I know it’s such a cliché, but WHERE DOES THE TIME GO? This week marks the beginning of May. MAY, people. May is going to be utter mayhem, that’s for sure, and I am already bracing for impact. Carla has so much going on. Three performances, a school presentation, a school trip, a fifth grade “graduation” ceremony, TWO class parties. On top of all the normal day-to-day chaos, of course, with three extracurricular activities that each meet twice weekly. And then BAM!, it will be summer break.
I tried to plan this summer so that it would be easier than last summer. Last summer, of course, we both bought and sold a house, so at least we won’t be dealing with THAT nonsense again. But I think we also over-scheduled Carla last summer. She had summer camp, plus she continued her music lessons through summer. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but I felt like we were constantly on the go – like there was no “break” from the busy schedule of the school year.
This summer, I want time to relax by the pool and have friends over. But… Carla still wants to do summer camp. I am FULLY in favor of camp. While it sounds restful and decadent to spend the summer doing nothing by the pool, I feel like our days would end up being filled by a lot of screen time. And how many playdates can I really handle? Not enough to give Carla the same kind of social interaction she’ll get at summer camp, that’s for sure. So. Summer camp it is.
Okay, so summer camp by itself still gives us evenings and weekends to play and relax. But… Carla is considering trying out a new sport and maybe a new musical instrument. On top of that, we have two other commitments that will take place weekly after camp. Ugh. Now summer is sounding just as hectic as the school year!
Maybe this is simply a busy season of our lives and I should learn to lean into it, instead of trying to force things to slow down? (Note: I realize that, once again, these are the Champagnest of “problems.”)
One thing that’s always constant: the need to plan and prepare meals. Once again, we’ll have two nights of takeout. I am ready to be done with THAT aspect of this school year. Takeout is fantastic once in awhile, but I am weary of it by now. And the annoying thing is, no matter how much I try to pack my day with nutrient dense foods, by the time dinner rolls around, I am so ravenous I scarf down a bunch of fries or chips. I love fries and chips, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t want or need to be eating them twice weekly. Well. Just a few more weeks of this nonsense left.
(You may be thinking, Suzanne, simply DON’T ORDER the fries or chips. And yet… I find this hard to do??? When it comes down to it, I am extremely picky. My child, also extremely picky, only has two or three places where she will deign to eat on these takeout nights. And there are only a few options at each of them that I can stand to eat. Plus, I have a lifelong resistance to paying good money for food I don’t like. If I’m going to spend extra money on takeout, I am going to enjoy it, dammit. So. Loading up on fries and chips. I am my own worst enemy, etc.)
I DO have control over what I can make at home, though! So I will try to compensate for the takeout with some protein and veggie packed meals.
Caesar Chicken with Salad: I cannot for the life of me remember where I saw this idea, but it sounds easy enough: marinate some chicken in Caesar salad dressing and roast with a little parmesan sprinkled on. Pair it with a salad. My only question is whether I dress the salad with the Caesar dressing? Or go for a light vinaigrette instead???? I don’t want to over-Caesar myself.
Baked Pork Chops and Zucchini: Another sheet pan meal! This recipe calls for asparagus, but I already have some zucchini on hand, so I will probably use that instead.
Golden Cauliflower Chickpea Bowls: These sound so nourishing right now. I bet my husband will want a chicken breast alongside his, and maybe I will add a salmon filet. We’ll see. I wonder if I could coax Carla into eating this? She likes crispy chickpeas…
What are you eating, these last few days of April? How’s your summer shaping up?
And just like that, it’s mid-April! Many apologies for being MIA lately, internet! I miss you! (And I fully intend to catch up on what you’re up to.) This is one of those pell-mell times of the year, where I feel like I’m being propelled down a steep hill and can barely get my feet under me. All (mostly?) good things, but this is the first Fun Writing I’ve done in… three weeks maybe? When I go to open a document in Word, NONE of my recent files are my blog document, is what that means. (Yes, I type all my posts in Word and then transfer [some of] them to WordPress.)
Seems like a good day for a quick catch-up. And then I need to find a solid week or so to go back and read ALL OF YOUR POSTS, omg, I feel so out of the loop.
1. I am spending today as we all hope our Fridays go: waiting for the HVAC service technician to show up. Why, yes, that was sarcasm, and yes, our furnace IS dead. I’m glad it’s not, like, January, but it is currently 45 degrees F outside and the internal temperature of my house has dropped to 65. Perfect weather for walking on the treadmill while I cross two items on my to-do list off simultaneously!
Our furnace is 23 years old, if it is a day, so it’s no spring chicken. But we did just have the HVAC people in here this February to give it a checkup, so I’m feeling a little grumpy that it’s acting up now. Back in February, I asked the HVAC guy to give me a prognosis on the lifespan on my furnace, and he said, “Well, I can’t guarantee anything – it could stop working tomorrow! But it seems like it’s in good shape and you could get another ten years out of it.” Not sure why I didn’t hear the foreboding music swell in the background of this little pronouncement.
2. While I drank my breakfast (which was a smoothie and a mug of green tea, not, like, whiskey), I whacked away at my to-do list a bit more. It’s at that out-of-control point again, where things keep piling up until I am buried under their weight. The section I tackled today was Making Routine Doctors’ Appointments. Well, some of them were routine. Like I got Carla scheduled for her annual well visit and her annual eye exam (which we somehow skipped last year????). I also left a message on my doctor’s prescription line to follow up on a refill that I requested earlier this week. That last one took two calls because I got through three menu trees and clicked on “leave a message for Dr. X” and then had to listen to a recording that said this was the place to leave questions for the nurse, NOT the place to leave refill requests, so I had to go through all the phone menus again. And! Most exciting of all: I scheduled an ear piercing appointment for Carla! This will be her Big Birthday Present this year. She has been ramping up the requests to have her ears pierced over the past six to twelve months, and she has really made strides in Being Responsible (she has a necklace she wears daily that has so far always come home with her; she has a dental appliance she has to care for). Plus, she got a pair of nice-quality clip on earrings from her grandmother last fall, and she wears them regulary. So I think she is ready for pierced ears. I, however, am NOT ready for pierced ears. I have never had pierced ears, or any sort of piercing, and the whole thing a) squicks me out and b) makes me extremely nervous. I am squeamish and blood/body stuff makes me woozy. I am comforted by Carla’s swift and independent handling of her dental appliance; I have never had to touch it or adjust a single rubber band, and her orthodontist says she is doing great, so I am going to trust that between her and my husband, she’ll figure out how to care for HOLES in her BODY.
Still on the list are many additional phone calls, which I will probably avoid some more. I need to call the landscaper, make an appointment to get my car serviced, call someone to come look at our oven, call the trash collection service about whether they will collect some unusual items (paint cans and gutter guards), hire a lifeguard for Carla’s birthday party, and get some estimates to get the exterior of our house painted. Also on my list: a work project, two rather major projects for my volunteering role, a message for a family member’s Big Birthday Memory Book, finding photos of Carla for a school project, making decisions about and then scheduling a couple of other healthcare-type things, and, most daunting of all: figuring out how to order breakfast for an out-of-town group event at which I will not be present, in a town I have never visited and know nothing about.
3. A phone call I already made this week? Scheduling an appointment with our new pest control service. Even though we live, like, twenty miles away from our old neighborhood, the locations are different enough that they seem to have totally different pest problems. At our old house, we had silverfish; at this house, we have ants, stinkbugs, mice, and bats. “Probably you had rats, too,” the pest control guy said helpfully. But since in twelve years I never once saw a rat, or any sign of such, I refuse to acknowledge this as a possibility.
While he is from the same pest control company that handled our mouse problem when we first moved into this house, he is not the same person. He tells me he was injured last fall and on leave. But he used to do pest control for the previous owners, which was useful because he knew exactly where to go and what the problem areas were. He also kind of implied that the previous owners canceled a ton of their appointments, so he wasn’t surprised we had such a huge mouse infestation when we moved in. While I feel deeply uncomfortable with service people sharing qualms about their other customers, I do feel a little bit justified in my growing belief that the previous owners did not really take care of this place. Lots and lots of things have looked lovely on the surface and then turn out to be falling apart behind the scenes, and the repeated cancellation of regular home maintenance stuff helps explain that. Don’t get me wrong – they seem like lovely people, and I get the impression they are just very busy and travel a lot. And who knows! Maybe they had other stuff they were dealing with, and/or once they decided to move, they simply stopped keeping things up. I will tell you, while I am NOT EXCITED about bats or mice, I do prefer the tiny little ants and the occasional stinkbug to silverfish.
4. Did you know you can make queso dip out of cottage cheese? Possibly you already knew this, but I only just tried it. It was marvelous. I don’t know how “healthy” it was, especially because I ate it with tortilla chips. But it was easy and much higher in protein than covering my chips in shredded cheese while being just as delicious.
5. Speaking of things I have recently tried and loved, I have FINALLY found a travel pillow that allows me to sleep on the airplane! Sleeping is really the only way I can fly, because I find the entire experience so anxiety-producing. But I am not a person who can lean back against the questionably clean headrest or use a travel pillow. My head insists on flopping forward, no matter what, and each time it falls, I snap awake. It is neither comfortable nor restful and it’s kind of embarrassing, to be honest. I have tried so many travel pillows. So many. None of them work. But then! My husband ordered a TRTL travel pillow to use on our flights to and from spring break (four-ish hours each way) and on our first flight, he let me use it… and it WORKS. My head can rest gently in a forward position but there is enough support to prevent flopping AND it doesn’t make my neck ache! I did feel like a moron, winding it around my neck like I was bracing for arctic winds, but it was well worth it! I used it on the flight home, too, and it is now mine, all mine.
Okay, in the time since I drafted this post, I got a phone call (friend with whom I exchanged phone numbers for my phenomenal roof/siding person; being an adult is weird), made a phone call (oven repair person is scheduled!), wrapped two birthday presents, unloaded the dishwasher, tidied the kitchen, welcomed the furnace repair person into my home, threw some ice cubes into the dryer to refresh the clothes I dried last night and forgot about, discovered that my front door will BLOW OPEN unless it is locked, tossed a load of laundry in the washing machine, and agreed to pay to have a new transformer installed in my furnace. I think I hear the heater doing its thing!
Once again, I am awarding superlatives for the week.
Biggest Success: My husband and I designed and ordered our holiday cards!!!! Holiday cards are my favorite thing about December, but I am rarely thinking too much about them this early. This year, cards feel extra urgent because we just moved. And I have not had it together enough to send out change-of-address cards, so the plan is to send out holiday greetings that also alert people to our new address. We did not take any new photos. My husband took complete ownership of this year’s card, and found photos and card options for us to choose from, put the card to together, found a coupon code, wrote the copy on the back, and placed the order. I had some input, but it was really his thing from start to finish. Is it exactly what I would have made? No. But it’s good enough and it was extremely pleasant to have him take over a task that is usually my purview, and which I usually have to beg and wheedle and prod him to focus on. We (he) ordered our cards Sunday and they arrived Thursday! Some very well-organized people on my recipient list send out their cards immediately after Thanksgiving, so we have to get these babies in the mail! My plan is to get them out the week of Thanksgiving. I already mailed two, including one to the person whose card arrives earliest every year.
Most Delicious Thing I Made: My parents came over for dinner one night, so I experimented on them. I made cider braised pot roast with crispy sage butter potatoes and, of course, my favorite fall salad. First of all, this meal is SUPER EASY and yet it tastes like it took hours to prepare. I mean, it does take hours, but the oven is doing the work, not you. I was a little worried that it would be too sweet, but it wasn’t, it was meaty and perfect. The onions turn into jam and the potatoes – while I could have crisped them up a bit more – were delicious. I don’t even LIKE sage, and I loved the potatoes. I highly recommend this as a tasty, super easy, prep-in-advance dinner to prepare for company. Also, my husband RAVED about it. He is always very nice about the food I make, but I can’t remember him being so enthusiastic as he was about this dish.
Most Panic-Inducing Realization: At some point this week I realized that Thanksgiving is TWO WEEKS AWAY. Family will be arriving at my house in eleven days. This is… too soon. We still have boxes EVERYWHERE. There is no lightbulb in the guest room lamp. I have not yet located the guest towels. My daughter’s bathroom (which she will be sharing with my niece and sister-in-law) has no towel rack. We have A TON OF WORK to do in the next eleven days, and that doesn’t even include all the normal Thanksgiving prep! At least Past Me had the foresight to order a turkey. Whole Foods offered a pre-brined version this year, which removes an onerous step from my prep list.
Best and Most Comforting Decision: I made another batch of pumpkin bread. I was a little worried that the first batch was good through the magic of Beginner’s Luck, but no. It is just delicious, delicious bread.
Longest-Time-Coming Completion of a Task: I would have counted this as my biggest accomplishment of the week, but I’m not because the whole thing is so dumb. I have been trying to end my relationship with a financial institution for TWO YEARS, and, in fact, thought that I had finally done so last winter. So imagine my surprise when I got a statement recently that listed assets the financial institution supposedly was still managing (no) and charged us a $30 maintenance fee (ARGH). But! I think we have finally finally cut ties with this institution. Unfortunately we are not getting our maintenance fee back, but it is money well spent if I never have to talk to the plan administrator (who never administrated ANYTHING) ever again.
Current Most Perplexing Home Maintenance Issue: While the new house is flush with perplexing things (why does the laundry room smoke alarm, which is wired into the house’s electrical system, chirp constantly and why is there no way to turn it off?), my husband and I have encountered a new one this week. We are trying to hang things like artwork and the aforementioned towel bar, but twice now our efforts have been thwarted. My husband will begin to drill into a wall, and will hit something. He thinks it is somehow our ductwork, because it sounds and feels like flexible metal. HOW did the previous owners hang things? There was a towel bar in my daughter’s bathroom, for instance; the painters removed it to paint, and then when they reinstalled it, found that the screws were stripped. So we asked them to simply remove it, patch the wall, and then we would install a new towel bar. (To make this boring story even more boring and also longer, the existing towel bar was very small, and there is no linen closet near my daughter’s room, so we wanted a double towel bar on which to hang multiple towels.) So there WAS a towel bar there, and my husband is trying to install the new towel bar in virtually the same place… how did they make it work?! So weird.
Any superlatives you need to award this week?
I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here.
Today is a holiday in the US, and we’re all being extraordinarily languid. Laundry is happening, and my husband and I have a cleaning project on tap, but otherwise we are just kind of draping ourselves over the furniture and losing ourselves in various screens. That’s fine with me. Two more weeks of being Extremely Busy before I get a mini-break (I think), so I’m taking this day of loafing while I can.
My husband and I fortunately remembered YESTERDAY that today is a holiday, so we managed to make it to the grocery store while it was still open. We were prepared for it to be a madhouse, but it wasn’t too bad. Seems like most people do this odd thing called planning ahead when there is a long holiday weekend. Food for thought.
This coming weekend, one of my dearest friends is coming for a visit. I haven’t seen her since 2008, which is TOO LONG. I am so excited that I get to see her. We have fun things planned, but of course I am already overthinking everything and wondering if I need to schedule MORE things to keep her entertained. When probably we would be fine just sitting in my backyard yakking it up.
As you know if you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, I am really overthinking what to feed her. When I asked her about food restrictions, she said she eats anything, so… I am not sure what to make for dinner. Fortunately, I think I will be responsible for making but one meal while she’s here (we have restaurant reservations for the other nights), so my overthinking can only go so far.
Dinners for the Week of May 29-June 4
Hamburgers and Chickpea Salad: We don’t have any propane, so we won’t be grilling. But that’s okay, because these instant pot hamburgers are so yummy. Full disclosure, my husband is making a caprese salad for himself. But I am in the mood for chickpea salad and so chickpea salad is what I am making. It is so good, and leftovers will make a delicious lunch.
Tacos: I will probably default to regular old ground beef tacos when my friend arrives. Who doesn’t like tacos? Plus, Carla will eat them so we can all sit at the table together.
Grilled Chicken and Charred Lemon Cauliflower: I think I have some shawarma marinade for the chicken, and this cauliflower is so yummy I could honestly eat it by itself.
What are you doing this week? Now that Mayhem/Maycember/May-oss is nearly over, can you breathe a little? Or is June JUST AS BUSY?
It seems impossible, and yet this is pretty much the last week in May. School is nearly done. Camp is on the horizon. My parents’ move is imminent. All sorts of good things – and yet instead of happy and light, I am feeling scattered and overwhelmed.
A lot of this is due to the fact that May has been cram-jammed with social events. In the last week alone I have attended: THREE school concerts, a playdate, a skating party, a birthday dinner, and a school event. Plus I went out to an impromptu lunch with a newish friend. Plus I got my hair cut and colored, which is wonderful but also involves more than an hour of chatting. Even chatting with my very lovely and hilarious hair stylist is exhausting. Plus it was a call week.
Up next, I have: a parents association event, my twentieth college reunion, a visit from my grad school best friend, and my parents’ arrival. Quickly to be followed by Carla’s birthday and subsequent party (which I still haven’t planned yet, because Carla has been dithering; I think we FINALLY have the details set, now I just need to book the place and send out invitations).
Like I said earlier, this is all good stuff! Happy, fun, wonderful things I am excited about and have been looking forward to! And yet, THIS IS TOO MANY THINGS.
One of my gentle aspirations this year was to get together with two friends a month, if you need a sense of my typical level of social interaction. This is so far beyond the typical that I am I am waving the white flag. I am standing on the prow of the ship, shouting “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” into the storm.
What do you do when you have too much going on? I am coping with walks – ALONE – when I can, and by sitting on the couch – ALONE – and watching episodes of Jeopardy! and reruns of Psych when I can. So far, these strategies are not helping a huge amount, mainly because my alone time has been severely limited. Because, of course, these Fun Extra Events are all being squeezed in and around Carla’s continued roster of activities and my regular duties of attempting to be a human. So I feel like I have little to no time to sit in a quiet room and decompress before bravely facing all the people and the talking once again.
Well. There’s no way out but through. Let’s think about food instead of about making small talk with a million more people. Yes, that’s right. Meal planning is the less onerous option here.
Last week was a sheet pan success, even though I only managed to make two of the meals I planned, so I’ve got a couple of sheet pan items on the menu again as well as a couple of leftovers. (The sheet pan tandoori chicken and cauliflower was my favorite, by the way. Very similar flavors to my old shawarma standby, but in a different and delicious form.) (Instead of sticking to the things I had planned, I also tried a balsamic chicken and veggie bake. It was okay, but the balsamic sauce ended up overpowering the meal. I might use the sauce only for the chicken if I make this recipe again.)
Dinners for (practically) the LAST WEEK IN MAY OMG:
Summer Chipotle Chicken Salad with Cilantro Dressing: I did not manage to make this last week, but I have been thinking about it with longing. So back on the meal plan it goes! The only issue is that it calls for strawberries, and the berries on offer lately haven’t been particularly appealing, especially because they are also wildly expensive. To be fair, I don’t think it’s quite strawberry season. But maybe I’ll swap in blueberries? I haven’t decided if that will taste right with the cilantro dressing. Follow Up: This was underwhelming. The cilantro dressing was fine, the blueberries were fine (or, at least, I couldn’t see how strawberries would have been better), but the whole dish was kind of one-note. I think it could have benefited from some chunks of fresh mozzarella. When it comes to chipotle chicken, I VASTLY prefer this recipe.
Chicken Fajitas: A couple of people mentioned sheet pan chicken fajitas last week and I built up quite a craving.
Mediterranean Chicken and Veggies: I think this was a backup for one of my options last week, and I didn’t make it or the meal for which it was a backup. But I have lots of cauliflower leftover from the tandoori sheet pan meal and I have some zucchini ready to go, so I think this is a done deal. Follow Up: This was delicious! I used cauliflower, zucchini, red onion, and chicken. The recipe doesn’t make a huge amount of marinade, but it was just right. The tahini sauce was fine, although nothing special. If I’d had hummus on hand, maybe thinning that out with some lemon juice would have been better (and quicker). I did drizzle the veggies and chicken with leftover cilantro dressing from the chipotle chicken salad, and combined with the tahini sauce, it added a delicious zing.
Sheet Pan Sausage and Veggies: This is my reach meal for this week. Sarah recommended it, and it sounds delicious, but maybe more importantly, it sounds different from what we normally eat. Here is where I admit that I have never once cooked a sausage in my life. I’m not opposed to sausage. We ate kielbasa semi-regularly when I was growing up. But it wasn’t my favorite. I guess I feel about sausage the way I feel about meatloaf: totally something I am fine eating, but not necessarily something I would choose. But maybe that’s why it is the perfect choice! Maybe I will realize that I have been missing out on a delicious and easy protein source! At the very least, it will be a pleasant novelty compared to all the chicken we eat around here. If I can get past the abundant variety of sausage options and just CHOOSE one, I think I can make this happen.
Let’s just say that some of the meals on my dinner plan this week are highly aspirational. You may also note that this is a double dinners this week, because I fully plan on NOT making dinner during my volunteer event, which begins on Friday and encompasses the entire following week. Also, my husband is on call. I have no idea how I am going to get Carla to and from all her many activities, but I can sure as sugar tell you I won’t ALSO be making dinner.
This week, a plaster expert is coming to finally repair the hole in my kitchen ceiling. He is supposed to be here for two days, and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get into my kitchen to cook while he’s here. (That would be super weird, right? To be chopping and mixing while he is doing stuff to the ceiling? I feel like I would have to invite him to eat with us?)
The name of the game, therefore, is heavy utilization of my slow cooker coupled. Here are some things that I am planning, but I fully reserve the right to toss all these plans out the window in favor of takeout or digging random bits of things out of the fridge/pantry/freezer.
Dinners for the Week of November 7-20
Slow Cooker White Chicken Chili: This just sounds good, and autumnal, and as I said I am going to lean hard on my slow cooker.
Slow Cooker Barbacoa Beef Tacos: Yum. Also: another slow cooker recipe that is fairly easy to just chuck in the crock pot until needed.
Oven Baked Pork Chops: This I know I can do – it’s so easy to mix up the sauce and marinate a few pork chops, and then shove everything in the oven when it’s time to eat. Maybe I’ll steam some broccoli alongside it? Or roast some green beans? What I REALLY want is to try those viral parmesan roasted potatoes, but… well, we’ll see. (I honestly don’t know where the potatoes originated, and it may not be from the recipe I linked to. But I’ve seen them everywhere and I [still] don’t do TikTok and I am also lazy.) This feels like A Normal Meal, to me – as in, a meal I can make during times of life that don’t feel pell-mell trying-to-catch-my-breath whirlwinds. Will I have a calm period in my life ever again? Who’s to say.
Instant Pot Chipotle Chicken: The lovely Birchwood Pie Project posted this recipe last week, and I MUST try it. Seems like the kind of thing that you can make once and then just add to random recipes as needed. I am going to eschew the instant pot, however, and make this in my slow cooker. Yes, I am afraid of my instant pot.
What’s new with you?
It seems as though I am doing NaBloPoMothis month, which is 30 blog posts in 30 days. (Will I make it??? Only time will tell.) Details at San’s blog here.
First, I feel duty-bound to inform you that last week’s spinach artichoke chicken was a bust. I don’t exactly know why it was a bust, but it was.
The spinach artichoke dip or sauce or whatever you want to call the element containing the creamy spinachy artichokey goodness was quite delicious. But the chicken… well, it suffered, and the whole dish suffered in empathy. I made enough to have leftovers, but when it came time to reheat the leftovers and eat them, I was filled with such revulsion I ended up a) making fish tacos with frozen fish sticks one night and b) ordering Chick-fil-A another night. And then I ended up throwing out the rest, which made me feel extremely guilty and wasteful. (I did scrape off the rest of the spinach artichoke element and ate it by itself; it was yummy.)
The other issue – besides the chicken, which was very tough? and also didn’t really seem to complement the sauce somehow? even though chicken is so neutral I have no idea how this is possible? – was that some of the artichoke hearts were… inedible. So that you would be eating along and then all of a sudden you realized you had been chewing for ten thousand years on a particular leaf. That was wildly unpleasant. I used the frozen artichoke hearts in a bag from Trader Joe’s and maybe that was the issue. It really kind of put me off of artichokes, though, and those have always been such a treat.
Since I raised the issue of extracurriculars in my Dinners This Week post last week, I also feel duty-bound to update you. We had our first (nearly) full week of extracurriculars and we survived. It was rough going though. Although it was also a Call Week and it was also a week that Carla was recovering from a nasty respiratory thing that resulted in a lot of coughing, so she and I didn’t get a lot of sleep.
This week has to be better, right?
I am also experiencing that free-falling panic that often accompanies September, which only just started and yet is also somehow two-thirds done. I have several freelance projects all due at once and then another one coming up in a couple of weeks; I have a big volunteer event looming in the near-distance and preparations and meetings have begun for that; we just had two family birthdays and two more are coming up early next month and one more after that; I am finally getting the ceiling repaired so we’ll have workers taking over our kitchen for a bit; then there are ALL the fall holidays one right after another and I feel as though I am already behind. Plus, in that time my husband and I have a pre-planned mini-getaway and I am trying to figure out if we can go visit my sister-in-law to see a performance she’s in even though the dates we could possibly make that work are the single weekend in between the big volunteer event and Thanksgiving. I don’t mean to complain, because it is all good stuff. It is just A Lot and it all stresses me out.
I did buy my husband one of his birthday gifts already, so there’s that. But the rest of the uncompleted tasks are in a big, teetering stack and I don’t know what to grab first because everything is going to come toppling down on my head.
Let’s think about food!
I did not make lentil soup last week. The weather went from cool and rainy to 80+ degrees and sunny, and hearty soups no longer sounded appealing. I am back in Salad Mode, at least until I remember how much work salads are to put together.
Dinners for the Week of September 19-September 25
Greek Marinated Chicken with Something Green, Probably Zucchini: I saw this on Instagram and immediately wanted to try it. In the Instagram video, Laura Vitale simply combines all of the marinade ingredients in a blender and blends them together, which is a relief because “use a mortar and pestle” is otherwise a reason for me to skip a recipe entirely.
Greek Farro Salad: I am feeling really into farro right now? I will make an extra couple of chicken breasts on Greek Marinated Chicken night so that we can have this salad.
Fall Chopped Salad with Some Sort of Protein: Another salad, and another Instagram find, this time from Healthy Girl Kitchen. Her recipes are vegan and I am not vegan, so there will be a little variation in the way I make my salad. For instance, I might add shrimp? Also, I don’t have any butternut squash on hand, so I may skip that part. I absolutely HATE chopping butternut squash – they are so hard and I am always afraid I will chop my hand off with the knife, or that I will send a shard of squash straight through the window (they tend to fling themselves away from the knife, when I can get it through the rind). My grocery store sells pre-cubed squash but one package was $5.49 and, while I appreciate how much labor is required to cube that squash, $5.49 is too much for me to pay for what is likely to be my least favorite part of the salad. I suppose I could look for frozen cubed butternut squash but I didn’t and I am not eager to return to my grocery store anytime soon. Last time I went I FORGOT TO WEAR A MASK and I am still reeling from that. Like… WHAT? I have worn a mask in a grocery store for TWO YEARS at this point, how did I just… forget?!?!?!
Tacos: ** Alert, alert: very quick weight loss talk ** The thing about tacos is that I love them with my whole heart. I want to put them on the menu because they are easy and everyone loves them, and because they SHOULD produce enough leftovers for a second night. However. I tend to overeat tacos. It’s as though you put a taco in front of me, and suddenly my body is certain this is the last time I will ever have access to a taco, and so I eat more tacos than any person should eat. I have a fond memory of being invited over to my schoolbus driver’s house when I was in elementary school, along with all the other kids on her route, for a taco night. (Yes, I suspect this is a little unusual, and yet my parents okayed it as did other parents of other children. Small town life, I guess.) And I ate TWELVE TACOS. As an elementary school student. Please understand that I do not eat twelve tacos when I make them at home, that was a one-time feat of extraordinary stomach stretchiness, but I do really, really like tacos. For most of my life, I have just… eaten however many tacos I want. But that’s not in line with trying to lose weight. I think it is reasonable to eat tacos, but that it is also reasonable to not eat ALL the tacos. So I am trying very hard to tell myself that just because things like tacos exist in my house right now, doesn’t mean I need to eat them. And likewise, that just because I am not eating tacos now does not mean I cannot eat them later. (This point is to prevent me from scarfing down leftover tacos for lunch, which I usually do as well.) Furthermore, I am not going to die if I only eat two tacos. I’m just not. (I am being hyperbolic; I never feel like I am going to die by restricting myself to X tacos. But I do feel a deep, deep longing for more.) Anyway. I am going to put tacos on the meal plan for TWO NIGHTS and ZERO lunches and it is going to happen.
Do any of these meals seem particularly in line with “easy” or “quick” (aside from the tacos)? No, not especially. So we’ll see how quickly it all falls apart.
Football season is back, baby! It’s super problematic and fills me with conflict and yet I just can’t quit it! My husband and I enjoyed a luxurious afternoon watching our team win yesterday and sampling some Octoberfest beers, all from the comfort of our living room. Carla made herself a couch out of blankets and the cushions from the actual couch, and sat there through the whole game. She was originally very excited about football, but then realized after only a few minutes that she finds it quite boring. Well. It took me many decades before I learned how to enjoy it, so I get it. She watched a few shows on her iPad, then started doing a “research project” on her computer that seems to involve googling photos of animals and pasting the photos into a google doc. There may be an element of alphabetization at play. (“Mommy, Daddy, what’s an animal that starts with a G? All I can think of is ‘gnu.’”) Delightful.
We’ve been having fallish weather, which is pleasant. And makes me crave all the soups and stews and hearty foods. We made impromptu chili last night, which was delicious, and which means we have leftovers for dinner tonight.
This week also marks the start of all of Carla’s after school activities. To be fair, we started one activity a little more than a month ago, and then there was a week of tryouts for the sport she’s doing. But the real, FULL schedule begins this week. (Technically, it’s not “full” yet. We will add a second Monday activity in late October as part of her music lessons. I am apprehensive about that one, because it means Carla will need to eat dinner in the car as we drive from one activity to another.)
I did after-school activities as a kid – piano and gymnastics starting when I was in elementary school – and I remember dinners being tricky. Well, they were also wonderful because I had a sanctioned reason to eat fast food; my parents both worked right up until the time of the activities, and our house was too far out of town for us to go home for dinner. I have no recollection of how I got from school to my parents’ offices. But I do remember fighting with my brother over whether we were going to get tacos or McDonalds for dinner, and then eating whatever we’d decided on at my father’s paper-cluttered desk while he finished seeing patients and dictating notes. This was the time before smart phones and iPads, too, so I am not sure what we did while we waited. Looked through old medical journals and bickered, probably.
I don’t remember feeling overscheduled when I was a kid. But until high school (when I still did piano, but also added debate, cheerleading, individual voice lessons, and a capella group practice), I had two, maybe three activities spanning two or maybe three nights a week. Carla is going to have something every single day. Yikes. She and my husband and I talked at great length about the scheduling and the time commitment, and I am hopeful that it won’t be too overwhelming. Carla doesn’t really have homework yet, so her only requirements at home are playing her instrument, reading for 15 minutes, and keeping her room and play areas tidy. And even though she’s doing something every night, she really only has three activities. (Sport: 3 nights a week. Instrument: 2 nights a week. School activity: 2 afternoons a week.) And she is SO excited about all of them.
She’s a very busy, active kid, so I don’t necessarily worry that much about her being overstimulated or tired. My main worry is that she won’t feel like she has any time to play, which is really so important for kids. But she will be able to come home after school three days a week and play a bit before her sports practice. Plus, her weekends aren’t terribly crowded. Well. I forgot about Girl Scouts. She will have Scout meetings once a month. But that’s not too bad. And then there’s skiing, but that doesn’t start until January.
Well. We’ll see how it goes. If it’s impossible, or she’s too exhausted, we will apologize profusely and back out of one of the activities.
Did you do after-school activities when you were a kid? Did you feel overscheduled? If you are a parent, what is/was it like for your kiddo/s? Do you think Carla and I are nutso for doing this to ourselves on purpose?
With all these activities, I am back to planning super easy meals with plenty of leftovers. Here’s what’s on the agenda for this week:
Dinners for the Week of September 12-19
Leftover Chili: This reminds me that I have never posted my chili recipe. It’s very good. I make it with ground beef and beans, but it’s very adaptable to be vegetarian or to accommodate alternate types of ground meat or your particular preference for beans.
Spinach and Artichoke Chicken: I don’t know why, but I’ve been dreaming about something like this for awhile. I think it should make some good leftovers, and it sounds perfect for fall.
Crockpot BBQ Pork: This was on the menu a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t execute it for whatever reason. So it’s happening this week. I slather my pork on a baked potato, my husband eats his in a sandwich with coleslaw. The pork tenderloins at Trader Joe’s were teensy, but I think I can make this stretch to two nights anyway.
Lentil Soup: I haven’t made lentil soup in a good long while, but it sounds really yummy. I got pre-made mirepoix from Trader Joe’s, which makes this meal very simple to put together. Perhaps I will also make a loaf of miracle no-knead bread to go along with it. I’ll make a nice big pot, which should make enough for another night of dinners and maybe even a lunch or two.
Are you having fall weather in your neck of the woods? Are you a football fan? Any fall meals on the docket for you this week?
I woke up at 3:00 this morning from a bad dream. In the dream, I was in my childhood home with my husband. Somehow, my horse had gotten into the house, and we were trying to get him out but he was stomping around and bumping into the furniture and getting very riled up and upset. In the confusion, a fire started in the dining room. My husband was yelling, in a very loud monotone, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” That’s when I woke up.
My father is a volunteer fire fighter, and he’d told me yesterday about a recent fire that had devasted a dwelling. Plus, my husband and I started watching a new show this weekend and last night’s episode featured an explosion that resulted in a house going up in flames. So I think it’s safe to say that I had fire on the brain.
Nonetheless, it’s easy for a dream like mine to have the weight of prescience, foreshadowing, and I lay there in the dark house taking long deep breaths through my nose, trying to smell smoke, listening intently for the crackle of flames. I finally got up and did a walk-through of my home, which allowed me to fall back to sleep after an hour or so of troubled thoughts about my loved ones and whether the dream fire had escaped into any of their homes.
We’re also about to begin the new school year, and, along with it, a new schedule of extracurricular activities. So perhaps my brain was merely venting its feelings of facing the unknown in an uncontrolled way.
Carla will be doing extracurricular activities FOUR DAYS A WEEK, sometimes five, and that sounds completely bonkers I am aware. But these activities are ones she has been wanting to do for a long time, and we discussed the time commitment at length as a family, and my husband and I think they will be good for her.
But I am fretting, as usual, about dinner. Dinner is a thing I can – usually – control, in a world that increasingly feels uncontrollable, but I haven’t quite figured out how I will make it work with our new schedule, so I am out of sorts. Horse-in-the-dining-room, fire-breaking-out out of sorts, it seems.
Some weekdays will be normal – by which I mean Carla has no commitments after school is out. One day each week, she will have an extracurricular commitment that takes place after school but ends before dinner. I suppose on those days, I will need to have everything prepped and ready to go so that we can come home from the activity and I can immediately get food in the oven. Some weekdays, we will have a couple of hours of free time after school, and then the extracurricular activity takes place in the evening. My plan is to feed Carla dinner before we leave for her activity. But then, it will be quite late when we return, and she’ll need to shower and go to bed immediately upon arriving home. (To accommodate the new activities, we’re pushing her bedtime back a teeny bit to 8:30, as long as she still gets adequate rest.) So… when will my husband and I eat?
(Recall, if you will, that our normal school-year dinner schedule is: Carla eats at 5:30 and is in bed by 7:30-8:00, my husband arrives home between 6:00 and 8:00, my husband and I eat between 8:30-9:00. Thanks, I hate it.)
I wailed to my husband that we might be eating a lot of Lean Cuisine this year, and he very kindly said that that was FINE, we would make it work. But I don’t really LIKE Lean Cuisine (or its brethren), so I would prefer to find an alternative that isn’t a) fast food or b) nothing or c) me making dinner at nine o’clock at night or d) some variation on Lean Cuisine. (Although all of those are options occasionally, I don’t want to do any of them ALL the time.)
Making meals with built-in leftovers sounds like our best option. That’s why I have chicken fajitas on the menu this week. That way, I can eat before the activity and my husband can eat whenever he gets home. But I’m not great about knowing which meals will produce leftovers, and it seems to me that most of them (not all, but a lot of the ones I love: chicken paprikas! pizza! chili! spaghetti and meat sauce! tacos!) are the more decadent, less I’m Trying to Lose Weight ones that I would prefer to be eating lately. Sigh. Maybe Lean Cuisine is the way to go.
20 Minute Korean Beef Sesame Noodles: This doesn’t seem particularly leftovers-friendly, although that could be my own bias against reheating beef, but it sounds really tasty.
What are some of your favorite Plentiful Leftovers meals? Also, your favorite make-ahead meals, quick meals, one-person-eats-now,-the-other-person-eats-later meals?
May is chaos. I was whining to the mom of one of Carla’s classmates recently about busy I feel, and she said in a gritted-teeth, long-suffering voice, “That’s just how May is. And it will get worse as the kids get older.” So that was cheering.
It feels like I was just chugging along, doing my thing, and then suddenly realized that I have fifty deadlines heading my way and I am only partway through each project. Luckily, this isn’t true (at least in the paying work sense; I am on top of those at least). But it FEELS that way. Worse, it feels like everyone else has alsosuddenly had the same realization. My email inbox is jammed with teacher conference requests and reminders to schedule my gutter cleaning and invitations to end-of-year parties and check-ins about summer swimming schedules and gently scolding messages from camp to fill out my kid’s many, many forms already and notifications to update school payment plans and on and on.
We had, in the past week, an invitation to a musical performance at Carla’s school literally three days before the performance itself. And then a notice, seven days ago, from Carla’s teacher, that the class has themed days all this week – and require things like sandals that I had not yet purchased. Then we had to schedule a meeting with one of the teachers to review Carla’s goals for next year. And I (stupidly) signed up to volunteer at a big end-of-school carnival. Not to mention, we get alerts near daily about Covid cases in Carla’s grade. Plus, Carla’s been working on her big Eleanor Roosevelt research project. IT’S A LOT.
I have not felt up to most things lately – reading, cooking, planning meals, blogging – but I miss those things (except planning meals). So let’s try a random info dump. I will try not to complain TOO much, but no promises.
Zoom Awkwardness: While I am deeply, sincerely grateful for the ability to meet with people virtually, I wish someone would figure out how to solve the end-of-meeting awkwardness. You know what I mean. When you have all already said goodbye, but then you have to fumble around to find the button that ends the meeting. I realize that this awkward moment lasts maybe five seconds, but I find it excruciating. Often, I find myself distracted in the last moments of the meeting itself because I am trying to plan my exit in the quickest possible way. But no. Even if I can find the “end meeting” button ahead of time, I inevitably fumble it, or forget that I’ve carefully hovered my cursor over it for exactly that purpose, or the “are you sure?” box pops up and I just want to die of embarrassment. I realize this may not be as big a deal to some people as it is to me, and obviously I have lived to zoom again, but I HATE IT. Just let me out of this virtual discomfort!
End of Year Teacher Gift: Every year, our Room Parent (i.e. Room Mom) collects money for a class gift. Every year, I dutifully send in money. Every year, I fret and worry and scour Etsy for an additional gift that my kid can give to her teacher, personally, on top of the considerable amount we have already sent in. Every year, I decide that the collective gift is BETTER – usually it’s a gift card, and I’m guessing it is much more useful/appreciated by the teacher than whatever dumb crap I could come up with – and exit Etsy without buying the personalized water bottle/bookmark/coffee mug I was pondering. And yet, despite going through this for SIX YEARS NOW, I inevitably find myself in the last week of school, fretting and fretting about the possibility of being the ONLY person who doesn’t double gift with a physical gift in addition to the cash contribution.
Road Trip: I am doing a right terrible job of Not Complaining, so let’s talk about something positive. My husband and Carla and I are going on a Road Trip this summer!!!! Aside from the astronomical cost of gas, I am really excited about our Road Trip. (Yes, I am capitalizing it.) We finalized all our hotel stays over the weekend, and so now I am gleefully shopping for Road Trip Necessities. This is what my father refers to as a “Tool Buying Opportunity,” which is part of what makes the planning portion of something (an event, a hobby) as enjoyable as or more enjoyable than the actual thing itself. My husband is researching the best family audiobooks to buy (or check out from our library) for our trip, and I love that this is the way his trip planning excitement manifests. He has already played a few samples to Carla, so that they can figure out whether she’ll have trouble understanding the accent of the narrator.
Birthday Planning Stagnation: Despite ALL of your lovely suggestions, I have made ZERO progress toward planning Carla’s birthday party. Zero. This fills me with dread and anxiety. However, I will say that with every confident, encouraging comment about hosting a party here, I grew more and more entrenched in my certainty that having a party in my home is NOT the right way to go. So that was extremely helpful, and I am so appreciative. I genuinely envy those readers who are so easy-breezy about hosting an in-home birthday party. You make it sound so easy! And fun! And like the better choice! But my gut was clear: NO. So whatever we end up doing, it will be somewhere else. Your kind, helpful suggestions also clarified for me something that I already knew – but did not know I felt with such stringency – which is that I loathe trampoline parks. We used to take Carla when she was smaller, because it was a great way to release her endless reserves of energy in the dragging months of winter. But even then I always felt like I had to be careful not to touch ANYTHING, and I would always through Carla in the tub and her clothing in the washing machine the instant we returned home. Perhaps this speaks more to the cleanliness of my local trampoline park than to anything else, but since that’s what we have available, I am going to skip it. So I suppose even if I haven’t made any forward progress, I am at the very least narrowing the field. Thank you so much for your help, even if you may feel like I am ignoring your very helpful recommendations. Your advice is helpful nonetheless.
Handyman: In other good news, I finally finally got a handyman to not only return my call, but to come over and look at my long list of projects!!!! He seems great. He reviewed things and took measurements, and was very clear on things he can/will do and things he cannot/won’t. The most important result, though, is that he CAN and WILL repair our ceiling. I don’t know if I’ve described our ceiling hole in this space, but I am going to do so now in case you want to skip to the next equally riveting bullet. It is not a hole, per se. It is more like a place where the plaster has declined to provide its normal coverage. The plaster is peeling away from whatever material forms the ceiling, and so it looks like a hole. We have had the spot examined several times by a plumber (and by our fathers), and it does not appear to be a leak. And it’s been there for YEARS, so I think we would know by now. But this stupid plaster lapse makes me so self-conscious about our house. It looks terrible, and it’s right above the kitchen table, and I hate it. And now it will be fixed!!!! Of course, there is no scheduled date for the fixing; the handyman warned me he is booked out for several weeks. So I guess now I am just hoping he really will send me an estimate and offer some dates. I almost don’t care what it will cost because I want it fixed. But then again, I have no idea what this kind of thing should cost, so… I will report back on whether it is a swallowable amount or something that kicks me in the gut and forces me to live with the stupid hole for longer. Like I said, we’ve been living with it for YEARS, so it shouldn’t be such a big deal to keep on living with it. But at some point in the past few months, I have reached some sort of tell-tale heart level of complete inability to co-exist with this thing for one second longer.
Calendar Bedlam: Recently, I am having an issue that makes me think my mind is on a steep decline. I keep making plans, putting them in EMPTY SPOTS in my calendar, and then realizing – sometime later – that I have double booked myself. Example 1: A friend invites me to a performance. I check the calendar and see I have plans that night. I decline. Later, a friend invites me to dinner. I check the calendar and see I am free, so I accept. The next time I talk to the performer friend, she mentions the day of her performance… which is on the day I originally had free but now do not. Example 2: I set a playdate for Carla. The next day, I notice that she in fact has an orthodontist appointment that day, so I have to reschedule the playdate. Example 3: I have to do a mandatory nicotine test per our insurance, so I schedule it in an empty spot on the calendar. I get a reminder for the test at the same time I get a reminder for a meeting with Carla’s teacher, because I have scheduled them in the same time slot. WHY AM I DOING THIS AND HOW CAN I STOP.
Dirty Martinis: I recently learned the joy and beauty of a very, very dirty martini. My whole life, I have been staunchly anti-vodka, but it seems that may be because I have only ever had cheap vodka? I recently had a martini with really good, smooth vodka and it was delicious. Then I made one at home, with the fancy expensive vodka my father-in-law drinks, and it was also delicious. I am now out of olive juice.
Jury Duty: My stint of jury duty went GREAT. The summons said that we needed to be available for five days, beginning on a Monday. So I prepared to be gone that entire week. When I did jury duty several years ago, I went in on a Monday, sat around all day, and then was called to a courtroom near the end of the day. I wasn’t selected for that jury, but I was released from jury duty for the rest of the week. This time, you call a number in advance of your service and figure out if your jury number has been selected for that day. I got to miss two days, but my number was called for Wednesday. Then I arrived at the courthouse, sat around all day, and… was released. I didn’t have to go back at all! It was… kind of pleasant? Of course, the anticipation was the dreadful part. I had to worry about childcare for Carla for the whole week, and then I had to worry about driving on a freeway during rush hour, and I had to worry about parking downtown. But once I had Carla stowed at school, had made it downtown, parked, and successfully made it to the courthouse, it was fine! Pleasant, even! It was a beautiful day and we got ninety minutes (!!!!) for our lunch hour, so I got something from Starbucks and walked around downtown. I was even a teeny bit disappointed that I didn’t get selected for a case – I think it would be interesting to serve on a jury. The biggest inconvenience of the week, it turned out, was that I kept having to email the school to let them know that Carla would or wouldn’t be arriving early for babysitting services.
Step Off: My watch has developed quite an overblown sense of its own roll in my life lately. Constantly telling me to stop and breathe, or noting that I am usually more active at this time of day what is up????, or advising me that I can “still do it!” if I just take a brisk 20-minute walk at 11:15 pm on a weekday. And now this??? Stay in your lane, watch. I am doing the best that I can.
Keto Stall: I feel the need to give you a keto update. During my extravagant jury duty lunch hour, I ordered coffee with cream (despite the fact that I hate coffee) and a pre-made lunch kit that seemed to be fairly keto-friendly: salami, cheese, and some nuts/dried fruit that I ate even though I’m sure it was full of sugar. I did not eat the crackers. Anyway: I continue to follow a low-carb plan. And I have completely stalled. It is SO frustrating. I am doing the plan, I am eating the high-protein/high-fat foods. I am in ketosis. And yet my weight has gone nowhere. It wouldn’t be so terrible except that I HATE it. Food is not fun or enjoyable. I do not look forward to meals, and in fact actively dread them. I cannot stand to plan meals, because they are inevitably some variation on meat + veg, or else they are complicated and frequently end up tasting awful. I am constantly asking my husband what I should make for dinner. I am not having fun, I am not losing weight, it is all awful. And yet any time I LOOK at a carb, I instantly gain two pounds. So I don’t think I’m ready to quit keto either. At least I am maintaining this not-quite-ten-percent-of-my-bodyweight weight loss. ARGH.
A Good Salad: I did make a really good salad recently. It was arugula (yum) and spinach (yuck), heavily weighted on the arugula side for me and on the spinach side for my husband (who dislikes arugula). I added goat cheese, blueberries, strawberries, a sprinkling of sliced almonds, and grilled chicken. And then I added balsamic dressing because I love dressing as much as I love sauce. (Perhaps this is causing the stall in the previous bullet, perhaps indeed, although I don’t eat salads often because of the dressing factor.)
Strawberry Marketing: The strawberries in the aforementioned salad were PINK. My grocery store had a big display and they had a lot of marketing to assure customers that the strawberries are fully ripe! And taste like pineapple! I had to try them. My husband wondered if they might taste like underripe strawberries and indeed they did. They were fine with some goat cheese and balsamic dressing though, but NOT worth $6.99 per container when I can buy actual ripe strawberry tasting strawberries for $3.50. Between these berries and the miniature iceberg lettuces, produce marketers are really working hard for their money, let me tell you.
Garden Inertia: Let us turn to another pleasant topic, which is gardening. Of which I have also done ZERO. What the hell am I doing with my time, if I am not cooking or gardening or planning Carla’s birthday party? I am fretting and wringing my hands and going in circles is what. We have people coming for dinner this weekend, so now I am suddenly feeling Very Urgent about having at least some flowers in pots. It’s not like my “garden” is anything impressive. But I do like to have a few pots with flowers and I need to do that. Perhaps Carla and I will go after school.
Spring Shopping Syndrome: In addition to fretting/hand wringing, I have been struck by Spring Shopping Syndrome. You are familiar with this yes? The point at which the weather begins to edge carefully toward warmth and suddenly you hate every single item of clothing you own? I have been buying (and then returning) things with great abandon. Loft has been my latest obsession, and they know it: they keep emailing me with adorable dresses front and center, and so I order the dress and then it doesn’t fit and I take it back. But, to get free shipping, I added on a cute blouse, and that DID fit, so now I have that sweet, sweet dopamine rush of clicking “buy” alongside the possibility, however small, that the item I bought will be cute, which makes me want to repeat the process all over again. Interesting how I am able to analyze this behavior and see it for what it is and yet I still can’t stop/won’t stop.
All right, that’s it for now my dear Internet.
What’s clogging your calendar this month? Have you made any springy purchases? Tell me which deer-proof flowers to buy for my garden.
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life of a doctor's wife 