Trying Pinterest Recipes

I have been attempting some new recipes that I have found on Pinterest. The first recipe I tried, Veggie Crescent Fold-Ups, got a thumbs down by everyone in our family.  Caleb gagged just by looking at the insides of them, but that is not entirely unusual for him.

I can't even find the link now, but you basically mixed cream cheese, sour cream, broccoli and carrots together with a few spices, spooned it onto crescent rolls and folded them up to bake.  The appeal for this one was chopping the broccoli and carrots pretty small so that picky eaters weren't as worried about the vegetable content.  I guess if the whole thing tastes like poo, then it doesn't matter if there are veggies hidden in it or not.  No one is going to eat them!

Which reminds me of something a pharmacist once said to me about a medicine I was picking up for Caleb.  It was a nasty smelling liquid antibiotic, and I asked if they could flavor it to make it easier for him to take.  She came back with, "Yes, but that medicine tastes like poop and if you flavor it, it is just going to taste like bubble gum poop."  

Sweet.

Moving right along, next I tried these two recipes in one meal.  

Baked Creamy Chicken Taquitos

and Chipotle's Cilantro Lime Rice.

These were both a success.  Initially, I took the taquitos out too soon because they were getting pretty brown around the edges.  But once they cooled a bit, I realized they weren't very crispy at all.  So I popped them back in the oven for another 5 -7 minutes with foil on top and they were much better.

I LOVED this rice.  It tasted just like Chipotle's rice to me.  Added a side of black beans and it was a yummy meal that was pretty easy to make. (Steve did make the statement that although he liked these, taquitos by definition are supposed to be corn tortillas with beef inside, not flour tortillas with chicken.  These should have been called "flautas".  Note taken, I just follow the recipes sir, I don't name them.)

Lastly, we had Santa Fe Chicken Salad Wraps for lunch this week.

I did not even offer these to the kids, there were way too many things in them they would not have liked.  But I thought they had great flavor from the lime juice, cumin and cilantro, and it was a nice change of pace from a sandwich. 

Have you tried any new recipes lately?

Baby Dutch

I recently had the privilege of taking baby pictures for one of my dearest friends in the world, Cindy. We went to college together and she lives out of state, but her and her sweet husband made the trek down with {almost} two month old Dutch to spend a weekend with us.

Ok, sweet little baby feet, lips, belly buttons, chubby rolls...such cuteness that needs to be captured!

Can you please come back so I can hold you again and stare deeply into those beautiful eyes?

This green blanket he is laying on was made by someone in his Daddy's family...aren't those trees amazing!  

Jake's Accident

Oh me. Oh my.

I am only now able to speak of this.  A little over a week has gone by since "the incident".  I had PTSD for several days afterward, combined with severe sleep deprivation.  I might have been a tad on the crazy side.

Last Tuesday night, Steve and Seth were in the backyard with our dog Jake.  Jake is a 9 year old yellow lab who has bursts of energy like a puppy.  He was running circles around the yard, and although we have never officially clocked him, we have suspicions that he can run about 30 mph.

On one of his circles, he ran underneath the trampoline at full speed.  The trampoline legs have bolts coming through them and sticking out about 3 inches on the insides of the legs.

You know where this is headed now, don't you.  Is your body tensing up, your face crinkling because you know this can't be good, right?

No, it was not good.  The bolt ripped his left side open.

Lot's of blood, lot's of screaming, Caleb looked out the window and saw the carnage and promptly threw up all over the living room floor.  Orange goldfish throw up to be exact.

I called my mom to come stay with the kids while Steve and I rushed Jake to the vet.  I am pretty sure I was yelling into the phone, something about bleeding to death and what not.  I hope it wasn't too long before I told her it was Jake and not any of the humans living in this house.

Steve got into the back of my 4runner with Jake and a bunch of towels.  I was driving like a crazy person and made him car sick, on top of the fact that he was having to look at our dogs insides.  Not a good combo.

We were about 2 minutes from the vet when we came upon a car accident. The fire department had the road shut down and we had to turn around and make a 15 minute detour with lot's of traffic.  Sweetness.  That didn't cause me any added stress at all.

We got to the vet, and Steve was gray.  They took Jake in on a stretcher (and probably should have taken Steve on a stretcher as well...) and two vets and 4 vet techs started discussing what to do.  All the while, Jake is sitting there with his skin gaping open and I am trying to keep someone between me and him at all times because I am sure I will either faint or throw up.

They decide to stay late and do emergency surgery.  Because our vet is awesome like that.  And at about 8pm that night, I brought home a dog that had a 14 inch incision from the middle of his back, all the way around his side and down under his belly.  He had two drainage tubes sticking out near the incision which meant that he couldn't be on the carpet without a towel underneath him.

I will spare you the gory details, but let's just say ol' Jake was a lucky dog.  This is is a picture of him the day after his surgery.  I figured I could put a small one on here and not gross anyone out.  If you want to see what it REALLY looks like, just click on the picture and you can see it in much clearer detail.  Just warning you...it is not for the faint of heart!

(If you were brave enough to look at the picture and are wondering what the white strips are along the incision, they are rubber strips that are meant to reinforce the incision and keep the sutures intact.)

So I mentioned earlier that I had severe sleep deprivation...it is because of the cone.  THE CONE!  We have taken to calling Jake "Cone Man".  He has had the cone now for 10 days, and he still acts like it is a surprise that he can't fit through small openings without snagging the cone.  He constantly runs into furniture and doesn't make it through doorways on the first attempt.

The cone is noise-y.  He usually sleeps in our room, and the first night I wanted to keep an eye on him. He got up and down all night, and scraped that darn cone up and down our closet doors and bedroom walls all night.  ALL. NIGHT.

Now I know most of you are thinking, "Put him in another room for goodness sakes!"  But remember, we have the drainage tube issue.  And we had already done wall-to-wall towels and sheets on our bedroom floor.

So we have tried him in the bathroom, the living room, the office and we can pretty much hear the scraping of the cone on walls, furniture and doors from any room in the house.  It is that loud.

Even with the cone, he found a way to lick the bottom few inches of the incision.  So now we have the cone and.......

THE 80'S T-SHIRT!

Why so forlorn Jake?  You are stylin'!

We are really looking forward to ditching the cone.  Hopefully next week sometime.  Until then, we will continue to be serenaded by the sound of stiff plastic scraping on all the hard surfaces of our house.

I wanted to leave you with Jake's feelings about the cone, since he is the one having to wear it and all.

I asked him how the cone made him feel inside.  This is what he had to say.

Our Halloween

We had Davy Crockett and a fierce Pirate on our hands for Halloween this year.

On Sunday, we went to a small local carnival at a church.  Last year, we went to a massive carnival at a massive church.  We decided to downsize and simultaneously lower our stress levels this year.

Just for nostalgia sake, here are their 2010 Halloween costumes...they look so much younger!

The carnival we attended had Trunk or Treat with cars trunks all decked out in themes and people handing out candy.  They also had lot's of games set up for the kids to play.  One of the most creative was an Angry Birds game.  You put an Angry bird in a sling shot and launched it towards a tower made out of wooden blocks with a stuffed pig sitting on top.  

They had pony rides...

...and a picture taking area set up.

And bounce houses, which the kids loved of course.  So all-in-all, it was a great carnival with lot's of things to do and the kids had a lot fun.

Except on the train.  There wasn't really a line for anything.  Except to ride the train.  And for some reason, this train went approximately 3 miles per hour and only held about 12 riders at a time.

I think we waited about 20 minutes for the boys to ride the train.  As it pulled away, a man made the remark, "Someone needs to take the governor off that thing and let it rip!  This is ridiculous!".  So funny.

And when they came back from their ride on the express train, this is what they looked like...

I think they must have come to the conclusion that just because it is a train doesn't mean its fun if it is barely moving.

But by the time we left and they were buckled safely into the car with their pumpkins full of candy on their laps, they were happy campers again.  The train was but a distant memory.

On Halloween night, we took them to a nearby neighborhood to go trick-or-treating.  We don't live in a neighborhood, and the road we live on has a speed limit of 55 mph, so no one does much trick or treating around here!

Seth was in heaven.  He had so much fun.  He loved the houses that were really decorated, and he wasn't the least bit phased by anything spooky this year.  All of the adults in the neighborhood were super friendly, and many of them were sitting out on their porches or in their driveways.

Caleb fell asleep in the car after about 15 minutes, so Steve just drove along slowly as Seth and I walked up and down the streets. (He ended up having a fever later that night, poor little guy.)  So we gave him some of Seth's trick-or-treat loot the next day.  There was plenty to share!