Food Glorious Food

Another week another menu!

Last week took a lot out of me. I was SO out of practice for a whole 5 days of working and school pick-ups and doing all the things. By the time Friday rolled around Christmas break and the days of lounging in bed with JP till 9, going to yoga at noon, and lounging about the house reading about time traveling Highlanders and determining the perfect placement for my latest Homegoods purchases felt like eons ago.

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I wrote the above on Sunday and apparently it took so much out of me that it's taken me until Wednesday to pick it back up, but I'm watching Top Chef as I type, so maybe my subconscious was just waiting until the proper thematic pinnacle could be achieved.

I was going to write about food and our menu. I am still loving doing all the cooking and talking to the kids while I do it. We'll go back in time a bit:

Sunday: Black Bean Spinach enchiladas (I think this might be my #1 favorite recipe; we all love it and Cora ate more than Landon and Claire combined; you should go make them), cilantro lime rice.
Monday: Chicken lasagna (this lasagna roll-up recipe morphed into lasagna because I didn't feel like rolling up the noodles, with PW's tomato cream sauce on top).
Tuesday: Teriyaki chicken meatballs (from Costco), simmered in TJ's soyaki sauce, with broccoli thrown in at the end; all over brown rice.
Wednesday: Pasta with this Tomato Sauce. JP wanted something simple and I didn't want to open a jarred sauce yet in my kitchen.
Thursday: Tacos, Mexican Rice (I love this rice).
Friday: TBD. Landon now has basketball practice on Friday nights and it's becoming tradition for me to feed the kids before, play with the girls for 90 minutes (kids' yoga video, a bath, and fingernail painting has been the agenda so far), and then have JP pick up Thai food on the way back in for us to eat on the couch with a bottle of wine after we tuck the wee ones in bed. I see no reason to deviate from that past practice.

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Owning a small business in a smallish town makes JP a minor celebrity who gets free stuff a lot. It's awesome- not necessarily because of the free stuff, but because he's really part of our community and it seems like everyone knows him. Or knows of him. For the first time in our 13+ years together he's the one who knows people when we walk in a room (or store, or restaurant, or wherever) and I love it. I also love that one of the families he coaches owns the best donut shop in town and sends him home with boxes of them all the time. I also kind of hate it, but tonight I was in a donut frame of mind and inhaled a cinnamon sugar twist 5 minutes before skipping dinner to run out the door for barre. You think a giant twisty donut might not sit well during class, but I think it gave me that extra burst of energy to lift my leg up long after it lost all feeling. And then I got home and ate a glazed cinnamon twist in celebration. So, for full disclosure, that was my actual dinner tonight, not the more well-rounded meal I fed my family above.

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Cora was home sick today. She had some tummy trouble yesterday (7 dirty diapers in 2 hours; maybe a new daycare record?), so she had to stay home for 24 hours to recover. Here's our little invalid out shopping with daddy. As his text to me stated, "best day ever!".

She woke up this morning bright eyed and bushy tailed and ran around the house clapping her hands over her head and screaming in joy. Good thing she was home recovering.

Luckily in our new life, we can roll with faux sick days. JP took her along on his errands this morning and then responded to emails while sitting on the floor in the playroom while Cora brought him all the food and big kid toys she couldn't figure out how to play with without her big sibs present. (JP said she kept wandering around the house looking for them; poor baby has pretty much never been alone). She napped, he worked more, and then I came home to relieve him when he went to the pool at 3 to coach. Cora found the whole day to be completely fantastic and didn't burden us with a single tummy-troubled diaper. Basically, she's learned the art of skipping school early.

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Claire put together this outfit on Saturday and wore it while cheering on her brother's basketball game and running our errands at Costco and Target. Our rainbow girl garnered smiles wherever we went, which is pretty wonderfully typical for the Bear.

She carried it off so well I almost wondered how I could incorporate rainbow tutus into my everyday wardrobe. Almost.