A wonderful Christmas...

We had a great Christmas day celebrating with my mom and her friend Christmas morning.  We take our time opening presents and oooo and ahhh over everyone's gifts.  The house gets trashed.  Laughter abounds.  Pictures are taken.  It's a lot of fun without any kind of stress.  Even our Christmas dinner is very simple.

The day after Christmas we headed down to my husband's family for another round of celebrating.  There's food.  Games.  Laughter.  It's loud.  It's just so much fun.  Enjoy a few of our pictures taken along the way...

We hope that your holiday season was as joyful as ours.  May God bless you and your family this holiday season and the upcoming year.

The land of giants….

When my husband and I first got married (22 years ago) we were young and money was tight.   Living on love.  But that, can only take you so far.  Especially at Christmas time.  We had little to no decorations at that time.  Even for the tree.  Our first angel on top of the tree was made of paper and to this day I cannot throw that thing away.  Pathetic old thing.

I remember we would go out "window shopping", because that's basically all we could afford to do, and I would see such elaborate winter Christmas villages.  Filled with twinkling lights and oh so cute, accessories.  I wanted one.  So with just a little bit of money in our pockets and a whole lot of creativity, I decided to paint my own village.

At a local craft store, I found unpainted houses on clearance and so, our snow village began.  Then every year after that I would continue to buy more and more on clearance.  It took a while, but our village began to take shape.  There was one problem though…..I had no people to go with it.  Zero. Zilch.  Nada.   It was like the Christmas ghost town I put out every year.   Kind of creepy.

Not willing to give up, I shopped garage sales for years and rifled through thousands of Christmas clearance bins.  Slowly but surely….the people came to our village.  But here's the thing.  Not a single one of them are proportionately correct to the houses. Any of the houses.  Kind of funny if you really think about it.

My husband calls it the land of giants.

And I wouldn't trade this homemade, out of proportion village for the world.

One of the best Christmas songs ever….

With Christmas just days away, what better way to get in the holiday spirit than to talk about Christmas carols.  Love them.

The end.

Okay, I guess it's not that simple.  There are like a billion of them on the face of this earth.  But….I do have a favorite one I heard this year.  It's this one….

It's worth the 4 minutes to slow down this holiday season, and get mesmerized by the experience.  I love the part where all the angels show up at the end.  I believe this was just a fraction of the angels that were probably there that night.  They all came for the par-tay.  I know I would.

Enjoy!

My brain's feeling just a little bit fuzzy….

This morning, before going to the swim meet, we squeezed in our appointment to pick out our windows for the new house.  Apparently, it's one of those things you have to do before they get very far on the house.  Basement gets poured, house gets framed, windows are put in.  Makes sense, right?

So we beep-bopped ourselves over there for our first meeting.  Pretty fun, huh?  Well, I guess it is and it isn't.  When questions are fired at you at the speed of light, your brain begins to feel a bit fuzzy.

 Do you want crank out or double hung?  Wood or vinyl?  3 grill or 6?  Plain windows or craftsman style?  What color is going to be on the outside?  What's the inside color?  On and on the questions went.  By the end, I felt like holding up the white flag of surrender and retreating.

Yes, it's true.  We've never built a house before.  We've relocated some for my husband's job but the houses we've always chosen have already been built.  Easy-peezy.  And yes, we are excited about this.  But, it is a bit overwhelming at the amount of things you must pick out.

And we just started.

So one step at a time, right?  Windows are now checked off our list.  One down…..a bazillion more things to go.

Finally found a picture that looked like the windows we chose.  No.  This is not our kitchen, but I do love this style of windows for our new farmhouse.

It's not hard….it's just about planning

This weekend our girls are in a weekend long swim meet.  Translation….we need a lot of food to take with us.  Yes, we could actually buy fast food everyday and it would be easier, but really?  From a family that never eats out, and I mean never, that just sounds so gross.

So today I'm in the kitchen cooking up a storm.  I've got pita breads fresh out of the oven to stuff with our favorite lunch options.  Fruit snacks are chilling in the fridge and granola bars are packaged up and ready to go.  Tomorrow I'll whip up some homemade chips real quick to take with us.  Man, are those yummy and surprisingly enough they only take about 15 minutes for me to whip up.  Finally for breakfast, I'm thinking about surprising the kids with some homemade toaster strudels - they'll love that.  I can make those in advance and they can heat them at the hotel later.  Throw a bunch of fruit in the cooler and we are good to go.

You see, good food is not hard to make.  You just need to plan.  I don't pick crazy elaborate meals that my family eats on the road.  Nope.  Not going there.  Just simple ones.  Things that can be reheated (if that's an option) or healthy munchies to grab and go.  It keeps us clear of the fast food places for a long as we possibly can and at the same time, I feel better about what's going into their bellies.  

So for now, I'm off to whip up some toaster strudels.  And then get this crew ready to go swim up a storm.

Oh man….that sounded like a challenge

"You can't make those."  It was said at the dinner table last night.

We were talking about vanilla wafers.  My husband requested banana pudding for desert, sooner rather than later.  He drops hints like that.  However, being out of vanilla wafers, which everybody knows is a key ingredient to banana pudding, that poses a bit of a problem.  What's a girl to do?  Go to the grocery….ugh!  Or make it.

I'll take the challenge.

I have learned that you can make anything really.  If it was boxed and put on a shelf in the grocery, then by golly, somebody created it first in a test kitchen.  They had to come up with the recipe before it went to the assembly line.  And if I make it, then I can pronounce everything in it.  Oh that's right, folks.  I am a food snob.  There I said it.

So, let's do this.  Let's whoop-up on this challenge and make us some vanilla wafers.  Who's with me?

Nobody?

Alright, fine.  I'll do it first.  I'll be the guinea pig.

I'm going to use Alton Brown's recipe.  However he used ounces instead of cups in his version.  That's just plain weird, if you ask me.  So I made the adjustments in mine to show cups.  Easier for me that way.  So let's do this…..

Homemade Vanilla Wafers

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup of unsalted butter (room temperature)
1/2 cup of sugar (he used vanilla sugar - no clue where to find that one right now so I just used regular sugar)
1 large egg
8 teaspoons vanilla extract (his recipe only called for 4 but since I have no vanilla sugar I'm going to double the vanilla)
1 Tablespoon whole milk

Directions:
Heat the oven to 350 degrees.  Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt in a small bowl and set aside.  Cream the butter and sugar for 2 minutes, stopping to scrape down the sides.  Add the egg.  Then add the vanilla extract and milk and blend for a moment but don't blend the fire out of it.  Chill the batter in the refrigerator for at least 10 minutes before scooping.

Scoop the batter in teaspoon-sized balls and arrange them on a cookie sheet.  He says to use parchment paper.  I didn't have any so I just sprayed my cookie sheet.  It came out just fine.  Slightly flatten each ball and bake for 15 to 20 minutes rotating the pans halfway through the baking.  Remove the pans to a cooling rack to cool completely before removing the cookies from the pan.

And the results are in….

The vanilla wafers tasted fantastic.  I got the smaller ones a little bit darker than what I wanted but they didn't taste bad or burnt.  Just a bit more crunchy like the ones at the store.

So here's my thoughts for next time.  I'm going to double or triple the batch, for sure.  With this large of a crew I'll be lucky if this small batch makes it through tonight, much less tomorrow.  Also, I think I'm going to try and flatten them a bit more….not too much, but just a tiny bit.  Finally, I think I'll use a teaspoon to actually scoop them all out next time. This time I just rolled them in my hand, not really paying too much attention to that detail, but I think it will help in cooking if they are all closer in size.

Overall, it's a winner winner chicken dinner.

"Hey Momma….

….what number am I?"  my little boy yelled at the top of his lungs in the middle of his basketball game.  He was reaching his jersey around trying to see the number on his back.

"45."  I yelled.  Motioning for him to focus back on the game.

He took off running again and then stopped in the middle of the court, turned and yelled…

"That's your age, right Momma?"  and that's when the gym went quiet.

Well of course it did….