Home cooking

Just read through some of my posts the last few months - I haven't mentioned how much we make things from scratch now. Just in the next days we'll make homemade crockpot yogurt, bagel chips (this is a new experiment), veggie broth/stock (usually 8-11 cups for the freezer-pantry), red sauce (we use it for pizza, spaghetti, meatloaf, anything that calls for marinara/red sauce) - making 6 cups at a time approx, French bread. We'll also dry some fruit both for snacking, and in anticipation of making our own granola-style cereal in another week.

We've made a few other things too - tried our hand at sandwich thins, but we would be making those every week to keep up with our crew, and they weren't the easiest either.

We made homemade pretzel sticks for our trip, as well as home-dried jerky, and garlic-sesame sticks.

Whew! Lots of cooking, but I greatly appreciate my husband's willingness to help us eat more healthily. He does most of the cooking and I keep up with dishes. That's saying alot, for both of us!

A new year

We spent our Christmas vacation traveling - to St Louis, then to KC, then to Garnett, then back home in the reverse order. We had a great trip. The girls were a bit overwhelmed at so much family - Garnett had 48 people for Christmas Day dinner. WOW. Especially Jessica was clingy, Joanna some too. Jeremy got his glasses bent, but the eye dr office was able to fix them on Jan 3, thankfully. Joanna got an ear infection right after Christmas, first noticed the Tues eve after. We took her to an urgent care center in St Louis Thurs early afternoon, so she had medicine and was back to her normal self by that evening. We arrived home New Years Eve, 3pm ET, had dinner out (who wants to cook after all that driving?), then we watched a Redbox movie and played Scrabble until the ball dropped.

Jeremy got a new guinea pig on Saturday. His last fish died earlier today, sad. Both his fish lasted through our trip, with Peppy dying the day after we got home, and Zippy today. Don't know what happened, if that is just how long betas live or what.

Jessica is starting to work zippers - not great for her warm pj sleepers! Probably have to turn around soon.

We had a snow day today, probably 2-3 inches of snow.

I will start training for a new VERY part-time job this next Tuesday evening. I don't know my regular hours yet, but anything will be after 5:30 or a couple hrs on some Saturday mornings. Doing taxes with a Christian tax firm. Very excited about it.

That's it for this update!