Catch me if you can!

Doesn't he look innocent? Well I'm here to tell you, he's definitely not!

We seem to be playing catch me if you can alot with Max these days, he runs everywhere! I especially noticed it this week while I was down with a cold. I'd have to heave myself off the couch to remove Max from a situation about fifty thousand times an hour. And he's taken to running away when he knows he's in trouble. If there's ever any question about us being born with sin, just watch a 15 month old boy. There's no way he could have learned this stuff, it's all natural folks.

Today he only took a 20 minute nap. That's definitely not the norm for him, but it made for an interesting afternoon of me trying to get him to nap. I just left him in his crib, and he would alternately cry and talk for 15 minutes at a time, so I knew he wasn't terribly upset, but he never did fall asleep. I eventually got him out and decided to just chill and he almost fell asleep right on the couch, until he realized it and then stood up and started dancing so that he wouldn't zonk out. Goofy child. I just hope it's not a new habit for him. Here he is spaced on the couch watching tv.



Food
I love summer and fall most for the food. I'm gonna admit it, I love food. Luckily, I love food that's good for me too, but I've realized that dieting never works well in my household because I love to cook. I give away as much as I can when I do go on a baking bender, but you always have to taste it before you give it away right?

I always feel weird when people say I'm a good cook or they like something I made because cooking is not something I've done for long. I didn't know how to cook when I got married, but like everything else I do, I picked it up and ran with it. We couldn't afford to eat out our first (and the rest too) year of marriage so I had to learn. Adam doesn't like hamburger helper and that's all I knew how to make. We still occasionally have macaroni and cheese out of the box for dinner, but I'm happy with the repertoire I've built up over the years, and I'm always game to try a new recipe. There's always a frozen pizza in the freezer in case it doesn't turn out.

I have my tried and true recipe books. I always go first to my Better Homes and Gardens book and then after that The Joy of Cooking always makes an appearance, especially if I'm working with an ingredient I've never used before or I want to know something specific. I also do a lot of internet recipe finding.

I guess I always figure that anyone can cook if they can follow directions, but I also know that the best things I make come from trial and error, by knowing how you want it to look, smell, and taste and just giving it a little something else that's not in the recipe. That's what makes it good.

I've been attempting to make Adam eat things he normally wouldn't. He always puts up a fuss, but tries it anyway, and then normally says he doesn't like it. Oh well, I'll keep trying.

So with all the blueberries I've had lately I've been tossing them in just about everything Max and I are eating (I've discovered that although I like strawberries in my salads, I'm not a huge fan of blueberries in them). I briefly mentioned previously a variety of things I've been making with them. Tonight I tried one more. I made muffins from scratch. I'd always used mixes before.
I used my trusty Joy of Cooking basic muffin recipe and doubled it, then split it in half, and made blueberry with half and lemon poppy seed with the other half.

Lemon poppy seed muffins are my favorite. In high school when I went to OSU my senior year I had to take the city bus. I didn't have a car. And the bus schedule never worked out quite right so I would be early for class. The best bus stop stopped right in front of Insomnia the best dark squirrelly local coffee shop there ever was. I would stop in there for a cup and a muffin most mornings. They had the best lemon poppy seed muffins. I've dreamed about those muffins (while pregnant, mind you).

So at any rate tonight I made a lot of muffins. They are good. Not great , but good enough that I can alter the recipe next time I make them to make them better, and they were almost as easy as making a mix, and they didn't take any strange ingredients. Tonight I altered the recipe a little bit. I used half whole wheat flour and half all purpose. I also juiced a whole lemon in the batter. So that would be half a lemon in a regular batch of the batter. I like it because it gives it just a hint of fresh to it but I think it cut the sweetness out a little from the batter and Adam wanted the muffin to be more sweet and sugary. Oh well, we can't win them all.

Most of them are going to work with Adam tomorrow to be passed out to the church secretary and missionaries who are living in the parsonage while on furlogh.

Today Max and I were running errands and we ended up at the Peoria Metro Centre Farmer's Market. That's the biggest one (that I know about) in the area and they are open during the week also. We ended up with some locally grown tomatillos and some potatoes (I love love love fresh potatoes). The tomatillos were a novelty I couldn't pass up because they were in every grocery store in Texas and I hadn't seen them in so long. I'm planning on roasting them and making breakfast burritos for dinner this week sometime.

They look like green tomatoes with a papery skin and they are kinda like tomatoes and chilis mixed together. They have a hint of lemon in them too and are mostly used to make salsa.

Crafts
Max loves to crawl up the stairs. Sometimes I get sick of carrying him back down and reprimanding him so sometimes we stay up and I close us in my craft room (soon to be Max's big boy room) and turn on the window air conditioner and we play. Max plays with glue sticks (for my hot glue gun -- they are not in the glue gun, they are just sticks of glue), ribbon, yarn, tissue paper, storage tins, pillow forms, fabric, stickers, anything he can get his hands on. He loves that he can actually crawl up on the twin bed himself and loves to get up on it and jump to his heart's content.

And I love it because I've actually be working on a couple of projects. I made a couple of the things you've seen recently, the butterfly shirt sent to Kate in the PNW, and I've been making cards again. They are such an easy project that I can whip one or two out while keeping Max out of trouble.

Then I got a grand idea while up there the other day. SCRAPBOOKING! I loved scrapbooking before we had the munchkin. In fact I have so many supplies that I use for cards and such that I could probably make a million scrabooks with just supplies on hand. I also have more than enough "boy" materials to make Max's scrapbook. The only problem with that is I don't ever print of pictures now. Everytime I think to myself that I should just go ahead and upload like three or four for every month to walmart and just have them printed I get nervous because I've taken literally 4 bazillion pictures since the kid's been born. And I haven't deleted a single one. I don't even hardly have any printed out and put around the house. I just need to do it sometime. Just sit down and spend the day organizing the many cds of pictures I have.

But I do have a started and unfinished scrapbooking project from the Disney trip Adam and I took in 2005. Yes, 2005. August 2005 to be exact, so that's 4 years it's taken me to actually work on this scrapbook again. So then I stress a little less about working on Max's, he's only been alive a year. I'll get to it someday.

I got out the Disney scrapbook and all the stickers, and papers, and stamps, and pictures, and memorabilia, and laid it all out. Really for those of you who scrapbook, you know that getting everything out really takes the longest, that's why I keep putting it off. Everytime I would get it out I'd only have time to do a page or two then I'd have to pick it all back up. But upstairs I can just leave it out on my work table. It's a separate table from where I have my sewing machine, so if I need to I can still sew. I can just leave everything spread out and ready to go as I get a few minutes here and there. I have all the pictures organized by place (this was already done) and I just have to caption as I go. It was a nice trip down memory lane while getting it out. That was our biggest vacation all by ourselves we've ever taken besides our honeymoon. It was a fabulous week, and I had the cutest haircut.

In other crafts, I've been working on and exploring lots of knitting patterns. It's like I've opened the door to a whole new realm that I couldn't even fathom before. But while I'm knitting sometimes I'm still limited with what I can do logistically. I've made a fool out of myself asking silly questions at the local yarn shop. I've discovered that crocheting is really the easiest to design and revise in like altering a pattern to make it a custom fit, or embellishing, or being creative. But knitting it so very delicate and utilitarian at the same time.

I've been working on a crocheted shawl in a soft, bulky yarn. It will be perfect for winter. It's for a friend of the family who is always cold.


And a crocheted baby blanket with an unknown recipient so far. I'm waiting to see who's having what.... I have 3-4 boy colored blankets finished and waiting for babies to warm. I have a lot of boy colored yarn. This blanket is my quick and easy project. It's a well known pattern and my hands just go about it on their own.


And then there's Mom's scarf which is a labor of love. It's not a hard pattern, but it's just having the patience to complete it. Knitting takes so much more patience than crochet, but I love how it's turning out. And it's a lovely ruby color, not the bright orange it appears to be in the badly lit photo.


Well If you've made it to the end of this post, thanks for sticking it out. I always feel like there's so much to talk about when I haven't blogged well in a few days. If I was a good blogger I would break it up and post it on different days, but I'm not that good of a blogger anyway. We've been so busy (besides getting rid of these colds), there's been something for us to do out of the house every day for the past two weeks (or someone over at the house), and Adam has started Thursday visits with members of our church again. Tomorrow we are having girls night/boys night with the youth before they go back to school (the girls are watching movie(s) here at our house) and then Friday we'll be at a sportsman club fish fry with some people from church, and then Saturday and Sunday is the big art festival in town. I can't wait for that.