The year of thirty and a half

I often read in magazines that a woman's prime is mid-thirties.  I will not accept that I'm in my mid-thirties until I'm 35 (I know that doesn't make much sense, but phooey!).  I've decided to do a few things in this year of thirty and a half!

1. Send flowers to my husband.  Check!  What says "I love you husband" more than a manly Ford truck?  I can't think of anything.  I hope he knows how much I am truly blessed to have him in my life.
2. Take pictures of me.  Just me.  I know that sounds kind of hokey, but I'm always the one behind the lens, so I'm thinking about getting dolled up and getting some fun pictures done.
3. Do a triathlon.  There is a woman's only 'sprint' triathlon in June that I'm thinking of.  It's so short I could do it without training, but it's a perfect starter one for me.
4. Go to Hawaii!  I'm going to look great in June/July with that baby weight finally gone.

While I'm not 35 yet, I look forward to being in my prime.  And I plan on having my prime last until I'm 80.

Figuring out Christmas Traditions

This year, we are trying something new.  We are staying home for Christmas.

The holidays for us are often a time of running around from this party, to that one, from this city to the next.  By the end of the Holidays, I am stressed and I wonder what people see in celebrating Christmas.  So this year we (ok, it was I - still not sure if my husband is completely on board) decided to stay home for Christmas.  It’s our first Christmas in Jackson this year!  The first thought of this made me very excited.  I can sleep in!  I can wear my pjs!  I don’t have to do ANYTHING!  Who doesn’t love these things?  But now I try to make plans with friends, and they are all off celebrating with their families.  Bah Humbug!  Where’s my happy middle?

I haven’t found it yet.  I feel like it’s all or nothing.  If we travel up to KC/CS, we have two parties on Christmas Eve, one (sometimes 2) on Christmas Day, and usually the next day.  That’s where our family is, that’s where the parties are.  I find that I’m constantly looking at my watch to make sure we aren’t late for the next one.  Sometimes that means that I’m bugging the host to hand out gifts so the kids can open them and have time to play with them before we leave OR reminding family members what time we need to leave for bed time.  It’s not any fun.  Plus, since we aren’t home on Christmas Eve or Day, we have our Christmas days earlier and have to write Santa to make sure he knows when we are celebrating and the kids are opening presents and we are taking off.

Now, in Jackson, we’ll go to church Christmas Eve and go check out the Nite Lites sometime the weekend before.  We’ll sleep in Christmas day…oh wait.  No we won’t (what kids sleep in Christmas day?).  We’ll sleep in the day after Christmas, and have a nice pajama day, all by ourselves.  I’m interested in how we feel (as a family) about not traveling.  We don’t know what works for us, until we try it!  Merry Christmas!

Young at Heart

I have been working at my employer for almost 11.5 years.  My business card says I'm a Senior Application Developer. The company org chart says I'm a Specialist I.  So why do I feel so young (more so 'inexperienced')?

I look in the mirror and I have wrinkles on my forehead (this I blame on my kids for constantly worrying about them), I have laugh lines around my mouth (definitely blamed on my friends), and I use wrinkle cream around my eyes EVERY night (still figuring out who to blame this on).  But when I'm at work, talking with coworkers, management, or VPs, I feel so YOUNG.  So naive  so insecure, so ready for them to point a finger at me and tell me I'm an imposture - that I'm lying to myself and everyone else around me - that I JUST graduated from college and I'm really inexperienced.  But they don't, because my wrinkles and long list of accomplishments tell them I have experience, even if my body language/posture/idiotic responses show otherwise.

I have notes from colleagues telling me about my "invaluable experience", how they couldn't have done it without me, how I am very helpful and knowledgeable, how I'm a very good leader and I have good management skills.  People come to me with questions, and I have answers or I know where to find them.  Wouldn't you think I would believe everybody by now?  Shouldn't I be strutting around with an inflated ego by now?

I don't know why I feel like this some days.  Maybe I need to carry a mirror around to remind myself that I'm older than I feel?  What I need to do is find a way to stay young at heart, but still believe in myself.  Perhaps feeling inexperienced is good, so I strive to understand more and maybe that's what others see. Maybe it's because I work in a male dominated occupation, so I don't know how women are supposed to feel/act?  That's a lot of maybes.  One thing for sure is that I feel more comfortable now in my job setting than I did when I first started this blog post.  Maybe seeing this in writing will help pep me up!  But just in case, I'll carry a mirror around.

Kids will be kids, is that enough?

A couple of weeks ago, my husband was gone so I brought the kids by myself to church.  I was looking forward to the peacefulness I would have sitting in the pews by myself.  Turns out, once a month the kids' Sunday school is closed.  Unfortunately for me, that was this Sunday.  I had nothing with me to keep the kids entertained and nobody to help.  So much for peaceful.  I started off the service trying to keep the boys sitting in the seats the right way, followed by getting them off the ground, followed by getting them to stop laying down, this wasn't nap time!  To make matters worse, the couple in front of me with a tween kept looking back at us.  I was already sitting in the balcony, where did they want us to go?

I had kept my voice reasonably low while threatening the kids with death (aka no DSs for a week), but they were all over.  During a prayer, B managed to crawl under the pew and was a few rows back. I was beyond frustrated.  They tailored the sermon to be entertaining for younger kids.  It was about Sampson, well, from what I could hear, I thought it was about Sampson.  So why won't my kids sit still??!?!

Boys will be boys is a common phrase people tell me, but is that ok?  Should I just laugh at their wild ways and shrug?  Or should I try to tame them?  I've spent my whole, child-rearing life trying to tame and I'm not sure it's helped.  It has just caused a rift between them and me.  I guarantee they think I'm a terrible mother because instead of playing, I'm telling them to be safe, be responsible, don't hit, don't kick, to quit putting underwear on their heads, to JUST LISTEN and DO IT THE FIRST TIME!  Apparently, they are well behaved in school, daycare, Sunday school, so is it too much to expect them to behave for me too?

So I'm in turmoil.  Should I change my ways?  It would be very difficult for me to do that, but if it would help me regain a better relationship with my kids (especially my oldest, he's 8), then I would try very hard.  Or do I continue beating down on them to sit still and maybe it'll sink in?

Here I sit, at the Chelsea Tree House (indoor play area), catching up on my work and watching the kids play.  My main motive is to get them tired out so they will sleep tonight (my youngest was up until 9:50 last night!!), but a secondary motive is the enjoyment I get out of them playing well together (because this is rare at our house too!).

Here we go again!

When I first moved to Jackson, I only knew my boyfriend (now my husband), his best friend, and his best friends girlfriend.  I'm an introverted person, so it's hard for me to make friends (I usually have to be around them a lot to feel comfortable enough to talk about anything personal but most people just think I'm shy or rude for not speaking).
I spent my free time with my boyfriend.  I had made a few friends at work and spent some time with them, but mostly it was with Mike.   His best friend's girlfriend, Meredith, had met a friend (Lidija) that she said was a lot of fun.  They were getting together with a few other women at Lidija's house and Meredith invited me along.  I knew two girls from work there and thought it was a great group of girls. Fast forward 8ish years, past marriage and babies and more baby, and past 6 years of slowly coming out of my shell and now these girls can't get rid of me.  I've got stories that I've told a hundred times that they still listen to, tears that nobody cares that I shed, and constant chocolate whenever we meet.

Three of these girls (Angie, Becky, and Michelle) get stuck with me quite often.  Actually, now that I think about it, I think they can't get enough of me.  They begged and begged and begged for me to run a marathon with them (OK, maybe begging isn't the right word, it went more like this:  Me: "Hey, did I hear you guys talking about a marathon?"  Them: "yea"  Me:  "Ok, I'll run another one with you."  Them: <awkward pause> <whisper> 'Did we invite her?'.  Ha!  I'm kidding!
They did the full training for the May marathon, and I ran half of what they ran (see training schedule ) and we all started the marathon.  One of us became severely dehydrated and had to stop around 21.5 miles.   A few hours after we finished, I volunteered to run another one with her when she was ready.   Last week she decided she was ready, so we are upping our mileage to prepare for an October marathon.  I really don't care about completing another marathon, I don't care about another medal, but I wouldn't miss the training.  I have learned so much from these girls.  I learned how great organic food is, I learned about eMeals (about any night of the week you could pop over to any of our houses and we'll probably be preparing the same meal!), I learned that I'm not the only one who screams at my children until I'm blue in the face.  We read the same articles, listen to the same podcasts, run a ton and still don't lose weight.  We can talk for five hours without much silence.

So here we go again.  Another 2.5 months of training, another hundred or two miles on my shoe, and I'm sure an injury or two, but I wouldn't miss it for anything!  I wonder how many marathons we can fit in next year....

Recipes from the 'net

Here are a couple of recipes I have borrowed from the internet.  I can't even imagine life without the internet.  No place to look up code snippets (work), no place to view symptoms of diseases you think you have, no place to look for how to find all of the coins in Super Mario Brothers (we use to check out gamer books from the library for this!) and no place to find recipes!

I like to look up recipes after going to a restaurant with food that I like.

Here are some great ones that I've found:

Carrabba's Dipping Oil for Bread
SUPER EASY!  I love dipping bread and this one is super simple to make.  I put all ingredients (except garlic) in a little container so I have it on hand for when we have bread, and add the garlic in the dipping dish with the spices.

McDonald's sweet tea
YUM.  Since I usually order 1/2 sweet tea and 1/2 regular tea, I only put in 1/2 cup - 3/4 cup sugar.   Instead of the 3 regular sized lipton, I use the cold brew pitcher size tea bag.  And I also dissolve the sugar in warm water first (on the stove).  The first time I made it, I dissolved the sugar, poured it into a 2 gallon pitcher, and then put the Cold Brew lipton tea bag in it.  It brewed in like 10 seconds!  So let the water cool down if you use the Cold Brew bag.

Carrabba's Tag Pic Pac
This one requires a little more work, but it's SO good!  One of the reviews was from a manager at Carrabba's and suggested rough chopping 8 basil leaves and add them at the very last minute to flavor the sauce.  He also suggests using white pepper instead of black and canned, whole Italian plum tomatoes to crush them in the sauce yourself.  I also like chicken to put on top.

The two main websites I go to to find recipes are Kraft Recipes and Betty Crocker.  They are nice because you can put in the main ingredient and search for what you'd like to make or put in a list of ingredients that you have and come up with a meal.  I like looking at the 30 minute meals and the kid meals.  I don't remember which site (or maybe it's both?), but some of the meals aren't very spicy/salty/flavorful, so be sure to add in extra spices (if you are good at that kind of thing).

Have fun!  Be sure to put in your recipe links in the comments!

Happy Cooking!

Creating a garden

At the beginning of this year, I decided to try and start eating healthier, for myself and my family.  Not only increasing consumption of fruits and veggies, but increasing organic products.  I started buying organic milk, carrots, frozen berries, and a few other misc items.  I'd like to buy more organic stuff, but I can't find it at my local Meijer.  Every few months I can find organic strawberries, but I love strawberries so much, that I end up eating the 'regular' ones.  Jillian Michaels had said that if we started eating organic berries, we could reduce the pesticides that we eat by 80% (this was in one of her podcasts - Jillian Michaels' podcasts).  So, we decided to start a garden!

My husband has a Lowe's How To book and we found a picture of a simple garden set up.

My husband bought the boards (at Lowe's of course!), stained them, and joined them together.  We pulled up the grass underneath and poured in a TON of soil (Miracle Grow).  It's 8' x 4'.
I had some cucumbers growing inside, so I planted them the day we got the garden set up.  The deer ate them that night.  The next day we bought 10' PVC pipe and bird netting.  The 10' PVC pipe is connected to a larger PVC pipe connected to the board.

The netting is secured at all 4 corners with large screw hooks.  At first we though this was enough.  The deer still walked right through it!  So we added smaller screw hooks to the sides (2 on each side).

This held down the side of the netting.  I also added pinwheels to each of the corners hoping that helps scare the deer away.  The only thing we would have done differently is add grating (wire) at the bottom (underneath the soil) so the moles won't dine on the roots.

I've got cucumbers, carrots and green beans growing this year.   If the animals don't dine and we get to eat them, I may expand next year!

It's not a very technical post, so if you have any questions about sizing of any of the products, let me know (and I'll ask my husband :).