This time it is final.  I promise.

http://nottryingforaboy.com/ 

So, my first wordpress post. It isn’t that pretty around these parts right now. But I wanted to make the move. Soon and hopefully sooner than later, it will be pretty.

I was all set to have Summer at Designs By Summer make a new layout for me. I like her work and she has very pretty layouts. But in trying to figure out how I wanted my blog set up, I realized that the majority of the blogs I liked used wordpress. I contemplated moving- after all I don’t really have that many posts to move and if I lost something it wouldn’t be a big deal. But on the other hand, I don’t have many readers and what if I lost some? I realized I wasn’t blogging for others though.

Then Lisa at Take 90 West made the move. And that was the icing on the cake. So here I am.

Like I said, it isn’t pretty. But it is going to have to wait a bit.

Because I’m going to Vegas, Baby! We’re going this coming week. I just don’t think I’m going to have the time to devote to making it a pretty little home on the Web for me before we leave.

Plus, I’m still debating on it I want to have wordpress host or set up my own url. So, tell me why you did or didn’t.

They get it from their father.

Because God knows, I’m far from anal. Things don’t have to be perfect in my book. I don’t mind a little clutter, my clothes are never perfectly ironed, and my bed is rarely made. Ok, so it is only made when the cleaning ladies come because they do it, details, details. But yes, I live in a little clutter. I certainly wouldn’t be friends with Bree. Well, I would because I’ve love to go to her house, rub myself all over her impeccably organized house and hope some of it would come off on me, but I’m afraid that she wouldn’t want to come to mine.

But LushMan is just plain anal. “Everything in its place and a place for everything” is something he says often around here. Good thing I don’t take him seriously. We only need one uptight adult in this house.

My poor innocent babies though. They’ve been infected. TheOldest and TheMiddleChild have gotten the anal gene. The first sign was when they lined up all their Little People train pieces at almost 28 months and 14 months. Notice all the people and animals are facing the same direction.

This brings me to Wednesday. It was the first day of TheMiddleChild’s speech therapy. The therapist said that part of her problem is that she’s a perfectionist. If she can’t say something the right way, she gets frustrated and doesn’t try. She does not like to make mistakes.

It’s all LushMan’s fault.

I stumbled upon a cookbook software a few years ago and I have to say that not a few days go by that I don’t use it.

Mastercook has become a life saver for me. It comes with its own recipes (over 8000 actually!), but what I like it best for is to create my own cookbooks. I have one cookbook for crock pot cooking, one for Christmas cookies, and now I’m starting one for dairy free meals.

It manages shopping lists too. In fact, I made a dairy free recipe today. Instead of writing out my shopping list, with one click, I added the ingredients necessary to create my meal. I was able to delete the ones I had at home too. The coolest thing about the shopping list is that it automatically sorts the items by location in the store. No more wandering aimlessly in the grocery store.

Meal planning is something that seems like it would be a good idea, but I just can’t get my act together to do it. But when I do, the software also does that.

All that and more for only 20 bucks.

How fun! This is my first blog tag game. I was tagged by Boys Rule My Life. I’m sure the majority of the 5 I’m tagging have no idea who I am as I’m kind of a quiet reader. I know, I know, if I want people to comment here, I should comment THERE. Tit for tat and all that stuff.

Let me just say to the 5 I’m tagging, that I do enjoy their blogs.

*Start Copying Here*
I have randomly selected 5 of you below to be tagged and I hope that you will similarly publish this post in your blog. You will have to tag 5 other bloggers and just keep adding on to the list. (Do not replace, just keep on adding! Yes we hope it will be a long list!)
It’s real easy!
Tag others and see your Technorati Authority increase exponentially!
The benefits of Viral Linking:

As you know, I hate love my house. When we first acquired it in the fall of 2006, it needed so much work that we couldn’t move in for 6 weeks after closing. The previous owners really liked having blue carpet in the kitchen and throughout the house and wallpaper in every room. I didn’t like it as much.

The before pictures only give a hint to how bad it was. We’re still working on it (it is a never ending project, isn’t it), but here are some after pictures.

We haven’t done much to the kitchen because eventually we’d like to redo it all. We did get new appliances, but that was mostly out of fear of what might have been living on or in them. Kind of like that blue carpet.

I think what makes me happiest about the house though is that our garage door opener will finally be replaced on Thursday. And I can’t wait. Nothing like a few days of 0 degree weather and snow on top of snow to make you appreciate your home even with all of its faults.

It was 2 degrees this morning while driving the girls to school. Normally, it wouldn’t have bothered me that much as I could go from my warm house into my running, heated car in my not so warm garage. Today I wasn’t so lucky. Our garage door broke last week following the footsteps of almost everything else in my lovely house.

Because I had to go out the front door and down the walkway to our driveway, I passed by many of the 40 or so rose bushes we inherited with this house. They are so beautiful:

Oh wait, that’s how they looked last summer. This is what I saw today. And it made me cry. Sobbed really. Well, maybe not. I would have cried but I was afraid of my tears freezing to my skin. That would have hurt and made me cry more. Plus, I wanted to get my butt inside the car as quickly as possible.

If you look closely, you can see a rose hiding under a rose cone. Or maybe you can’t. The rose cones are being held down with a brick and are almost hidden in the snow. Mmm, snow cones.

See this next little guy? I ran out of cones and being the procrastinator that I am, the stores also ran out of cones. I’m sure he’s very mad at me right now and cold. Very cold. We’ll see if he survives.

And look at this tree. It should be standing up straight and tall, but the snow weighed it down and just robbed it of all its dignity.

It will be a couple of months still before the cones come off and I see which rose made it through the winter.

What would possess an almost 5 year old to stick a popcorn kernel up her nose?

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time until it hurt and she began to freak out. One quick blow with me holding the other nostril shut dislodged the kernel which shot out like a cannonball.

And all was right with the world again.

No popcorn kernels were damaged during the making of this blog or the experiment.

Thursdays in the summer are like Christmas morning. That’s the day our box from our CSA is delivered. CSA stands for Community Support Agriculture which really means we get a box of local, fresh, organic veggies each week. It makes me feel good that we are supporting local farmers (ok, so they are really a couple hours away, but at least they aren’t from another country where the vegetables are packed up, put on a plane, end up in a warehouse, and then trucked off to the grocery store.)

Last summer was the first time we joined and I do have to say it was overwhelming at times. We got vegetables that I’ve never made before- like kale, collard greens, beets (wasn’t a fan previously), and sometime we got so much of something, we just couldn’t use it up especially when TheYoungest was born. My mom got the rewards from that week.

But it was SO MUCH FUN. You never really knew what you were going to get since they didn’t know exactly what would be ripe the following week. They did give you an idea of what would be in your box but nothing was guaranteed due to Mother Nature. I made recipes I would have never made before and we ate a lot more veggies than ever before.

I miss it.

It was so cool to get garlic with a big stalk shooting out of it, or brussels sprouts still attached to their stalk knowing they were probably picked just days before. And tons and tons of peppers- that is LushMan’s favorite as well as bags of potatoes still with dirt on them. And popcorn still on the stalk with the husk on. Too neat. This summer, I’ll share them all with you.

Angelic Organics, the CSA, gave a cookbook last year to all members. It zeros in on the food they grow. It showed how to store veggies the proper way (who knew you just didn’t throw them all the crisper?!), some recipes and plenty of interesting stories and quotes.

I received an email from them today with very exciting news. Their DVD, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, is now available on DVD.

“The Real Dirt on Farmer John will turn every idea you ever had about what it means to be an American farmer, or an American dreamer, on its head. Meet Farmer John, the incredible human being whose inspirational story of revolutionizing his family farm and redeeming his own life has won accolades and awards at film festivals around the world.”

I can’t wait to watch it! And if you’re interested, you can buy the DVD and the cookbook on their website.

As I said on Works for Me Wednesday, I shopped online at Chocolate Cake Club for some Christmas gifts. I’ve been really a happy with my purchases there and was happily surprised that Sue Kirchner, the founder of the Chocolate Cake Club, was kind enough to stop by and leave me a comment thanking me for the endorsement.

I want to make clear that I don’t work for Chocolate Cake Club. I have not been paid, encouraged or threatened to make this post. I have never met Sue or anyone else that works for them. I am just a happy consumer.

That all said, I thought I’d share what I did buy from them. I first found them because I was looking for a 2007-2008 planner. I bought the one I used the year before at Barnes & Noble, but they didn’t have this years version and I wanted to start using it. I did a google search for the planner and up came their website. So, in my first purchase, I bought the Mom’s Plan-it™ 2008 Engagement Calendar. I also added the Baby Daze™ Sitter Slips because we were starting with a new sitter and I thought they’d come in handy.

For Christmas, for my 6 year old niece, I bought the Playful Chef Kids Cooking Kits. It is adorable and she loved it. I got my nephew, her twin, the I Dig™ Tyrannosaurus Rex Skeleton Excavation Adventure. I cannot begin to say how much he loves this set. Any little boy who loves dinosaurs would love it. I also got him this Dinosaur Kids Talking Alarm Clock.

For me, I bought the Retro Take Out Menu Organizer Binder. Like most people, (I hope it isn’t just us!), we have a junk drawer (or two or three or four) that was overflowing with a bunch of crap stuff. Our takeout menus seemed to multiply in the drawer. We had more than one copy from each place we order from. I don’t know if they were having little menu babies in the darkness of the drawer when we weren’t looking or what, but it was getting way out of hand. Now our menus are organized, all in one place and we only have one copy each.

Of course, I have a whole other list of things I’d like to buy. One day, one day.