Dinner madness

  To everyone that has checked out my blog and commented-thank you so much!  It is a lot of fun-and I am always open to suggestions to what I should discuss.  Send me a message and I'll see what I can try to write.  I think it would be kinda fun!  

  Yesterday I introduced two different life changing books to my life.  Maybe not that dramatic, but at least game changing!  The first one is a book called "Once-A-Month Cooking".  I struggle every night figuring out what to fix for dinner.  Not to mention I'm trying to figure it out and make it during what our family affectionately calls the "arsenic hour."  It's where you either want to take some arsenic and put yourself out of misery or give it to one(or all) of your kids and put them out of misery.  A couple of kids are wrestling and screaming that someone hurt the other one or that someone's life is more unfair than the other's.  My three year old is usually screaming for me to hold him and my 18 month old is usually swimming in the toilet.  I am screaming at all four simultaneously and then I usually find that whatever I have started is missing a few ingredients and I have to load up all of them to take them to the store.  That's usually when I have an out-of-body experience from fear and stress.  They're just as unhappy to be going to the store as I am to take them, and they let everyone within earshot know that. I'm pretty sure that I could get paid really well to be a traveling birth control troop to local high schools and other community organizations.  Does this happen to anyone else?  Didn't think so...

  Okay, so enter the Once-A-Month Cookbook.  It's written by two busy moms, and they provide a grocery list, meal plan, and recipes that are supposed to make my life a lot easier.  You do all of the cooking on one day, which is a long day of pain but then you have a whole month of meals in the freezer.  

  I decided to start with the two week cooking plan because I was unsure I had the patience to do a whole month's worth yet.  And it's a good thing that I did, because I almost croaked trying to get the two weeks prepared.  The baby was up on the dining room table countless times, removing my decorative balls from my hurricane in the middle of the table, spilling drinks, jamming keys on the laptop, and in general wreaking complete havoc.  He also found a box of nerds and opened them and dumped them all over the kitchen floor, so I was slipping, sliding, and sweating while running around my kitchen trying to make 75 dishes at once (again, an exaggeration).  To sum up this painfully overly long story, I got almost all of the recipes for the next two weeks done and in the freezer.  The best part?  We had one of the meals last night and one of them tonight and everyone HATED them.  Awesome.  

  I do think the book is a great idea and I actually liked the recipes, so I think once I get the hang of it I think it will make my life a lot easier and save us a lot of money.  So check it out and you, too can be a new person like me.  I will discuss the other book tomorrow because I am exhausted from just writing about everything that happened yesterday.  Until then, I will leave you with a picture of the awesome decor that my kids have provided in my house.  For a nominal fee I can provide you with the same look if you'd like.

                                                               D's butterfly garden

                        Wyatt's love note held in place by packing tape, which I find to be a classy touch