Chopped salad with feta, lime, and mint

Let me just start by saying that I am not a cook.  It's only recently that I'm just beginning to enjoy it.  I'm still in the phase of following recipes as closely as possible; if I don't have an ingredient, I'm likely to not make the dish at all because I'm terrified to improvise.  I'm a lucky girl because Tyler is an amazing cook and he loves doing it.  But these days he gets home too late to cook dinner on weeknights, which leaves me needing to fill our tummies.  Thank goodness Aven is a good eater and not too picky.  But there are a handful of recipes that I've been loving lately so I want to make sure I write them down so I can come back and find them and remind myself that indeed, sometimes, I can actually make yummy food.  Tonight I did good.  I made a chopped salad with feta, lime, and mint from Smitten Kitchen (an amazing food blog that my friend turned me on to).

3 cups crunchy veggies (I used carrots, cooked green beans, radishes, celery. I forgot to add my cucumber)
green onions
chopped mint
sunflower seeds
feta
black beans
quinoa

The dressing was a mix of lime juice, olive oil (next time I'll use grapeseed oil because I think our cheap olive oil tastes a little funky as a dressing base), salt, pepper, and a dash of chili powder.

It was easy and so deliciously fresh on such a hot summer evening.  I think I'll be making this one all summer long.

Avocado & garlic confit on toast

Ooohh, this is another good one.  I made a garlic and pepper confit last night  (http://honestfare.com/garlic-sweet-pepper-confit/), which is another incredibly easy dish and absolutely delicious to have on hand.  For lunch today, I spread some avocado (mixed with garlic powder, salt, and pepper. always) on some good french bread and topped it with the confit.  SO GOOD.  I had it again as a snack tonight and added some sliced radishes.  EVEN BETTER.

Sleep

The past three or four weeks have been terrible in terms of how little sleep I'm operating on.  Louie had been doing great for about a six week stretch or so but as soon as we got home from visiting my parents for a week, her nighttime schedule went awry.  She wakes up a lot now.  She nurses and falls right back to sleep so I'm lucky that she's not actually "awake" more at night, but still...there's plenty of room for improvement.  I started to keep track of what was happening at night this week because I'm typically so tired that everything blurs together and I just don't remember.  Here's how the first night looked:

8 pm - asleep
11:15 - mama goes to bed late
12:40 - 1st feeding (this is the latest it's ever been; typically its when I go to bed)
1:25 - aven woke up from a bad dream, then needed water, and then needed to pee
1:50 - finally back in bed
2:56 - 2nd feeding
5:21 - 3rd feeding
6:45 - she woke up for the morning

No wonder I'm so freaking tired.  There was another night this week where she only woke up twice, which is exactly what I'm aiming for...problem is, it's not her norm.  Most nights look like some variation of the above.  The only consistent thing is that she is asleep for the night sometime between 7:30 and 8 pm.

But then, when all is said and done it doesn't really matter how much sleep I get tonight.  In no time at all, she will grow up and I'll be missing these days.

I get moments like this and all the exhaustion washes away.

Swing set

I never would've thought I could get so excited over kids' toys but life changes.  We built a swing set for the backyard over the weekend for the girls and it turned out great.  It kind of marks the beginning of putting some effort into transforming the side yard into something useable.  We've planted some fruit trees (haphazardly in my opinion, but whatever) and my husband has his hop vines growing over there but for the most part, it still looks like a dumping ground for crap we don't use.  We don't want to spend a lot of money fixing up the area but it would be nice to have it useable.  Vague ideas of a play area and some grass and pathways are being thrown around but we're nowhere near settled on anything.  It will be a work in progress for quite some time I'm sure.  But hey, we have a swing set!

Goal

I made a new goal for myself.  Over the next six months before I go back to school full time I'm going to get damn good at baking pies and breads.  I want to be able to quickly bake a loaf of bread without it being a big deal and I want it to be GOOD.  I don't even like pies that much but I want to have a "thing" that I'm good at.  At who doesn't like pie (myself excluded)?  So now that its in writing I have to do it, right?

So far I'm on a roll - 2 for 2.  Cherry pie on the 4th of July (next time I'll just use frozen cherries instead of the jars from Trader Joe's) and tonight I made a flatbread dough for pancetta, asparagus, mozzarella pizza.  I figure as long as I give it a try then I'm doing good and eventually I'll just find a rhythm.  Hopefully.

Here's to throwing out new goals into the universe and hoping they stick!

Moments

I had one of those little moments today where I was able to fully let go of everything on my running list of to-do's and just enjoy what was happening.  Aven, my 2 year old, woke up early from nap with a little whimper and called for me.  It wasn't her typical style of running out of the bedroom with a smile from ear to ear yelling "I had a good nap!" so I knew she wasn't done sleeping just yet.  I was only part way through all of the laundry and cleaning that I wanted to get done during nap time but I wanted her to sleep more (a well rested child is more important than anything these days).  So I asked her if she wanted me to lay down in bed with her and she nodded yes.

Right there, I knew the next few minutes could go either way--she would either start rolling around in bed, nudging me, kicking, and we'd eventually get into an argument OR she could just fall back asleep.  My fingers were crossed for the latter and sure enough as luck would have it, she drifted off peacefully.  After about five minutes, I slowly tried to move off the bed but she immediately woke up.  She opened her eyes, looked at me, and said in the sweetest little voice "stay Mama, just stay" and then closed her eyes and wrapped her arm around me.  With those words I threw out all my plans and just laid there with her, face to face, and took the nicest nap with my girl.  I imagine in 15 years, I'll probably be begging to hear those words from her so I'm going to take every opportunity I get to savor them now.  Chores can wait.

Beginning

Sometimes when all you want to do is take a nap, it's the last thing your body agrees to.  Right now my two daughters are sleeping (albeit one fitfully, due to a cold) and the only thing I want to do is join them.  I got no sleep last night thanks to a sick husband, sick baby, and overtired toddler.  The smart thing would be to just lay down and close my eyes.  But I tried that.  It didn't work.  Which means I'm suddenly counting down the minutes of free time I have left before one of them wakes.  So here I am, suddenly creating a blog.  Because, why not?  It seems a logical thing to do in my sleep-deprived state right now.  I can write non-stop about nothing, press publish, and suddenly feel "accomplished" of all that I got done during nap time today.  So there, blog started.  Now how do I make it look pretty?