Nathan and I have not been good at dating lately. Scratch that: we’ve been pretty bad at dating lately.
So, in an effort to date at least twice a month, we’ve started “home dates”. Tonights date will be a home date.
We’ll have Friday night pizza night, like normal, then clean up, play with the children, put Ainsley to bed by 7, and the boys to bed by 8. Instead of coming downstairs and parking it in front of the tube, computer or book, we’ll be dating each other.
Tonight will be a to-be-determined dessert (maybe the new Pumpkin Spice Hot Chocolate I picked up at Costco this week that is SO SO good?), and then we’ll snuggle up together and read this book that I picked up at the library a couple weeks ago, Travel Therapy by Karen Schaler.
What better way to leave behind the stress of Nathan’s job and my unfinished house work from the week (hello, disheveled pantry! unmopped floors!) than planning trips we might take next year, in 40 years, or just in our heads. After we flip through the book and plan some maybe-trips, I might lie in front of the fireplace next to my husband, with the light right in our faces, and pretend I’m on that beach in the photo. Who needs a private beach for a day when you have your husband, your imagination, and a date night.
That kid is just cracking me up lately. He’s so fun to be around.
Last week I was holding the cat like a baby (having this cat is doing wonders for calming my severe case of being baby-hungry) and Jacob came up to me and asked why. I told him that it’s fun to pretend I’m holding a baby since we’ll probably never have a new baby in our house again.
“That’s ok, mom. We’ll just go to another country and do an adoption thing and bring home some more brothers and sisters.”
Then yesterday he was on my bed early in the morning, telling me how the police came to his school a few weeks ago. He – finally – told me all about the police officer’s uniform, and car, and then mentioned that they even got to go in the car.
“That’s so neat, Jacob! Why didn’t you tell me about it on the day it happened.”
“Well, it’s not like I was getting in the car because I was going to jail. I just got in one side, and got out the other.”
(yeah, jaw dropping)
“You know, Jacob, you can tell me about really good things, too – not just when you get taken to jail.”
“Ok!”
With my looney idea to go one whole month without eating out of any kind, I’ve needed to reaquaint myself with, oh, the kitchen. Menu planning helps. Last week I hadn’t planned, and one day I came oh too close to saying “forget it! we’re going out! it was a dumb idea from the start!” Nathan jumped in, suggested pancakes, and saved the day. (even though I didn’t want pancakes – I wanted BAJIO)
The next morning, I decided that getting back to planning menus would be a good idea, as it’s the only thing that keeps me from giving in.
My quick and easy recipe for planning menus right now is to have – every week -
one soup night
one pizza night
one freezer dinner night (take dinner out the night before or that morning to thaw, and just cook it that night)
and one crockpot night.
Yes, that’s only 4 nights, but it makes thinking about the other 3 so easy and planning menus anything but overwhelming. A lot of weeks, we’ll have a nice breakfast night and a taco night, too. There – 6 nights done.
When I plan the meals, I make sure we have at least 1 vegetarian dinner, as well as 1 chicken, 1 beef and 1 fish. If I don’t think of that before hand, and go down the check list as I plan each week, we would eat chicken every single night. (or Rubios) (I wish)
I figured out a year or so ago that planning the main dish only got me into trouble every single night as I scrambled for sides. So now I preplan side dishes for each main dish. Usually we have 2, and this week it seems like most nights are a veggie and a bread.
Just thought I’d share what makes life easier over here. If any of you post menus, I’d love to see and get ideas. Leave your link in the comments.
AND if you have good ideas for YUMMY veggie side dishes, please share! Last week we were in a serious frozen veggie rut.
I’m going to get back in the habit again of posting our menu plans on my recipe blog. I’ve found I really like going back to see what we ate last October for ideas this year, but I’ve lost a bunch of the papers I wrote the plans on – so this way they (hopefully) won’t get deleted.
After church we had Big Meat* for Supper**, rinsed dishes and took off looking for turkeys.
The area from Moroni to Manti is thick with turkey farms, and one of my big memories from our summer vacation the year I was 15 was driving through Manti and seeing millions of turkeys (no exaggeration (this time)).
We drove through Moroni and Manti last year on our trip to Captiol Reef, but since it was the week before Thanksgiving, the fields were full of nothing but feathers. Lots and lots of feathers that belonged to birds that were now being shipped to YOU.
This year, we saw sheep.
So very many sheep.
A really big Alpaca farm (this is just a small bit of it):
And then, where the turkeys…lose their feathers:
There were feathers. SO MANY FEATHERS. On the sides of the road there were so many feathers, like the county had the biggest pillow fight you’d ever seen and every participant went home with empty cloth bags because all the feathers in their pillows scattered during the fight.
I was disappointed we couldn’t get close to the turkeys – all the barns were set pretty far off the road and on every driveway there were signs about “stay out” and “don’t go any further”. Something about not getting the birds sick. (isn’t it usually the other way around?)
About half the barns were saw were recently vacated, their previous tenants taken to be…processed…and left behind was only gobs of feathers and piles of poop. Most of the barns that still had turkeys had the turkeys all inside, doors shut and fans on. I was glad we finally saw some LIVE BIRDS.
Other things we saw:
A pretty Mormon Church…and in UTAH! (not common) I LOVED this building in Spring City. Built in 1902.
The Mormon Temple in Manti, UT. I think it’s just so beautiful.
*Big Meat: usually beef, like pot roast. What my family ate for dinner every Sunday, on nice dishes. Because “it’s Sunday and that’s what we do” (at my mom’s house. at my house, we often eat nice breakfast for Sunday dinner, because we’re Pettits, and that’s what we do).
**Supper: basically, when you eat big dinner (usually Big Meat) for lunch on Sunday. A word that made me say “huh” when my mom’s mom said it every Sunday.
When I uploaded these pictures I snapped just before church, I got all teary! I love them, yes, but better – they love each other. And I just want to do whatever I can to help them continue and grow that love for each other. (and also – aren’t they just the two cutest boys ever? so lucky they’re mine)
Funny post about dressing up for church over at As Sistas in Zion.
She is all girl.
Just lately have I started embracing the idea of more typical gender roles for toddlers and preschoolers. In the past, I have found pride in the fact that we gave our boys dolls, a toy kitchen, and other “girly” toys (that they have loved) far before they had a sister. Ainsley has been surrounded with both “boy” and “girl” toys. We expose all our kids to everything, and let them choose what they enjoy playing with and pretending to be. I still think that’s the way to go. But it has been so interesting to see that with all the exposure our kids have gotten to toys made for the other sex, they’re still all boy/girl.
My boys are such typical boys. I didn’t let them have guns in the house until just recently when Jacob got a foam dart gun and western cowboy gun for his birthday. But even before that, they still had guns – the 2 foot flower I had as a decoration was a gun -the leaf was perfectly placed for a trigger, I guess. The giraffe – his neck was perfect for a gun, too. So instead of banning the boys from having guns, I/we have decided to teach them gun safety – the same safety rules you use with a REAL gun are used with every “pretend” gun in our house, too – even gun giraffes.
The boys DO have gentle sides, and still love playing dolls and kitchen and with stuffed animals. But more often they are rough, really very rough. And I find myself wondering if there’s a good reason to let my boys be “all boy” – to help them become more of a man (while still keeping their gentle, kind, soft sides). I think there might very well be, and I’ve got some thinking to do about that.
Ainsley is only 17 months, and with her 2 older brothers to watch, she’s loud, daring, and rough, too. I wish she had more fear in her. But she has this girly side that has blown me away as I’ve watched it develop. She is incredibly into shoes, and has been for awhile. But the past few months, she has discovered my long forgotten jewelry and wears my necklaces and bracelets around the house while changing shoes faster than you can believe. I don’t really wear jewlrey often at all, so to see her take to it and love it has be interesting. This week, she found a tube of lipstick. Did you know an almost 17 month old could really truly love lipstick? She loved looking at herself in the mirror holding the tube, she loved opening that tube, closing it, and opening it again. And oh, how she loved putting it on. All over her lips and some of those very cute cheeks, too. She really loved that lipstick. So she has her rough side, absolutely, but she undoubtedly has her girly side, too. A side she found all on her own.
Dennis Prager once asked if we are teaching our daughters to be feminine or feminists, and the question bothered me because I don’t see why we can’t teach them to be both! (understanding that ‘feminist’ is a very loaded word and I don’t embrace it the same way Gloria Steinem does – at all) I have more to think about that, too.
At the library last week, I saw the cover of this book and thought it would be useful to help teach Jacob to count by twos. It was called “Counting Animals by Twos”. I took the book over to the table to flip through it while keeping an eye on the littles. Page one – right on.
Two birds, blah blah blah. Page two, a-ok:
Four dogs. Great! And then I turned the page.
Six, uh, wait…three rabbits? Huh? We were counting animals here. Two BIRDS. Four DOGS. There’s only 3 rabbits. Did they hide 3 somewhere, like Waldo? Maybe I’ll read the text.
Oh. Six rabbit EARS. Oh, it works, but it messed up my pattern. We were counting animals, not animal body parts. Geez.
Wait, the next page gets better.
Eight… uh, there’s 2 cats. And I see four huge claws coming out of that book and into my face. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to count 8 of, I just want the cats to quit attacking me!
“RAH! See these claws? They’re nothing. Don’t learn to count by twos and I’ll send my friend after you.”
“I claw little childrens eyes out.”
- – - – -
Nightmares, anyone? I didn’t read any more of the book, either.
We don’t eat out a lot, which is good and bad. Good because eating out adds up and usually isn’t so healthy, bad because it’s fun, someone else does the dishes, and I just love it. In September, we did eat out a lot. Probably 6 times the whole month, and I don’t remember if that includes the times I went out with friends (minus family) or not. So, I did something really dumb.
I proposed we do #61 on me 101 in 1001 list – don’t eat out for one month. Now I realize that it was dumb to put it on the list, and it wasn’t wise to suggest it last week. I’m in mourning for restaurants.
Apparently, Joshua is, too, because when we were at the library yesterday, and I told him we were going to hit the restroom on the way out, he said “we’re going to a restaurant?!?” Boy, was he disappointed.
I’ve tried to pull a couple quick ones on Nathan. I pulled coupons out of the mail, and asked Nathan if Papa Murphy’s counts as eating out, since you don’t just eat it in your house, you COOK it in your house. He thought about it and declared that no! it does not count as eating out! I was excited for a day or two – super excited. Then I realized I was more excited about pulling a fast one on my husband than I was to be “allowed” to eat Papa Murphy’s this month, and took it off the table as an option. I think it would be totally cheating. (weep)
What Nathan declared totally and completely not allowed this month – drinks from Maverick’s and Sonic. This is quite unfortunate as it’s something I’ve started doing at least twice a week, which yes – I know is way too much – but it’s what I love love love. Possibly more than eating out. Diet Pepsi from a fountain at a gas station is just way better than out of a can is just way better than out of a 2 liter bottle.
Hopefully we’ll save a few bucks with this challenge, and I’ll get organized at menu planning again. It’s not started out so great, though. We left the house at 4 pm last night for a very cold outdoor Family Not-Home Evening, and I had to pack sandwiches for dinner.
Wish me luck. Lots and lots of luck.
This week, stupid celebrities have blown my mind in a whole new way. Top of the list – Whoopi Goldberg saying that Roman Polanski isn’t a “rape-rapist”.
But what I want to talk about is a part of this Dave Letterman thing. A part of the Dave Letterman thing I haven’t heard one person bring up, and the part of the Dave Letterman thing I keep talking to my husband about. The part of the Dave Letterman thing I told my husband just yesterday that “I really want to blog about this, but I just don’t see the point.”
I want to talk about the people in the audience when Letterman made his “I had s*x with a staffer” announcement.
I’m guessing most of you have seen the clip on the news. I just spent more than 5 minutes searching for it to show you if you haven’t seen it, and can’t find it. Here’s what I just don’t get.
Right after Letterman says “It’s true. I had s*x with a staff member.” – the audience busts up laughing.
Did they think he was joking? I don’t think so. Were they nervously uncomfortable? Possibly. I haven’t read or heard enough about this whole thing to know when the affair happened – before or after he was married. But Letterman was in a really long term relationship with the woman he married for decades before the wedding. So what he was admitting to was an affair. An affair that was wrong. An affair that likely broke the soul of his wife. And the audience laughed.
I just don’t get it.
I have a little essay up at Mormon Women today. Take a look.
