Monday, December 28, 2009

I'm a bad bad blogging machine

WOW! So far in 2009 I've posted 4 whole blogs, well 5 once I hit "publish post" on this one.

It's not for lack of material. We've gone to cut down our own Christmas tree.
I've made lasagna, quiche, meatballs, sweet potato soup and cabbage rolls. I've attempted to invent a cheese bread recipe (a yummy fail). I've made white chocolate/candy cane popcorn and a milk chocolate/skor popcorn. I've taken 100's of pictures of a bunch of things that have never made it to blog land.

My only excuse is that I've been crazy busy nanny lady, babysitting my sisters 2 kiddies as well as taking care of my 2 lovelies. I normally look after Ava for about an hour every day after school and babysit Jakster on Monday's. With school holidays and my sisters mother in law out of commission for what ever reason (eyeroll to the max) I've had the sweethearts A LOT! Which means my house has been more of a disaster than normal and I've had zero time for anything except crafts, baking and sleep.

2010...yikes! well January 4th, 2010!

Neil and I have an exciting new plan which includes almost daily blogging by both or at least one of us.

Last week Neil rented Julie and Julia, which for 2.5 seconds gave me the insane idea to try and recreate the 365 day lots of recipe thing until I quickly realized I didn't want to gain another 500lbs. So I came up with the fun and exciting challenge of 365 days of healthy eating. We don't have the rules set in stone yet but we'll probably follow a plan like weight watchers (since I still have all the info). At the end of the 365 days when we've successfully completed our challenge, we're going to reward ourselves with a mini vacation to somewhere like the ice hotel.

Coming soon "the rules" blog then tons of fun, torturous and exciting blogs in 2010 :)

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

What the heck do I do with all these apples

Apple pie!

Sunday my favorite sous chef and I made apple pies. First we had to peel and chop tons and tons of apples. Haley peeled and I chopped. Notice the cool apple peeler we have, it even cores and spiral cuts the apples which means I don't really have any chopping to do (don't tell Haley). Also notice my messy messy kitchen and some of my Halloween greatness.


After we prepared all the apples we added some flour, brown sugar, and cinnamon and mixed mixed mixed it all together. Have a look, Notice it's also in the pie shell.

Next we added a dab of butter then covered it in more pastry and cut a few slits in the top.

Throw it in the oven till it's golden and smells delicious. While you wait you should bathe a baby.

Finally we have a finished pie. We actually made 3 to use up all the apples. One for that night and 2 for the freezer for another time.

YUM!

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Apple apples everywhere

We recently took our annual trip to the apple orchard for some apple picking fun...YAY!

I forget what time I woke up that morning but I'm sure it was early since being a sweet wife I let my hubby sleep in, although he did do the middle of the night feeding for me so I guess he can be sweet too. Anyway, I spent the morning balancing my son on one arm while I put a picnic together. You would think that having a 5wk old I would have just done something simple like throw sandwiches into a cooler or just opt to pick something up on the way but no... I lovingly spent 2 hours making a pasta salad and for some extra fun I made a potato salad as well.

Two stops and an hour and a half later we made it and OH MY GOD the place was packed. Instead of picnicking in our usual spot with all the tables and swings we found a quiet corner at the back of the field they use as a parking lot, jealous? I thought so. The only reason I had to write about all of the food stuff is because I'm the only one who ate the salads :( nobody else could be bothered to eat the food I so lovingly slaved over. LOSERS! Thats right I'm talking to you Neil :p

Apple picking fun



Please excuse my homely look. I realize I should have 2 eyebrows but sadly I barely have time for a shower so this is what I look like these days.

So what do you do when you're done picking 20lbs of apples well you eat candy apples and jump in hay of course




What do you do after you jump off big hay piles? Well you stand on hay piles and pick hay out of your underwear of course


When you're all done having the appleiest time of your life you may start to wonder what you do with 20lbs of apples. Well so far I've used 14 apples to make a yummy apple crisp.


I also made french toast with soft caramel apples for dinner the other night SO delicious!

My mouth is watering just looking at the pictures, it's a good thing it's almost dinnertime.

On the next installment of my insanity we'll explore some early Halloween fun and maybe some apple pies.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Yummy

Haley didn't have the greatest day at school yesterday. My poor pumpkin pie started crying at school because she missed her momma and daddy toooo much. So for today we sent her on her merry way with a picture of the 3 of us at Disney and I promised her a yummy snack if she stayed all day. That's right folks I like to bribe my children, I think I should be up for a mother of the year award any year now.

I made her yummy brownies from this recipe http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Best-Brownies/Detail.aspx if I was a super cool blogger I would have made the word brownies the link but I'm an idiot and don't know how :)


To make myself feel like a half decent mother I added raspberries to the plate so it would atleast appear healthy cause fruit magically takes away all the bad sugar.

hmmm I don't think so mother nice try though

Friday, September 11, 2009

I am Superwoman

I got the call at 6:30am on Tuesday August 18th. "Come on in for your induction, oh but if someone else beats you here we'll have to send you home" In my head I was thinking like hell you're going to send me home, this baby is being evicted TODAY!

Don't get me wrong I enjoyed being pregnant and I love feeling the baby moving but the last month was so hard. I had been sent to the hospital so many times for blood work to see if I had pre-eclampsia but thankfully my liver was always functioning. In the last 2 weeks of my pregnancy my blood pressure skyrocketed to 157 over 105, I was crazy swollen, had major headaches, I could barely stay awake and when I was awake I felt so sick but hey my liver was perfect.

Anyway I ran out of bed and in an excited tone I started yelling for Neil and Haley to get up "it's time for the baby". I ran into the bathroom and peed faster than I had ever peed before, you know since I had to beat every other pregnant woman in the world to the hospital. I ran back into the bedroom and woops I guess I hadn't quite finished peeing so I ran back into the bathroom to squeeze somemore out. I ran back into the bedroom and woops "what the hell is going on, why is pee dribbling down my leg again?" then it dawned on me maybe my water had sprang a slow leak.

We raced to my sisters house to pick her up and to drop off Haley, then we raced the hour to the hospital. Neil being the coffee addicted fella that he is was almost crying when I wouldn't let him stop at Tim Hortons but hey we made it and before all the other women...happy dance!

So lets skip a few boring hours of walking, repeating myself to the nurses "no I only had 1 ultrasound, and no no one had mentioned anything about a big baby" (that should have maybe clued me in but no), the pangs of early labor, and a few baths to try and control the pain...WOOHOO it's time for the epidural.

When I say WOOHOO it was more of a holy hell it's about damn time! By this point my contractions were so incredibly painful they were bringing tears to my eyes and I was getting a whole 10 second break between them. While I sat in bed waitting for my most favoritist person in the world to show up (the anistesiologist) my nurse started playing with my IV when all of a sudden I hear her say "I don't like this at all" yank out comes the IV then I hear her mutter something about needing an Iv before they'll give me an epidural. So for the next whoever knows how long I needed to sit still with my arms extended trying to relax while this woman repeatedly poked me trying to get this IV into my vein all while basically having 1 big excruciating contraction, I'm not really sure how long this went on for or how many pokes but it felt like forever!

Ahhhh the sweet sweet relief.

It didn't last long. Before I knew it the nurse said the phrase that both thrilled me and filled me with dread "It's time to push" The dread came from the birth of my daughter, there's something about feeling yourself wrip apart that fills you with fear especially when you're about to do it all over again.

16 minutes and 3rd degree tearing later my beautiful baby boy was here. As soon as he was born they placed him on me and I got to look at the back of his head while Neil cut the cord. Seconds later they whisked him away to the warmer thingy so they could examine him and get him to cry better. I wouldn't get to see his face for another 2 hours.

All I kept hearing was "wow he's a big boy" they were all excited to weigh him and at this point I was still expecting him to be 8lbs something. He was a whopping 11lbs 12oz I think I'm still in shock. Now when you have a huge baby apparently your placenta is huge too, so huge that even the doctor and his intern were impressed with the size of it. On a whim they decided to weigh it too, it weighed 3lbs 7oz.

After this point the next 2 weeks would be one hell of an emotional roller coaster. Maybe for another blog...

Meet Tyler Daniel Walker the man who made me a Superwoman.