Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Our Baby!


Here's our dear little child....or atleast what our baby will look like. Our children will definently have brown hair and there's a 50/50 chance of olive skin. I'm hoping we'll get a variety of eye color--not just brown. Oh, what the heck! Whatever our baby will look like, it will be the cutest baby EVER!

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Pictures


17 weeks, 1 day = about 4 months


Mayfield modeling for the spring catalog of sexiness.



Our serious photo shoot. Look at Mayfield wink.

Sunday Afternoon Family Update

I'm afraid to announce that spring is here in fear of another winter storm warning. It was quite odd last Monday how it was 65 degrees out, I was raking leaves in the front yard, and Colorado was under a sever winter storm warning. It snowed its six wet inches of snow, and by the time I woke up Tuesday at noon, it was practically all melted away. Ah, yes, spring in Colorado.

As of a literal family update, I'm on my laptop tapping away while Steven collapsed at an odd angle onto the bed into his Sunday nap coma.

Baby update! I'm 17 weeks, 1 day along. The baby has been most active these past few days, especially at night making it kind of impossible to sleep. A few days ago I was lounging in my bed on my laptop when I felt all my innards move around, and I could feel the baby flip. And then my lower back/kidney area hurt like heck! I thought I was going to die like my kidneys exploded from a stealth uterine infection. I just breathed it out (hee-hee-whoooo...hee-hee-whoooo) until it went away. Freaking out, I called my sister Mindy up to ask the heck just happened to me. She explained the baby was just rested on my kidneys, I was going to feel this a lot, and the pain will worsen during labor. GREAT! How am I going to survive labor if one little incident like this had me crying for five minutes?!?! I admit, I'm a wimp. Give me an epidural now! Anyway, I'm beginning to show like I really am pregnant, not just getting fat in my belly. It's exciting that this is actually happening, I'm really pregnant, and I'm going to have a baby. I'm trying not to buy any baby things right now; we're waiting to find out the sex on April 20th. Then, after that, I will be a baby maniac! I can't wait to get the nursery under way.

I can't forget to mention our little friend that came to visit last weekend. We had a bird in our chimney, and before we left for church Sunday afternoon, Steven put a box in front of the fireplace for the bird to fly into. When we got home from church, we took a nap, and I was woken by something freaking out in the living room. I woke Steven up and told him the bird got out but when he listened for it, nothing moved. I finally kicked him out of bed, in which he went into the living room to discover the bird did not fly into the box but into our blinds. We scared it out of the blinds and it flew out our front door but not before it flew into the door first. This wasn't our first encounter with a wild creature in our house (no, I'm not talking about Mayfield.) About a month or so ago, a squirrel fell down onto the shoot and wouldn't come down for days. We put the box up with chips and nuts for it to eat. We came home one day after running errands to find the squirrel made its way into the kitchen and was hiding behind our flour and sugar canisters. I ran it out the back door and it got its little sooty paws all over the counters. We're going to put some bird netting over our chimney so this doesn't happen again. Mayfield will probably eat the next critter that comes to visit.


Chicken Posole from Food Storage

A few weeks ago, I was feeling too sick to make dinner but I really needed to eat something substantial. I decided on a chicken posole recipe from Real Simple magazine--I've cooked it before, knew it was easy to make, and it was a fast solution for my hunger. I tweeked the recipe a little to accommodate food storage items, so in time of a nuclear fallout I will have a year supply of supplies to make this soup.

Items:
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, thinly sliced***(food storage tweek: 1/2 cup of dried chopped onions)
1 32-ounce container low-sodium chicken broth
1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes, drained
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper (any more and your soup will be ridiculously spicy and make you cry)
2 cups of shredded rotisserie chicken meat***(food storage tweek: 13 ounce can of white chicken meat)
1 15 ounce can of hominy, drained and rinsed
1 lime, cut into wedges***(food storage tweek: I have no idea what to use for this)
salt and pepper

Directions
1. Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and 1/4 teaspoon each of salt and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft and beginning to brown, 10 to 12 minutes. (food storage tweek: using dried onion, stir until cooked)

2. Add the broth, tomatoes, and red pepper and bring to a boil. Stir in the chicken and hominy and simmer until heated through 3 to 4 minutes. Serve with lime.

The only fresh items I used for this soup was the lime and the onion. It was delicious!! The first time I made it, I had a cold and couldn't taste the red pepper, so I added another 1/4 teaspoon. I could still barely taste it but Steven said it was too hot and it made his eyes water. When I got over my cold and have a second helping a few days later, I knew what he meant and I cried too from how hot the pepper was.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Mayfield the Mighty

I'm such a dweeb. I just tried to send three different messages containing what I could just put on this blog and have everyone enjoy! Mayfield is one stud muffin--and such a good poser for the camera. Here's his photo--I know, another one!--and a little video I put together to show how studly he is.

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Thursday, March 4, 2010

Monday, March 1, 2010

Happy Anniversary!

It's our 2 year wedding anniversary today. Yahoo! We've made 2 years, 68 years to go! We celebrated by eating out tonight. We planned on using a coupon for Cafe Mexicali, but upon walking in and realizing our coupon was expired by 1 day, we left in search for other food. We drove around a bit until we convinced ourselves to splurge and go to Red Lobster--without a coupon!! But, hey! It was our anniversary and we wanted the yummiest of all food. It was such a great day, and we're so happy how these past two years have gone. I wonder what this next year will be like...

I was doing bills today and organizing health insurance stuff when I discovered that the pharmacy hadn't billed our insurance for some medicine I ordered these past two months. The insurance had my birthday wrong so nothing from the pharmacy was getting through to them. Steven and I went to the pharmacy to get things settled--I thought if these meds could get through to the insurance company, then we would get closer to our deductible. Upon our arrival, turns out we had met our deductible through our medical bills and now we were getting a refund from the pharmacy! Ooo...we were so surprised! The medicine I had been on my first trimester was NOT cheap and we got around a $200 refund. What such great blessings we receive from the Lord. I'm so happy!