Ready for Spring....

I am soooo ready to spring. Though I love to wake up to freshly fallen snow, I can't help but yearn for fresh buds on the trees, for a glimpse of my tulip tips waking up from the winter. Yea, I'm missing spring.

Spring break is just around the corner, and we are trying to figure out what to do this year. On the list this year are Florida, San Diego, or Mexico. Right now we are leaning toward San Diego. Found a nice deal that included airfare, car, and hotel at Coronado Island. Sounds like a winner to me. If you haven't been there, it's one of my favorite places to visit. The area is just beautiful, with lots of activities for the family.

If you can think of other family friendly trips, please leave me a comment. I am really open to anything right now....

Mexican Chicken Soup...

Of course there is nothing better for a cold than a nice big bowl of chicken soup! My favorite kind of chicken soup is the "Mexican" version called "Caldo de Pollo" - it is so easy to make and taste so so yummy! I've been home with the flu, and finally got myself out of bed and decided that chicken soup was just what I needed. So I ventured out to the grocery store and picked up what I needed. I also made a pot of Mexican rice to go with the soup. My kids love this!

Recipe:
5 chicken drumsticks
5 chicken thighs
2 stalks celery
2 carrots sliced
1 cilantro bunch chopped
1 zucchini sliced
1 small onion sliced
2 potatoes cut into chunks with skin
1/2 head of cabbage cut into bite sized
2 corn on the cob, cut into 2 inch pieces
salt
pepper

Serve with warm corn torillas and garnish with a slice of lime.

Images of Fall....

Ahhh Fall is my favorite time of the year, when the leaves change color, and the air is crisp. It's a time for harvest, pumkins, apples and cider, acorn, squash....makes me want to be in the kitchen cooking up chicken pot pies, and baking pumpkin pie. It is also my favorite time for going on long walks early in the morning when all is still. I captured some images for you from my morning walk today. I loved smelling the crisp air, and the sound of the leaves as I tracked over them....Welcome Fall!!!

I'm Back...

Hey all.....I'm BACK - went offline for a while - lots goin on in my life and well I really couldn't keep up with it all. But, my favorite time of the year is here - I LOVE Fall. I'll be workin on getting my blog back up and running. Miss ya'll!

Amazing Video - Declan Galbraith

A friend of mine forwarded this video to me. WOW - you have got to watch this!

The Champs!

My boys won their championship and came in 1st place for the season! They were SO happy and mamma is so proud!

Feeling the Looove by Risa Green

I stumbled upon this article today, and thought it was interesting enough to share with all of my blog friends. I think I'll give it a try...get ready hubby - LOL!

Feeling the Loove by Risa Green....

By all accounts, my husband and I should have been divorced three years ago. We met in college, then spent two years in a long distance relationship, and then I dropped my entire life and moved to a new city where I didn’t know a soul in order to be with him. With that kind of a story (Too young! Not reality! Asking for resentment!), the odds of our relationship lasting past year one of parenthood, let alone past the seven year itch, were totally against us. But, so far we have defied the statistics, and we recently celebrated our tenth anniversary. As I wrote in my card to my husband, I really do love him more every single day. (Okay. Maybe not every single day. There are definitely some days when I want to strangle him, especially when he obsesses over how many calories are in three Red Vines, or when he treats me like I am a total moron who is incapable of performing even the most basic things without him.) But these days are far outweighed by days when I really do like him a whole lot, and so if you were to measure my love for him every single day and then take a daily average, I am pretty confident that it would turn out to be a net positive.)

But still, loving my husband and, you know, loooving my husband are two totally different things. Love is what you get when you realize that, despite his flaws, there is probably no other man on the planet who you could tolerate on a daily basis. But looove is what you get in the beginning of a relationship, when you’re stomach does all kinds of flippy things and you just want to be with him all. the. time.

After more than fifteen years together, I feel lucky that I love my husband as much as I do. But do I looove him? Yeah, not so much. Of course, it happens, on occasion. A drunken night in Vegas, a surprise gift from the Barney’s shoe department. But those are few and far between (and, given the economic situation, even fewer, and even farther between). But is it possible to looove the man you are married to on a more regular basis? It turns out that you can. Well, sort of. Short of having an affair, you’re probably never going to feel that crazy, new relationship adrenaline rush ever again. But you can have spurts of something close to it. I’ve been doing a little bit of reading on the subject lately, and what I’ve discovered is that the looove feeling is created by doing things together. New things. Different things. Fun things. Things that you don’t do every single weekend, like going to the same little hamburger joint every Friday night and then walking across the street to the same theater to see a movie, and then afterwards going to the same ice-cream shop for a fro-yo. What? I’m just saying.

Our president, apparently, is aware of this. His little jaunt into New York for a night out on the town with his wife was way up there on the loooving scale. Say what you will about using taxpayer money to finance the First date night, but he scored a home run with that one, and in turn got the entire population of married women to collectively nudge their husbands. Because the truth is, we don’t need research and studies to tell us this. Deep down inside, we all know that in order to spice things up a bit, you just need to break out of your rut and do something new. The studies suggest that simply going to a different, new restaurant for dinner, or to a different, new theater, or ordering a different, new flavor can be enough to get you from love to looove. Because trying something different or discovering something new together reminds us, they say, of what it was like in the beginning of our relationships, when everything was different and new. But, somehow, I’m thinking that it might require a little more than a change from lo-carb chocolate cheesecake to low fat cookies and cream.

I have a friend who has been married for twenty years, and she and her husband do new things together all the time. A cooking class, a weekend writing workshop, a drive up the coast. She swears that this is the secret to a long lasting relationship. So I decided to try it myself. A few weeks ago, instead of our usual hamburger/movie/fro-yo combo, my husband and I went down to the beach and took a bike ride together (which we’ve never done), then went and had dinner at a place on the sand that we’d never been to before. It was romantic, and fun and exciting, and for a moment, I forgot that we even had kids and a house and a pile of bills sitting on the desk in our bedroom. For a moment, I felt like we were back in college again. (Well, at least, I did until I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror). But the point is, it worked. When we were riding, and he stopped to point out how the sun was setting behind the mountain, I looked at him in a way I hadn’t in a long time, and my stomach did those flippy things that I had thought it had forgotten how to do. And as we walked into the restaurant, he held my hand, and I was feeling it. I was feeling the looove. But then at dinner, as we sat there, talking about ride, he wondered aloud how many calories were in the bread sticks, and just like that, it was gone.