Our Happenings

I find it funny that every time I make a goal to either go to bed early, or get up early, I get thwarted by my dear, lovely children.  There have been several times in the past 8 years that I have decided that I will get up before the kid(s) do and have some quiet time for myself to get organized and ready for the day.  Without fail, the baby at the time will suddenly alter their schedule to wake up before me, no matter what time I have picked to rise.

This time around, I determined I would go to bed earlier and no sooner did I make that goal, then my little girl suddenly started waking up just before midnight to make sure I didn't get to sleep until late.  I'm guessing she is having night terrors.  Her big brother had them for a while at this age.  It's not a very fun evening activity, usually striking one to two hours after the child goes to sleep.  They are difficult to wake when having a night terror and touching or holding them seems to make it worse.  Last night, I put some soothing music on repeat and there was no night terror.  I don't know if the music helped or if she is simply past them, but I think I'll play some music again tonight.

We had some very cold temperatures this past week, coupled with a furnace that only works when it feels like it.  Thankfully, I have a large sweater collection.  I discovered that the cold weather had penetrated the garage and frozen about 25 pounds of potatoes I had out there.  I decided I would try to do something with them before they thawed and I had a nasty pile of mush to deal with.  So, I turned them into fries for the freezer.  I wasn't sure how it would work out, since the potatoes were already frozen.  I thought they might just fall apart, no matter what I tried, but I couldn't stand to just throw out that many potatoes.  I tried two different methods of preparing the fries, one was much faster than the other so we have more of them.  The first method was to slice the potatoes into fries and soak them in hot water.  Then put them in boiling water for 2 minutes, dry and place on baking sheet and put in the freezer.  The other method kind of followed this recipe for baked oven fries, but I didn't bake them for the entire time.  I put them in the fridge to cool and then put them into freezer bags.  I have cooked up both varieties in the oven using the method in the linked recipe and I do like the baked first fries a bit better, but the boiled fries worked very well thrown in some stew I was making.  I was so very happy that both methods turned out perfectly edible.  We ended up with 10 quart bags of fries, plus what we ate for our taste tests.

Another adventure in my life this past week was making deodorant.  I've seen recipes for it all over the internet and I just kind of tucked it into the back of my mind to try someday.  So I finally tried it.  I haven't been using it long enough to have a great opinion, but I don't dis-like it.  My armpits are much more moisturized than usual, but I don't sweat a whole lot in the winter, especially with a moody furnace.  We'll see how I like it as the seasons move on.

Last, but certainly not least in our happenings, we celebrated our anniversary yesterday.  Or maybe we just observed our anniversary.  Nine years isn't generally the center of a huge party, although I have to say that I'm very excited for our 10th, since it will come right after my husband finishes school for good and ever (if I have anything to say about it.)  If I was a more thoughtful and organized wife, I would have created a cute and thoughtful gift inspired by pinterest... and I do have some things pinned with him in mind, but we obviously weren't thinking clearly by getting married so soon after Christmas.  We pretty much doomed the creative gift giving without even knowing it.  But who needs gifts?  I have a wonderful husband who just seems to get better as the years go by.

Have a  lovely blog week!