We're leaving for Puerto Rico on Thursday!!

And we're so excited! Definitely looking forward to warm weather after these 6 degrees above zero days and spending some time with Kody's family. I'm thinking our Christmas break travel plans could definitely get interesting if the weather does cooperate. But before 80 degree weather and the beach, we have to finish up finals (for Kody) and one more day of work (for me).

Last weekend, the XC team was honored, for probably the first time ever, for placing at the NAIA national meet. The cross country teams and track individuals are, by far, the best athletes on our campus - winning the most awards, qualifying and placing high at national meets. However, the school likes to celebrate when our basketball or baseball team does well against other Chicago-area schools. So, here's to the XC team who placed 14th out of 32 teams across the nation (and many, many more that didn't even qualify to nationals) at NAIAs. They were "honored" during the men's basketball game last weekend.



Also over the weekend, Kod and I tried our hand at making Christmas cookies! It's sort of been a family tradition (we skip some years) to cut out and decorate Christmas cookies, so Kod and I continued the tradition in Bourbonnais! Here's the result:


All baked and ready to be frosted.


I also made some plain sugar cookies as well.

My very own Handy-Man

Kody doesn't normally contribute very many ideas to this blog, and I don't think he's even looked at it since October! He just, very kindly, obliges when I want to take 50 pictures of our first Christmas tree and chuckles silently (rather than out loud) at me when I ramble about what I've recently written on the blog or attempt to show him the pictures I plan on putting up soon. So, the other day, when he said "Do you think you could write a blog about ..." I was so excited! Even if it is about him and how awesome he is :-), I love the fact that he thought to ask me to write about it! haha.

So here goes: I do live with my very own handy man. And while we do live in an apartment and there aren't too many "projects" for him to work on, he still has done his share of handy man work around our little home.

Project #1:Our grill
Apparently this wasn't a very hard project, but I was still impressed! When we first moved in, it was one of the first things he put together and he did it so fast! It's too cold to go outside and take a picture of the beautiful grill, but here's one from inside!



Project #2: Our futon
He had a little help with this one from his friend Caleb because the futon was ridiculously heavy and Caleb helped us shop for it. But again, he put it all together (very quickly) and continues to be my "handy man" whenever we pull it out to use. Many of our evenings are spent on that futon watching movies and sometimes we just end up having a "sleepover" on the futon if we're too tired after the movie to move back into our bed. But that's not the handy-man part. I can never get the futon to fold back up by myself (the mattress is pretty stiff), so my trusted and strong husband always comes to my rescue.

Project #3: Our bedroom furniture
Imagine the below photo in about 50 different small boards and bolts laying across our living room floor. We bought a "bedroom-in-a-box" set, so Kod "built" basically our entire bedroom - our dresser, nightstand, backboard and mirror (which is currently under our bed).

Please ignore the dirty laundry. Thanks!

Project #4: Our bathroom sink
This is the project that prompted Kody's request (and then together we brainstormed what other projects he had completed). We keep a lot of stuff under our sink in the bathroom, and I often forget what is back there in the depths of the cabinet. The other day I decided to pull out a bag to find out what was in it and possibly use what was in there (some lotion and Burts Bees products). But when I pulled it out, I discovered the bag was half filled with cold water! I was so confused and called Kody in to have him take a look. Nothing else in the cabinet was wet, just the water in my bag. To make a short story even shorter, Kody checked out the pipes, but we couldn't get it to leak again. So I left the bag out to dry and we left all the stuff in the cabinet. The next morning, we had a very soggy cabinet. It leaked. But my handy-man checked it out again and fixed the problem completely! No more leaking under our sink!

I’m sure there will be many more projects to come and even after just six months of marriage, I am fully confident that my handy man can conquer whatever task is put in front of him!

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree

We have our first Christmas tree! It's real, of course. The only way to go, at least in my mind. It's a Balsam Fur and has been drinking up our sugar water each day since we got it! Here's a little photo scrapbook of our first tree:


Picking out the PERFECT one at Menards. Kody was giving it a gentle pat in this picture.


It's up! Kody's job was to pick out a stand and he came home with a stand and a beautiful tree skirt! I was so excited! His other job was to put up the tree and put the lights on (courtesy of my parents), which he did beautifully.


All decorated! My mom helped me string popcorn and cranberries and we borrowed a box of ornaments from the Carr's in St. Charles (Thanks again!)


So pretty! Whoops, still haven't taken down the fall decorations.


My attempt at making a door hanger/wreath thing for our front door with scraps from the tree. It sort of worked out, but it kind of feels like it's going to reach out and grab you when you try to open the door.

This picture isn't Christmas tree related, but over Thanksgiving we went on a late-night walk and my parents borrowed Kody and I's Smittens (a Christmas present from our Aunt Lynette last year).

SMITTENS: "Now you can love the earth and your sweetie with Smittens made from recycled fleece. Invented by knitwear designer Wendy Feller, who came up with the idea for Smittens while on a romantic but chilly walk with her husband, a set of Smittens comes with a set of two regular mittens plus a third over sized one for a couple to share between them."

A Thanksgiving Feast!

Our first Thanksgiving as a married couple and a celebration of six months of marriage! I can't believe it's already been that long. It seems like the wedding was just a month ago, but at the same time it seems like we've been married forever!

My family came to Bourbonnais to celebrate Thanksgiving with us. A few highlights:
- Cooking my first turkey and making half of the Thanksgiving feast (It actually turned out really well!) Here are a few pictures of our food that day:

- Watching the Nebraska football game against Colorado at Buffalo Wild Wings (they won!)

- Doing some shopping at Wal-Mart for our cousin's husband who is in Iraq and Mom and Dad surprising Kody and I with groceries (possibly the best part of the weekend, thanks again Mom and Dad!!)

- Playing LOTS of Wii tennis and all of us getting sore

- Having Todd and Jonathan spend the night with us every night while sharing our futon. See below:

- Getting our first Christmas tree (more on that to come)

- Playing lots of games and just spending time with the fam - Todd, Jonathan, Mom, Dad, me Kody, but we definitely missed Chris, Sarah and Elijah

- and finally ... taking Todd to the airport on Monday morning at 2:30 a.m. during the middle of a snowstorm. The sacrifices you make for family :-)

All in all, it was a great weekend with my family and we can't wait until our Christmas ski trip with the entire family!

XC Nationals

A few weekends ago, Kod and I headed up to Kenosha, Wis. for NAIA Cross County Nationals. Here are a few highlights from the weekend:
- Spending Friday night at the Carr's home in St. Charles (it's always fun to go there alone and pretend like we actually live in a big house! haha)
- Dropping off our mountain bikes in St. Charles for the winter! (yay!! They're no longer in our bedroom!)
- Leaving super early (well, like 7:30 a.m.) to drive to Kenosha and almost not even going to the meet because we wanted to sleep in so bad.
- Driving by an American Girl building and the Jelly Belly factory on our way there.
- This one is pretty amazing, so it deserves a more lengthy story - Kody printed off directions to the meet before we left...well, to Kenosha at least. He said he couldn't find where the meet was located. So we arrive in Kenosha and Kody tells me we're just going to drive around until we find the meet (huh??). We take the first Kenosha exit (there are like three different exits you could take) and Kod begins driving for a while down a main road. He decides to call a friend on the team, who tells him this: "Exit the interstate, go for a while, take a left and then you'll run into it." (HUH???) So, Kody follows his directions and goes for a while, takes a left, goes a while longer, makes a few other turns (never making a U-turn, mind you) and we magically end up right at the college where the XC course is. I'll admit, I didn't think he was going to be able to get us there, but somehow he did and I was very impressed by my husband that day!
- During the very cold, long meet, Kody proceeded to lose our car and apartment keys when the fell out of his coat pocket. We searched the course and the "wilderness" where we had been, but didn't find them. Thankfully, I had decided at the last minute to bring my keys, so we were able to drive back and get into our apartment.
- Kody also decided before we left that instead of taking the tollways back to Bourbonnais, we were going to take other roads that MapQuest directed us to, allowing us to have a nice tour of about every single Chicago suburb there is (not really, but it sure felt like it!) It was only supposed to take us an extra 15 minutes, but the bus the athletes took beat us back to Bourbonnais. :(

Here are some pics of the weekend!


Kody doing what he does best: cheering the team on


The mile hill at the beginning of the race



Me and my husband :) I was very cold...

Thanksgiving preparations

We're having Thanksgiving at our home this year! My mom and I have been preparing for a few weeks now, talking about menus and what who was going to make what. We're serving my parents, two brothers, Kody and me. Here's the menu:

K and K:
Turkey
Jell-o
Mashed potatoes
Green bean casserole
pumpkin pie

Mom:
Stuffing
Sweet potato casserole
Rolls
Cranberries
Chocolate pecan pie

I also attempted to make some homemade bread for the first time ever last night. The attempt went ... well, I did make some bread and it is edible. haha. Here are some pics chronicling my adventure:


The bread before it rose the first time - I made one loaf of white and one loaf of wheat


It rose!


It rose again! So pretty! Problem #1: I only have one bread pan, but two loaves of bread rising at the same time. So the white bread got to go in the oven first.


The wheat bread rose too, but since it rose for the second time in a bowl and then I had to transfer it to the bread pan, out went all the air. So here we have a slightly burnt loaf of white bread and a very short, dense loaf of wheat bread. We tried the white last night and I had it for breakfast this morning - it was pretty good! A little burnt tasting though. The wheat ... I'm waiting until tonight to give that one a try, haha.

Getting into the routine of life

We're finally beginning to have a somewhat regular schedule! Here's a look into a typical week in the Carr household, mainly to do with meals.

Monday: Kod goes to class and I cover board meetings - scrounge around the cabinets for food!
Tuesday: We both get home early! yay! We've decided to make dinner together this day and try something new. Look below for last week's Tuesday meal.
Wednesday: Beginning this week, I'm declaring Wednesday to be Crock-Pot day. Both Kod and I get home later that night (me: 6:45 p.m., Kody 6 p.m.), so it's nice to have dinner already made! However, my plan failed this week and Crock-Pot day was on Thursday. I guess our "regular" schedule isn't so regular. I also haven't really liked any of the Crock-Pot dishes I've made, so I may give up on it soon. We'll see.
Thursday: Kody makes dinner! And he does a great job if I do say so myself. I normally plan the meal and tell him what he's making and then he does, with his own variations. I almost always follow a recipe to the tee because I don't know what I'm doing if I don't! Kody, however, enjoys experimenting and normally it turns out great!
The weekend: Look in the cabinets, complain that there's nothing to eat because neither of us want to actually make anything and then finally decide on tomato soup with Cheez-its (amazing!) or leftovers.
Sunday: Eggs after church, and coffee cake if I am feeling unhealthy. Then pizza for dinner! This week, though, we just had leftovers after church.

Kody's specialities: Omelets and quesadillas
Katie's specialities: Smoothies and eating ice cream

Last Tuesday's creation: Easy Focaccia Bread - recipe found here
We had it with an Easy Chicken and Noodle dish, broccoli, grape juice and dipping oil for the bread. It was pretty delicious! The bread was amazing, especially right out of the oven.

Swagbucks

So this kind of sounds like one of those scam things, but it really isn't! It's a thing called Swagbucks--an online search engine that rewards you for searching online. I heard about it here, and she heard about it from a lady who received hundreds of dollars in gift cards in the last four months through Swagbucks, here. All you have to do is sign up and it puts a search toolbar on your computer when you get online. You can search there and it comes up with results from Google and Ask.com. You get points when you search online and you redeem your points for gift cards. Like at Gap!! (my absolute favorite!) The lady from before bought almost all her Christmas presents for her kids from these gift cards!

The reason why I'm telling you this is because we downloaded Swagbucks and have gotten about 6 or 7 points so far, but you get a lot more when you refer friends to it because we get points when you search too. So ... click here to sign up!

(I can't believe I just wrote all that because it sounds like such an advertisement...but gift cards are fun and extra money is always nice, so I convinced myself to do it. Just thought I'd give you a little look inside my head as I was writing this post).

Other random comments on life:

1) It's been lightly snowing on and off here and I had to scrape the ice off my car the other morning (angry face!) Solution: Park my car in a different row facing where the sun rising in the morning and hope the sun melts it off before I get there.

2) My family is coming into town for Thanksgiving on Wednesday! Thanksgiving at the Carrs! I'm going to attempt to make a turkey (wish me luck). Step 1 accomplished: I did remember to put it in the fridge today to defrost for the next five days.

3) Kody's gone to play football right now with the guys from the XC team, but I can't go watch because "now that we're married, I can't let them know I really like you," Kody said at lunch today. haha.

4) At the moment, Kody is killing me in our Fantasy Football match-up against each other this week. But...he has almost all his guys playing right now and I don't, so I will make a fantastic comeback later on today/tomorrow night.

5) After months of living with about 15 minutes of hot water in our sink/shower, we finally called/texted the landlord today and someone is going to come look at it! Yay!! We can take long showers with out getting cold! And I can do all the hand wash at one time! Hooray!

6) Kod and I are trying out some new churches in the area because we were originally wanting to get into a young married couples Sunday School class or something and Kody wasn't very happy at our current church. We really only tried out one church, but we really like it! It's College Church of the Nazarene (the church on our campus), but they have a second location called North Campus that we really have liked the last two weeks. So, we think we're going to stay there. Sadly though, the only "young" married couples group they have is made of like four married couples in their late 20s, early 30s. I don't think we'll be attending that group. Definitely a disadvantage that comes with getting married so young.

7) Remember how I told you I ordered lots of freebie samples of products. I was getting sad because I hadn't gotten any of them in the mail yet, except one that I didn't even really want in the first place (a Splenda spray bottle thing). Well, I got two in the mail on Saturday! A sample of Orville Redenbacher popcorn and popcorn cake things and a small bottle of Vaseline intensive care lotion (the kind I use and the perfect size for my small purse!). I was so excited! haha. I'm hoping the free coffee sample I ordered comes in before my family does, so we don't have to go buy any coffee :)

The end of the final season

Kody's last cross country meet ever. *tear* But it really wasn't that sorrowful because he hasn't been able to run all season anyway. But STILL, the last two cross country meets Kody will ever "participate" in have come and gone. No more home meets, no more XC nationals. No more freezing our butts (or bottoms off, sorry Mom) in ridiculous Illinois weather(!). Two weeks ago, Marla, Kacey and Bethany joined us for Kody's last home meet! The guys won the meet and we were all there to cheer them on. Here are a few pics:

We were very cold...


Breez, Kacey and Kody at the potluck lunch after the meet. I've been really excited for a potluck, so I could bring some fun side dish in one of my fun, cool, new dishes, but alas, with having company that weekend, I didn't even bring anything :( But next time...there will be a fun, cool side dish.


The guys doing their cheer after the awards ceremony.


Conference champs! Kody's head/hat is a little to the right of the middle.

A blog about this past weekend to come soon.

Kody in Heaven

When Kacey and Bethany came to visit us a few weekends ago, they brought their dogs, Spanky (black spaniel) and Mighty (yellow lab/hound mix). Kody was in Heaven :)

My field trip with Manteno’s senior citizens

During the last couple weeks I’ve been covering an event in Manteno called the “Senior Police Academy” for work. It was a six-week class that happened every Monday for senior citizens in Manteno to teach them about what the police department does and how it can benefit them. It covered topics such as identity theft, elder abuse and resources available to senior citizens to make their lives easier.

Anyway, I was invited to tag along on the last day of class and join them for a field trip, “graduation ceremony” and a free lunch. Since I am often not very busy at work and am always looking for things to do to get me out of the office, I readily accepted the invitation (it was a free lunch! Who can pass that up?).

Each meeting begins with a hang-out time complete with donuts, coffee, water and this week Propel! During the two Mondays that I’ve joined the group, I helped myself to a donut (only after being encouraged to take one, of course) and enjoyed the free breakfast before the class started. This last Monday, I noticed the donut container was still very full when I took my donut at the end of the hang-out time. Were the donuts really for the senior citizens or really just for the policemen??

Well, I hopped on the bus with 26 loud and crazy senior citizens, one police officer who ran the classes and a guy from the sheriff’s department. When I say loud and crazy, I really do mean loud and crazy. I had no idea these people could be so funny and full of energy! I don’t want to sound ignorant or like the 20s-something that I am, but I’ve never been with a large group of “living on their own, still very active and healthy” senior citizens. And they’re hilarious when they all get together!
There was the class clown who was always cracking jokes with the people around him. The ones that bantered back and forth with the officer. They were all cracking jokes about being old and teasing each other about who was going to get locked up when we visited the jail later.


The sheriff's office

I was more going along for the ride to take some pictures, but I think I enjoyed the field trip about as much as all of them! We visited the 9-1-1 dispatch center (Really interesting! I never really thought about where the calls go and who responds to them), the county jail and the Sheriff’s office. The jail was probably the most interesting part because we got to see where the inmates stay in the minimum and maximum security units, but I kind of felt like I was at a zoo gawking at “animals” in cages.
Highlight of the day: One of the ladies was mooned by an inmate while touring the jail!


The 9-1-1 center

Second highlight of the day: Free amazing buffett lunch at a restaurant in Manteno!
Third highlight of the day: I didn’t get back to the office until 2 p.m.! Amazing!!
Fourth highlight of the day: I was fired! Sort of :) Along with the entire rest of the office except Tracy and Reenie, courtesy of my boss’s four-year-old son Carter. I was actually fired the Friday before for leaving work early and then double fired that Monday for coming in late. Thankfully, I was rehired when Carter realized that firing me meant he wouldn’t ever see me again (Phew!).

You work where?? There?!?!?

I thought I'd give all the viewers at home a look into my work setting to help everyone understand a little more about the stories I tell when I come home. We have been "remodeling" for about the last eight years, I've been told. And since we publish newspapers, of course it makes sense that we would have a giant insert machine in our little building and be getting an even bigger press. In the four months I've been working here, my desk has been moved three times (almost everyone in the office has had their desk moved). My first desk location was taken over by an inserter and my second desk location will soon be home to a giant press. Just a little background to keep in mind as you view the pictures below:

Looking from the inside at the front door - my new desk would be at the bottom right corner. This is the front room of the building.


My new desk! Note the cute engagement picture of Kody and I at the bottom left of my computer screen. Also note the two phones on my desk. The right one is not hooked up yet and the left one is the one I always steal because they haven't hooked up my phone.


Looking toward the front from the back room of the building. This is where our desks used to be, but where the inserter and printer now go.


This is looking at the back of the building. If you look closely, you can see I've marked where my first desk was and then where my second desk was. I'll admit that I do like my third and most current desk space the best and it is sooo much warmer up front! I am very thankful for that!

What we did on the '08 election night

Grocery Shopping!

Not that I wasn't interested in the election, but it just so happened to conflict with the first free night in November where Kody and I could go grocery shopping to fill the VERY bare pantry and fridge shelves. AND...I was really excited to use all the coupons I have been collecting over the last couple weeks.

I did vote before work on that Tuesday morning (and enjoyed a free peppermint tea from Starbucks right afterwards). I did wear my "I voted" sticker all day long and I did follow the election online for about the past four months (my hobby when work was/is slow). So, I didn't feel bad just sitting back and waiting for the results to come at the end of the night. After reading lots of articles and updates about the campaigns, it was nice to not have to sit through commentary the whole night as results came in. Besides, we don't have cable, so we would've been sitting in front of a computer, which I do all day long anyway! So, grocery shopping was a great alternative.

I've made the last few grocery trips on my own because whenever Kody and I go together we always seems to end up going right after work (and before dinner). Often these trips end with one of the two of us getting frustrated and both of us being very hungry. I've always heard to never go grocery shopping on an empty stomach and that's very true in more than one way.

We decided this was going to be a fun grocery trip and that meant starting out on full stomachs with a meal that Katie did not make! Jimmy Johns! Then we headed to Aldi where I didn't get to use any of my coupons. :( But after that came the real fun!

Deal #1: $0.75 Kellogs cereal at Target! - I got five $1 off coupons online and Target was having a sale that if you buy five boxes of cereal you get a $5 gift card! So, a $2.75 box of cereal becomes $0.75, yay!! I was so excited! haha. And I even had a extra $1 off coupon we used a Kroger to get a giant box of Corn Flakes!

Deal #2: Olay Ribbons body wash at Kroger - I had a $1 coupon for one bottle and then a buy 1, get 1 coupon, so we got two bottles of NICE body wash for $3!

Deal #3: Crest toothpaste - I had $1 off coupon and the toothpaste came with an extra tube of it for free!

Deal #4: FREE Nestle hot chocolate and Ouchless hair bands from Wal-Mart with coupons!

Deal #5: $0.98 flour and sugar from Ultra Foods with a coupon!

The night ended up being really fun and we topped it off with the movie Get Smart with Steve Carell (Hilarious!), while I kept up-to-date on the election results on my computer. It was kind of like a middle-of-the-week grocery shopping date night.

I think I am beginning to get the hang of this coupon thing and I was so proud of our purchases! I have to credit my inspiration to my dear newlywed friend Emily, who showed me a few blogs that tell you where to find all the free stuff and sweet deals! You can find them here and here and about a thousand other places. I may be addicted. I may have ordered about 10 different "freebie" samples of products in the last week. Kody may think I'm crazy.

I think I must need a little more excitement in my life...

A new wife's attempt at cooking

While thankfully there haven't been too many awful meals, a few recent ones haven't exactly been "keepers," to use a Nichols family term. Each for a different reason, which means I'm learning (hopefully)!

Meal flop #1: Sicilian Meat Roll and an oven fiasco
I got home from work a while ago with plan to make a "meat roll." I knew I had all the ingredients (always a good thing, which often doesn't happen), but failed to realize I was making "meat loaf." Not a big problem, but meat loaf isn't my favorite, so I'm not sure why I chose to make it. Lesson #1: Since you're the cook, make meals you like! I also didn't see that the recipe called for extra lean meat, which we didn't have. Normally I would buy lean, but when you can get the fatty stuff sooo much cheaper than the lean, it's hard to pass up. Lesson #2: Buy lean meat because grease weirds me out and make me not want to eat the meal. So I go ahead and make this "meat roll," and place on a "baking pan" as the recipe calls, which to me means a cookie sheet. As it begins to cook, I hear sizzling and popping coming from the oven. I, being the genius that I am at times, take the pan out in hopes of pouring the grease into the sink (yes, I know you're not supposed to do that) and proceed to drip the grease all over the bottom of the oven. I "degrease" the meat loaf pan, but leave the grease at the bottom of the oven planning to clean it later. The meat loaf continues to cook and instead of a nice smelling "sicilian" smell, I almost pass out from being in the room for an hour with the smell of burning grease. Lesson #3: Don't let grease drip to the bottom of the oven. I took the meat loaf out when it was done and decided a great idea would be to let the oven clean itself! Less work for me, right!? I quickly realized after setting it on the "oven clean" setting, this wasn't the greatest idea. Smoke came pouring out of the stove top. Lesson #4: Don't use the oven clean setting unless you want the smoke alarm to go off again in the whole entire apartment building. See Spaghetti for that story. Kody came home from the library to a freaking out wife waving dish towels frantically near the smoke detectors in hopes that the smoke alarms would not go off. Rest your fears, they didn't go off and we (I) didn't burn down the building either. Lesson #5: Take the batteries out of the smoke detectors if you suspect they may go off and you don't want them to (Kod taught me this one). But remember to put them back in! In the end, we enjoyed our somewhat good tasting meat loaf on our back porch with our winter coats while we waited for our apartment to stop smelling awful. Lots of candles and fans were used that night. Lesson #6: The meat loaf was actually pretty good as leftovers (when all the grease had dried, yuck!) and I might even make it again at some point.

Meal flop #2: Chicken Linguine Alfredo
These next two don't have quite such elaborate stories, but I learned lessons from them anyway. I got a little cookbook from my mom for my birthday that has some great looking recipes in it. So I decided to try the chicken linguine alfredo. Kod actually ended up making this one for his "Thursday is the day Kody makes dinner for us" night, but the lesson learned isn't that Kody is a bad cook. He's actually really great! It's just that some recipes aren't as good in real life as they sound on paper. I actually called my mom before we ate and told her we were trying it. I should've been expecting less than the best from her report that she had tried it and wasn't too much of a fan. But I had been looking forward to the meal all week! Well, the alfredo was a disappointment. It just needed something more and since I have no experience cooking, I have no idea what else it needs. But something. One way to tell if a meal was well-liked in our home is to see how long the leftovers sit in the refrigerator. This one sat for about a week and I finally finished it up a few days ago for lunch. Lesson #7: Listen to mom's advice and don't make something she isn't a fan of.

Meal flop #3: Sweet and Sour Chicken
I'll start with the lesson this time. Lesson #8: Don't make something Kody doesn't like. He probably won't eat it. I should put a disclaimer on that statement, saying that Kod has eaten basically everything I've cooked for him, which is pretty impressive. This is the first dinner he took about two bites of and said he'd eat some other leftovers instead (frozen pizza). My mom gave me a recipe for this, but I used a different recipe that I'd already marked for some reason. Lesson #9: Use Mom's recipes. They'll probably turn out better. The recipe I used called for deep frying the chicken in oil with a batter around it, which I sort of attempted to do at first (with an itty bitty bit of oil) and then quit, so we had some weird batter stuff floating around in our dinner. Mom never deep fried anything, so I'm sure her recipe would've been better in that respect. But the real problem came when Kody saw that I had dumped a can of pineapple and pineapple juice into the wok where the chicken was cooking. Lesson #10: Pineapple and fruit do not go with pizza or chicken (and I'm sure other things), according to Kody. It weirded him out way too much. He tried to eat just some of the rice, but couldn't even handle that! Side note: leftovers are still in the fridge.

Sorry, no pictures of these wonderful meals! (We're trying not to remember them!)

Who knew...

How many things you can make with apples!?

Things I've made with apples since our apple orchard adventure:
- apple oat bran muffins

- whole wheat apple muffins
- apple cinnamon waffles

- apples and yogurt dip (a Kody creation)
- apple crisp

- apples and peanut butter
- *dried apples
- *homemade apple butter

*plan to make soon :-)

Apples, apples, apples galore

A couple weeks ago Kody and I headed up to St. Charles for a weekend “getaway” for my birthday. Included in the thing we did were:
- Driving up after work without eating anything and getting REALLY hungry when we finally reached St. Charles
- Eating dinner at Panera and getting bagels for the morning!
- Watching lots of movies, including Music Man (which I had never seen and Kody was a part of when he was younger)
- Going to bed at 10 p.m. and waking up at noon the next day
- Sleeping together in Kody’s twin bed
- Going to Kuiper’s Family Farm and picking apples (a definite highlight) - Kod wasn’t too excited about it at first because there were TONS of kids there, but it turned out to be a lot of fun! We’ve been eating apples straight for the past two weeks.
- Locking ourselves out of his parents house (but they couldn’t really bail us out since they’re in Puerto Rico!)

We spent the rest of the evening going to dinner at JuRin, a favorite Japanese restaurant in St. Charles, for an amazing teppanyaki meal of steak and chicken. If you want a good place to go for your birthday, this is it. I got a free balloon, extra rice, shrimp and chicken, a dessert platter of fresh fruit and terra misu, a happy birthday song, AND a coupon for $20 my next meal AND a free meal next year for my birthday!

Sunday was spent going to church and me dragging Kody to another pumpkin patch near where I work to take pictures of Girl Scouts - the biggest waste of gas and our time! But we had a wonderful weekend of bonding and lots of apples.

Here are a few pictures from the weekend:







We also had a small celebration for my birthday on the actual day. A few highlights were:
- Getting a non-stick frying pan , so we can cook eggs!
- Our beautiful new butter dish (it matches our plates!)
- Beating Kody in our own “Wii Olympics” - I never beat him!

Twin Cities celebration!

In the last two weeks, Kod and I logged more miles on my little gold Honda Accord than its seen in a long time. But it’s been a lot of fun!

Two weekends ago, we traveled 7 hours up to Minneapolis and back to join my parents and grandparents at Chris and Sarah’s house for our nephew Elijah’s first birthday! After a full day of work for me and an incredibly hard cross country workout for Kody, we gobbled down BBQ beef sandwiches, packed the car and headed out. We passed the time by singly loudly to the “Wicked” soundtrack and listening to “Deception Point” by Dan Brown. Books on tape/CD have been our road trip lifesavers. We got in around 1 a.m. and Kod instantly fell asleep after we greeted my half-asleep parents.

Saturday was birthday day and we got to see Elijah open up all his presents (he liked the toy we got him!) and try birthday cake for the first time. We determined that he ate a little too much when we woke up the next morning to a sick little baby boy.

After the party, we went out to the Old Spaghetti Factory in downtown Minneapolis for some spaghetti, in hopes of carbo-loading my oldest brother Chris for his marathon he ran on Sunday. I think he ate the perfect amount (unlike Elijah) because when Sunday came Chris felt great through almost the entire marathon! He never stopped to walk and finished under 5 hours, which was faster than his goal pace!

Kod and I, along with my dad and sister-in-law Sarah, chased Chris around Minneapolis and St. Paul and got to see him running about 4-5 times. For the first seven miles, it poured rain which didn’t make it very fun for the runners or sideline cheerleaders. We cheered him in to the finish and heard his name announced over the intercom as a Twin Cities Marathon finisher!

Kod and I headed out for Chicago soon after the marathon, only to drive right back (well, only two hours back) the next weekend. To explain that, on our drive to MN, we drove right by Kody’s parents house, which is where we went last weekend ... which will be the next post because this one is already too long.