Catching Up

Life's been going on around here, so I decided it was time to catch up. It's hard when you forget for a couple weeks to remember everything you wanted to write, but I guess I'll do my best. I find it's easiest to remember what I did by going through my camera and looking at the pictures there. We've gotten pretty good about always having it in my purse so that we can whip it out at any time.

First of all, here is the next phase of Mike's BBQing. I've seen on the Food Network (one of my many obsessions) that they always do beer can chicken - which means you stick the can of beer up the chicken's rear and smoke it. This supposedly made it really nice and moist. Well, in Mike's handy dandy BBQ book, it had this same technique, but it had a side note that said you could use cola or root beer. Before I go on, just to clarify, I realize that the alcohol in any beer would be cooked out in the smoking process and that using wines and such in cooking is not abnormal. In fact, every time I eat at an italian restaurant they are probably cooking with it. I have a phobia of it though, hence my hesitation. Maybe some day I will overcome it, until then, I guess there's no problem with using non-alcoholic beverages. Mike did want to go with the root BEER so that it was closer to the original, in name at least. He used the same rub that he used on the delicious ribs and it turned out AMAZING! It was super moist and tender. Amy had about 4 servings of it, along with a whole ear of corn and a ton of watermelon. If we are ever worried about her eating enough food, we will just have to make her this again.

Another recent fun experience I got to have was going to the CKC scrapbooking convention with my mom. We went last year and I'm still trying to finish that project (boo me - it's hard when it takes so long to get everything out and put it all away; I need to make a craft corner in my room or office so that I can just leave it out). This year we did smaller projects that were SUPER high-speed, but very interesting and fun. We did a canvas project, which is used for home decor; we didn't LOVE this one, but it was definitely a different technique and kinda cool. We also did a page for scrapbooking children - I didn't notice it was super "kiddie" though, so it was really just a two-page spread. My ABSOLUTE FAVORITE was the halloween book we made. I loved it the most, not only because I'm a halloween FREAK, but also because it was different than just a page. My mom makes a lot of cute little books that she sets out with pictures in, and I have a couple I'm working on. They let you finish a complete project instead of constantly working towards one scrapbook. I really like it.

Let's see... I guess to catch up on Amy, she will be 2 in about a month and a half, which is ridiculously crazy to me. The potty training is still continuing. She has gotten really good about telling me when she needs to go #2, but doesn't always remember to ask to go #1, but will do so if I ask her or just set her on the potty. My mom really hates the pictures of kids sitting on toilets, but I had to post this one. I figured it was okay because she was concealed completely. This is what Amy does when she has to go #2. She hides inside the curtain while she grunts and groans, then pops out when she's done and says "all done!". It's such a funny little thing that she just has always done, so I thought I'd better document it.

Amy has also gotten into some trouble today because she decided to color on my walls. Now, while this is annoying and takes a bit to clean up, it's not unbearable on most walls. However, we still have the stupid flat paint on all our walls in the entry way and front room, which is where she decided to color of course. So even though I can remove the crayon marks, not there's smear marks because that's just what flat paint does. I guess now I'm more motivated to paint my house like I've wanted to for a long time.

Speaking of painting, Amy let me paint her toes today. I decided to do mine, even though I want to go to the nail salon and get "halloweeny" toes at the beginning of October. My 4th of July toes were just not working for me anymore, so I pulled out the nail polish and Amy thought it was cool. I had tried to do this once when she was a little little baby, but she kicked too much. She actually held still really well and I made sure to blow on them before letting her loose. Every once and a while now she stops, looks at her toes, and says "pretty toes."

This weekend my mom went on a cruise (hooray mom!) with my grandma, so Mike and I decided to cook dinner for my dad and sister. We did the root beer chicken again, with corn on the cob, salad, and rolls. It was yum yum good! Jessie, my littlest sister, agreed to watch Amy afterwards and Mike and I headed over to Gilbert High School where Rob Gardner (one of Mike's favorite composers) was doing a free concert. If you look in the July posts, you'll see Mike's tribute to pioneers - this is the same guy. This concert, however, was a tribute to WWII veterens. It goes through the major battles, showing video, accompanied by the orchestra, with narraters and singers telling stories based off of letters written by soldiers, some who survived and some who didn't. It was really nice and we were glad we got the opportunity to go.

I guess to wrap up this post, I will share what our FHE was tonight. With Amy being so young, it's hard to do a lesson, but we try to take some time to play together as a family, so we went to the nearby park (has anybody else noticed that most of the parks in the neighborhoods do not have lights on the playground areas? How dumb is that?!). We were the only ones there, so we got to climb around and slide with Amy without looking too strange. When we came back, I glanced at the calendar and noticed that today is the first day of autumn. Mike misses the changing of the leaves down here, so I decided it would be fun to make our own autumn leaves. We have a bag of real ones that Mike's mom had sent us in past years (thanks mom!) that we used as templates. Amy liked using the markers and stayed on the papers really well (we watched her much more closely after this morning's crayon fiasco). We had fun and now our front room is full of fall colors.