New pictures are up

Life has been going by quickly - sorry for no updates. I have put a bunch of new pictures up in the album. The exciting news today is that I changed Anna and my flight to leave for Vietnam on November 27. One month away and we will be seeing Kevin, Lori and Caleb. I am super excited!

The master of mac and cheese

I recently got the cookbook Deceptively Delicious. I was intrigued by the idea of being able to add extra veggies to our lives (we all need more veggies, right). Gabby has made the chocolate chip cookies with the chickpeas often, and I really like them. One of my friends makes the macaroni and cheese with butternut squash for her son all the time. So I've made a couple of things out of there - turkey burgers with zucchini and mushrooms, applesauce muffins and the macaroni and cheese. Anushka LOVES the macaroni and cheese. This is the only thing she will eat a whole bowlful of with no assistance or poking and prodding (this could also be due to the addition of "dip-dip"/ketchup, which is novel right now). It makes for an easy and fairly nutritious lunch. I probably make it once a week, since it is convenient (I have all of the ingredients in the house most of the time) and goes over well. She now can say "noonles", which she gets pretty excited about.
I never thought I would be so consumed with finding food my kid will eat, but I sure do spend a lot of time thinking about whether she is eating a well rounded diet. Don't get me wrong, she still has to eat vegetables on their own, but it is nice to sneak some extra bit of goodness into her food. Interestingly enough, the cookbook doesn't give nutritional information for the recipes, so I am skeptical that everything in there is high on the nutrition list, but you can't win it all.

Fixed front step

One of the things we needed to do when we moved in (over 3 years ago!) was fix the leaning and not so stable front step. Well life happened and it only had minor work last winter (or was it the winter before? I can't remember), when Melanie and Jeremy put a rug on it to stop it from being an ice death trap. Jeff knew it needed to be done this year, so for the last couple of weekends he has been adding supports and rebuilding portions of it with the help of family. When Jeff took the side off he discovered that it was only being supported on the two sides that connected to the house. Yikes! Anyways, it is fully supported now and nice and sturdy. It should hold us for another couple of years. There is some minor finishing work to be done, but I am proud of my handy husband. Now onto the next project, which is never ending with a 60 year old house! I was going to take a picture of the step, but realized how unexciting that is, so you will just have to come for a visit to check it out.

Melissa and Mark's wedding

I am a little behind in posting what's been happening in the last little while. My birthday festivities stretched over two weeks, so I am just trying to get back into a schedule (I am begrudgingly realizing that Anna sleeps a lot better when we adhere to a schedule, even though that doesn't come naturally for either Jeff or I). We just got this picture of Anna at Mark and Melissa's wedding from the beginning of September. Floating around on friend's cameras there should be some family pictures, so I will try to hunt them down. Anna had a great time at the ceremony, which was at Shalom Park (Rabbit Hill). We decided to leave her with family for the reception. It was nice, but I just missed her and I think she would have loved dancing and the candy table that they had.