to keep both of you from getting covered in paint. Good luck.

Let it all dry…. The next day, glue the “stems” on the paper, and have the toddler help you glue baking cup daffodils on top. To do this, glue one baking cup completely flat, and then glue another (not flattened) in the center of it.

The 4-year-old is now cutting up strips of green paper into additional “grass” using his new and improved cutting skills. Let him glue them over his brother’s fingerpainted grass…

Voila! A beautiful spring painting for your playroom wall…. =)

weekending…

Hmmm, this is a “let’s see what this post ends up being about, and then I’ll pick a title” kind of day. =)

It’s been a slightly down Monday. I think that’s just because the weekend didn’t turn out to be as relaxing as we thought it would be.

For starters, we went out for dinner on Friday night at our favorite Mexican place. After that, we walked over to the children’s museum. It’s open one Friday night a month. So far, so good, right? We’re feeling relaxed, we’re chillin’, all is right in the world.

So we go back to our car, parked on a street near the restaurant. It’s dark, and it’s time for bed for two tired boys. We all pile in, and we pull away. That’s when we hear the awful scraping sound. Another car honks at us. We pull over… and discover that someone has hit our car so hard that our front bumper is almost completely ripped off.

Thank the Lord for the kind guy who gave us zip ties and helped us put it back on enough so that we could get home. It was a nerve wracking ride back to the house, lemme tell ya. We had to stop once because a piece of bent rubber started scraping, but we managed to push that back up.

The damage report is in… it should cost about $1600 to fix. Our insurance will cover it, minus the deductible, and they’re covering a rental car…. but they couldn’t tell us if our premiums would go up as a result of this.

I’m trying not to seethe with anger about this…. I would love to find the lowlife scumbag and give him a piece of my mind. Examples of the depravity of man abound, don’t they? I’m thankful that we have the money to fix it, and we’re not going to be out a car while we wait on it.

So, after that, David wakes up Saturday morning with the overwhelming, uncontrollable urge to buy Seth a bunk bed. Today. Now. This minute. Don’t finish your breakfast, honey, just get in the car. So we go to the local BJ’s and get one. It’s a great deal… and we discover why. We bought a pile of lumber, a pile of screws, and an instruction manual. He spent just about every waking moment of his weekend putting it together. And I spent it keeping Evan away from the action, so we didn’t see each other much…

Seth loves his bunk bed, and David is living the little boy dream of brothers and bunk beds. Don’t ask me why this is so appealing to guys, but it is, and I’m glad to see him get joy out of it.

I woke up this morning wishing for another weekend. Oh well, I get another chance at it in about 6 days… =)

baking and freezing chicken…

Ok, I just bagged up a bunch of cooked chicken. It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon, and it needed to be done. =)

Why, oh why, didn’t I do this before? I read the Life As Mom blog, and she talks often about freezer cooking. I scrolled through the comments in one of her posts, and a lot of her readers were commenting that having cut up, cooked chicken in their freezers was the best thing they’d ever done for easy meal prep.

So I went to this post, and I followed the directions. It was super easy. I just grabbed a package of bone in, skin on, Tyson chicken breasts from Walmart. They weren’t on sale, but they were cheap at $1.18 a pound. I put in 5 large breasts in two Pyrex dishes, and the house smelled delicious an hour later.

David, Seth, and I ate from one breast for dinner, and then I bagged up the cooling breasts to deal with later on. I’m glad I waited. I suspect they were a lot easier to cut after they became completely cool.

I got 7 c. of chicken meat to freeze for soups, casseroles, stir-fry, quesadillas, pasta salad, etc. out of those 5 breasts. And that doesn’t count what we ate for dinner on Friday night.

The bone-in breasts definitely had a better flavor and were more moist than the boneless, skinless breasts that I usually use. And it seems that chicken fat is now considered good for you in some circles, so I kept the skin on without guilt. =)

Anyway… if you haven’t tried this, you should. Or maybe I’m the only one late to the party… =)

friday morning thanks…

a little nostalgia from last March….

- a big bed of yellow daffodils…

- … with their loveliness filling tiny vases all over the house…

- Seth: “Mommy, we need more flowers in the house.”

- discovering bought-but-forgotten construction play tools in the closet…

- a new stroller for my birthday… thanks, David and Mom and Dad… and all the people who will hopefully be buying all my old strollers off Craigslist… =)

- a 21-month-old who is giving me extra snuggles lately…

- a picnic lunch all ready to eat with Daddy today at work…

- this video that makes me misty every time I see it…

- Nestle Drumsticks…. need I say more? =)

- finding hand me down shoes in the closet that fit Evan for the rest of the winter… sweet blessing…

- red buds on the tree out front…