Menu Plan Monday — March 16th-22nd

Last week's new menu selections were big hits overall. There was the Beef and Noodles, Country-Style Pork Loin, and Cheesy Sausage Penne, and all of the recipes can be found at the bottom of my left sidebar. Everything was great actually, except that I didn't have to make the Beef Stew on Saturday since we had leftovers during the week so I was able to bump things around, but those were specifically the new recipes we hadn't tried before.

For this week I will be trying a few tried and true recipes and a few new ones again. I'll be using another new Taste of Home Cookbook I recently purchased at Sam's Club as well.
I've discovered that I like cookbooks with pictures, being a visual person and all. If they don't have pictures I have a tendency to not pick a thing out of them. I used to have five or six Southern Living Annual Recipe Cookbooks, but I got rid of all but one of them about ten years ago in a yard sale. Actually, they went to Goodwill because nobody wanted them. They don't have many pictures, so I never made anything out of them, but the Taste of Home Cookbooks and Magazines — LOTS of pictures. Often they have one for every recipe. I like that.

Monday — Chicken Enchiladas (recipe to follow). Last week I bought the family size pack of boneless, skinless chicken breasts and boiled and cooked up the extra. I cut them up and froze them, so I already have the meat for this meal.

Tuesday — Incredible Cavatini for a Crowd. This sounds a lot like a cavatini I've had at some Pizza Huts, so I'm going to try it. The recipe says it serves 12-15 people. Since there are six of us, I'm just planning to have it for leftovers the next night.

Wednesday — Leftovers.

Thursday — Potato Bacon Chowder. I've got a couple of kids that aren't big soup eaters, so we'll see what happens.

Friday — Bacon Cheeseburger Rice. Seems like I have a bacon theme going now.

Saturday — Tacos. Then we'll have the leftover meat for Monday evening for Taco Salad.

Sunday — Eat out since we ate in all week!

Chicken Enchiladas
from my friend, Erin

6 cups boiled, cut-up chicken
Butter
Onion, chopped
Chili Powder
2 cans cream of chicken soup
16 oz sour cream (or more if you like, which I do)
Flour tortillas
Shredded cheddar cheese (or a shredded mix)

Saute onion in butter (about 1/2 stick) and chili powder (sprinkle to your taste). After onions are soft add chicken. Mix soup and sour cream together. Add about 1/4 cup of the soup/sour cream mixture to the chicken and onions. Fill tortillas with chicken mixture. Fold and place in a casserole dish. Cover with remaining soup mixture. Sprinkle cheese on top. Bake at 350 degrees until bubbly around edges and hot throughout. I serve with Spanish Rice on the side.

Erin at $5 Dinners is hosting Menu Plan Monday this week for Laura, The Organizing Junkie. I've never checked to see how much my dinners cost individually, but I might just give it a try. I'm not so sure I can make it a habit though, especially with six of us. A weekly budget may be my best bet still, but I'm a little curious. I'll keep you posted.

And The Winner Is...

Cute dish, huh?


Just three names to pick from. Well, four, because one was a pair of sisters. Buddy was the one still awake to help me out at 10 p.m. EST!


And the sisters were the winners!


They win this copy of Guided By Him To a Thinner, Not So Stressed-Out You!

and I'm sending their name(s) on to Kathy Carlton Willis Communications for a chance to win this awesome gift basket of books. I hope you win it, too!


If you'd like to read more about the book Direction by Cheri Cowell, you can read the blog tour post here.

p.s. Just in case you wonder on the post time, I put the time back a little so my Menu-Plan Monday would show up on the top. I actually waited until after 10:00 to do the drawing in case there were any last minute commenters.

Tour The House — The Powder Room

I suppose it's a powder room instead of a bathroom since there is no bathtub or shower. Basically, it's the downstairs half-bath and the only bathroom, or powder room, that is on the first floor. It's located near the laundry room, mud room area (not officially a mud room yet), kitchen, and where we come in from the garage. It's the only bathroom...I can't keep from calling it that...that has nine foot ceilings in the house, too. It's kind of weird.

You can tell I've got pictures up. We're really doing this unpacking and moving in thing for real now. Someday we'll paint over the builder beige and replace the basic light fixtures, but those things can wait.

There is a strong resemblane to the bars hanging in the kids' bathrooms. Oh, they might be from Ikea. The only bathroom they aren't in is mine. The only reason they aren't is that they were just a little too cutesy for me to pull it off.

You might also be sensing that I have a tendency to like a little bit of an Americana theme.

Well, except for that daisy dish holding Peka's Dixie cups for his fresh tap water.

Americana, daisies, and snowmen. That's me in a nutshell.

Can You Do Donuts When You Pull In Your Driveway?

Maybe if you are a teenager.

See who's behind the wheel? Neither of the adults in the family.

It's Sparky!

There was a repairman's truck in our driveway when I got home from taking Buddy to the doctor (poor guy's sick) so I parked out in front of the house. Hubby decided to let one of the girls back the van up and then pull it in the driveway. They've never been behind the wheel of a vehicle, unless it was in Mario Kart Wii.

He asked me to pick which girl. Now that's just not fair. I picked Sparky, because she wins more at Mario Kart.

A note to all of you out there — being better at Mario Kart might just mean that they are a little more reckless.

Sparky had gunned it to get it at this point (in the above picture) to get it backed up to here. My stomach already hurt a little from laughing, and it had hardly started.

Turn, turn!

Um, it was a little impossible since she'd left a little rubber on the road this time. This one took a back-up and a do-over.

And here the vehicle is pulled 'straight' in the driveway.

Compare that to Chatty's, since Hubby decided to pull the van out to the end of the driveway and let her pull it in. Just to make it kind of fair and all.

She also shows a little more enthusiasm.

We have one that wants to use both feet (Sparky) and one that wants to look down and around the steering wheel to make sure where the pedals are, while she's driving (Chatty). I'm not so sure my heart's ready for this. I definitely know this job will be Hubby's 100 percent.

They don't look old enough to drive, but they sure are cute!

Organization — Purse Innards (and Receipts)

Can you use the word innards like that? It's usually associated with Thanksgiving and the still frozen stuff in some kind of bag I'm trying to pull out of the middle of a turkey. That makes innards sound private-like, so I guess purse stuff for a girl is private-like and the word is being used well. I'm going to run with it.

Well, we had a little chat about purses a few weeks ago around Valentine's Day and I showed you all five of my new look-a-like purses that have me set for the next ten years or so. I hadn't changed my stuff out of my original cranberry-colored purse until tonight. Spring is in the air — not here but in some of the Southern states — so I went with the spring-like green-colored purse. Just in case you wondered, at last check this evening, we were at 25 and having some light snow flurries.

In celebration of the big purse changeover, I thought I'd show you how I keep my purse organized. Hey, it was enough that the purse/bag check guy at the hockey game commented on it!

I tried to open it up big and wide for that picture so you could see just how roomy it was in there. I just love it! You can also see how large the self-closing magnets are. I don't have my blackberry in my purse in this picture, and I have my keys thrown in the bottom. You can also snap them on the straps like this:

I'll do that sometimes, but it makes it harder if you're going to be getting in and out of your purse a lot.

The primary things that take up residence in my purse are my checkbook, prescription Imitrex for migraines, an envelope with coupons or loose papers, wallet, zippered thing for miscellaneous cards (I'll explain in a minute), blackberry/phone, keys, and sometimes Altoids and/or Kleenex. My Imitrex box is only slightly larger than my checkbook, so they are always next to each other along with the coupon envelope. I use the built-in zipper pocket of my purse for my lipstick, blistex, mechanical pencil, nail clippers, Motrin, and a little box with medicines I take with my Imitrex.

This is my wallet and the zippered pouch I mentioned.

I carry a very small wallet. That helps control how much I keep in it, primarily receipts. I can't keep very many or it won't fold and snap. I keep my driver's license, one credit card, my debit card, and my Sam's Club card in here, as well as my retired military ID, plus any cash I'm carrying. That's pretty much it.

In the zippered pouch I carry a couple of store credit cards that I have, my kids' military ID cards, store cards, punch cards, teacher discount cards, etc. I just have to flip through them to find the one I want when I'm checking out. Usually it's not a problem, and if I'm waiting in line I find it ahead of time. I used to have Krispy Kreme donut cards where you got a dozen free glazed when you bought a dozen, but they got all used up and now I don't have anymore. Tell me we weren't sad when that day came.

You might think pink was my favorite color, having the pink wallet and pink zippered thingie (I should really come up with a good name for that), and being Pink Daisy Girl, but it's not. It wouldn't even be on the radar. If you asked me my favorite color, it's blue, followed by red, then probably orange, unless I'm wearing brown and it's working for me that day, and then brown might bump orange. But pink, not really even in the top four. I don't dislike it, but not a favorite. Now fuschia with orange...LOVE IT!

This is my Bible. Not a single adult comments on it. Now if I were a teenager I might have someone say something about it, but at my age, nothing.

These are my in-the-house shoes. I don't really wear house slippers or house shoes. I just find something comfortable that I don't wear out of the house so they stay clean. But those socks, they are my favorite. And you know what has happened to them.

It feels kind of like when you wear the same lipstick for 20 years and then they discontinue the color. You just don't know what you're going to do. I love these socks. I can wear them with my boots and they stay up. I don't have to stop every five steps and pull them back up my legs. So I'm still wearing them, even with the hole.

I'm going to refocus and finish up this post now, otherwise I don't know where I'll end up. I mentioned that I don't keep many receipts in my wallet, mainly because they don't fit, but really there isn't any need either. I empty it regularly, and I have a Sterilite box where I place all current receipts. Every month or so I go through them and see if they are okay to shred, once I have my credit card bill or bank statement, or maybe make sure I don't need to make a return. Here's what the box looks like:

It's the same style as the paper-size boxes I use for manuals and booklets, but it's just a smaller version. The bottom of the box is around 9" x 5 1/2", but measuring around the lid it's closer to 11" x 6". If you have more than one they are stackable.

So, are you brave enough to show me your purse innards? Are receipts taking it over?

Homeschooling — Math Manipulatives

What are they? Some of the coolest math manipulatives and one of my favorites!

These three (3-for-$1) bins hold the original versions that I had. I got them when the girls were younger, and each set was probably around $12 to $14.

They are equivalency cubes that snap together, and each set can interchange with each other. They coordinate because they show the fraction, percent, and decimal equivalents. Of course each color coordinates between each set.

The only thing that would have made it better is if the blocks would have had all three equivalencies printed on each one. This week I went to a teacher store for the first time since I arrived in Michigan, and it's the best one I've ever been to. You know what I found? Equivalency cubes that have the fraction, percent and decimal equivalents printed on three sides of the same blocks.

How genius is that? They were $14.95 for the set, and in my eyes definitely worth it even though I own the other three already. This is an area that is always a challenge to work through, and we always pull out these blocks. You can use these sets for:

Showing pairs of unit cubes that are equivalent
Parts of a whole
Making two equivalent decimals by comparing heights (also percents and fractions)
Adding and subtracting
Simplifying fractions

Love these!

THE LAST BOX!!!

If I could insert a drumroll here, I would. So imagine a drumroll, please.

I have officially opened and emptied the last box following the move to our new house that we closed on on November 14, 2008.

When I was packing the boxes and working on 4 hours sleep in a 72 hour period, there were times I would tape up the box and forget what I'd just put in it. This one almost turned out that way, with the 'I think' comment in parenthesis.

In case you can't read that, here it is up close:

This box had three shoebox-sized Sterilite boxes in it, and one 2-gallon Ziploc with the toys in it. I used a lot of 1- and 2-gallon Ziploc bags inside the boxes to move smaller items and keep them contained. And yes, I keep my kids' teeth. I don't know why. Ask me in a few years.

I popped open the box of old photos that were pre-kid, and with the exception of a couple thrown on the top, that's exactly what they were. Some of them made me reminisce, and some of them made me laugh, so I thought I'd share a few with you.

In December when I posted the three-part birth story for the girls (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), I mentioned that we never took any pictures of me when I was pregnant, but that there was one somewhere from the day I got my braces off, which also happened to be the day I got put on bed rest (I got the call later in the day after all the doctors had conversed on the phone). That picture was in this box. You can't really tell I'm pregnant, but I do have some really big bangs.

I also found the picture from our first Christmas card after the girls were born and out of the hospital, so they were just over a year old. I cut the side off since it had their names on it.

I'm not going chronologically, so here is a picture from a military ball of some type, probably the Christmas one, when we were at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, affectionately known to many of us as Fort Lost-in-the-Woods. This was probably somewhere around 1990 or 1991. I'd have to think too hard to do better than that.

This next picture is of our first cat, Cherokee. We got him about six months after we got married. He could be asleep in another room and wake up when he heard a banana being peeled. He loved them. He also loved spaghetti-o's. We also did not have a quality camera.

About a year and a half later we got him a friend. You know, so he wouldn't be lonely while we were in class. So now meet our second cat, Theodore.

Those two boys were best buds!

I will probably regret showing these next two pictures for the rest of my life, but I'm going to do it anyway. The first one is my very big hair, complete with very big bangs, my last year of college. I was working at the time on Christmas break in my aunt's children's clothing store when this picture was taken. Oh, and I even had a perm in my very naturally curly hair just to make it curlier and bigger. It was 1987. The glasses could have been a giveaway too.

During college after Hubby and I got married, he got me watching wrestling on TV. Now it was nothing like you see on TV today. I mean, it was real and everything. Oh, I'm kidding. But we did see one guy hit another guy with a chair once and it actually dented the chair. So one night we went with two other friends to Little Rock and sat in the second row to watch the wrestling matches, and to top it off, it was Fan Appreciation Night! Woo Hoo! So Hubby took pictures of me with the wrestlers as we went down the line and got autographs. Look at me in my floweredy jeans with Dr. Death. Cute, huh?

I guess if that's the most embarassing photo I own I'm doing pretty good, especially in this day and age with all that's out there.

And to think that this started as a post about finally being unpacked.