Awards...

My dear friend Whitney nominated for me an award - or did she just give me an award?  Because technically nominations just mean I'm a candidate for the award.

So, it's called the Liebster award.



And there's a million steps I'm supposed to do for it, so I'll just plunge in:

11 things about myself:

1.  I actually don't like these award thingys.  It feels insincere when you're supposed to tag 20 other bloggers or something crazy.  It's kind of like those annoying emails that you're supposed to forward to 20 people and then you suddenly realize you don't have 20 friends to forward things to and so you just get depressed.

2.  That being said, I would feel left out and hurt if I didn't get nominated/included on at least one or two a year.

3.  Also, I'm doing this mainly because it's from my best friend Whit, and I'm bored and too lazy to come up with an actual post.  Hahaha.  (So, what this has to do about myself:  I'm a bit of a pleaser when it comes to people I love and I'm also really lazy).  :)

4.  I've recently taken up running and really enjoy it.  Except I seem to be attracted to the "weird" races like the Warrior Dash (a mud race), the Color Me Rad race, and most recently I would love to do the Zombie races in October!

5.   I'm a bit of a health-freak.  My family always complains that I don't have junk food in my house when they come over.  One of our friends recently informed me that Lucky Charms isn't a true sugary cereal, it's a wanna-be.  Darn.

6.  I love to cook and bake.  I might not have Twinkies and other disgusting pre-packaged, processed foods lying around my house, but I'll make Banana Chiffon cake, cookies, and cinnamon rolls in a heartbeat.  Mmmm.

7.  People always wonder how I can possibly read so many books.  They always say they don't have time to read.  Well, it's pretty easy to find time when you don't clean, do crafts, or really anything extra in your life.  Just the basics.

8.  That being said, I do love my children and they are some of the only people I will put my books down for so we can go to the park or even better, the library.  :)  They just crack me up and I'm always amazed at how they went from being helpless little infants to these little people with personalities, running and jumping and getting into all kinds of mischief.

9.  I'm a hopeless romantic.  I get lost in romantic movies, stories, and live vicariously through fictional characters.  However, whenever my husband tries to be romantic and say some line from some movie or something I crack up laughing - because when you take those lines outside of the context and put them in real life they're just cheesy.  No way around it.

10.  Whenever I go out for alone time I end up at the library (if I have no money) or Barnes & Noble (if I do have money, because then I can buy a cookie or something while browsing books and most likely talk myself into bringing home a new book).  Carlin knows not to expect me home till closing time.  He also knows that I'll come home with a new book to read, even if I have a stack of books currently sitting by my bed waiting to be read.

11.  There are times when I'm doing something mundane like the dishes, the kids are playing in the backyard and Carlin is working on something on the house and I suddenly feel completely content because no matter how much I wanted to be swept off my feet and married to some rich prince when I was younger, when I really thought about what I pictured my future to be, it was this.  Just living my life with the people I love.

Okay, now if you haven't had enough of me yet, you get to read my answers to Whitney's questions:

1.  Favorite candy? (you knew it was coming)  Gummy Sweet-tarts and M&Ms.  I'm both fruity and chocolate-y.

2.  What's one thing you'd change about yourself?  Nothing because I'm awesome!  Haha.  Honestly, I would love to be more patient, especially with my family.

3.  To cuff pants or not to cuff pants?  That is the question.  I am not even sure what you mean by this Whit...  I don't cuff my pants.  I think...

4.  Favorite type of crafting?  Hahahaha - oh you're serious.  Okay, I'll admit I actually really like to make wreaths and am currently looking for cute spring and summer wreaths to make, so I'm open for any ideas. 

5.  The best book you've read recently?  Oh, that's a hard one.  I'll have to go with "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" by Mary Ann Shaffer.  It's definitely now on my top 10 all-time favorite reads. 

6.  Favorite way to unwind at the end of the day?  Watching TV - bet everyone thought I was going to say reading, huh?  I do read before bed, but in order to unwind I usually curl up with Carlin on the couch and watch something mindless or play video games with him. 

7.  How did you meet your husband?  At institute, we were trying to keep him from running home every weekend so the powers-that-be called him as my assistant to help with a thing on campus we were arranging.  Found out later that it wasn't purely coincidental, apparently they thought I would be interested in him.  Which makes me wonder about the two other guys I had to work with before Carlin... apparently some people were trying to set me up...

8.  Hot cocoa or hot apple cider?  Hot Cocoa hands down.

9.  Do you hang-dry your shirts or dryer-dry them? (odd question, I know, but I'm kind of OCD about my laundry)  Dryer-dry unless it specifically says to hang-dry.  I am SUPER lazy when it comes to laundry.

10.  Biggest pet peeve?  People who suck the mucus into the back of their throats - sniffling.  Just blow your nose already!

11.  Favorite holiday?  Christmas, although I love Fall (but it's not really a holiday is it?).  I just love the decorations, the colder weather, the music, the good food, and the fact that Carlin gets a week paid holiday.  :)

So, I think that does it.  I'm too lazy to come up with some questions so just use the questions Whitney gave me.  As for nominees - anyone can do it.  I'll pick on my Mom and Nichole.  I know, I'm supposed to come up with 11 people (who chose 11 anyway?  My Monk-side is coming out, couldn't we just drop it to an even 10?).  But I'm kind of done with this post for now.  So, Mom and Nichole - go for it!

It all started, when one day...

I decided to make pasta from scratch.  I had recently stolen - I mean, borrowed, my Grandma's pasta attachment to my Kitchen Aid Mixer and was dying to try my hand at homemade pasta.

So, I got out the flour, salt and eggs and started mixing.  Except that I was one egg short of the recipe I was using and the dough wasn't coming together, it was just really dry and in little chunks.  However, undaunted, I simply added water.  Now I had a rather stiff, chunky mix of flour and eggs.  My kneading wasn't making the dough "soft and smooth." 

But, I wasn't to be stopped so easily.  Oh no, I was making pasta that night no matter what.  I decided I would just run the dough through the roller attachment and see what happened.  Except I didn't have instructions on how to attach said roller.  That's alright, I'm pretty good at figuring things out on my own.  After a little bit of critical thinking I had the attachment on my stand mixer and was ready to insert my dough. 

The dough was tough, I apparently did not have the attachment on correctly and the whole thing (attachment and dough) started flipping itself in circles with the dough making a smacking noise.  My kids started laughing hysterically.  My own personal cheerleaders.

Finally I figured out the attachment was locked into place.  So, I locked and started shoving my dough through the roller.  It came out looking like this:

Yeaahhh....  However, I was going to have pasta no matter what, so I thought I would just skip the rolling out process and run it straight through the spaghetti cutter.  In case you were ever wondering if this is acceptable, it's not.  In fact, it's a very, very bad idea.  I'm just lucky I didn't break anything. 

Now what?  My kids were still laughing and cheering me on (so, I thought) and I really wanted to have homemade pasta that night.  I stood there thinking for a moment casually gathering up all the scraps of dough when I realized the dough was a lot softer.  All the work I had put it through had softened it quite a bit.  I ran it through the roller one more time and got something that resembled the soft, flat sheets that was in the picture, if one used their imagination greatly...  I then ran the sheets through the spaghetti cutter and voila - I had something that resembled spaghetti!

Yay me!  I turned around to proudly show my children what a little bit of determination and hard work can do when I found this...

Apparently the laughing and cheering was not for me after all... Water was EVERYWHERE. 

At this exact moment a rather over-zealous splash sent water flying into my vicinity of the kitchen.  Now I was covered in water, the stove was covered in water, even the dining room table was covered in water.  I figured there was nothing to be done right now, the kids were soaked, the floor was soaked, might as well keep making dinner.

I started to boil the water on the stove.  Barely a minute after turning on the burner my GAS stove became possessed.  It tried to light itself.  The clicking got louder and louder as I frantically tried turning off burners that weren't even on in the first place.  I suddenly had an image of a fireball erupting from the kitchen and made a quick decision.  We must evacuate.  It is a GAS stove after all.

I shoved the kids out the front door while calling Carlin and flipping breakers trying desperately for the ticking noise to stop.   Finally I got the ticking noise to stop and decided we would wait for Carlin to get home outside playing in a box.

After all this one would think I should have given up.  That it was fate, something telling me to not make pasta that night.  But Carlin unplugged the stove, we started it manually with a lighter and were soon eating homemade pasta with canned spaghetti sauce (I did have to stop somewhere, obviously fresh sauce was out of the question).  It was delicious.

We later found out that the water from the splashing had caused the lighter on the stove to short-circuit, hence the ticking noise.  A few hours of drying and our stove and oven were back in business. 

Home

"It's been a long hard ride,
And I won't lose hope,
This is still the place,
That we all call home."

I thought I would take a page out of my SIL's book and start this post off with lyrics to one of my favorite songs.  It's partly because I've wanted an excuse to put this song on my blog, partly because I am trying to convert my SIL to country music so she must listen to the song in it's entirety at the end of this post (hint, hint Heather), and partly because I just wanted to mention a few things about life in general. 

 My days are filled with Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go, singing, adventures, preschool and messes.  Sometimes I find myself completely overwhelmed with all the STUFF that needs to be done on top of the daily stuff and the just-being-a-Mom stuff.  I don't have any secret formula how to control this stress, but I find that if I try to laugh I get through the days a bit easier.

A laughing incident recently occurred when the kids pulled the sheets off the mattresses, the mattresses off their beds, and were pushing their bed-frames around saying they were garbage trucks. 

There was also the "dirt-angels" they tried making instead of snow-angels. 

Or when they got into my "party box" filled with ribbons, crepe paper, banners, balloons... you get the picture and "decorated" the upstairs bedroom for my surprise party. 

Or when my daughter locks me out of the house and then climbs onto the counter and eats marshmallows all while smiling at me through the window (don't worry, I always have a way to get into my house). 

I find that my friends and family help me see the humor.  Whenever I share the latest adventures with my Mom she just laughs and eventually I find myself laughing along with her. 

This song is really about our country - and oh how I love my country.  Because without my country, I would not have my home and the beautiful life I get to live.