Happy 1st Birthday Sullivan!

Sweet Sullivan,

My whole life, since I can remember, I have had an inward drive to achieve the next step in life. I've always been motivated and rarely content. I went to school early, married early, had Barclay before any of my friends were even thinking about babies. The second I met your daddy, I couldn't think straight until I married him. The day after I married him I was wanting a baby SO badly, the day after having Barclay I wanted another baby. It's like there has always been a race for me to run.

30 minutes after you were born and I was assured you were alive and well (we had some very scary complications), I was overwhelmed with the contentment that flooded my heart. I felt so content, so peaceful and not in a rush to do anything but soak up how blessed I was. I thought it would just last a few days, but this entire year, I have been nothing but content with my life. Having you has completed our family (even if we do decide to have more babies later). You have brought a certain personality to our home that we so desperately needed! You are peaceful, easy going and just plain delightful!

I was able to really relax with you since I was confident in my mothering skills from my poor guinea pig, Barclay. I co-slept with you from day one and enjoyed doing a lot of attachment parenting with you. I feel so in tune with you. I feel like I know you so well.

Despite having to have 2 surgeries in two months, having horrible ear infections constantly, you are so pleasant. You smile and coo and bat your beautiful, thick lashes and completely melt my heart.

You are so different than your brother, in almost every way. I love watching your personality develop more and more as you grow.

You are not predictable at all. You have NEVER napped at the same time your whole life, try as I might. But yet you just go with flow, no matter if you're tired or sick.

The only complaint I have about you is that you are NOT a good sleeper. Just in the past week have you consistently slept through the night. A lot of it was ear troubles, and then bad habits but I think we might have broken through and are on our way to both feeling a little more rested.

You, my son, are a bottomless pit. You are constantly hungry and I am constantly feeding you! I cannot believe how much you eat! I'm worried for our grocery bill when you're in high school!

I can't wait to see what you are like this next year. To hear you talk more than the few words you say, and to see you become your own little person.

I love you and am so thankful to the Lord that he knew better than us, and gave us you.

Love Mama

Dear 3 Year Old Barclay (almost a month late)

Dear Barclay,

From the second you were born and put on my chest, I've loved you. To watch you grow from that tiny baby to the spunky, precious, smart, thankful boy you are today has been such an honor and a learning experience.

I would say being your mother is the best thing ever. And I would say being your mother is the hardest thing ever.

This year you became a big brother 10 days after your birthday. You did not like him much. It was hard to see you "dethroned" as the only prince in my life. But today (for the most part) you are very loving towards him and are a great protecter of him. You are constantly on the lookout for things he might have placed in his mouth. You've "saved" him dozens of times! When you and Sullivan are giggling, it is absolute music to my heart. I love watching you love him.

This year we worked A LOT on discipline. It was hard. I wish I could have just skipped it all, but I love you too much. You have turned out to be a little OCD about things and have a hard time with any type of change. We have worked really hard and I am now learning things that make those changes a little easier on you.

You started preschool this year and love it! You call it your work;-) You have three friends you talk about all the time. Jonah and David...and Maddie. Oh you think Maddie just hung the moon! You have two great teachers who love on you and gently guide you. I think you are the trouble maker of the class. You are smart and give them a hard time, from what I hear. But they LOVE you. You are so much fun and so smart and so excited about learning. How could they not love you?

I have seen you become such a social butterfly this year. You are constantly having full on conversations with complete strangers. One of my favorite memories I'll always treasure of you, was on the bus in San Fransisco's China town, you went and sat right in between two very old chinese men. You just started chatting away with them. It was precious! It doesn't matter how old or young, you can talk to them...just like your daddy.

You are so much like me too. I can feel your little heart's desires so strongly because I remember feeling that way too.

You love to preform. You love when people watch you and clap for you. Your eyes just sparkle if I take the time to really watch you and encourage you.

You, my sweet boy, keep me laughing. You say the funniest things at the funniest times.

There is nothing I love better than to spend time with you and listen to what you have to say.

You are very, very intense. Even though it is hard now, and I have to discipline you so much, I am confident that your passion and your strong will will serve you so well as you grow up. I know you are going to be quite the man some day, Barclay Thomas George. I just pray that you will know the love that God has for you and that you would serve him.

I love you more than words can even explain. I am thrilled to be your Mama and so very excited about what this next year has in store!

Love, Your Mama

Conviction

I've been quiet on the blog front. It's because my mind is a hurricane of thoughts. I have been going through a really self searching, confusing, discouraging, exhausting stage of life. I feel like I am drowning pretty much every second of every day. My mind is a jumble of thoughts and ideas and I cannot straighten them out. I try so hard to get motivated and I fail within the hour and give up.

I feel very out of control in so many areas. I WANT to be better. I take time out of my day to plan, make lists, make goals. Noah encourages me to work on goals daily, weekly, monthly. But yet if one thing goes different than I planned on, I complete feel paralyzed.

In my mind's eye, I want to be this calm, happy, healthy, organic, baby wearing, yoga doing fun mom. I want to be an attractive, fun, energetic, thoughtful wife. And yet when I look at myself I am a mess. A real mess. Inside and out.

God has really been teaching me so much though. Most recently (and through reading The Meaning of Marriage with our small group at church) my eyes have been opened to some real root problems in my marriage. Ask me a month ago and I would have said it was mostly Noah's fault for this and this and this reasons. And now I just feel like my mind has been opened and I see my selfishness. It doesn't look like selfishness at first. I serve Noah physically all day long. I do pretty much everything in our home. Cooking, cleaning, etc. I do it all. I wake up all night long with Sullivan, I plan dinners with family and friends, I even coordinate everything for the small group HE is sapposed to lead. So when I hear that I need to be serving him in our marriage, I usually write it off. Because I feel like I am and I do. But I have really realized that I have served him out of resentment and bitterness and for me OWN selfishness. Instead of serving him joyfully. I just want to cry as I look back on most of our 6 years 9 months of marriage, and see the damage I have done by living in my marriage with this mindset. I see how much joy and happiness I have robbed us from. I see hundreds of situations playing in my mind like a movie where I can just feel the bitterness seeping out of me.

I'm human and I cannot change myself. But if I let the holy spirit love through me. If I serve Noah with joy because Christ gave everything for me...how different would our every day life be? Very.

Ha! I should have known that putting up meal plans like I was some put together housewife would backfire on me!

Literally the day after I posted all those meal planning blogs, my life has taken a steady decline. Starting with a family case of the nasty, 24 hour stomach bug from hell. Which came right in the middle of me cleaning out all my closets, starting to get in the habit of working out, and finally feeling like I wasn't drowning. Now Barclay is sick for the second time in 2 weeks, and once again I feel like I'm drowning.

Sigh.

I seriously hate Januarys. The past 3 have pretty much sucked.

Meal Plan 4

Randomly I chose meal plan number 4 this week. I had some ingredients on hand that it called for and I wanted some enchiladas.

You can see the meal plan HERE

I thought I'd post the links to the recipes I liked, shortcuts, and comments about them. Because I always do better with someone TELLING me about a recipe versus just reading it.

Cinnamon Almond Fruit Dip...found on pinterest.

It was YUM! Barclay ate it ( so like 1,000 bonus points). It opens up a world a possibilities. I will say I was not so much a fan of almond butter. Maybe I put too much? It just tasted a little too nutty for me. I think next time (and their WILL be a next time-because I have half a thing of ricotta and because we liked), I'll blend up a strawberry in it instead of the almond butter. We ate this with apples and there is a lot left over.

Jalapeno Popper Grilled Cheese...found on pinterest

I saw this and immediately thought of my husband. He has a strange hankering for cheap, frozen jalapeno poppers a good bit. I hate buying them so I saw this as a good, fast, easy..."might become a staple in our house" meal. He was skeptical (as he usually is about me "not following a recipe". But the verdict was a resounding, "Can you make me another one?"

I did not roast the jalapenos as she suggested because, it would have added 30 minutes to my prep time and because I had pickled ones already. I also ended up using potato chips instead of tortilla chips because that is what I had. I think the potato chips were probably better!

Crock Pot Mac and Cheese...found on pinterest

This was very yummy and easy. Barclay is allergic to eggs so that was a bummer that he couldn't partake:-/ My bad for not noticing beforehand. Only thing was it was so rich that I felt like I needed to eat just a bit of it. So unless I'm taking it to a church potluck, I'll probably not make it again.

Chipotle Sour Cream Enchiladas...found on pinterest

YUMMY! Loved it! Made a huge mess in my kitchen that I didn't clean up for 14 hours but it was worth it.

I used rotisserie chicken and just coated it instead of cooking chicken breasts. Super yum. If I'm ever in a pinch to cook some quick enchiladas, I'll probably just freehand the inside of the tortillas and top with the yummy sauce (which I already have frozen)

Since the chipotle pepper in abado sauce came in a can and I only needed 1 and there were like 6, I just made up several batches of the sauce and froze it.

*One main thing I need to state is that I never buy chicken or veggie stock. I just boil celery, salt, pepper and onions and/or rotisserie carcase. And use the juice. I usually just make it when it is needed in a recipe (seriously takes like 15 minutes) and I freeze whatever's left over for another day when I'll need it.

Turkey Chili...pinterest

I have made so many turkey chili recipes and have never not liked one. This one was particularly yum and I made it in 10 minutes. Literally. I top with sharp cheese. Barclay actually ate this one and it didn't involve fruit or hotdogs (10,000 bonus points!).

Japanese Chicken Salad...my Aunt Robin's Recipe

It is lettuce

Sliced Almonds

Poppy Seeds

Chow Mein Noodles (the dry ones in the Asian section)

green onions

and chicken (I usually use rotisserie because it's fast)

and the dressing is:

1/2 cup olive oil

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

1/4 sugar

salt and pepper

It's a staple around here.

12 Meal Plans

Click on the numbers to view meal plans:

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

*I did not have to the time to make sure that these were perfect. Once in a while I would leave an ingredient out on my grocery list because I knew that it was a basic that I would have on hand. And once and a while I'd see a short cut and decide to take it (aka rotisserie chicken all the time;-)

New Kind of Meal Plan

Here are some facts about me and my cooking skills:

-I'm a food snob.

-I refuse to eat any fast food. Literally never.

-I only eat chicken as meat (they are the least cute of animals to eat and I have a big imagination)

-I am a GOOD cook. I know it. I can cook without recipes, I can make pretty much anything, I have only cooked maybe 3 things in my entire life that I didn't like.

-I am terrible at baking, must be because I rarely follow a recipe.

-The hardest part of cooking for me is the grocery shopping.

-I am a MESSY cook.

I try to be little Susie Homemaker and every Monday morning with a fresh new week ahead of me, I try to sit down and make a lovely little meal plan. With my creative ADD and the millions of recipes at my fingertips, I usually waste an hour and then end up being too tired to go grocery shopping, then I end up either making pb and j or we go out or get take out. Usually by Wednesday I have it "together" enough to get some stuff for some real food but it's always a hassle.

So I had a brilliant idea to set aside a few hours and just have fun with it and make 12 weeks of meal plans and grocery lists. It was fun! It is relatively organized and I think it just might work. I ended up making the lists on google docs in a spreadsheet. They are labeled 1-12. I figured I can just look over them and pick whatever looks good and go with it. Because of stuff I already had in my kitchen, I chose meal plan 4 this week. It was easy! I printed it off, grocery shopped, and returned home without any brain cells lost and instead of returning home with a lot of random stuff that looked good to me I had enough stuff for about 5 meals and snacks. And I think I only spent about $10 more than usual.

Here's the thing, if you're looking for meal plans to feed your family of 5 on $25 a week...look elsewhere and remember back at the top of this post when I declared my food snobbery. It's not just me! If I don't cook something truly yummy and satisfying, my husband will refuse to eat it and go order something out instead. I think keeping things a little more exciting will keep us out of restaurants and in our home.

I decided to keep a running spreadsheet of basics that I want to always keep in my kitchen. That way, before I run out the door to grocery shop, I can pull it up on my iphone and do a quick run through to make sure we aren't out of everything.

For right now, my basics list is this:

Almond Milk

Coffee

Honey

Milk

Butter

Juice+spinach for green juice

Feta

Lettuce

Sharp Cheese

Creamer

Peanut Butter

Eggs

Chicken Frozen

Bananas

Red Sauce

Hot dogs

Stuff for bread

Garlic

Cinnamon

Olive Oil

Brown Sugar

White Sugar

Onions

Yogurt

Lemon Juice

Cumin

spinach

dijon

salt and pepper

flour

soy sauce

Curry powder

salsa

balsamic vinegar

greek seasoning

As I said, it is on my google docs spreadsheet so it's easy to change and always available. I find myself updating it a lot lately.

Also, I decided a realistic meal plan for our family is NOT 21 meals a day, because we will want to go to our favorite Mexican place, or join friends for dinner. And I also know that we will probably eat leftovers from these meals as meals. So instead I came up with this list:

*2 Snacks-This is 2 different snacks that will be new, fun, and easy to pull out when the kids or I get hungry

*2 New Meal Plans-Why not?! There are SO many meals out there to try! I've pinned like 250 of them but I still feel like I'll never be able to cook them all!

*One easy meal-like fried egg sandwich, tacos, turkey burgers (basically something I can make without a recipe)

*One soup-Noah hates soup with a passion and I love it. I love to reheat it for lunch and don't mind eating it nearly every day.

*One salad-Not to brag, but I make a mean salad! I am not scared to put all sorts of random things on it and there are so many cool dressings, toppings I want to try. One of my secrets to a good salad is to mix 2 dressings. One creamy and one oily.

*Fruits and Veggies-just whatever looks good or is not super expensive.

We tend to like to snack a lot and we are both not into complicated meals. For the most part I don't worry about having a meat, a starch and a veggie. #1.I make quite the mess anyways so it cuts down on the mess. #2.We usually don't need a complicated meal. #3.I wont be overwhelmed with cooking and keeping 3 things hot.

So unless we are having new company, we tend to literally eat one thing.

We do eat fruits and veggies, it just tends to be more for snacks.

So there you have it. I very unorganized, very doable, FUN meal PLAN. I'll try to post my spreadsheets for you to look over in case anyone else wants to try.