Meal Plan for September 17-21

I am really excited about my meal plan this week! A nice thing about shopping at the commissary is that their prices on meat and produce are pretty stable so I don't need to try to plan my meals around what's on sale this week. It gives me a little freedom to just try new recipes that sound good!

Monday: Grilled Chicken, Corn Cakes and Cucumber and Carrot Salad

Tuesday: Cheesy Ham and Potato Soup, Salad, and Cheese and Chive Biscuits

Wednesday: Crock Pot Chicken and Dumplings, Green Bean Casserole, and Strawberry Buttermilk Cake

Thursday: Dinner out with a military spouses' group

Friday: Spicy Sweet Glazed Shrimp, Cheese Grits, Sauteed Zucchini

All the links except for the cheese grits on Friday are new recipes. I can't wait to see how they turn out!

5 Months Old

Addie is 5 months old! Technically, she was 5 months old over 2 weeks ago. But some months I get a little behind on getting the picture made. Ah, well. This is my favorite of the bunch of 5 month shots. I just can't get enough of that sweet face! At 5 months old she is almost sitting up on her own, she has learned to blow bubbles and she started eating cereal! She is such a big girl!

Easy Cheesecake Pie

This is one of my favorite desserts because it is easy, it is fairly healthy, and you can switch out the cheesecake for lots of other flavors! Here's the recipe:


2 cups of milk
1 large or 2 small boxes of Cheesecake flavored pudding (sugar free if you'd like)
1 tub of Cool Whip (sugar free or light if you'd like)
1 Graham Cracker Crust

Whisk together milk and pudding until well mixed. Fold in Cool Whip.  Pour this mixture into pie crust. Refrigerate for a couple of hours. Top with fruit if you like (I like it with raspberries).

 See? So easy! And there are all kinds of flavors of pudding you can use in place of cheesecake: banana cream, chocolate, lemon, coconut, butterscotch, whatever.

Trying again (again)

Hi there. I'm going to attempt to get the blog back up and running. Yes, again. :) Much has changed in our lives recently. We are now living in Dayton, Ohio, where Andrew is stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He is finished with his course work for his PhD and is completing his internship year here. A year from now we will probably get orders to go to our next base... but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

We have lived in Dayton about 3 weeks now, so everything here is new to us! In addition, I am now a stay-at-home mom! It is a new adventure. Not quite what I expected, but I think I am going to enjoy it (especially on days when nap time actually happens). Addie is 5 1/2 months old now! She is such a good, sweet baby. I love spending my days with her.

So the blog will hopefully be new and improved. I hope to do some blogging about cooking, crafting, books, life as a stay-at-home-mom, life in a new place and learning about the military and our new way of life. Stay tuned!

If you liked the Hunger Games...

... I think you would enjoy Matched By Ally Condie. I just finished this book and I loved it! Like the Hunger Games trilogy, it is young adult dystopian literature and has a strong female lead. It is set in undetermined time in the future, when every aspect of life is now controlled by the Society. The Society determines what you eat, what you wear, what job you will have, and, the focus of this book, who you will marry, all with the goal of maximum efficiency. Soon after your 18th birthday, you attend your Match banquet, where you learn who you will marry after your 21st birthday. When Cassia Reyes is matched with her friend Xander, at first she is thrilled. But then her mysterious friend Ky causes her to wonder what it would be like to make her own decisions. This was a great read. I can't wait for the sequel to come out in November.

My Pregnancy: 10 Weeks

Wow, it has been a long time since I've updated my blog! But after having a few people ask me about it, I thought I really should get back to blogging again. As you probably already know, we've had some life-changing news in our family since the last time I blogged. Our family will become 3 this March! We are thrilled about being parents. We've been married for 6 years now, and we've been through a lot as a couple. We've lived in 3 different states. I've had several jobs. We both got our masters degrees and Andrew is nearly done with his Ph.D. Andrew joined the Air Force. We became an aunt and uncle. And on and on. We have enjoyed being just the two of us so much. But we can't wait to add a little one to the mix and start the next chapter.


Right now I am 10 weeks along! That means our baby is about an inch and a half long (or the size of a prune). An amazing fact about our baby this week is that its elbows are already working!

I am feeling the pains of having a "barnacle" growing inside me (the baby's newest nickname). Morning sickness hit with a vengeance at week 6 and hasn't let up since. I feel like I am sleeping all the time! I included a picture here of me this week. Now, I am the first to admit that I wasn't a skinny girl to begin with! So this picture doesn't have much "baby bump" to it, just my normal chubbiness. But I know that I will like to look back eventually and see how my belly changed over time.

So I'm back to blogging. I promise to blog about more than just my pregnancy! Although the recipes may be on hold until the second trimester...

Books 23-26 of 2011

I'm a little bit behind on blogging about the books I've read recently. Life has been slightly hectic. But I have been doing some great reading. I've really been on a roll lately of reading books that are so good I can't seem to put them down! Here are the latest.

Book #23 was Little White Rabbit by Kevin Henkes, the amazing author/illustrator of one of my favorite children's books, Kitten's First Full Moon. I liked Little White Rabbit a lot as well. It is a sweet story about a rabbit using his imagination as he looks at his surroundings. The illustrations are great too. 5 stars


Book #24 was If You're Hoppy written by April Pulley Sayre and illustrated by Jackie Urbanovic. A fun and silly book about animals with cartoon-y illustrations? Right up my alley! I loved it so much I came home with my own copy of it. 5 stars


Book #25 was The Heights by Peter Hedges. I really enjoyed this book about a young family living in Brooklyn Heights. It was an impulse read, I found it while wondering around the library without any particular purpose. While the blurb on the book flap hinted at a mystery that didn't actually exist in the book, I still thought it was engaging and the format of short chapters with alternating points of view made it a quick read. 4 stars


Book #26 was The Help. Like probably everyone else on the planet (or at least in the Southern United States) I have been hearing raves about this book for a couple of years now. I've been wanting to read it, but just hadn't gotten around to it yet. My husband was actually assigned this book to read for one of his classes, so I thought I'd try to read it as well while we had it checked out from the library. It was fantastic! Well worth all the praise. I could not put this book down. It's 451 pages and I read it in 3 days. It's thought-provoking and eye-opening, especially for someone of my generation and up-bringing. It made me mad and sad and happy and... it's just great. Go read it. 5 stars